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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2007 The Impasse of Roman Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature Maxwell P. Wheeler

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

THE IMPASSE OF ROMAN CATHOLICISM

IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE

By

MAXWELL WHEELER

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2007 The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Maxwell Wheeler defended on March 16, 2007.

______James O'Rourke Professor Directing Dissertation

______Ray Fleming Outside Committee Member

______Barry Faulk Committee Member

______Eric Walker Committee Member

Approved:

______Ralph Berry, Chair, Department of English

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract iv

INTRODUCTION 1

I. CHARLOTTE SMITH'S ARCHETYPAL VIEW OF CONSCIENCE 13

II. BYRON'S CAIN AND THE NATURAL LAW 30

III. CHURCH HISTORY IN WORDSWORTH 50

IV. BISHOP BLOUGRAM, PASCAL, AND CASUISTRY 67

V. FREEDOM AND PAPAL INFALLIBILITY IN WILDE 80

CONCLUSION 98

REFERENCES 102

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 109

iii ABSTRACT

Within the post-Enlightenment adoption of subjective idealism, there is a contradictory attempt in English literature to assert an essential ontology of the natural and supernatural orders. Further, the voluntarism of English Romanticism sometimes accompanies a contradictory assertion of the centrality of an essential moral law. These tendencies toward essentialism in nature and law emerge at a time when the Catholic Church was receiving greater civil freedom in England and making more assertive claims to absolute spiritual authority. Therefore, examining the appearance of extrinsic moral and ontical essences in nineteenth-century English literature allows for an exploration of the relationship between this trend and the resurgence of English Catholicism. In the nineteenth century, the Catholic claim to exclusive spiritual authority raises concerns because it occurs alongside the appearance in literature of constitutive, extrinsic essences of human nature and the law which, by threatening the immanence of political and individual activity, pose the dilemma of locating authority externally. The authors included in this study are Charlotte Smith, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, and Oscar Wilde.

iv INTRODUCTION

The five essays of this thesis examine within the post- Enlightenment adoption of subjective idealism, a contradictory attempt in English literature to assert an essential ontology of the natural and supernatural orders. Further, they propose that the voluntarism of English Romanticism sometimes accompanies a contradictory assertion of the centrality of an essential moral law. These tendencies toward essentialism in nature and law emerge at a time when the Catholic Church was receiving greater civil freedom in England and making more assertive claims to absolute spiritual authority. Therefore, in examining the appearance of extrinsic moral and ontical essences in nineteenth-century English literature, these essays also explore the relationship between this trend and the resurgence of English Catholicism. In the nineteenth century, the Catholic claim to exclusive spiritual authority raises concerns because it occurs alongside the appearance in literature of constitutive, extrinsic essences of human nature and the law which, by threatening the immanence of political and individual activity, pose the dilemma of locating authority externally. The relationship of religious and national identity to progressive politics is a theme in the essays on Charlotte Smith and Lord Byron. A problem of revolutionary politics is that the progressive construction of political rights often relies on some prior state from which the political subject emerges to fashion government by consensus. In Locke, the person possesses a prior right to freedom. In Rousseau, the human being emerges from the state of nature and proceeds rationally to create law in a public forum. For both Locke and Rousseau, the challenge is to reconcile a progressive view of political identity with the essential state which precedes this identity. Charlotte Smith's poem, The Emigrants, expresses ambivalence toward French émigrés, particularly in its description of the French clergy. In the poem's dedication to William Cowper, Smith writes, "In speaking of the Emigrant Clergy, I beg to be understood as feeling the utmost respect for the integrity of their principles,"1 but her poem

1 Charlotte Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (New York: Oxford UP, 1993), 133.

1 lists both her doctrinal disagreements with Catholicism and her impression of the French clergy's aristocratic excesses. Smith's insistence on respect for the clergy's principles is striking because she alienates principles from specific doctrinal and institutional concerns. The clergy whom Smith portrays are those who refused to take the civil oath and thus refused a governmental imposition on their ecclesiastical authority. In 1791, Pope Pius VI's encyclical Charitas nullified the bishops installed by the French Civil Constitution of the Clergy and asserted the primacy of the spiritual authority to vacate a civil election. After Pius VI's assertion of papal primacy, some members of France's ancien regime began fleeing to England, and the Catholic clergy brought with them a troublesome political and doctrinal position. The Catholic Church upheld the traditional precept that "there is only one holy catholic and apostolic Church, outside of which there is no salvation,"2 and the English High Churchmen also held this view except that the delegate church was the Church of England. The Catholic clergy were French royalists and appealed to conservative English who saw them as representative of general traditionalism, but the aristocratic privileges of many clergy did not appeal to radical English who tried to find systematic causes of the plight of French emigrants. Smith implicates ecclesiastical excess as a factor that led to the Revolution and its subsequent misery. She characterizes Catholic doctrine as the "dark creed," but she reiterates in a note that the emigrant clergy's "steadiness of principle excites veneration."3 The term "principles" has political resonance, appearing in Burke, Paine, and others, but Smith assigns the value of holding principles to the French clergy even while she criticizes the specific tenets that the French clergy holds. Her unwillingness to find a parallel to the French clergy's "principles" either in politics or in doctrine shows how the term's want of meaning comes from Smith's reluctance to deal simultaneously in political and doctrinal language. For Smith, the French Revolution provokes the question of whether Catholicism is an

2 Pope Boniface VIII, "The Superiority of the Spiritual Authority," in The Medieval Reader, eds. James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin (New York: Viking, 1949), 233. 3 Smith, 139.

2 arbitrary identity whose subjects exist in a common world of material pressures in which the doctrinal differences among religious sects serve to disguise the infrastructural positions of acting subjects. Stuart Curran, among others, argues that Smith views political identity as a mask for systematic material forces. Writing about Smith's The Emigrants, Curran says, "The system is disintegrating of its own tyrannical impulses around both her and the outcasts of fortune she surveys. The fact that there is so little difference between its French and British victims, between those observed and the sympathetic but powerless observer of their plight, underscores the universal anarchy that passes for law and the helplessness of mere persons before encoded systems of public power."4 The opposition between systems that "pass" for law and "mere persons," however, is untenable in Smith, and the identification of it in her work assumes that she maintains a reliable gap between narrative and history. Smith, though, does not locate Catholicism merely at the site of material history, and her unwillingness to assign principles a specific meaning shows that the difficulty of religious identity in part results from the problem of reconciling doctrine and history. Slavoj Žižek's attempts to "reassert the Cartesian subject"5 identify in contemporary criticism a tendency to implicate or praise literature and criticism for its retention or rejection of the Cartesian subject. In The Emigrants, Smith introduces a universal archetype of individual conscience that threatens her progressive politics. But beyond the denial of history in favor of personal transcendence, which Jerome McGann interprets as Romantic complicity in historical displacement,6 Smith's retention of a Platonic, archetypal version of identity operates not solely as ideology, but even more as a concern for identifying a transcendent ontology of the political subject. In Byron's Cain, the dilemma of a prior essence which enables but also mitigates the creative acts of human beings calls into question the efficacy of subjective acts in determining identity and values.

4 Introduction to The Poems of Charlotte Smith, xxiv. 5 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2000), 2. 6 See Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983).

3 Paul Cantor traces the influence of Rousseau's version of man in a state of nature on the Romantic search for a free position from which Romantic authors, including Byron, can define humanity anew.7 Nevertheless, Byron's identification of a moral law that precedes the historical creation of juridical codes relies on a traditional concept of the natural law and contradicts Rousseau's conception of law as arising from the use of reason in specific circumstances. For Byron, the law has a centrality and derives from an ontological absolute. The context of Byron's view is the sacramental character of Catholic worship, which many biographers claim attracted Byron.8 Recalling Aristotle and Aquinas, Cain engages in a defense of the sacramental priesthood by retelling the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. In this retelling, Byron criticizes the determinism of Scottish Calvinism and expresses a Thomistic philosophy of the diffusion of creation from a primal, creative will. The retention of a primal moral law in this model of creation conflicts with the voluntarism of Rousseau because while Rousseau sees the law as an abstraction derived from material circumstances, Byron views the law as a transcendent reality which, like the sacramental realities of Catholicism, facilitates the human person's access to morality and identity. In moving away from an emphasis on individual rebirth and toward a Roman Catholic reliance on the priesthood's administration of sacramental grace, Byron further distances himself from the progressive view of the law as immanent in subjective acts. Coleridge's early "Lectures on Revealed Religion" show the difficulty of reconciling historical progress and religious tradition. Patton and Mann claim that one of Coleridge's goals in his lectures is to show that "the system of privately owned property and the institutions built upon it . . . must be 'removed' and 'destroyed' if inequality, injustice, and all the other evils of society are to be

7 Paul A. Cantor, Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), xiv. 8 Among others, see Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Vol. 3 of Religious Trends in English Poetry (New York: Columbia UP, 1949), 437; Jerome McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron's Poetic Development (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968), 253; William J. Donnelley, "Byron and Catholicism," Byron and Scotland: Radical or Dandy?, ed. Angus Calder (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1989), 46.

4 done away with."9 Coleridge's progressive agenda relies on Locke's idea of historical progress, but Coleridge's consistent recourse to metaphor undermines a chronological rendering of history. Coleridge tries to establish the continuity of Christian doctrine from the ancients to contemporary England. In doing so, he minimizes historical differences by saying that the ancients "felt the necessity of the Revelation which they did not possess."10 To Coleridge, the law exists as a sentiment that precedes its recognition in history. Historical circumstances therefore do not create the law. Coleridge wants to manage a connection between doctrinal precedent and historical progress, and he finally resorts to a claim that the ancients were "comparatively children."11 Because of its insistence on doctrinal consistency within differing historical sites, Coleridge's strategy of legitimizing doctrine by mythologizing history shows the problem of integrating historical advancement and doctrinal tradition. When Coleridge wants precedent and tradition, and therefore consistent religious doctrine, he constructs historical progress as a metaphorical narrative of the development from childhood to adulthood in which recognition of doctrine, but not its new invention, signals progress. When he advocates historical progress as material progress, he cites the continuity of reason. His political advocacy and its confidence in progress depend on an incompatible model of reason and doctrine as ahistorical. Reconstructing the past to find doctrinal consistency offers a metaphorical solution to the ruptures in the history of doctrine, but to impose this consistency, Coleridge suggests that aberrant historical events operate concomitantly with a permanent discourse of divine justice. An inevitable distance between material history and doctrine becomes an avenue for expanding the boundaries of religious identity because such a gap challenges the temporal model of apostolic succession that both the Church of England and the Catholic Church look toward to establish the authenticity of their respective doctrines. Without temporal continuity, the claim to exclusive possession of religious doctrine wavers.

9 Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, Editor's Introduction, Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971), lxviii. 10 "Lecture 1," in Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, 111. 11 "Lecture 1," 115.

5 Taking up the Church of England's assertion of historical and doctrinal succession, the third essay in this thesis examines William Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets and these sonnets' relationship to the Catholic Church. In a letter to Richard Sharp, Wordsworth describes how the factuality of some of his Ecclesiastical Sonnets spoils their poetics. "Several of them suffer as poetry from the matter of fact," he says, "there being unavoidably in all history, except as it is mere suggestion, something that enslaves Fancy."12 Wordsworth's skepticism reveals an ambiguity in the difference between history and poetry because Wordsworth does not say whether history as "mere suggestion" presumes the inevitability of material history in poetic texts. Wordsworth's complicity in historical displacement especially matters to McGann, but for Wordsworth, the question of history already involves its relationship to a standard of religious and moral doctrine. In the case of history as "mere suggestion," poetic narrative controls access to history, and representations of history supersede temporal progress. With the displacement of history into poetical content, history as material progress has to be accounted for because it always lingers in the suggestive narrative. Wordsworth's prefatory letter to the Ecclesiastical Sonnets says that "certain points in the Ecclesiastical History of our Country might be advantageously presented to view in verse," and Wordsworth offers the sonnets as advice on the "Catholic Question, which was agitated in Parliament about that time."13 This prefatory letter and the letter to Richard Sharp show that although Wordsworth seems to dwell on ecclesiastical history, he does not insist on a difference between ecclesiastical history and political history. Such indeterminacy evokes but refuses to resolve the Church of England's institutional position. Wordsworth wrote his prefatory letter after the defeat of Plunket's Reform Bill in 1821, and a difficulty in both Plunket's bill and Burdett's bill of 1825 is whether the coronation oath, in linking the Church of England's doctrine to English government, prohibits Catholic emancipation. In 1825, the Duke of York delivered a parliamentary speech and argued that Catholic emancipation inevitably

12 William Wordsworth, Vol. 2 of The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983), 998. 13 Wordsworth, 997.

6 asks the king to violate his royal oath to "maintain . . . the Protestant reformed religion established by law."14 The Duke of York's speech contends that the king can ratify neither a bill of emancipation nor any alteration of his coronation oath without violating the oath. When Wordsworth refers to the "Ecclesiastical History of our Country," he raises the question of whether church doctrine has a separate history from the history of English institutions, but unlike the Duke of York, Wordsworth does not resolve the question. While claiming an authentic history of the English Church, Wordsworth is nonetheless reluctant to decide whether Christian doctrine is distinct from its institutions, and the difference between the empirical facts of English history and the personal faith of individual English people requires Wordsworth to describe two histories: a material one, and a doctrinal one. When Žižek identifies the Christian concept of grace as a precursor to Althusser's ideas of ideological interpellation, he suggests that the call of grace in the Christian religion resembles the call of ideology whereby, paradoxically, one attains an authentic identity only after assuming one's inevitable, prior definition within an ideological complex. Žižek explains: This paradox, necessary if one is to avoid the vulgar liberal notion of freedom of choice, indicates the theological problematic of predestination and Grace: a true decision / choice (not a choice between a series of objects leaving my subjective position intact, but the fundamental choice by means of which I 'choose' myself) presupposes that I assume a passive attitude of 'letting myself be chosen'--in short, free choice and Grace are strictly equivalent; or, as Deleuze put it, we really choose only when we are chosen.15 The problem in Wordsworth of reconciling the specific demands of religious continuity with the actions of historical actors corresponds both to the problem of living up to grace in the Christian religion and

14 E. R. Norman, "Speech of the Duke of York against Catholic Claims, 1825," in Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), 127. 15 Žižek, 18.

7 to the accountability that ideological interpellation demands from the acting subject. Failure in these systems comes from the gap between doctrine and action. Robert Browning's exploitation of this gap is the topic of the fourth essay of this thesis, which deals with Browning's poem, Bishop Blougram's Apology. Browning's poem is a dramatic monologue in which Bishop Blougram tries to convince a skeptic of the value of religious belief. The poem engages with Pascal's wager, and the bishop of the poem is a representation of Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman. In 1850, Pius IX restored the Catholic bishoprics in England and appointed Wiseman as the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. The ensuing controversy over the compatibility of Wiseman's ecclesiastical authority and his civic allegiance to England appears in a series of documentary artifacts surrounding the installation. For example, Wiseman's statement that "until such time as the Holy See shall think fit otherwise to provide, we govern, and shall continue to govern, the counties of Middlesex, Hertford, and Essex"16 blurs the distinction between pastoral and national jurisdictions. The controversy over Wiseman's use of "govern" shows the term's applicability to both civil and religious authority. After reading Wiseman's decree, Queen Victoria responded, "Am I Queen of England or am I not?"17 Her rejoinder abbreviates the concern over the difference between governmental and ecclesiastical authority, but Victoria's rhetorical question also takes for granted the distance between the English government and the religious subject. The exchange occurs in the language of government as if governmental authority has a stake in the subjective assent to spiritual authority. In the Church of England, the Gorham Case of 1846 raised doubts about the Church of England's authority over Christian doctrine. A Calvinist who rejected baptismal regeneration, Gorham lost his parish when he failed a doctrinal test administered by his bishop, Phillpots. After Gorham's failure, though, a governmental Privy Council held that Bishop Phillpots had no authority to deny Gorham's appointment on doctrinal grounds. The council avoided ruling directly on the

16 "Cardinal Wiseman," The Times, 29 October 1850, 5a. 17 Walter L. Arnstein, Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr. Newdgegate and the Nuns (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1982), 46.

8 legitimacy of Gorham's baptismal doctrine and reinstalled him. The council's decision to accept state control of the Church of England's hierarchy while abdicating state responsibility for church doctrine--in effect, sanctioning Gorham's Calvinism by default--left High Churchmen without sure confirmation that the Church of England had the doctrinal authority to support its claim as the universal Church. By revealing the state's unwillingness to enforce dogmatic unanimity, the Gorham case revealed a shortcoming in the English Church's solidarity. Without the leverage of doctrinal certainty and with the Church of England's authority located in the state, opposition to Pius IX and particularly to Wiseman found expression in governmental language. The procession of Wiseman from Rome to Westminster also invoked persistent fears of Catholic invasion that partly relied on nationalist ideas of identity and that, upon Wiseman's installation at Westminster, united with fear of the loss of English religious identity. In a combination of political language, references to English territorial concerns, and invocations of English identity, William Bentinck and other Church of England clergy published the following response to Wiseman's installation: We lament also the fact that among British subjects, and especially among Christian ecclesiastics, any should be found to assume a title taken from a metropolitan city in the realm of England, and thus be guilty of invading Her Majesty's constitutional prerogative, which is to be the sole fountain of honour and dispenser of titles in that realm, and so be justly chargeable with an outrage against the British Constitution and with indignity to the British Crown.18 Bentnick's language of constitutional, regional, and subjective accountability arises at least in part from the English clergy's institutional dependency on the state as the Gorham decision defined it. While Bentinck casts it mainly as a matter of national sovereignty, the threat of Pius IX's defining ecclesiastical positions occurred when the Church of England's structure looked particularly vulnerable to state intervention.

18 "Address from the Clergy of Westminster," The Times, 26 October, 1850. 3d.

9 In Bishop Blougram's Apology, Browning responds to the Catholic threat by recalling the Renaissance debates over casuistry. Browning mitigates the Roman Catholic claim to doctrinal authority by emphasizing the disparity between the bishop's behavior and his advocacy of the religious life. The vehicle of casuistry, which is the practice of applying general moral laws to specific circumstances, allows the bishop to assert the material convenience of the religious life. Emphasizing Blougram's corporal motivation allows Browning to stress the difference between the bishop's religious rhetoric and his claim to authority, which finally rests more with his acquisition of material pleasures than with his commission from papal authority. Browning's exposure of the bishop's failure to live up to the requirements of his faith repeats what Alessandro Manzoni defines as an inescapable facet of the Catholic priesthood. Manzoni writes: It is necessary that many men, that all men, preach a morality more perfect than their own behavior. The ministry . . . involves weak men, who sometimes give in to their passions, preaching an austere and perfect morality.19 In Browning's critique, however, the bishop not only appears as a priest who fails to live up to his preaching. Bishop Blougram also raises the question of the relationship of conscience to an essential moral law. The gamble in favor of belief is logical in Pascal's famous wager because the self that is lost is finite whereas the potential reward is infinite. Pascal's wager assumes that an extrinsic, infinite reality has more worth than impermanent subjective feelings. In challenging Pascal's view and returning to a Protestant emphasis on private judgment, Browning affirms the role of private assent to spiritual truth and attenuates the importance of allegiance to institutional religion. Still, the possibility of error in private judgment looms over the poem because the bishop's concern for maintaining his institutional position mitigates his willingness to entertain the possibility of essential truth. The final essay of this thesis considers Oscar Wilde's portrayal of the papacy and papal infallibility. In "The Rise of Historical Criticism," an early academic essay, Wilde builds a theory of

19 Quoted in Romano Amerio, Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the XXth Century (Kansas City: Sarto, 1996), 186.

10 historical criticism that links intellectual freedom to democracy but that also, paradoxically, assigns greater critical freedom to a Greek writer who wrote after the Roman conquest of Macedonia and the Peloponnese. Polybius, the Greek historian to whom Wilde attributes the greatest achievement, was a hostage of Rome, and Wilde also applies the model in which lost civic freedom leads to greater intellectual authority to the First Vatican Council's definition of papal infallibility. In a group of sonnets on Pius IX, Wilde portrays the pope's expanding spiritual authority in contrast to his "imprisonment" after his loss of the Papal States. Wilde therefore enters the English debates over the status of Catholic citizens in light of the declaration of the pope's personal infallibility. Wilde elevates the spiritual authority of the papacy by developing the idea that the pope is in a better position to discern and pronounce spiritual truth after the loss of the Papal States. Wilde's view comes from his theory in "The Rise of Historical Criticism" that the freedom to pursue extrinsic truth is greater when the pursuit happens away from the venues of secular politics. Coleridge's poem "Querkopf Von Klubstick, Grammarian" parodies Fichte's absolute transcendental idealism in what Robert Pattison describes as a criticism of the idea that "since the universe is now composed of its events, . . . the universe converges on what apprehends these events, namely 'me.'"20 The title of Coleridge's poem labels subjective idealism as something foreign, and Coleridge's parody raises skepticism of German idealism by revealing its origin in the sensible world: "I of the world's whole Lexicon the root! / Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight."21 Each of the essays in this thesis shows how the literature deals both with the essential ontology of human beings and with the standard of an essential moral law. The works of Byron, Wordsworth, and Wilde attempt to assert these essential qualities, and Smith's and Browning's writings negotiate with their persistence and decline to eliminate them. The dogmatism of these approaches complicates any assumption that the Romantic movement's

20 Robert Pattison, The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1987), 24-25. 21 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria: or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. Ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986), 160.

11 emphasis on individual creativity reflects an attempt to harmonize the natural and the transcendent and thus to do away with the distinction between the natural and the supernatural.

12 I: CHARLOTTE SMITH'S ARCHETYPAL VIEW OF CONSCIENCE

Critical readings of Charlotte Smith often portray her politics as the story of an individual woman's political acts. Stuart Curran and Jacqueline Labbe, for example, say that because of her struggle against the patriarchal English legal system, Smith identifies with injustice across the boundaries of class and nation. This kind of rejection of local prejudice is a staple of Jacobin politics, but the reliance on Smith's biographical experiences that directs many readings of Smith and also enters Smith's portrayals of herself often obscures the sanctions of political participation that allow Smith to appeal to politically aware readers in a common interpretive community. In Smith's poem The Emigrants, the interplay between the poetic text and Smith's explanatory footnotes fashions the poem's readership in a way that distances the poem from political stances. The first part of The Emigrants portrays the Catholic clergy who while still in France, refused to take the oath on the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. These priests refused a governmental imposition on papal authority and brought to England a political and doctrinal background that had a troublesome relationship to the English Relief Acts and the Gordon Riots. Smith's depiction of the emigrant clergy follows common patterns of English anti-Catholicism, as when she shows a priest of higher order who once supported his material luxuries by fooling the masses with "clouds of incense" and "the imaginary bones / Of Saints suppos'd."1 But in her footnotes, Smith also expresses "deep and extensive"2 sympathy for the clergy, and her expression of sympathy distances her from her criticisms of Catholicism in the poetic text. Smith's ambivalence toward the French clergy represents a broader ambivalence toward the Revolution and radical politics. The strategy of Smith's footnotes in The Emigrants reflects a tendency of Smith to establish her place in the political field without signifying a commitment to revolution or to any other radical political stance. Contrary to the claim of Curran and others that Smith's work

1 Charlotte Smith, The Emigrants, The Poems of Charlotte Smith (New York: Oxford UP, 1993), 130-34. Poetic texts are cited by line number. 2 Jacqueline M. Labbe, "The Exiled Self: Images of War in Charlotte Smith's 'The Emigrants'," in Romantic Wars, ed. Philip Shaw (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 39.

13 consistently exposes the material conditions beneath the codes of power and law that perpetuate injustice, Smith sometimes relies on narrative strategies that align her more with Edmund Burke and that use nationalistic rhetoric to distance injustice from the English nation. Readings of Smith that stress her commitments to the Revolution and to radical politics often miss a countervailing rhetoric in Smith that opposes the radical allegiance critical readings usually ascribe to her. Furthermore, Smith's ambivalence toward Catholicism anticipates the revival of Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth century. The principles of revolution, whose articulation is a part of English Jacobin rhetoric, reflect the English political market's demand for codes of discourse as much as they correspond to the self-conscious decisions of lecturers, writers, and polemicists who attempt systematic critiques of injustice. While political ideas need an audience who can articulate and understand partisan difference, there is also a common field of political language that sanctions political participation. The epistolary and elocutionary forms of political discourse and the formation of "societies" of political interest demonstrate some of the structural sites of political participation in late eighteenth-century England, as do the dialogical contexts of pamphlets, prefaces, and dedications. Likewise, the publication of poetry and polemical writings depends on recognition in the literary and political markets. In light of these structures and markets, seemingly incompatible political opinions often share some collective language and organization. For instance, when Richard Price, Edmund Burke, and Thomas Paine repeat the myths of English intellectual history (Platonism, empiricism, "second nature"), distinctions in principles emerge from the dialogical form of their writing, a form which reflects their common membership in a class of political correspondents. Although partisan distinctions have decisive meaning in the immediate dialog, even these partisan differences acknowledge a common, if mythic, history of ideas that enables political participation. In Smith's The Emigrants, the formal structure of the book, with its dedication and footnotes, also signals its place in a field of literary and political discourse, but Smith's "principles" in The Emigrants are not associated unequivocally with a particular political stance because

14 Smith uses the same term "principles" functionally to establish her place in the political field. Often, critical interpretations of Smith emphasize her awareness of an exclusion from male systems of power, but Smith's position as an interlocutor in political discourse reflects not only her restriction from some echelons of power, but also the sanction that she courts by signifying her competence in the political field. For Price and Paine, principles denote universal rights whose observance appears in the material lives of people. Smith, however, does not assign this progressive meaning to the term and instead divests the term of such a meaning. The lack of meaning of "principles" reveals Smith's willingness to signal political engagement without estranging a broad readership. Smith first evokes the term as if its corresponding meaning is clear. Later, she disengages "principles" from its ideological and material foundations. She avoids a specific meaning of principles and uses the term to confer a general status of political engagement on the poem and its readers. In a similar way, Smith courts anti-Catholic sentiments while simultaneously retreating from them. Smith's strategy uses language, typical in Burke, that fabricates nationalistic ideas of Englishness. In A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, Richard Price echoes John Locke's temporal view of government when he says that governmental power "is a trust derived from the people" who should be "vigilant, ready to take alarms, and determined to resist abuses as soon as they begin."3 Price wants to divorce history from national and even religious identity. He emphasizes the historical moment and disavows a conservative notion of the "just prejudice" which the English inherit by virtue of their ancestry. "Our friends, our country, and, in short, every thing related to us," writes Price, "we are disposed to overvalue."4 Price talks about representational government and the ideal of impartial, "fair and equal" representation. He says that if representation is "extremely partial, it only gives a semblance of liberty."5 In underscoring "semblance," Price provides an example of his distrust of codified systems of power. Such systems hide an

3 Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (London, 1790), 26. 4 Price, 7. 5 Price, 34.

15 infringement on "liberty" which Price sees partially as a material event and partially as a universal archetype. The positions of representative and represented, and therefore the possibility of liberty, are quantitative for Price, but the laws and policies that represent political "representation" are mere pretense. Price's preference for temporal history over the illusion of an essential, national character is a staple of English Jacobin doctrine. Forms of government should come not from the ideological conventions of a nation, but from the temporal circumstances of active people and the ideals of benevolence and liberty. In her argument that Price "represented a Platonist . . . philosophy," Martha Zebrowski claims that Price wrote in part to refute "the epistemological argument and moral and legal voluntarism of John Locke."6 Zebrowski distinguishes Price from Locke by reiterating Price's belief that "moral ideas are objects not of sense but of understanding," and she says that Price countered "all manner of mechanists and materialists" by arguing for "an archetypal moral and physical reality."7 Zebrowski's ideas are meaningful for at least two reasons. First, she offers a caveat against making easy assumptions about material empiricism in liberal discourse. Although her argument is not explicitly historicist, she suggests that the respective historical circumstances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries inform Price's and Locke's different epistemological foundations. Second, while stressing Price's reliance on "the principle of universal benevolence,"8 Zebrowski leaves intact Price's skepticism of the view that "Englishmen had secured their liberty in the Gothic past."9 Analogical attempts to situate history within a distinctly English tradition are obsolete to Price not only because of the dubiousness of distinctive Englishness but also, significantly, because local histories take their meaning from a correlation to universal archetypes like benevolence and liberty. Even though Zebrowski tries to refute a reading of Price as having a materialist teleology of government, she

6 Martha K. Zebrowski, "Richard Price: British Platonist of the Eighteenth Century," Journal of the History of Ideas 55, no. 1 (1994): 17. 7 Zebrowski 23;17. 8 Price, 9. 9 Zebrowski, 18.

16 still acknowledges some of Price's empiricism when she outlines his agreement with Locke on the transience of forms of civil government. Zebrowski writes: [Price] said he agreed with John Locke's political ideas and pointed to the state of nature to establish that men have a native and pre-political liberty. . . . Civil government is a trust men form to guard against the invasion of their rights.10 As Zebrowski shows, Price often uses the explicit language of voluntarism,11 and regardless of his conception of the origin of rights and liberty, it is at least clear that Price sees government as a temporal construction that should reflect rather than create its historical moment. Nevertheless, the archetypal view of liberty portends a movement toward a unified source of authority and values. The rejection of local prejudice is a staple of Jacobin politics, but contrary to radical premises, a facet of Price's rhetoric sustains a distinct Englishness. Price evokes the Glorious Revolution as an analog to his call for the repeal of the Test Acts, and he places his authorship within the tradition of Milton, Locke, and Sidney.12 Because it proposes English history as a national history of ideas and identity, Price's recourse to historical and literary continuity represents a counter-narrative which lingers in his text and which complicates his more prominent skepticism of the formal continuity of government. The presence of natural Englishness in Jacobin writing is an internal, textual threat to the overt intentions of English Jacobinism. This is so especially when radical ideas occur in a Platonic context because formulations both of the universality of liberal ideals and of the transience of local government hope to separate the lives of people from forms of government and national mythologies. When the conservation of successive national identities precipitates a breach of this alienation, there is a disruption of the subservience of societal and governmental formations to the moment or

10 Zebrowski, 18. 11 "Civil government," Price states, "is an institution of human prudence for guarding our persons, our property, and our good name, against invasion. . . . Civil laws are regulations agreed upon by the community for these ends." See Price, 20-21. 12 Price, 15.

17 to ideals. The archetypal view of political values opposes progressive voluntarism because the foundational basis of archetypes demands a transcendent, not an immanent, evaluation of political doctrine. Commenting on the scholarly consensus about "the seemingly paradoxical presence of reactionary ideas in overtly radical ideology," Isaac Kramnick warns against leaping from the idea that "some part of it was backward-looking" to a view that late eighteenth-century English radicalism was reactionary.13 Kramnick writes: [W]hat gives English eighteenth-century radicalism its coherence is its very desire "to destroy the existing social order and create anew." English radicalism sought to topple the social order of rank and privilege, the static stratified society of ascription.14 Kramnick makes a case that the nostalgic sections of radical writing do not interfere with radical desire and that "backward-looking" ideas are often misread as reactionary when in fact they consistently intend liberalism. Kramnick's claim nevertheless has shortcomings. By separating radical desire from radical texts, Kramnick imagines meaning outside textual representation: Whatever the countervailing drift of radical texts, their basis is the "unique conception of liberty and equality, rooted principally in attitudes toward work and the marketplace, toward achievement and talent"15 (my emphasis). Kramnick's rendition of radical objectives may beg the question of, as Paul de Man puts it, "whether the proper, which is a linguistic notion, and the essence, which exists independently of linguistic mediation, can coincide."16 Kramnick not only absorbs countervailing textual tendencies into a metaphoric fabrication of counter-cultural desire, but he also contains the coexistence of countervailing desires. To the extent that progressive politics conform to a prior "conception of liberty and equality," however, they conflict with the voluntarism that makes consensus the arbiter of value.

13 Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990), 3-4. 14 Kramnick, 4. 15 Kramnick, 4. 16 Paul de Man, "The Epistemology of Metaphor," Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (1978): 19.

18 Discussing the manufacturing of political opinions, Pierre Bourdieu shows how participation in political acts "is a particular case of supply and demand" whereby social agents enter the business of ideological production according to their relative abilities to understand and take part in "the field of the politically thinkable."17 Bourdieu is skeptical of crediting "the common people" with an innate knowledge of politics because such an assignment disguises the stratified concentration of cultural aptitude for political participation. Political participation depends on a field of discourse whose boundaries originate in "a market for cultural products" and whose agents are "socially recognized as entitled to deal with political affairs."18 Kramnick's conclusion that English radicalism is always a project of social reformation underestimates the language of reclamation in radical texts. Beyond merely showing the coincidental presence of diametric political sentiments, the conflation of political language also sustains a broadly competent society of political subjects whose forums expect and perpetuate some common language. For Price, Paine, and Burke, the principles of revolutionary politics nonetheless are relatively clear and appear in a Burke's critical Reflections which Paine quotes as a kind of inventory of the legacy of the Glorious Revolution: [B]y the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights: 1. To choose our own governors. 2. To cashier them for misconduct. 3. To frame a government for ourselves.19 The debate about whether these "principles of Liberty" are new and partisan, innately human, or archetypal focuses on whether, in Burke's words, "this new, and hitherto unheard-of, bill of rights, though made in the name of the whole people, belongs to those gentlemen and their

17 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984), 399. 18 Bourdieu, 399. 19 Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attacks on the French Revolution (Philadelphia, 1796), 5.

19 faction only."20 Already in Burke, the conflict in progressive politics between archetype and voluntarism is a target. At stake in the debate are competing versions of English history and the contentious rendering of that history as empirically progressive, ideologically artificial, or simply natural. Charlotte Smith's rendering of these principles against the backdrop of revolutionary violence obscures both the articulation and location of principles. In Smith, the terms of the debate are unclear because in framing these political distinctions, Smith merges common signals within this particular rhetoric of English politics. Smith's abstract participation in a general political field raises the problem of the extent of her radical empiricism and presages Romantic retraction and retreat. Nevertheless, as the attempts of Zebrowski and Kramnick to give a foundational reading of progressivism show, the relationship between archetype and progress threatens the progressive narrative because an investment in archetypal values challenges the notion that political values originate with the community. This turn to unified meaning tends toward unified authority and figures in Smith's approach to Roman Catholicism. Competing expressions of reform and restoration saturate the work of Charlotte Smith, whose self-constructed biography frequently enters critical assessments of her texts. Stuart Curran, Diane Hoeveler, and Jacqueline Labbe are among the critics who emphasize Smith's awareness of her plight as a stranger to the male systems of power that she depended on.21 According to these readings of Smith, Smith's exclusion from male systems of power makes her especially skeptical of the metaphors of freedom. Smith is a materialist who "places herself outside history" and for whom "culture itself remains an Other."22 Writing about Smith's depiction of French exiles in The Emigrants, Curran offers an account of Smith's disenchantment with systems of law: In her most sustained public poem, The Emigrants, the system is disintegrating of its own tyrannical impulses

20 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1793), 11. 21 See Stuart Curran, Introduction to The Poems of Charlotte Smith (New York: Oxford UP, 1993), xix-xxix; Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1989); Jaqueline M. Labbe, "The Exiled Self: Images of War in Charlotte Smith's 'The Emigrants'," in Romantic Wars, ed. Philip Shaw (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 22 Labbe, 53; 48.

20 around both her and the outcasts of fortune she surveys. The fact that there is so little difference between its French and British victims, between those observed and the sympathetic but powerless observer of their plight, underscores the universal anarchy that passes for law and the helplessness of mere persons before encoded systems of public power.23 Curran gives a reading of Smith's politics according to which "encoded systems of public power" are facades for unregulated material forces, "the universal anarchy that passes for law." According to Curran, Smith sees historical forces operating behind the cover of national identities and political doctrines. She regards the political subject as identifiable by means of its material position which is separate from partisan systems of law. As it does in Locke and Price, history presumably functions outside political identity. Like Price, Smith also faces the problem of whether identity arises from history or derives from an archetypal essence. Some of Smith's materialism appears in her preface to Desmond when she criticizes national prejudice. Saying that "nothing [appears] so absurd as national prejudice," Smith directly challenges Burke's nationalism when she writes: To those however who still cherish the idea of our having a natural enemy in the French nation; and that they are still more naturally our foes, because they have dared to be freemen, I can only say, that against the phalanx of such prejudice . . . a novel writer can have no effect.24 (Smith's emphasis) Smith's argument that there is no "natural" difference between the English and French but only differences constructed by prejudice assumes the primacy of material history as an instigator of narrative. It makes sense that Smith not only discounts artificial constructs of identity but also claims that her novel is an ineffective instrument of change. In the same preface, Smith explains the origins of her novel's political language. Her account of her political language places her

23 Curran, xxiv. 24 Charlotte Smith, Desmond (London, 1792), viii-ix.

21 within a community of political speakers who create enclaves of understanding through collective language. "As to the political passages dispersed through the work," she writes, "they are for the most part, drawn from conversations to which I have been a witness, in England, and France, during the last twelve months . . . at a period when their political situation (but particularly that of the latter) is the general topic of discourse in both."25 Smith's explanation defines the parameters of her access to political language. Smith does not specify her precise stance in this "general topic of discourse," and she points out that the political portions of her novel concern France more than England. She limits her participation to that of a "witness" and avoids choosing between "arguments I have heard on both sides."26 The passive grammar of Smith's "being a witness" and "having heard" further distracts from her ownership of the political rhetoric. She leaves open the question of her own political investments. When the preface continues, Smith defends women's participation in politics. She writes: But women, it is said have no business in politics --Why not?--Have they no interest in the scenes that are acting around them, in which they have fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, or friends engaged?27 Even in this passage of affirmation, Smith distances herself from the agency of political action which occurs "around" her. Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke repeat Smith's deferrals when they argue that these lines show an "angry" Smith whose "defiant logic" and "sharp irony" challenge the British patriarchy to break down "barriers between masculine and feminine roles, between public and domestic realms."28 "Women of a wide spectrum of political persuasions," argue Craciun and Lokke, "felt compelled to respond to the moral and political questions raised by the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, despitesocietal taboos against such intervention."29 The

25 Smith, Desmond, ii-iii. 26 Smith, Desmond, iii. 27 Smith, Desmond, iii. 28 Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke. Introduction to Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution (Albany: SUNY P, 2001), 16-17. 29 Craciun and Lokke, 16.

22 misidentification of correlatives30 here imagines only an evidently repressive society. Taboos against women's participation in the masculine role of politics are societal "prescriptions," while the literal compulsion to political questioning has no discernible, systematic foundation but seems instead to come from an autonomous, even essentialist "moral" sense. Craciun and Lokke confuse the origin of women's questioning because they locate the questioning within some superstructural moral sense that lies outside conspicuous venues. For them, society is a "spectrum of political ideas" whose dependence on actual sites of expression matters only insofar as it limits the feminine genres of writing which individual women "are compelled" to exploit while they independently but compulsorily engage in political participation. But ideological interpellation demands that ideological and structural sanctions contain subjective expressions of oppression and rebellion so that there is a substitution of subjective experience for the system of oppression. Craciun and Lokke neglect these characteristics of political participation by subsuming its systematic sanctions into an account of individual women's moral and political acts, even while such acts are a part of the "spectrum of political ideas." They repeat Smith's problem of political agency which divorces women from the "scenes that are acting around them." Away from political action, women's political participation also occurs at the level of archetype and rhetoric or, as Craciun and Lokke put it, on a "moral" level. In the preface to Desmond, Smith negotiates a place for herself within a wide group of political sentiments. She also conflates disparate political ideas in The Emigrants. Sarah Zimmerman's examination of the "pragmatic view of form" in Smith's Elegiac Sonnets explains that Smith uses the lyric poem to "win readers and hold their

30 In his critique of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, Max Picard identifies a critical method which proceeds according to "a pile-up . . . of the most diverse phenomena" and in which there is "the substitution of the label for order." See Max Picard, Hitler in Our Selves (Hinsdale: Regnery, 1947), 100. In Craciun and Lokke, this coexistence of opposing terms occurs when Craciun and Lokke merge material and moral demands even while they try to establish the primary efficacy of the former.

23 attention by appearing to ignore them."31 According to Zimmerman, Smith establishes a "relationship between lyric poet and reading audiences" which becomes less appealing to readers when Smith's later works politicize her public identity.32 The idea that Smith's readers retreated when they sensed over-politicization in her work conforms to a view of Smith as a careful arbiter of political sensibilities, and the extent that Smith's readers saw politics as inconsistent with Smith's persona reveals how Smith situated her work in the middle- ground of political opinions. Zimmerman says that Smith's reviewers sometimes saw The Emigrants "as a retraction of her support of revolution abroad and reform at home in Desmond."33 The ambiguity of Smith's "principles" is an example of what makes the poem readable as a retraction, but whether Smith intends the poem as a retraction is not as important as the way the text allows itself to appear as a retraction. In The Emigrants, Smith operates in the field of political ideas which has its conventions of discourse. When critics note Smith's sense of alienation from male codes of power, they frequently ignore how her work secures a place in the field of political discourse. Smith's participation in this field accounts for the various strains of political rhetoric in her work. The subject of The Emigrants is political and thus depends on specific political language. Labbe contends that the poem is "a polemical document, not merely anti- war or pro-revolutionary, but rather anti-cultural and proactive,"34 but Labbe's distinction between polemics and culture disregards that Smith's polemical statements occur in socially recognizable forums of political participation. The formal and linguistic requirements of political discourse drive Smith's work, and her practical association with the political includes her use of nonpartisan language. When Smith engages in anti-Catholic rhetoric in The Emigrants, for example, her explanatory footnotes both affirm and deny her anti- Catholicism. Smith charges the French clergy with the usual errors of Catholicism. The sympathy of his English hosts amaze a French monk because the English are "by his dark creed, / Condemn'd as Heretics,"

31 Sarah M. Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyricism, and History (Albany: SUNY UP, 1999), 72; 40. 32 Zimmerman, 41. 33 Zimmerman, 69. 34 Labbe, 54.

24 and the monk eventually "regrets his pious prison, and his beads" and comes to a wider view of the world.35 The clergy whom Smith portrays are those who refused to take an oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in France. They were royalists and partly endearing to conservative English who saw them as representative of general traditionalism. Burke, for example, explains the appeal of the French clergy by saying: Though you were to join in the commission all the directors of the two academies to the directors of the Caisse d'Escompte, one old, experienced peasant is worth them all. I have got more information upon a curious and interesting branch of husbandry in one short conversation with an old Carthusian monk, than I have derived from all the Bank directors that I have ever conversed with.36 In contrast to Burke, "free thinkers and moderate churchmen," according to Roland Stromberg, "were quick to label any appeal to authority as Romanism."37 The aristocratic privileges of many clergy did not appeal to English radicals who wanted to find the systematic causes of the plight of French emigrants and who saw papal authority and "priestcraft" as obstacles to the recovery of rights. For Price, distancing himself from oppressive, "Popish countries" is part of a Dissenter's strategy of questioning authoritative and governmental religious demands within the Church and State in England.38 Without resorting to his "prejudices as a Dissenter from the established Church," Price believes that the Thirty-Nine Articles "cannot be properly adapted to the good sense and liberality of the present times."39 He criticizes "that application of civil power to the support of particular modes of faith."40 Price establishes the pursuit of faith as an inalienable, metaphysical pursuit outside the jurisdiction of civil power. In 1790, a year after Price's Discourse, the Republican government

35 Smith, Emigrants, 122-24. 36 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Thomas H. D. Mahoney (New York: Liberal Arts, 1955), 130. 37 Roland N. Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Oxford UP, 1954), 89. 38 Price, 16. 39 Price, 18. 40 Price, 19.

25 in France demanded that Catholic priests take an oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which meant that the clergy would have to agree to shift the authority to appoint its bishoprics from Rome to the government of France. This precipitated the arrival of more than five thousand clerical refugees in England. Gordon Rupp identifies the late-eighteenth century as a time when humanism and the tradition of social justice were "returning in confrontation with the Church."41 Rupp argues that the Church "had lost control" of these "two powerful traditions."42 According to Rupp, the French Revolution includes the conflict between the contradictory, universal claims of the rights of man and Roman Catholic authority. In his encyclical Charitas, Pope Pius VI responds to the French actions by asserting papal authority and rejecting the language of liberal discourse. While maintaining the primacy of papal power over the civil authority, a routine Roman Catholic claim since Gelasius I in the fifth century, Pius VI rejects "men elected by the low mob of the laity" and offers to "show as much favor to the French people as We can."43 In an echo of Price's view of the inalienable pursuit of faith, Pius VI writes to the French clergy: "Even if you are removed from your place by the civil power, you will still always be the lawful pastors."44 Pius VI further claims that the authority of "the one true religion . . . makes safe and thriving civil societies."45 At stake in Pius's assertions and his opposition to the Declaration of the Rights of Man is a model of papal power that argues for temporal supervenience on spiritual authority, "which the civil power is unable to destroy or overthrow."46 Like Price, Pius VI envisions religious identity outside the constructs of civil government, those "human calculations" that "We purposely pass by."47 Instead of returning humanity to a natural state of equality, however, Pius VI sees humanity's alienation from government as a result of the superiority of the spiritual hierarchy's claims. Pius VI's view

41 Gordon Rupp, Religion in England, 1688-1791 (Oxford, Oxford UP, 1986), 201. 42 Rupp, 201. 43 Pius VI, Charitas, Vol. 1 of The Papal Encyclicals (Wilmington: McGrath, 1981), 181; 179. 44 Pius VI, 184. 45 Pius VI, 184 46 Pius VI, 183-84. 47 Pius VI, 181.

26 corresponds to the archetypal view of liberty that Zimmerman assigns to Price. In these views, the claim to faith precedes the erection of governmental forms. In England, the Relief Acts of 1778 and 1791, which required oaths to the sovereign and against papal deposing power, hinged on averting fears that the pope might exempt Catholics from their oaths. For radicals and Dissenters, anxiety over the threat of papal authority's vacating civil oaths correlates to a conflict between civil liberty and religious authority. But the government and the Church of England, who both fell open to charges of "popery" from Dissenters, wanted to avoid having the acts kindle either persistent fears of Catholic subversion or fresh suspicions that the Church of England was quiescently "popish."48 When the passing of the Act of 1778 occasioned the Gordon Riots, the displacement of discontent with established English authority to anti-Catholicism became a vehicle for the violent expression of wider discontent with the stratification of English society. Boswell's assurance was that the riots took place according to "no combination or plan, either domestick or foreign: but that the mischief spread by a gradual contagion of frenzy, augmented by the qualities of fermented liquors."49 Boswell's two displacements-- relegating attacks on established society to attacks on Catholics and the figuration of discontent with local forms of authority as indiscriminate anti-Catholic violence--show how the overt logic of English anti-Catholicism, which fears an interference of authoritarian or military power from abroad, can covertly, and sometimes even explicitly, represent local controversies and inequalities. In The Emigrants, Smith repeats radical and Protestant objections to Catholicism. The "deep and extensive"50 sympathy for the clergy in her footnotes emerges from a strategy of formally distancing herself from the typical criticisms of Catholicism even while continuing to endorse them. In her footnotes, she defends herself against misrepresentations of her anti-Catholicism: Lest the same attempts at misrepresentation should now be

48 For an examination of the early history of the term "popish" and of the various Catholic and non-Catholic targets of anti-popery, see Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1985). 49 Quoted in Rupp, 199. 50 Labbe, 39.

27 made, as have been made on former occasions, it is necessary to repeat, that nothing is farther from my thoughts than to reflect invidiously on the Emigrant clergy, whose steadiness of principle excites veneration, as much as their sufferings compassion. Adversity has now taught them the charity and humility they perhaps wanted, when they made it a part of their faith, that salvation could be obtained in no other religion than their own.51 By provisionally clarifying her poetic text, Smith's note validates what it claims is a misreading of the poem. The structure of the note itself is provisional because it expresses veneration for "steadiness of principle" while it rejects the supremacy of spiritual authority and the doctrine of papal primacy that rest behind the French clergy's refusal to submit to a civil oath. The divestment of principles shows the difficulty in maintaining progressive values in the context of archetypal principles. Smith's note assumes a commiseration with its immediate readers by representing readership in some place outside both the current reader and the overt expressions of the poem. These artificial spaces of reading and writing demonstrate how Smith's text creates a sense of independent reading and writing even while she tries to limit the expression and interpretation of her poem to certain bounds of decorum and impartiality. Smith's rhetoric reveals the same two displacements as Boswell's explanation of the Gordon Riots. First, the displacement of the threat of local, unilateral authority onto the Catholic émigrés' exclusive view of salvation allows Smith to formulate a common bond with English readers. Her footnote establishes this bond by pointing out what it pretends to disavow: that the threat to English institutions, liberty, and religion, which reflects a wide array of political interests, actually comes from abroad, from those who believe that "salvation could be obtained in no other religion than their own."52 Second, when Smith moves from the potential for English violence to a general validation of the emigrants' sense of principles, she transfers the site of real violence overseas, which is a general strategy of The

51 Smith, Poems, 39. 52 Smith, Poems, 139.

28 Emigrants. Her unwillingness to touch the structure of English power relies on the universality of conscience which is good in itself as long as it consistently follows its principles "whate'er they may be." In moving from English discontent, to emigrant principles, "whate'er they may be," to English compassion, Smith establishes a universal archetype of conscience and principles but maintains the specific national differences that distinguish the English from the French. These archetypal strategies conflict with the usual view of Smith's progressive politics. Her anti-Catholicism and its simultaneous disavowal create a political persona that affirms and denies competing political principles. Her reliance on a transcendental model of conscience threatens progressive voluntarism and signals a Romantic shift away from Enlightenment empiricism.

29 II: BYRON'S CAIN AND THE NATURAL LAW

Byron wrote his closet drama Cain in Italy during a period of his life that Hoxie Neal Fairchild describes as coinciding with a "strong attraction toward Roman Catholicism."1 Cain dramatizes the fourth book of Genesis. After refusing to offer sacrifices to God with his family, Cain slays his brother Abel and receives the punishment of banishment. Before killing Abel, Cain engages in a long dialog with Lucifer on the nature of death, the age of the universe, and the value of knowledge. Byron's poem calls on several religious controversies. First, Byron depicts the views of prominent factions of English Christians, including the Evangelicals, the Latitudinarians, and the Catholics. Second, the poem criticizes the Evangelical and Calvinist views of depravity and the literalness of scripture. Finally, by making Abel a figure of the priesthood and by sometimes invoking the language of the Catholic Mass, Byron questions the Calvinist idea that human beings have no capacity to offer sacrifices. Byron's exposition on the efficacy of sacrifices allows him to challenge the Calvinist doctrines of depravity and predestination. Cain is a poem that reflects Byron's typical hostility to Evangelicalism. However, the drama also expresses skepticism of the Latitudinarian confidence in human reason, and Byron sympathizes with a Catholic, apostolic version of the Church and the efficacy of priestly sacrifices. While critics like Fairchild point to biographical explanations, Byron's doctrinal and theological decisions in Cain also convey political meanings. Byron's early reviewers sometimes recognize the politics of the poem, and some of these responses show that Byron's Italian residence, his representation of Catholicism, and his theology touch on the English anxiety over revolution. Byron's position on rebellion engages with Rousseau's conception of rights and the natural law. In contrast to Rousseau, though, Byron's Cain retains the natural law as external to the individual who participates in it. Rejecting both Calvinist depravity and progressive ideas of reason and voluntarism, Cain opposes Rousseau's idea of the human being and diverges from the narrative of rebellion in Rousseau. Byron instead postulates the created essence of

1 Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Vol. 3 of Religious Trends in English Poetry (New York: Columbia UP, 1949), 437.

30 humanity and the precedent of natural law. The English Romantic tendency to distance revolution from violent excess appears in Charlotte Smith's The Emigrants and permeates the Romantic project in general. "Cain," writes Paul Cantor, "is like Frankenstein in its ambivalence, showing a world order that is ripe for rebellion, and yet at the same time suggesting that rebellion is somehow self-defeating."2 Cantor traces the revolutionary potential in the Romantic "world order" to an abandonment of the Christian creation account in favor of a gnostic creation story and Rousseau's ideas of a return to the state of nature. Cantor sees the Romantics as engaging in a misreading of Rousseau because while Rousseau does not propose a strict return to the state of nature, the Romantic writers, according to Cantor, seek this primal, free state from which humanity can acquire for itself new, different meanings in opposition to the Biblical view of a fixed, created human essence. The question of human ontology, then, differs greatly in the Christian account and Rousseau. Rousseau abandons a created human essence in favor of an adaptability in which "man can become something other than what he originally was."3 Rousseau's idea of potentiality, which Hume and, later, Sartre also share, denies any law deriving from essential nature because it proposes that the general will according to which legitimate political action operates is habitual, not essential. Rousseau consequently also denies the traditional principle of the natural law and invests in a version of political rights which, in contradiction even to Locke, separates political rights from a basis in human ontology. In the "Geneva Manuscript" of Rousseau's Social Contract, political rights accrue from habit: And when the general will has to be consulted on a particular act, would it not often happen that a well- intentioned man would be mistaken on the rule or its application, and would follow his own penchant while thinking of obeying the law? What will he therefore do to safeguard himself from error? Will he listen to his inner voice? But this voice, it is said, is only formed by the

2 Paul A. Cantor, Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), 139-40. 3 Cantor, 6.

31 habit of judging and feeling in the midst of society and according to its laws; as a result, it cannot serve to establish them.4 Rousseau's reversal of the natural law rejects the notion that juridical systems derive from an innate natural law which in turn reflects a participation in the eternal law. Rousseau overturns the Aristotelian tradition of the natural law in which "[w]hat is natural is what has the same force everywhere and does not depend on people's thinking."5 Instead of Aristotle's essentialist and ultimately theological version of the law, which Aquinas adopts by saying that "a law cannot be a habit,"6 Rousseau proposes a voluntarist model of law in which any sense of an innate, pre-existing law is really a development coming from the progression of historical acts. For Rousseau, there is no law apart from human will and human action. In opposition to Locke and Rousseau, Antonio Rosmini's Principles of Ethics is an example of a nineteenth-century Italian affirmation of the natural law. Rosmini writes: "[The human] spirit is merely passive relative to the moral law; it receives the law, it does not form it. It is a subject who cannot refuse the law, not a lawgiver imposing the law."7 In Cain, Byron adopts this traditional view and opposes Rousseau's notion of the societal origin of the law. Paul Cantor identifies an ambivalence in English Romantic ideas of rebellion, but the literalness of this ambivalence already surfaces in Rousseau's idea of the habitual characteristic of law because the capacity of the law to take on different forms according to the

4 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Première version du Contrat social," Vol. 1 of The Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, ed. C. E. Vaughan (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1915), 452. The original French reads as follows: "[E]t quand il faudrait consulter la volonté générale sur un acte particulier, combien de fois n'arriverait-il pas à un homme bien intentionné de se tromper sur la règle ou sur l'application, et de ne suivre que son penchant en pensant obéir à la loi? Que fera-t-il donc pour se garantir de l'erreur? Écoutera-t-il la voix intérieure? Mais cette voix n'est, dit-on, formée que par l'habitude de juger et de sentir dans le sein de la société, et selon ses lois; elle ne peut donc servir à les établir." 5 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 93. 6 Saint Thomas Aquinas, Vol. 28 of Summa Theologiae: Law and Political Theory, ed. Thomas Gilby (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 77 [IIa.94.1]. 7 Antonio Rosmini, Principles of Ethics, trans. Terence Watson and Denis Cleary (Durham: Rosmini, 1989), 15.

32 progress of history means that the law is always ambivalent and ambiguous,8 acquiring different values and progressing in different directions according to the movement of history. Rousseau's view thus denies the epistemological foundation of the Aristotelian concept of the natural law because Aristotle's conception of the law depends on a view of knowledge as the settling of doubt. Because it rejects Rousseau's idea of the law, Byron's Cain does not express gnostic and progressive ideas of the mutability of human nature which, in Cantor's model, "gave rise to hopes of man's recapturing paradise."9 Rather, Cain returns to a more traditional version of law and human nature which recognizes the ambivalence and ambiguity in Rousseau and restores creation and its failures to more traditional terms than Rousseau's. The English Romantic project of returning to tranquility, of finding meaning away from the activity of history, is both a response to the failure of the Revolution and a means of integrating progressive values to traditional religious and national narratives. Often, the critical response to the Romantics has located this tendency mainly with the early poets and especially with the Lake Poets. In Wordsworth's Prelude, for example, "a dark / Inscrutable workmanship . . . reconciles / Discordant elements, makes them cling together / In one society."10 This Romantic concern with the creative capacity's essential origin appears again in Wordsworth's Prelude in lines 141-143 of Book Three: "I had a world about me--'twas my own; / I made it, for it only lived to me, / And to the God who sees into the heart." Here, as in the quotation of the Prelude above which begins the section in which Wordsworth steals the boat and comes to terms with the moral laws that also reside in a prior way in the soul, Wordsworth cautiously defines his own creativity as the living out in history of the "enduring things" of a moral law that precedes him. This turning away from immanence toward transcendence also appears in Cain. As in Frankenstein, there is a similar doubt in Cain of an innate and primary

8 Here, I am referring to the etymologies of the words which indicate "different evaluations" and "different directions." In Rousseau's conception of the law, the ambivalence and ambiguity consist of the law's capricious coming forth in an indefinite, future history. 9 Cantor, xiv. 10 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, in The Works of William Wordsworth (Ware: Wordsworth, 1994), I.341-44.

33 creative capacity in human beings. Byron distinguishes Cain from Abel by the differing extent to which each is able to realize, but not to create, his capacity to participate in the sacrifice which ultimately defines his potentiality. Byron therefore breaks with Rousseau because the realization of creative potential depends on participation in a mandate that precedes the will but nevertheless requires its co- operation. Before examining the religious rhetoric of Byron's Cain, it is necessary to summarize the Calvinist challenge to the Roman Catholic Mass because the theological possibility of human beings' having the capacity to propitiate God with sacrifices is a concern of Cain. This concern joins with a broader concern for individual freedom and the value of the person. In moving away from a Protestant emphasis on personal rebirth and toward a Roman Catholic idea of the commission of a priesthood to administer sacraments, Byron distances himself from the progressive view of the law as immanent in subjective acts. Furthermore, Byron makes a connection between the Catholic priesthood's reenactment of a previously completed sacrifice and humanity's participation in a moral law that exists beforehand as an ontologically independent absolute. The divisions in the English Church of the nineteenth-century consist chiefly of three "great parties" which Newman defines in the French edition of his Apologia as the Tractarian, the Evangelical, and the Latitudinarian.11 The Tractarian party of Newman's time develops from an earlier Anglo-Catholic movement which itself traces back to the Nonjurors of the seventeenth century. "They rested their faith," says Geoffrey Faber, "upon a two-fold revelation: upon the Bible, as the Church and the councils of the Church alone knew how to interpret it, but still more certainly upon the existence and authority of the Church itself."12 Although this group generally was "hostile to Roman pretensions, and severe toward Roman abuses,"13 the incipient or covert Catholicism that the movement suggested appears in Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel and persists into the late nineteenth century in such works as Dickens's Barnaby Rudge. The typical anxiety toward its Catholic-

11 Geoffrey Faber, Oxford Apostles (London: Faber, 1974), 72. 12 Faber, 72. 13 Faber, 72.

34 leaning emphasis on authority and tradition becomes part of Byron's defense of Roman Catholicism in his "Roman Catholic Claims" speech when he says that "the worst that can be imputed to Catholics" is "believing not too little, but too much."14 The Evangelical party opposed this version of Christianity. It held that the Bible alone provides everything people need for salvation and that the institutional Church and its extra-scriptural rites and teachings interfere with an individual's direct, personal relationship with God. This view descends from Calvin and tends toward a literal or fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. It holds that a person can have perfect assurance of salvation. The Latitudinarian party, or the Liberal party, put an emphasis on reason and, through Locke and Butler, associated itself with the Whigs by emphasizing social progress and the freedom of the individual will. The Latitudinarian reliance on reason and empiricism eschews literal Biblical interpretation. While rejecting Calvin's predestination and the Evangelical version of an exclusively internal relationship with the supernatural, Byron's Cain also rejects the expansive Latitudinarian freedom of the will which, like Rousseau, imagines a political order that is neither subservient to, nor even necessarily related to, anything outside material history. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin reduces the seven sacraments of Catholicism to two: baptism and The Lord's Supper. Calvin's theology of the Eucharist differs from the Roman Catholic conception, and his passages on the Eucharist amount to a critique of the Catholic priesthood and Mass. Recalling the fourteenth and fifteenth-century condemnations of Wycliffe and Hus, Ford Lewis Battles argues that the "most necessary and the most dangerous critical act the Reform party could perform was to question the Mass."15 Battles links the theology of the Mass to the institutional survival of the medieval Church and State, and he also describes how questioning the validity of the Mass necessarily meant questioning the entire ecclesiastical system of sacraments, indulgences, and canonical jurisprudence. Indeed, Calvin's critique of the Mass serves as a

14 Byron, George Gordon, Baron, The Complete Miscellaneous Prose (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 33. 15 Ford Lewis Battles, Introduction to Institutes of the Christian Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), xx.

35 dismantling of Roman Catholicism because it rejects the hierarchical constitution of the Church. Beginning his critique, Calvin establishes the unworthiness of human beings and the danger of "seeking our worthiness by ourselves."16 Calvin questions the necessity of auricular confession because he denies that reception of the Eucharist requires an examination of conscience and the proper disposition. The Catholic insistence on worthiness for reception, Calvin claims, is a device of Satan who, knowing the inevitability of human sinfulness, intends to debar those most in need of the sacrament from receiving it. Despite what seems like a more inclusive view, Calvin also maintains a distinction between those whom the sacrament helps and those for whom "it is turned into a deadly poison."17 For Calvin, the Church consists of the community of the predestined, and any action, even a good action, of the reprobate is sinful. Although there appears to be a contradiction in Calvin concerning the unworthiness of humanity and the absolute assurance of the predestined, Calvin's point is that there is nothing people can do by themselves to repair their intrinsic unworthiness. Calvin thus rejects as ineffective the Church's mediation on behalf of humankind and believes that all aids to salvation come directly from God's gratuitous intervention on behalf of the predestined, according to Divine Providence. This belief, in turn, leads to Calvin's second Eucharistic argument in the Institutes. Rejecting the Church's role as mediator, Calvin also rejects the Catholic priesthood and denies that Christ established a sacramental priesthood to stand in persona Christi as the minister of grace. For Calvin, Christ is "the sole Pontiff and Priest of the New Testament [cf. Heb., ch. 9], to whom all priesthoods have been transferred, and in whom they have been closed and terminated."18 The apostles were not "enrolled in the order or 'sacrificers.'"19 Arguing that Christ needs no partners, Calvin holds that the theology and practice of the Catholic Mass deprive God of honor and implicitly indict the historical crucifixion as an

16 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 111. 17 Calvin, 110. 18 Calvin, 119. The bracketed reference to Hebrews is Calvin's marginal note on this sentence. 19 Calvin, 114.

36 insufficient sacrifice. On the contrary, Calvin holds that no sacrifice but the historical crucifixion is acceptable as propitiation and that even the sacrifices of the Old Testament "are proved ineffective and weak by the fact that they are repeated."20 Calvin's insistence on Christ's singular sacrifice leads him finally to challenge the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation which he rejects as defying the essential fact that a thing "must subsist in one definite place, with its own size and form."21 In the Institutes, then, Calvin challenges the apostolic, ministerial priesthood, the possibility of the human creature's offering propitiation to God, and the doctrine of transubstantiation. The Catholic Church's definition of the tenets that Calvin opposes appears in the systematic condemnation of Wycliffe in the fifteenth century and then, in an exhaustive way, in the Council of Trent's decrees. In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas proposes that the Eucharist has "a satisfactory power" which "becomes satisfactory for them for whom it is offered, or even for the offerers, according to the measure of their devotion."22 Aquinas not only establishes the sacrificial character of the Eucharist, but he also sanctions the priestly office and apportions the benefits of the sacrament according to the individual merits of the offerers, who include the priest, those present, and the whole Church.23 The contentious assumptions behind Aquinas's view are that there is a priesthood capable of offering a propitiatory sacrifice; that even those who are not predestined are members of the Church on earth; and that the merits of the Catholic sacraments function temporally and are able to improve the condition of the individual over time. When the Council of Trent formulates its theology in opposition to Calvin, the council distinguishes between the "bloody" sacrifice "on the altar of the Cross" and the "same Christ . . . contained and immolated in an unbloody manner" in the Mass.24 This latter "clean oblation" cannot be "defiled by any unworthiness or

20 Calvin, 116. 21 Calvin, 106. 22 Summa, III.79.5. 23 See John P. O'Connell and Jex Martin, "The Mass," in The Missal (Chicago: Catholic, 1954), v. 24 Henry Denzinger, ed. The Sources of Catholic Dogma, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Fitzwilliam: Loreto, 2004), 289.

37 malice on the part of those who offer it."25 In contrast to Calvin, the council establishes that the apostles and their successors received a mandate so that the sacrifice of Christ would continue after his death. This "unbloody" sacrifice confers merit on those who offer it regardless of their eventual supernatural end but in proportion to their concomitant devotion which is liable to increase as a result of the sacrifice. The Council of Trent rejects Calvin's doctrine of the Eucharist on at least three points. First, while Calvin claims that no sacrifice can appease God after the sacrifice of Christ, the council maintains that Christ enlisted the apostles to perpetuate a propitiatory sacrifice, following from and completing the sacrifices of the Old Testament. Second, Calvin holds that no human act can contribute to a person's merit, but taking up Aquinas, the council says that those who offer the sacrifice receive merit both for themselves and for those for whom they offer the sacrifice. Third, Calvin limits the Church's membership to the predestined, but the council holds that merit accrues in time according to the actions and devotion of the individual. Underpinning these differences are wide differences in the doctrines of creation, predestination, and Divine Providence. The Thomistic view of creation as temporally diffusing all the possibilities of a primal creative will provides a somewhat fluid idea of eschatological history, and Catholic theology allows for the notion that predestination occurs post praevisa merita: following foreseen merits. For Calvin, the inevitability of the divine will necessitates the powerlessness of human actions. A parallel between the Thomistic view and the Romantic conception of creativity appears in The Prelude in the sections on the poet's access to transcendent laws. In Cain, this derivative creative capacity comes from Byron's analysis of the efficacy of sacrifices. Byron links the priestly capacity to offer a sacrifice that receives its efficacy from a previous, divine sacrifice with the ability of human beings to access a moral law that derives from an ontological absolute. When Fairchild proposes the incompatibility of Christianity and Romanticism, he cites a Romantic impulse whose satisfaction "could

25 Denzinger, 289.

38 be found only in complete intellectual and spiritual autonomy."26 Yet whenever transcendent values interrupt an investment in creative power and the immanence of the law, autonomy struggles with its dependence on a prior, extrinsic essence. In the nineteenth century, Scottish Calvinism fell under attack by Robert Burns, James Hogg, and Walter Scott. In "Holy Willie's Prayer," for example, Burns satirizes the Calvinist view of unconditional election and what he sees as its resulting antinomianism. Willie, the Calvinist elder of the poem, begins with a boorish statement of election: O thou that in the heavens does dwell, Wha, as it pleases best thysel, Sends ane to heaven an' ten to h-ll, A' for Thy glory! An no for ony gude or ill They've done before thee.27 The prayer continues with the elder's thanks to God that he himself will go to heaven despite his bad behavior that comes from his being "[d]efiled wi' sin."28 Burns's poem criticizes the unconditional election of Calvin and the limited-atonement theology of Scottish Calvinist Thomas Boston. In the Institutes, Calvin explains unconditional election in this way: We say, then, that Scripture clearly proves this much, that God by his eternal and immutable counsel determined once for all those whom it was his pleasure one day to admit to salvation, and those whom, on the other hand, it was his pleasure to doom to destruction. We maintain that this counsel, as regards the elect, is founded on his free mercy, without any respect to human worth, while those whom he dooms to destruction are excluded from access to life by a just and blameless, but at the same time incomprehensible

26 Hoxie Neal Fairchild, Vol. 4 of Religious Trends in English Poetry (New York: Columbia UP, 1957), 3. 27 Robert Burns, "Holy Willie's Prayer," in The Columbia Anthology of British Poetry, ed. Carl Woodring and James Shapiro (New York: Columbia UP, 1995), 422. 28 Burns, 423.

39 judgment.29 Thomas Boston's The Crook in the Lot also provides an example of the Evangelical belief in the powerlessness of individuals to affect their eternal and even worldly positions. "What God sees meet to mar," Boston writes, "one will not be able to mend."30 William Donnelly argues that Byron's negative reaction to Calvinism comes from Calvinism's "absolute denial" of the efficacy of repentance which "leaves the imperfect individual, and imperfect humanity at large, uncatered for, unreconciled, irredeemable--but for those arbitrarily elected to salvation."31 Donnelley cautiously links Byron's dislike of Calvinism's severity to an attraction to Catholicism which, according to Donnelley, offers Byron "those reconciliatory functions that his own religious background had denied him."32 Donnelley's caution about Byron's Catholic inclinations points to at least three facets of Byron's work and the critical responses to it. First, critics often find in Byron a rejection of religion in general. By taking Don Juan as "Byron's final attitude toward religion," C. N. Stavrou, for instance, defines Byron's irreligion as akin to "the urbane scepticism of Anatole France."33 Stavrou sees Byron as sympathetic to the Enlightenment rationalism of Pierre Bayle and David Hume. In addition to a philosophical argument for Byron's atheism, Stavrou also gives a textual analysis of Byron's skepticism in his readings of Childe Harold and the early cantos of Don Juan. These pieces satirize the Catholic Church and especially the devotional practices of Catholics. A second way that critics often portray Byron's attraction to Catholicism is as a pose whose intent is to shock or anger Byron's conservative English contemporaries. Elizabeth Atkins expresses this view when she claims that Byron considered Catholicism an "exotic religion whose defense would be most annoying to his good British neighbors of the Church of

29 Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Edinburgh, 1845), 540. 30 Thomas Boston, The Crook in the Lot (Philadelphia, 1792), 14. 31 William J. Donnelley, "Byron and Catholicism," Byron and Scotland: Radical or Dandy?, ed. Angus Calder (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1989), 46. 32 Donnelley, 48. 33 C. N. Stavrou, "Religion in Byron's Don Juan," Studies in English Literature 3, no. 4 (1963): 568.

40 England."34 Atkins has a view of Byron as influenced by "modern subjective idealism."35 Atkins also ascribes to Byron a Socratic perception of the "bottomlessness of true scepticism and the limitless degree to which we must live by faith."36 For Atkins, Byron's faith combines Wordsworthian nature-worship and a form of Platonism in which "the opposites, chaos and harmony, are generated out of each other."37 This Platonic belief is consistent with the Thomistic principle of "a diversity of species in things of nature,"38 and when Atkins proposes that Byron accepts Plato's idea of the pre-existence of the soul, she overlooks this idea's parallel in Aquinas's view of creation as the historical unfolding of the pre-existing essence of things in an eternal, supernatural intention. Atkins, therefore, assigns subjective idealism to Byron but also, paradoxically, describes his acceptance of Plato's ultimate essentialism. Atkins overlooks the demand in Platonism of a correspondence between philosophical propositions and objects, which Richard Rorty describes as a Platonic wish "to be constrained not merely by the disciplines of the day, but by the ahistorical and nonhuman nature of reality itself."39 This aspect of Platonism opposes subjective idealism because the coherence theory and dialectical method seek knowledge in the relationship between principles without the standard of an external, objective basis for knowledge. Finally, when critics see Byron's interest in Catholicism as genuine, they often divorce it from any doctrinal sympathy and attribute it to an attraction to the aesthetic lure of old abbeys and Catholic ritual. Jerome McGann, for instance, says that "the most important aspect of his leanings toward Catholicism is its pagan (not irreligious) character."40 McGann continues: "He compares it to 'the

34 Elizabeth Atkins, "Points of Contact Between Byron and Socrates," PMLA 41, no. 2 (1926): 406. 35 Atkins, 405. 36 Atkins, 406. 37 Atkins, 413. 38 Thomas Aquinas, A Summary of Philosophy, trans. Richard J. Regan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 43. 39 Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 53, no. 6 (1980): 725. 40 Jerome McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron's Poetic Development (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968), 253.

41 Greek mythology' and greatly appreciates its sensuality. Here speaks the man for whom the object of life was sensuality."41 Fairchild also takes this view and suggests that Byron "wants Catholic worship without Catholic belief."42 Therefore, although there is a general consensus that Byron felt an antipathy toward Calvinism and at least some attraction toward Catholicism, critics portray contrasting versions of Byron's religious thought and sincerity. My intention is not to attribute any personal faith to Byron. Rather, I intend to show that the text of Cain makes specific theological decisions which oppose Calvinism and conform to Catholic ideas. The drama questions the Evangelical views of the literalness of scripture and unconditional election. More specifically, Byron uses Roman Catholic language in support of the efficacy of sacrifices. These theological decisions also indicate political judgments about freedom, revolution, and human value. In Rousseau, history separates humanity from nature, and the rational law which follows from participation in society subsumes the primal natural law and becomes a "highly artificial means for 're-establishing' something like the natural order."43 Cain, on the other hand, maintains continuity between an essential order and the operation of reason so that reason engages with, but does not replace, the order that precedes it. Reason's reliance on a prior natural law restrains Byron's confidence in the creative power of reason. Byron's preface to Cain begins with a discreet rejection of a six- day creation. Referring to the second act of Cain, Byron anticipates criticism of his having Lucifer show Cain the remains, from the ages, of the extinct creatures of earth. When Lucifer responds to Cain's indignation at the suggestion that the earth is not new, he tells Cain that "mightier things have been extinct / To make way for much meaner."44 Lucifer then shows Cain remains of the former creatures of the earth which rest "myriads below its surface,"45 and Cain

41 McGann, 253. 42 Fairchild, Vol. 3, 440. 43 Leonard R. Sorenson, "Rousseau's Fulfillment of the Natural Public Law Tradition and His Contribution to its Demise," The European Legacy 10, no. 5 (2005): 441. 44 II.i.158-59. 45 II.ii.144.

42 acknowledges "those / Mighty pre-Adamites who walked the earth."46 Ian Dennis argues that Byron's plain, almost naive juxtaposition of the account of Genesis with practical and scientific data is a "defiant accommodation" by which Byron can express his hostility toward religion only after an act of self-abasement which allows him to reach a broad, largely religious readership by engaging in religious questioning that is really beneath him.47 For Dennis, Cain is an example of the "passive aggressiveness" according to which Byron recognizes that he must attract audiences in a pluralistic field of religious discourse even while he harbors an "impulse to be offensive."48 Fairchild arrives at a similar analysis of Cain when he mentions Byron's "enlistment of science against orthodoxy," but he then claims that Byron "does not like to admit even to himself the full extent of his unbelief."49 While Dennis recognizes that Byron negotiates a plurality of Christian beliefs, his expectation that the perspective of science indicates Byron's hostility to Christianity overlooks the drama's skepticism of reason's primacy. Byron's rejection of literal Biblical exegesis corresponds to a rejection of Evangelicalism, but this rejection is not sufficient to support Dennis's reading of the play as treating theological issues insincerely. In the preface, Byron catalogs his sacred and secular sources, and he claims that Cuvier's account of the ancient fossil relics "is not contrary to the Mosaic account, but rather confirms it."50 Dennis's questioning of Byron's sincerity imposes a preconception of Byron's irreligious personality onto the poem, and as Steffan points out, Byron and his editor anticipated and sought to prevent readings that found Byron and Lucifer to be identical.51 In any case, while Byron's subjective feelings are interesting, the text of Cain and its reception treat the theological and political issues in a particular context of which Byron's private disposition makes up only a part. Byron's preface rejects the idea that scientific discoveries contradict the Bible, and this rejection

46 II.ii.358-59. 47 Ian Dennis, "Cain: Lord Byron's Sincerety," Studies in Romanticism 41, no. 4 (2002): 663. 48 Dennis, 655-56. 49 Fairchild, Vol. 3, 429. 50 Byron, Cain, 157. 51 Steffan, 333.

43 accompanies a rejection of overly literal readings of the Bible which, in nineteenth-century England, characterize the Evangelical party. While adapting his drama from Genesis, Byron also puts forward an exegetical method for reading Genesis. This method corresponds more to the Latitudinarian and Roman Catholic method than it does to the Evangelical,52 and Byron expresses a Thomistic view of creation as the diffusion of history from a divine essence. The extent to which Byron really accepted religious stories or any exegetical method is an interesting question, but it does not arise explicitly in his preface or his poem. Affirming the age of the earth complements Byron's philosophical statements about the unfolding of creation in history. In Cain, Byron several times refutes Calvin's unconditional election by establishing the temporal progress of individual and collective moral histories. Rather than coming from Rousseau's ideas of progress, Byron's view descends from a Thomistic idea of creation and leads to the freedom of the will in Cain. When the Scottish Calvinist Thomas Boston addresses predestination, he describes the "over-ruling hand" of God which nullifies even the free will: There is not anything whatever befalls us without his over- ruling hand. The same providence that brought us out of the womb, bringeth us to, and fixeth us in the condition and place allotted for us, by him who hath determined the times and the bounds of our habitation, Acts xvii. 26. It over- rules the smallest and most casual things about us, such as hairs of our head falling on the ground, Mat. x. 29,39. A lot cast into the lap, Prov. xvi. 33. Yea, the free acts of our will, whereby we choose for ourselves.53 (Boston's emphasis) Boston's affirmation of Divine Providence at the expense even of the human will arises early in Cain and furthers Cain's susceptibility to

52 Under Pius X, the Biblical Commission summarized the Catholic Church's exegetical stance on the book of Genesis. While the commission's response takes literally certain facts "which pertain to the foundation of the Christian religion," it also allows for the "allegorical and prophetical interpretation of some passages." See Denzinger, 545-547. 53 Boston, 29.

44 Lucifer's suggestions. Cain complains initially of his helplessness in directing his fate when in his first soliloquy he says, "I sought not to be born; nor to love the state / To which birth has brought me."54 Later, Lucifer tells him that his fate has been determined "here and hereafter."55 In contrast to Cain and Lucifer, Cain's wife Adah responds to Lucifer's challenge by proposing a more flexible account of creation that resembles Aquinas's philosophy of predestination. Aquinas explains predestination by saying, "There is predestination so that there might be a diversity of species in things of nature."56 Romano Amerio describes the Thomistic principle of diversity as offering "the whole gradation of possibilities" in creation.57 In his summary of Aquinas, Amerio writes: Diversity is born with existence. Plurality is born in history. In fact, the single unique facet of the essence entering into the unfolding of history is the spreading of itself, the proportioning of itself.58 In Aquinas's account of creation, the temporal role of history functions as an effect of a creative ideal that unfolds over time within the progress of history. In Cain, Adah expresses this view. When Lucifer questions her, Adah repeats the Thomistic view of the unfolding of creation according to a divine will: [God] hath The angels and the mortals to make happy, And thus becomes so in diffusing joy. What else can joy be, but the spreading joy?59 These ideas of the individual instances of creation originating in a primal essence also appear in the first book of The Prelude in the "breath and everlasting motion" that engenders the forms of creation.

54 I.i.67-69. 55 I.i.321. 56 Thomas Aquinas, A Summary of Philosophy, trans. Richard J. Regan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 43. 57 Romano Amerio, Stat Veritas: Suite à « Iota Unum » (Rome: Courier, 1996), 35. 58 Amerio, 35. The original text reads: "[L]a diversité naît dans l'existence, la pluralité naît dans l'histoire: en fait l'unique façon pertinente à l'essence d'entrer dans le devenir de l'histoire est de se déployer, de se graduer." 59 I.i.478-81.

45 Cain mistrusts Adah's confidence in the unity of creation when he doubts the necessity of the division between God and Lucifer: "Would that there were only one of ye! Perchance / An unity of purpose might make union / In elements which seem now jarred in storms."60 In an effort to surpass the distinction between good and evil, Cain rejects the division of identities and powers in what Adah describes as the diffusion of creation. Cain's attempt resembles the emergence of Rousseau's natural man from the natural law's bondage in order to create the law himself according to the general will. Cain's powerlessness even in this endeavor leads ultimately to his rejecting his capacity to perform the sacrifices with Abel. When Cain finally kills Abel, the act leads not to independence from the moral law but instead to its assertion. In describing sacrifice in particular, Byron contrasts Abel's view with Cain's. When he offers his sacrifice, Cain resigns himself both to his own powerlessness and to the incomprehensible divine judgment that precedes and determines his life and actions. Cain does not believe his actions can affect his fate but rather takes a view similar to Boston's that even his will is bound by a divine mandate. Byron joins with Burns in criticizing Boston's brand of Calvinism, and Cain's distress comes in part from his disgust with his perception of powerlessness in directing his fate. In contrast to Rousseau's notion of the human capacity to create the law and to alter human ontology, Byron's response to this facet of Calvinism calls on the efficacy of sacrifices. Byron's view assumes a fixed human nature which has access to an extrinsic source of law and redemption. It is not therefore a progressive view. Besides a return to an Aristotelian idea of the law and human nature, Byron's redemptive philosophy invests in an Aristotelian epistemology which, unlike the continuum of Rousseau's adaptability, seeks knowledge in a finality beyond which there is no more development in being or comprehension. At his altar, Cain speaks to God and expresses his discontentment: [All r]est upon thee; and good and evil seem To have no pow'r in themselves, save in thy will. And whether that be good or ill I know not,

60 II.ii.377-381.

46 Not being omnipotent nor fit to judge Omnipotence, but merely to endure Its mandate, which thus far I have endured.61 When Paul Barton discusses Calvinism in Cain, he stresses Cain's "impotent anger" and rejection of "God's redemptive power."62 Barton argues that Cain eventually abandons his resignation and puts faith in himself. Cain's late speech, however, continues to express his resignation and insecurity. In contrast, Abel sacrifices as the "watching shepherd boy who offers."63 He asks Cain "to join me and precede me / In our priesthood."64 Abel builds altars "whereupon to offer / A sacrifice to God,"65 and "[h]is sacrifices are acceptable."66 In his description of Abel and his sacrifices, Byron makes references to the language of the Catholic Mass and its sanctioning of the power of sacrificers and their sacrifices. These references come mainly from the Offertory parts of the rite and have no counterparts in the Book of Common Prayer. For instance, Byron's language of the acceptability of Abel's offerings takes a similar form to the supplication to "hold acceptable . . . the offerings of Abel, Thy just servant."67 Abel's repetition of the greeting, "the peace of God be on your spirit,"68 also combines and repeats the "Dóminus vobíscum," "pax dómini sit semper vobíscum," and "et cum spíritu tuo" that recur throughout the Catholic rite.69 In addition, Adah describes the sacrifice as "a goodly off'ring to the Lord, / Giv'n with a gentle and a contrite spirit,"70 and the Catholic Offertory asks that the "sacrifice so be offered to you, Lord . . . in

61 III.i.274-279. 62 Paul D. Barton, Lord Byron's Religion: A Journey into Despair (New York: Mellen, 2003), 62. 63 I.i.183. 64 III.i.198-99. 65 III.i.96. 66 II.ii.352. 67 Hugo H. Hoever, ed. Saint Joseph Sunday Missal (New York: Catholic, 1953), 54-55. The untranslated text reads: "accépta habére dignátus es múnera púeri tui justi Abel." 68 I.i.63. See also III.i.163. 69 See Hoever, 24, 28, 30, 34, 42, 62, 72, 74. In English, these phrases are: "The Lord be with you," "may the peace of the Lord be always with you," and "and with thy spirit." 70 III.i.107-08.

47 a humble spirit and with a contrite heart."71 These references and the general leaning toward the efficacy of sacrifices in Cain come during Byron's residence in Italy which McGann, Fairchild, and others say coincides with "his attraction to Italian Catholicism"72 and "responsive[ness] to Catholic worship."73 Beyond demonstrating any biographical inclinations, though, Byron's adoption in Cain of Catholic rhetoric resonates domestically amid particularly English religious and political stances. For example, Thomas Talfourd's 1822 review in The London Magazine examines Byron's turn toward "conservative activities."74 Talfourd identifies Byron's conservatism formally in Byron's change from a "chartered libertine" who "scoffed . . . at the forms and creeds of the pious" to a writer who, in composing a "bad imitation of the Greeks," now employs the Aristotelian unities and "discovers ethical poetry."75 In addition to complaining about Byron's conservatism of form, Talfourd also accuses Byron of relying on aristocratic privilege to enable his change "from the wild to the austere."76 Talfourd's focus on formalism and ethics is compatible with the rejection of Rousseau in Cain. In adopting Aquinas's view of an essence which diffuses itself in the particular elements of creation, Byron engages in essentialism, particularly about the natural law. When Lucifer tries to convince Adah that sin develops "in those who replace ye in / Mortality,"77 he expresses the voluntarist ideas of Rousseau according to which moral laws develop ambiguously by the progress of history. Adah, however, questions "the sin which is not / Sin in itself" and asks Lucifer, "Can circumstance make sin / Of virtue?"78 Byron's Cain proposes an ontological definition of the human being that differs from Rousseau's acceptance of humanity's creative capacity with regard to the law. Whereas Rousseau proposes that human beings' reason, arising from historical circumstances, creates the law out of nothing, Byron conceives of a prior essence to which humanity's

71 Hoever, 39. The untranslated text reads: "In spíritu humilitátis, et in ánimo contríto . . . a te, Dómine: et sic fiat sacrifícium nostrum." 72 McGann, 255. 73 Fairchild, Vol. 3, 425. 74 Steffan, 348. 75 Steffan, 350-51. 76 Steffan, 350. 77 I.i.379-80. 78 I.i.380-382.

48 creative endeavors have access. Byron also rejects the determinism of Calvin. Byron's limited conception of creativity corresponds to Wordsworth's view of the poet's access to the transcendent forms which, though derivative, enable creative work, and there are links here with the commission of priestly sacrifices in Catholic theology and with the Thomistic idea of the law. In drawing on the capacity in Aristotle and Aquinas for human participation in laws and actions that are ontologically independent of human history, Byron shapes a worldview in Cain that conflicts with the progressive ideas of Rousseau. This conflict extends beyond the reshaping of progressive secularism because although Byron's conception of humanity shares with progressive secularism an expectation that good prevails over time, Byron relies on a supernatural, or at least metaphysical, essence beyond the material circumstances of history, participation in which determines individual success or failure, as it does for Abel and Cain. In Byron's Cain, a transcendent reality precedes the encoding of law, and the law is a concrete reality, not merely an abstraction derived from material experiences.79

79 Compare Byron's view on the moral law to the view of the Romans on scientific laws, which R. M. Ogilvie describes as affirming that a "scientific law was not an abstraction but a concrete manifestation of divine activity." See R. M. Ogilvie, The Romans and Their Gods in the Age of Augustus (New York: Norton, 1969), 10.

49 III: CHURCH HISTORY IN WORDSWORTH

In Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets, the Catholic Church's role in history appears both in the Church's doctrinal decisions and in the particularly Catholic practices of the hierarchical Church and individual Roman Catholics. Wordsworth presents the Roman Catholic Church as an oppressive institution, but he also praises Catholic architecture and some Catholic habits of worship. The conflicts between individual instances of Christian faith, the ideal of Christian faith, and the historical progression of the Christian era present a problem in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Wordsworth wants to establish a linear history of the Church of England in which the structures of the English Church and State work to preserve religious and social continuity in England and in Christendom at large. Wordsworth sees the structural Church of England as a repository for the true Christian doctrines that have passed inviolate through the crises and violence of material history. Despite certain historical corruptions, Wordsworth also believes that the Christian faith perseveres outside history in a place that defies empirical examination. This conflict between material history and supernatural faith forces the poem to portray two types of history, material and metaphysical. Whenever the poem divorces the latter from the former, it builds an alternative history whose continuity relies on its separation from the inconsistencies of material history. Because of this split, Wordsworth's attempt finally to reconcile the history of the Church of England with the ideal Christian faith encounters a problem because the poem shows how faith perseveres outside the structures of history, especially when those structures are pagan or Roman Catholic. The practices of some Christians, in for instance Catholic monasteries and the Roman Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary, often stand in opposition to the inviolate Christian faith that the Church of England is supposed to maintain. Even with these aberrations, Wordsworth nevertheless assigns a positive value to the acts themselves, apart from their deviation from the genuine faith. This value of the empirical act threatens Wordsworth's notion of an inviolable faith that perseveres despite historical provocations. Having established a rupture between faith

50 and history, Wordsworth creates a conflict that disturbs his project of reconciling Christian doctrine within the institution of the Church of England. Wordsworth originally published his Ecclesiastical Sketches in 1822 and by 1845 had added thirty sonnets to make up the 132 total sonnets of the Ecclesiastical Sonnets. The work's long textual history accounts for its diverse, sometimes conflicting attitudes. Wordsworth divides the sonnets into three parts which progress chronologically. Part I consists of thirty-nine sonnets and spans from the Druids to Frederick Barbarossa, a period of about twelve-hundred years. Part II consists of forty-six sonnets and spans from Henry V to the Commonwealth, and Part III consists of forty-seven sonnets and spans from the Restoration to Wordsworth's time. The work navigates the history of Christianity in England from the decline of the Druids to Wordsworth's present, and its critical reception has varied. Anne Rylestone reads the sonnets as portraying "the dynamic interaction between collective human experience and the individual's search for identity."1 "Nature and the Church," she writes, "serve as intermediaries in the dynamic between the phenomenal and spiritual realities of life in this world."2 Rylestone sees the Ecclesiastical Sonnets as moving beyond an "objective versified historical account" to the personal history of Wordsworth's salvation. In seeing the sonnets as she does, Rylestone integrates them into "the extensive Wordsworthian landscape that evolves over the course of the poet's many works."3 The English Church is another site of the private "inward eye" that concerns Wordsworth's work as a whole. While Rylestone's Christian reading seems to overlook the imposing roles of history and the Establishment in the sonnets, other critics account for Wordsworth's interest in the Church of England by saying that the later Wordsworth begins to link his longstanding concern for preserving rural values to the preservation of the Established Church. In contrast to Rylestone, for example, David Pym says that as "a man whose politics were stated in practical and not idealist terms," Wordsworth rejected

1 Anne L. Rylestone, Prophetic Memory in Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991), xii. 2 Rylestone, xv. 3 Rylestone, 1.

51 "that the Church could only be delineated in spiritual terms."4 For Pym, Wordsworth's concern with the structure of the Church serves his interest in ensuring "that the traditional English rural way of life and its values were able to survive the contemporary social and constitutional changes."5 In addressing specific social and constitutional issues, Regina Hewitt claims that the Ecclesiastical Sonnets offer Wordsworth's statement against Catholic Emancipation and show how "Anglicans would justify their hegemony through social programs," and especially through church-building which "would define every Briton's place within the national community."6 For Hewitt, Wordsworth's motive for writing the sonnets is to show his support for the Church Building Act of 1818. These critical views demonstrate a problem in the sonnets' depiction of the relationship between history and religious truth. Wordsworth's account of the Church of England is chronological, from the Druids to Wordsworth's own time, and the poem describes the role of English historical events in establishing civil freedom and ensuring religious freedom. At the same time, Wordsworth articulates religious truth as having a single meaning that retains fidelity to its Christian essence despite the apparent ruptures of material history. A problem arises not only because the sites of preserving truth are disparate and sometimes intensely individualistic, ranging from the underground Waldensians to ostentatious Roman Catholicism, but also because history appears to create truth, which Wordsworth still portrays as original and incapable of being created. Alongside this tension between material history and religious truth is another, similar tension between the exterior practice of religion and what the poem supposes to be the inviolable truth of the Christian faith. Wordsworth shows a hesitancy toward praxis in Ecclesiastical Sonnets, and this ambivalence is not only toward religious rites but also toward the monuments and accessories of religious worship. On the one hand, Wordsworth praises

4 David Pym, "The Ideas of Church and State in the Thought of the Three Principal Lake Poets: Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth," Durham University Journal 52, no. 1 (1991): 26. 5 Pym, 19. 6 Regina Hewitt, "Church Buildings as Political Strategy in Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets," Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 25, no. 3 (1992): 32-33.

52 as crucial to religious truth the church buildings and authoritative rites of the Church of England. On the other hand, he describes the role of ruined Catholic abbeys in demonstrating religious truth, and he also depicts a domain of religious truth that resides even outside the structures of history. Slavoj Žižek describes the Christian introduction of the "principle according to which each individual has immediate access to universality."7 Žižek's primary interest is the way in which Christianity constitutes "subjectivity as such."8 For Žižek, Christianity offers the prospect of authentic subjectivity outside the prescriptions of the existing social order, but Žižek also recognizes the problem of describing a Christianity that refuses to interpolate subjects systematically by posing beforehand the possibility of their subjectivity. To answer this Althusserian objection, Žižek reads the anti-social injunctions of Luke 14:16 and says that Christianity proposes subjects who must remove themselves from the social order and even from the restraints of the superego. Žižek claims that one of the effects of this Christian practice is not the abstract distancing of the subject from the world, which really articulates subjectivity for the prevailing social order and thus ensconces the individual concretely within the Law. It is rather the accomplishment of a definitive act that situates the subject in "the space of free action."9 "When we abandon the fantasmatic Otherness which makes life in a constrained social reality bearable," Žižek writes, "we catch a glimpse of Another Space which can no longer be dismissed as a fantasmatic supplement to social reality."10 Žižek's concern with an act that takes the individual outside social identifications and the prescriptions of ideology shows the difficulty in proposing an authentic, "alternative community" because Žižek's recognition of the authentic self comes from a single, insurmountable act of separation that is not understandable at the immediate or anterior site of its schism but is instead a series of posterior acts demonstrating nonetheless the achievement of a "space

7 Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (New York: Verso, 2000), 120. 8 Žižek, 150. 9 Žižek, 150. 10 Žižek, 158.

53 of free action"11 that substantiates the new subject. In the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Wordsworth's dilemma is how to represent actions that take the Christian actor outside the constraints of the dominant social order even while these same actions tend toward the establishment of the Church of England and its institutional purpose of enunciating English subjects. Žižek proposes that Christianity shows how the Christian actor can act apart from historical constraints, but the problem in Ecclesiastical Sonnets is that the inevitability of the Establishment looms over every prior act in the history of Christianity. Assessing Wordsworth's attempt to build a singular history of the Church of England, Barbara Gates points out how Wordsworth's sonnets "blurred the Church's Roman origins and wrongly sought its source in Britain."12 For Gates, the Ecclesiastical Sonnets are selective "distortions of church history" by which Wordsworth avoids divisive and factious issues. "Defeated by the difficult artistic and philosophical problem of uniting the temporal and spiritual aspects of his politico- ecclesiastical subject," writes Gates, "he made the stream of history a reflection of his own mind."13 The elisions and inaccuracies that Gates identifies as a kind of dishonesty toward history, though, accompany another history in the poem. Not only temporal history, but also the immaterial history of faith concerns Wordsworth. Even when he records lapses in the temporal history of the Church of England, therefore, Wordsworth appends to temporal history a clandestine history of doctrinal and individual purity. He thereby attempts a seamless history of the Church of England not as much in temporal events as in suprahistorical, spiritual perseverance. In Wordsworth's descriptions of the Saxon invasion and the destruction of the monastery at Bangor-on-Dee, he depicts the pagan Saxons as concerned with no "other monuments than those of Earth": Who, as the fields and woods have given them Birth, Will build their savage fortunes only there; Content if foss, and barrow, and the girth

11 Žižek, 150. 12 Barbara T. Gates, "Wordsworth's Mirror of Morality: Distortions of Church History," The Wordsworth Circle 12, no. 2 (1981): 129. 13 Gates, 132.

54 Of long-drawn rampart, witness what they were.14 Wordsworth's invading Saxons have no sense of spiritual history and rather concern themselves with material history alone. Wordsworth puts this opposition in temporal terms as the Saxons, who bring "a second and a darker shade / Of Pagan night,"15 seem to occupy an earlier historical moment than the English whose extinct paganism precedes the Saxon invaders. To achieve this opposition between Saxons and Christians, Wordsworth moves his account of history from material history to an extrahistorical assessment of belief. Despite the destruction of the monastery at Bangor, Christian doctrine accomplishes its preservation outside material history. "Mark!," Wordsworth writes, "How all things swerve / From their known course, or vanish like a dream": Only perchance some melancholy Stream And some indignant Hills old names preserve, When laws, and creeds, and people all are lost!16 The ambiguity of preservation and loss that appears in Wordsworth's sonnet introduces a moment when a latent Christian history, which is inevitably also English history, takes precedence over the events of temporal history. The fields and woods, which concern the Saxons for what they are materially, represent the ideals of Christianity and Englishness for the English. As Wordsworth tries to build a singular ecclesiastical history, he offers an undercurrent of belief whose purpose is to smooth over the discontinuity of Christianity in material history. This strategy diminishes the role of historical change in the establishment of the English Church because it suggests an enduring, but extrahistorical religiosity. The institutions of the Church neither create nor sustain the current of belief that has its own history. Barbara Gates shows how Wordsworth is "willing to disregard historical accuracy and continuity" to convey a point of moral

14 William Wordsworth, Vol. 2 of The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven: Yale UP, 1981), I.xi.10-14. Unless otherwise noted, all poetical works of Wordsworth in this chapter come from Hayden's edition and are cited by line number. 15 I.xi.4-5. 16 I.xii.9-10; 12-14.

55 uprightness.17 Gates gives the example of Wordsworth's inclusion of a spurious story of "Pope Alexander III's setting foot on the neck of the Emperor Barbarossa."18 Besides including the story of Alexander III, Wordsworth borrows from Shakespeare to portray Archbishop Chicheley as the source of Henry V's ambition toward France. Wordsworth's story of the Waldensians similarly relies on historical fabrications. In his treatment of the Waldensians, Wordsworth builds a doubtful origin for the sect while nonetheless intimating that its history is in fact irrecoverable. The Waldensians were a heretical sect of the Middle Ages. They arose in the twelfth century after Waldes of Lyons, a merchant who later took the name Peter, commissioned vernacular translations of the Bible and began preaching an intensely personal version of Christianity. Waldes held that the ostentatious display of the Catholic Church should be countered by nonviolence and a commitment to ascetic poverty. The Waldensians traced their origin to Constantine's legalization of the Church under the pontificate of Sylvester I, and they held, as did other heretical sects, that from the time of Roman legalization, the Roman Church began to lose its spiritual mission and become secularized. The Waldensians endured ecclesiastical censure, inquisitors, and even outright warfare, and the sect still exists today. In the fourteenth century, the Waldensians manufactured a myth about their founder who was supposed to have been "transported back more than eight hundred years and transformed into a companion of Sylvester."19 According to the story, the miraculously transported Peter Waldes attempts to stop Sylvester's agreement with Constantine. As a result of this interference, Waldes and his followers earn an exile to the mountains "where they had preserved the church all these years."20 While the myth of Waldes attempts to push the Waldensians' founding back in time, Wordsworth's version of the Waldensians does not explicitly mythologize their founder but similarly suggests that the Waldensian sect pre-existed even Waldes.

17 Gates, 129. 18 Gates, 130. 19 Susan K. Treesh, "The Waldensian Recourse to Violence," Church History 55, no. 3 (1986): 296. 20 Treesh, 296.

56 For Wordsworth, the Waldensians establish continuity in doctrine. Stephen Gill maintains that "Wordsworth's commitment to the Church of England" led Wordsworth to "an interest in the evolution of the Anglican Church" and to a "growing sense of its importance as a conduit of spiritual values in the decade following the triumph of the Reform."21 In Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Wordsworth indeed traces the spiritual values of the Church of England, but in order to establish continuity in Christian doctrine, Wordsworth reaches outside history and manufactures an extrahistorical lineage of doctrine. Wordsworth's Waldensians, by existing in "safe retreats,"22 both precede Peter Waldes and endure without him. Of the Waldensians' origin, Wordsworth writes: But whence came they who for the Saviour Lord Have long borne witness as the Scriptures teach?-- Ages ere Valdo raised his voice to preach In Gallic ears the unadulterated Word, Their fugitive Progenitors explored Subalpine vales, in quest of safe retreats, Where that pure Church survives.23 As fugitive progenitors, the Waldensians' forerunners precede Peter Waldes, and Wordsworth concludes his account of the origin of the Waldensians by saying, "[T]he eternal snow that daunts / Aliens, is God's good winter for their haunts."24 The winter haunts of the proto- Waldensians locate them in a particular place, but the "eternal snow" serves as a metaphor for the Waldensians' persistence outside visible history. The hidden Waldensians preserve doctrine and truth, which Wordsworth wants to see handed down to the English Church in an uninterrupted spiritual history. As Wordsworth's sonnets proceed from the Waldensians to the Reformation, Wordsworth repeats Shakespeare's account of Archbishop Chicheley's self-interested influence over Henry V, and he attributes the War of the Roses to Chicheley's role in Henry's defeat of the French. Attributing these wars of English history to the Catholic

21 Stephen Gill, "Wordsworth and Catholic Truth: The Role of Frederick William Faber," The Review of English Studies 45, no. 178 (1994): 204- 05. 22 II.xii.6. 23 II.xii.1-7. 24 II.xii.13-14.

57 Church, Wordsworth also articulates the predominance of "spiritual truth" even beneath the surface of "civil slaughter": Yet, while temporal power Is by these shocks exhausted, spiritual truth Maintains the else endangered gift of life; . . . And, under cover of this woeful strife, Gathers unblighted strength from hour to hour.25 Spiritual truth, although it evades description and remains "under cover," nonetheless achieves a temporal effect that Wordsworth expresses in language that includes both permanence and temporal progression. Christian truth as inevitable in historical progress is an ideal that Milton expresses in his Areopagitica, and Wordsworth expresses a similar idea in his Ecclesiastical Sonnets. In Wordsworth's description of the Danish conquests, which he attributes "to the Crown that doth the Cowl obey,"26 he writes that "Gospel-truth is potent to allay / Fierceness and rage" after the victory of "a Pagan sway."27 The Danish conversion is a repudiation of "native superstitions"28 in favor of truth, but the conversion of the Danes is beyond historical description. The conversion of the Danes takes place apart from material history, and Wordsworth compares the unfathomable effect of the "Gospel-truth" to the effect of the moon on the night sky: Thus often, when thick gloom the east o'ershrouds, The full-orbed Moon, slow-climbing, doth appear Silently to consume the heavy clouds; How no one can resolve; but every eye Around her sees, while air is hushed, a clear And widening circuit of ethereal sky.29 Just as the moon's dominion in the sky is inexplicable, the way that truth achieves its preponderance does not succumb to historical explanations, and Wordsworth's poem establishes the axiological superiority of religion as a supernatural antidote to the historical

25 II.xvi.9-14. 26 I.xxix.1. 27 I.xxix.4-6. 28 I.xxix.8. 29 I.xxix.9-14.

58 change that pagan invasion brings. The poem nevertheless describes the chronological progress of English ecclesiastical history. The movement of history thus complicates the inevitability of truth because the primacy of spiritual truth becomes a particular institutional history. Part I of the sonnets ends with papal dominion, and Wordsworth moves to the Reformation in Part II. Stephen Gill details the influence of Frederick William Faber on the sonnets, particularly in Faber's convincing Wordsworth to praise "more explicitly our debt to the papacy."30 Gill explains that "[d]uring the late 1830s and early 1840s . . . attempts were made publicly to tie Wordsworth into one party within the Church of England, to appropriate both the poet and the poetry for the great work of spiritual renewal now in train."31 In his preface to "Musings Near Aquapendente," a poem from Wordsworth's Memorial of a Tour in Italy, Wordsworth indeed praises the Oxford Movement: "Much of the work they are undertaking was grievously wanted, and God grant their endeavours may continue to prosper as they have done."32 By 1845, Wordsworth had composed and published some additional Ecclesiastical Sonnets on the Roman Catholic Church. Although Gill calls Faber's influence "an almost wholly successful" attempt "to determine the complexion of the 'Wordsworth' handed down to posterity,"33 the additional sonnets repeat the dilemma of Christian truth and material history with which Wordsworth's poem consistently struggles. In a letter to John Keble, Faber describes his influence on Wordsworth and says that Wordsworth "deplores the absence of all tuition in theology & old Ch[urch] history wh[ich] marked the universities of his day."34 Still, the sonnets try to avoid partisanship, and they praise the Latitudinarians35 and warn against the distinction between High Church and Low Church, the "watchwords of

30 Gill, 214. 31 Gill, 205. 32 William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth (London, 1876), 89. 33 Gill, 209. 34 B. W. Martin, "Wordsworth, Faber, and Keble: Commentary on a Triangular Relationship," The Review of English Studies 26, no. 104 (1975): 436. 35 III.iv.

59 party."36 Regardless of the extent to which the Oxford Movement successfully appropriated and even altered Wordsworth, Faber's letter highlights the link between theology and history that Wordsworth attempts in Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Marjorie Levinson has pointed out that in Wordsworth's later poems, the literal infrastructure of England, its buildings and churches, supplants Burke's native prejudice and reverses the introspection of Wordsworth's earlier poetry.37 In her analysis of "Tintern Abbey," an early poem, Levinson suggests that Wordsworth blocks out evident items of the scene on the Wye, like the beggar's huts and the smoke of iron furnaces. In "Tintern Abbey" Wordsworth preserves nature from the incursion of the landscape's unsavory elements and thereby creates an inauthentic, misleading setting for his experience of nature. According to Levinson, Wordsworth in his later poetry no longer suppresses the landscape but instead rationalizes English institutions by emphasizing the weight of their infrastructural presence. Levinson identifies an exteriority in Wordsworth's later poems, but in "Musings Near Aquapendente" and Ecclesiastical Sonnets, the insinuation of clandestine, spiritual history challenges Wordsworth's attempts to trace theological history in the structures of material history. In "Musings," Wordsworth seems to acknowledge that the loss of religious values and the emphasis on material gains are characteristic of the Victorian age: Time flows--nor winds, Nor stagnates, nor precipitates his course, But many a benefit borne upon his breast For human-kind sinks out of sight, is gone, No one knows how; nor seldom is put forth An angry arm that snatches good away, Never perhaps to reappear. The Stream Has to our generation brought and brings Innumerable gains; yet we, who now Walk in the light of day, pertain full surely To a chilled age, most pitiably shut out From that which is and actuates, by forms,

36 III.xi.10. 37 Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth's Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986).

60 Abstractions, and by lifeless fact to fact Minutely linked with diligence uninspired, Unrectified, unguided, unsustained, By godlike insight.38 The "abstractions" of science that Wordsworth describes as lifeless facts belong to "the light of day," but just as eschatological history predominates over the facts of material history in Ecclesiastical Sonnets, the "godlike insight" that is threatened by "the light of day" returns in "Musings" to "liberate our hearts from low pursuits."39 The "tuition in theology & old Ch[urch] history," which Faber reports Wordsworth as valuing, represents two opposing forces. On the one hand, Wordsworth structures theological history within the bounds of Church history. On the other hand, Wordsworth claims that spiritual history escapes and even opposes material history. Levinson sees an emphasis on infrastructure in Wordsworth's later poetry, but there is a conflict in the poetry between infrastructure and religious truth. While religious truth appears to have become external in the later poems, its perseverance despite the changes in material history shows continuity outside the material history that Wordsworth seeks to represent as ultimately religious. In his description of the papacy, Wordsworth contrasts papal abuses with the same irrepressibility of truth, and this contrast is one that appears in other contexts throughout Ecclesiastical Sonnets. In Memorials of a Tour in Italy, the sonnet "At Albano" expresses some of Wordsworth's ambivalence toward Roman Catholic religious practice. Depicting a peasant woman, Wordsworth writes: My dull forebodings in a Peasant's ear Found casual vent. She said, "Be of good cheer; Our yesterday's procession did not sue In vain; the sky will change to sunny blue, Thanks to our Lady's grace." I smiled to hear, But not in scorn:--the Matron's Faith may lack The heavenly sanction needed to ensure Fulfillment; but, we trust, her upward track

38 315-330. 39 347.

61 Stops not at this low point.40 In the encounter with the peasant, the event of seeking intercession is an act that has merit of itself without explicit "heavenly sanction." In his prefatory note to "At Albano," Wordsworth writes, "They who reflect, while they see and observe, cannot but be struck with instances which will prove that it is a great error to condemn in all cases such mediation as purely idolatrous."41 Wordsworth's careful language here says only that these instances "prove that it is a great error to condemn" them. Wordsworth proposes an "upward track" that leads aberrant practices toward supernatural fulfillment. A tension between external practice and inner faith comes from the disparity between practice and the continuity of faith, even in the case of an individual history of salvation. In Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Wordsworth regrets the loss of the veneration of the saints in similarly equivocal language: "Yet some, I ween, / Not unforgiven the suppliant knee might bend."42 The problem of history in Ecclesiastical Sonnets often involves reconciling the progress of material history with the inviolability of "Gospel-truth." In these sonnets on the Virgin Mary, though, a different problem arises because worship seems either to generate its own truth, which contradicts the claims of Ecclesiastical Sonnets that religious acts either conform to truth or do not, or to tend toward truth by following an inevitable course of faith. Wordsworth justifies the Reformation and the Church of England by cataloging papal abuses. In Wordsworth's time, the papacies after Pius VI began to restore some of the authority that Pius VI lost in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The pontificates of Leo XII, Pius VIII, and Benedict XIV witnessed both a gradual restoration of papal influence in Europe and a doctrinal conservatism in the Holy See. Although it was not until 1850 that Pius IX restored the bishoprics in England, causing some fear of a Catholic invasion, the Holy See from 1799 to 1846 negotiated treaties with France and Italy. During the same time, the popes confirmed the prohibition of vernacular

40 4-11. 41 Quoted in Edith Clara Batho, The Later Wordsworth (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 417. 42 II.xxv.9-10.

62 translations of the Bible, the indissolubility of marriage, papal supremacy, and the exclusive apostolicity of the Roman Church which had been challenged by Lamennais.43 While the Oxford Movement was garnering concerns regarding the influence of Roman Catholicism in England, the papacy was undergoing a crisis in Europe that would lead to a new alignment of papal power in which the pope's doctrinal conservatism surpassed his influence on civil government as the foundation of papal authority. This shift in the papacy from temporal power to doctrinal authority provides a model that Wordsworth uses in an attempt to consolidate the Church of England's temporal and doctrinal history. Wordsworth's criticism of papal power in Ecclesiastical Sonnets focuses in part on the influence of the papacy on civil government. "From land to land," Wordsworth writes in his description of the rise of the papacy, "[t]he ancient thrones of Christendom are stuff / For occupation of a magic wand, / And 'tis the pope that wields it."44 Nevertheless, in one of the 1845 sonnets, Wordsworth, presumably under Faber's influence, revises his assessment and says of the Catholic Church that "there is none that if controlled or sway'd by her commands partakes not, in degree, / Of good."45 In "At Albano," the good of Roman Catholicism suggests that religious practice has value of itself, distinct from its correspondence to "heavenly sanction," and in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Wordsworth repeats the same ambiguity toward Catholicism. The origin of this ambiguity is a conflation of the papacy's temporal and spiritual authority. The papacy's "magic wand" interferes in temporal affairs, but the "sway" of the Roman Church's spiritual commands derives from some essential "good." Dennis Taylor's appraisal of ruined abbeys in Wordsworth's poetry sees these ruins as reflecting a feeling that "Protestant culture is haunted by its destroyed Catholic past."46 According to Taylor, Wordsworth discovers in the Cisterian ruins at Chartreuse "a prime analogy which connected a massive cultural fact with a personal

43 Henry Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, trans. Roy F. Deferrari (Fitzwilliam: Loreto, 2004), 398-410. 44 I.xxxix.10-13. 45 II.ii.9-11. 46 Dennis Taylor, "Wordsworth's Abbey Ruins," in The Fountain Light: Studies in Romanticism and Religion, ed. J. Robert Barth (New York: Fordham UP, 2002), 43.

63 experience: the analogy between the Protestant stripping of Catholic places and the imagination's violation of its sacred sources."47 From the ruined monastery of Book VI of the The Prelude, Taylor extrapolates a pervasive cultural regret that leads Wordsworth to "empathy for Catholic spirituality." Taylor sees Wordsworth's theory of contemplative "spots of time" as a descendant of the Catholic past. In the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, though, monastic life ambivalently appears on the one hand, as an impediment to public charity, which David Pym identifies as crucial to Wordsworth's definition of the Church, and on the other, as a spiritual refuge from papal authority and abuse. Wordsworth uses the unproductive privacy of Catholic monasticism to make his political point that the Church of England must visibly serve the rural poor, but he also uses monasticism as one of his "under cover," extrahistorical sites of faith's perseverance. Like the religious ritual in "At Albano," monastic life in Ecclesiastical Sonnets has a value that exists in its actions and apart from doctrine. Wordsworth praises the intellectual activity of the schoolmen and monks even while rejecting the doctrines which the same schoolmen and monks were defining. It is as if the schoolmen and monks assumed the "yoke of thought"48 without employing their thoughts in particular theological and historical contexts. Whereas "Musings Near Aquapendente" describes the deficient abstractions of modern science, Wordsworth's scholastic monks are "spirits that crowd the intellectual sphere."49 Although their work takes place "in the most forbidding den / Of solitude," the monks and schoolmen "in their private cells have yet a care / Of public quiet."50 The private intellectual lives of the scholastics rest alongside monastic life's "legalized oppressions" which force the monks to "forfeit [Man's] high claim / To live and move exempt from all control."51 By contrasting the monks' oppressive rules with their private, intellectual work, Wordsworth creates another instance of the preservation of faith despite the oppression in history. When he describes the dissolution of the monasteries and the release of a

47 Taylor, 46. 48 II.v.10. 49 II.v.12. 50 II.v.3-4. 51 II.iv.10-12.

64 formerly cloistered nun, he tries to show how concealed, interior faith perseveres apart from structures that seem nonetheless to contain it: The lovely Nun (submissive, but more meek Through saintly habit than from effort due To unrelenting mandates that pursue With equal wrath the steps of strong and weak) Goes forth--unveiling timidly a cheek Suffused with blushes of celestial hue, While through the Convent's gate to open view Softly she glides, another home to seek.52 The nun reluctantly escapes to the public world, which reflects Hewitt's view that Wordsworth is particularly anxious to assert the public role of the state in harboring religion. There is, however, a contradiction in the distinction between the public and private preserves of faith. The nun's institutional acts have always meant less than her "saintly habit," and the private, internal dimension of faith appears to take precedence over exterior structures and practices. Yet, if the "unrelenting mandates" of Roman Catholic religious life are not the nun's "saintly habit," then her saintly actions escape description in institutional terms. Wordsworth displays a reluctance to consign faith to any institution, even while he insists that religious faith requires habits and institutions. After itemizing the sacraments of the Church of England in Part III, Wordsworth depicts a "Rural Ceremony." The procession of village children carries "offerings which their fathers bore / For decoration in the Papal time."53 Wordsworth expresses his regrets over the loss of old religious practices: Would that our scrupulous Sires had dared to leave Less scanty measure of those graceful rites And usages, whose due return invites A stir of mind too natural to deceive.54 These lost rites that in the poem immediately follow definitions of the institutional sacraments provide a final site of faith outside the institutional Church of England. In this case, though, Wordsworth has

52 II.xxii.1-8. 53 III.xxxii.10-11. 54 III.xxxiii.1-4.

65 finished tracing the trajectory of faith that began with the reception of Christianity in England. He includes a scene of unsanctioned rites amid a recounting of the sacraments and a polemical exhortation to erect new church buildings. Throughout the sonnets, the local preservation of faith often takes place outside the institutional Church and despite the repressive practices of the Roman Church. By following his account of the official sacraments of the Church of England with a scene of local ritual, Wordsworth tries to integrate the extrahistorical line of truth with the Establishment. There remains, however, a tension between the history of the Church of England and the unscripted practices of English villagers. Wordsworth's attempt to account for the passage of religious truth through history is complicated by his creation of a domain of religious truth that is outside history. Arriving at the present day, Wordsworth's sonnets present a doctrinally complete English Church. The historical lineage of the Church of England is a mixture of Roman Catholicism, underground Christian sectarians, and the contribution of English kings and martyrs. The variegated history of the English Church competes with Wordsworth's vision of an unbroken line of faithfulness, and it also threatens Wordsworth's final confidence in the established Church. As Gill notes, Wordsworth's similarity to the Oxford Movement appears here. The sympathy toward Roman Catholicism that Gill identifies goes beyond nostalgic regret because the reconciliation of an essential faith with its institutional structure demands that some authority rest with institutions. Wordsworth's difficulty comes in the attempt to infuse institutional history with some essential meaning that transcends it.

66 IV: BISHOP BLOUGRAM, PASCAL, AND CASUISTRY

The bishop of Robert Browning's Bishop Blougram's Apology delivers a dramatic monologue while hosting the young reporter, Gigadibs, for dinner. Bishop Blougram portrays the reporter Gigadibs as a skeptic who has questioned how an intellectual like the bishop can adhere to Roman Catholicism. "You've had your turn and spoken your home-truths," the bishop tells Gigadibs, "the hand's mine now."1 Throughout his monologue, Blougram paradoxically argues from the perspective of the worldly benefits of his position. He compares the power and position he has earned as a believer to what he predicts will be Gigadibs's unsuccessful future should Gigadibs hold to unbelief. The dinner takes place on the Feast of Corpus Christi, and Park Honan suggests that the "sensuous and spiritual" aspects of Eucharistic symbolism are indicative of the bishop's "two characteristic drives: the one based upon a yearning for good food, bodily comfort, pleasant surroundings, practical power and influence--the other on a passion for God."2 Besides combining the competing influences of sensuousness and religiosity, the bishop's argument tries to reconcile faith and doubt. In his argument, the bishop recounts and even tacitly approves of nineteenth-century religious skepticism, and he describes how he keeps his own skeptical character hidden from the public world that he serves as bishop. The bishop's maintenance of his faith, according to him, has arisen from his worldly ambitions and has served them better than succumbing to unbelief would have. Blaise Pascal and Nicholas Wiseman are primary figures in Bishop Blougram's Apology. Browning borrows at least two of the poem's prominent ideas from Pascal. First, the bishop's dramatic monologue adapts Pascal's famous wager. Like the Pensées, Bishop Blougram's Apology takes the form of a debate between a believer and a skeptic. Second, Blougram's rhetoric is an example of casuistry, in both its colloquial and theological senses. Pascal's Provincial Letters characterize the seventeenth-century debate over casuistry, and Pascal

1 Robert Browning, Bishop Blougram's Apology from Vol. 5 of The Complete Works of Robert Browning, ed. Roma A. King and others (Athens: Ohio UP, 1981), 47-48. All references to the poem are by line number. 2 Park Honan, Browning's Characters: A Study in Poetic Technique (New Haven: Yale UP, 1961), 147.

67 opposed the Jesuits and other casuists. For Pascal, the practice of casuistry, which attempts to apply general laws to individual cases, allows an undue subjectivity in the application of what are supposed to be universal laws. In his presentation of Blougram, Browning not only shows the adaptive process of casuistic rhetoric, but he also offers a critique of Pascal's wager as itself participating in casuistry. The controversy over casuistry in England reflects cultural concerns over Roman Catholicism and Catholic citizenship. Browning bases his Bishop Blougram on Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman who, at the time of poem's composition, had assumed the restored bishopric of Westminster. By portraying the duplicity in Blougram's depiction of his public versus private self, Browning offers a commentary on a Catholic bishop's attempt to negotiate his allegiance to Rome and his English citizenship. Rowena Fowler briefly traces the influence of Blaise Pascal on Browning's poem. According to Fowler, not only does Browning's bishop adopt Pascal's wager in his argument, but Browning himself also recognizes in Pascal's Jansenism "an echo of his own non-conformist background with its ideas of election and salvation."3 Fowler's primary concerns are the emergence of mathematical probability in Victorian social sciences and the impact of the idea of probability on the mid- century individual's sense of "agency, privacy, and uniqueness."4 Fowler describes the Victorian anxiety that the uncontrollable events of life, which traditionally had been consigned to Providence or God's will, could be reduced instead to mathematical laws, and she distinguishes between a concern for mass probabilities and a fascination with the individual's experience of chance in insurance, lotteries, and other kinds of gambling.5 For Fowler, Bishop Blougram's argument in favor of religious belief reflects a cultural fascination with chance and probability. In addition to Fowler's insight that Browning provides an artifact of the Victorian concern with chance and probability, though, Bishop Blougram's Apology is a criticism, rather than a recapitulation, of the wager in Pascal's Pensées. Pascal's influence on the poem extends beyond the adoption of the form of a

3 Rowena Fowler, "Blougram's Wager, Guido's Odds: Browning, Chance, and Probability," Victorian Poetry 41, no. 1 (2003): 23. 4 Fowler, 13. 5 Fowler, 13.

68 wager because Browning takes up the debates on casuistry that Pascal, calling on his Jansenist theology, fashions as dialogs in his Provincial Letters. Blougram's speech adopts the argument for religion of Pascal's believer, and Browning also combines the personae of skeptic and believer into a single character so that Blougram emerges as someone who claims both belief and unbelief. Fowler and others have seen Browning's portrayal of Blougram as an exercise in casuistry,6 but the complicated theological and social implications that underlie Blougram's casuistry have gone unexplored. Tracing Blougram's casuistic methods to Victorian anxieties over identity, I will place Blougram's casuistry in the context of Pascal's wager and his letters on casuistry, and I will propose that Browning identifies the casuistic method with the potentially seditious position of Roman Catholics in Britain. In Pascal's wager, there is an equal probability of God's existing or not existing. Belief in God is rational because the reward of wagering for God is infinite while the reward of wagering against God is finite. At the same time, the losses of wagering for God are finite, but the losses for wagering against God are infinite. The believer in Pascal's dialog explains: There is, indeed, an infinite distance between the certainty of winning, and the certainty of losing. But the uncertainty of gaining, is in proportion to the certainty of what is risked, according to the proportion of chances of gain and loss: and hence, if the chances on both sides are equal, the risks are equal; the certainty of what we risk, in such a case, is equal to the uncertainty of the prize, instead of being infinitely distant from it. And our assertion acquires infinite force, when as in the present case, what is only finite is hazarded on even chances of gain and loss, for what is infinite.7 The wager, then, places what is finite against the possibility of an infinite return. Although the certainty of winning or losing irreconcilably excludes the other, the possibility of winning and the

6 Fowler, 23. 7 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. Isaac Taylor (New York: Grolier, 1978), 68.

69 risk of losing are equal for either wager. Pascal therefore suggests that because it is impossible not to make a wager for or against belief--"you must wager: it is not left to your option to be neutral"8--, the value of the prize ought to be the criterion for wagering on one or the other. In the case of belief, the infinite worth of the prize outweighs the finite worth of what is risked. As a result, Pascal claims that the wager for belief is more reasonable. The "what is only finite" that is wagered and in reality lost in Pascal's argument is unclear, but he means either worldly life or, further, living for a finite time under the delusion of belief. Browning's bishop repeats both these possibilities of loss, but Browning levels at least two criticisms against Pascal's wager. First, Bishop Blougram's monologue ponders what is wagered at least as much as it evaluates what is gained. The bishop's concern with the wagerer's possible loss of authenticity of self reflects a Victorian worry that Andrew Miller describes as a conflict between "the fragmenting process of modernity" and "the romantic value placed on expressive speech and the evangelical emphasis on self-investigation."9 In choosing to wager for God, the bishop has lost in himself what he sees in Gigadibs: an allegiance to self. Second, in focusing on the fragmented life that results from the wager for God, Browning shows both that the wager's form does not account for different wagerers' subjective senses of risk in evaluating and wagering the self and that the repudiation of self in the wager reduces belief to an exterior performance that necessitates no internal disposition for belief. This latter claim repeats a common criticism of Catholic sacramental theology. For the "believer" in Pascal's Pensées, the decision to believe is the better wager not only because of the potential spiritual benefits, especially in the next life, but also, if vaguely, because of the worldly benefits. Pascal frames the gains and losses of wagering for God in general terms: It is true, you must relinquish some hurtful pleasures; you must renounce the splendours and amusements of the world:

8 Pascal, Pensées, 68. 9 Andrew H. Miller, "Reading Thoughts: Victorian Perfectionism and the Display of Thinking," Studies in Literary Imagination 35, no. 2 (2002): 89.

70 but do you think that you will gain no others? I assure you, that you will be a gainer, even as to this life, and that every step you take in this path will show you, with greater clearness, the certainty of the gain and the nothingness of the risk, till at last you know, without the shadow of a doubt, that you have made the venture for a certain and an infinite good, and surrendered a mere nothing to obtain it.10 Pascal raises but leaves open the question of the gains in this life, but Browning seizes on the vagueness of the worldly benefits of belief. Blougram's argument transposes the infinite gains of the wager to this life when the bishop pits his own finite gains as a believer against Gigadibs's wager for infinite gains in his unbelief. "I am much, you are nothing," Blougram tells Gigadibs, "you would be all, I would be merely much."11 In Gigadibs, Browning moves the possibility of absolute reward from the next life to this one. Blougram, who adopts an equivocal stance toward the possibility self-knowledge, proposes that Gigadibs's wager to retain his self is idealistic and naïve: [Y]ou did what you preferred, Spoke as you thought, and, as you cannot help, Believed or disbelieved, no matter what, So long as on that point, whate'er it was, You loosed your mind, were whole and sole yourself. --That, my ideal never can include, Upon that element of truth and worth Never be based!12 The bishop's speech poses the expectation of an absolute reward in this life, which is a prize of the winning wager in favor of unbelief: "you would be all . . . whole and sole yourself." Part of Browning's critique of Pascal's wager places infinity in the mathematical calculus of both the wager for and the wager against belief. Blougram makes equivalent in both choices the possibilities of gain and loss. Consequently, the possibility of risk is also equal. Unlike Pascal's wager, Blougram's version of the wager concedes the wagerer's

10 Pascal, Pensées, 71. 11 84-85. 12 54-61.

71 subjective evaluation of risk. If Pascal's original premise that the chances of God's existence are 1/2 remains constant in Blougram's wager, then the possibility of gaining an infinite reward in Blougram's wager is equal for both the believer and the skeptic. The decision to wager for one or the other is not based on reason, as it is in Pascal, but it is based rather on independent preference. When Blougram begins to posit "the next place" as a motive for wagering for faith, he immediately stops himself and engages in a long metaphor in which a ship's cabin is the space of life.13 In wagering to gain the infinite in this life, Gigadibs, according to Blougram, tries to take too much on board. Introducing the internal disposition of the wagerer allows Browning to focus on the bishop's thoughts and to juxtapose the bishop's pragmatic outlook on religious practice with Lutheran notions of the nature of Christian grace and justification. There is an overtly religious critique in Bishop Blougram's Apology, but the terms of the debate over justification are not strictly theological and raise questions about religious affiliation and English citizenship. G. K. Chesterton points out that Browning bases Bishop Blougram's character on Nicholas Wiseman who in 1850 was appointed Archbishop of Westminster by Pope Pius IX,14 and Robert Schweik shows that Blougram is a composite of John Henry Newman and Wiseman.15 The most explicit reference to Wiseman comes at the end of the poem when Browning discontinues Blougram's monologue and offers some authorial comments on the bishop and Gigadibs. Browning refers to Wiseman's former bishopric in Greece, where Wiseman served in partibus infidelium as Titular Bishop of Milopotamus. Browning's halting Latin renders the title of Blougram's English bishopric as "Sylvester Blougram, styled in partibus / Episcopus, nec non--(the deuce knows what / It's changed to by our novel hierarchy)."16 Browning's "in partibus" suggests that Wiseman perceives his condition in England as that of a believer among infidels. Wiseman, who was born in Spain and spent most of his career

13 217. 14 G. K. Chesterton, Robert Browning (1903; reprint, Whitefish: Kessinger, 2003), 188. 15 Robert C. Schweik, "Bishop Blougram's Miracles," Modern Language Notes 71, no. 6 (1956): 416-18. 16 972-974.

72 on the continent, was a contentious choice for Archbishop of Westminster because of his close associations with Rome and because of the crisis in the Church of England over the Roman influence on the Tractarians. The specific Roman Catholic aspects of Browning's portrait of Blougram show how concern over the appointment of Wiseman colors Browning's assessment of Catholic religious practice. Browning revisits the debates on casuistry in Pascal to assess Blougram's character and its relationship to English citizenship. The crucial but unempirical role of one's internal disposition in making the wager evokes questions about the public persona of Blougram and his willingness to perform a public role that conflicts with his personal beliefs. The conflict between action and disposition in Browning's poem recalls a similar dilemma in the practice of casuistry. Critical assessments of casuistry in Bishop Blougram's Apology have varied. Arthur Symons's early assessment sees casuistry as Blougram's "speech in defense of himself in which the aim is to confound an adversary, not to state the truth."17 Distancing the poem from any consequential reference to Catholicism, Rupert Palmer depicts the bishop's monologue as "a mixture of irony and sincerity whereby a deeply religious but skilled dialectician proves to an auditor who would refuse to accept any argument based upon religious feelings that a life of religious faith is the only course for a sensible man."18 Rowena Fowler sees Blougram's casuistic method as a reflection of the Victorian concern over probability. These assessments tend to ignore the significance of Catholicism in the representation of casuistry. Casuistry, which originated in the confession manuals of the thirteenth century, arose as a crisis in Roman Catholicism in the seventeenth century. The appearance of casuistry in Bishop Blougram's Apology touches on the role of casuistry in religious practice and on the perceptions in England of casuistry, in both its theological and colloquial senses. According to Romano Amerio, theological casuistry "has a function analogous to legal casuistry, or jurisprudence, and is begotten of the necessary and ever-present imperatives of moral

17 Arthur Symons, Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning (1887; reprint, Port Washington: Kennikat, 1971), 98. 18 Rupert E. Palmer, "The Uses of Character in 'Bishop Blougram's Apology'," Modern Philology 58, no. 2 (1960): 113.

73 action."19 In this theological sense, casuistry is the application of general moral rules to individual conduct, and a body of literature developed whose purpose was to instruct priests on potential penitential cases. After the Reformation, the reformers' emphasis on subjective repentance without the need for sacramental absolution led to a suspicion of both auricular confession and the practice of casuistry. The tendency of casuistry to alter ostensibly absolute moral laws to accommodate disparate behaviors also led to the colloquial sense of casuistry as an intentionally deceptive argument whose purpose is to obviate the force of precept.20 In the seventeenth century, a body of Jesuitical literature proposed the view that Pascal criticizes in his Provincial Letters: "that nobody sins without having previously the knowledge of his weakness, and of a physician, or the desire of a cure, and of asking it of God."21 For Pascal, the problem with the praxis confessariorum of casuistry is that even the lesser probability of theological opinion can judge an act to be in conformity with the moral law because the actor's relative knowledge determines the morality of an act. This proposition received the name "philosophical sin" because it held that a person's acts do not offend unless the person knows the acts are sinful. The seventeenth-century controversy over casuistry authoritatively ended in the Catholic Church when Alexander VII and, later, Innocent XI issued condemnations of philosophical sin and the casuistic propositions of the Jesuits,22 but because the condemnations of casuistry generally prohibited specific conclusions and not the practice of casuistry itself, the theological literature of casuistry persisted in, for example, the moral theology of Alfonsus Liguori. Although a Cistercian and not a Jesuit, the mathematician Juan Caramuel produced casuistic writings that were influential in the seventeenth century. "The divine goodness," writes Caramuel, "has

19 Romano Amerio, Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the XXth Century, trans. John P. Parsons (Kansas City: Sarto, 1996), 27. 20 The OED defines "casuistry" in common usage as "a quibbling or evasive way of dealing with difficult cases of duty." 21 Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters, trans. Thomas M'Crie (London, 1898), 109. 22 Henry Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Fitzwilliam: Loreto, 2004), 319-322; 325-330.

74 given different characters to men, by which men may form different judgments of affairs among themselves, and believe themselves to be acting rightly."23 For Pascal, the casuists' emphasis on subjective judgment involves both a negation of universal law and an attempt to gain support for the priest and his order by accommodating penitential prescriptions to the disposition of the penitent. "They are prepared for all sorts of persons," says Pascal, "and so ready to suit the supply to the demand."24 According to Pascal, casuistic practice wrongly assigns different penances to different people, even when the sins are the same. Pascal accuses the casuists of trying "to keep on good terms with all the world."25 Beyond being a strictly theological debate, the crisis of casuistry represents one of the ways in which the Church's role in shaping the narratives of behavior intersects with the desire to maintain ecclesiastical authority in different social spheres and amid changing social hierarchies. Pascal's analysis of casuistry shows an awareness that the practice of auricular confession and the inscription of its rules in theological manuals reflect larger concerns regarding the Church's ability to maintain its influence on the behavioral and classed aspects of secular life. In tracing the secularization of casuistry and its role in the development of the novel, Lowell Gallagher points out the shift in English perceptions of casuistry from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century. According to Gallagher, the Enlightenment demystification of casuistry occurred because "the social and political context in which it had gained notoriety two centuries earlier was no longer a dominant force."26 Gallagher holds that by the eighteenth century, the defusing of the "Catholic problem" had acquitted casuistry of the political anxiety that it had caused earlier. Casuistry became an "obsolete phenomenon, one that had no place in the current cult of rationalism."27 The attempt to contain Catholic casuistry came not only in its disparagement by Alexander Pope and others, as Gallagher shows, but also in its Protestant revision in the theology of English

23 Quoted in Amerio, 27. 24 Pascal, Provincial Letters, 119. 25 Pascal, Provincial Letters, 118. 26 Lowell Gallagher, Medusa's Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance (Standford: Stanford UP, 1991): 1. 27 Gallagher, 3.

75 Protestants like William Perkins and Jeremy Taylor. "It had become necessary," writes Gallagher of the eighteenth century, "to view casuistry--once the central, if controversial, instrument for drawing order out of a chaotic landscape of conflicting moral, political, and social hierarchies--as the residue of a hopelessly antiquated epistemology and interpretive practice."28 The discourse of casuistry had a central role during the reigns of Elizabeth, Charles I, and Charles II. As primarily the discourse of a dissident Catholic community, casuistry, appearing as a revolutionary trope in the advice of Achitophel in Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, also indicates the presence of an alien and subversive population. Gallagher's study explores the way in which the literature of casuistic case manuals nonetheless enters the culture of the Renaissance and early modern period, appears as a trope in Renaissance speech and literature, and despite attempts to disclaim it, emerges as a model of rhetoric in the early novel. By 1855 when Browning wrote Bishop Blougram's Apology, the contentious issues of Catholic Emancipation and Catholic citizenship, which recently had arisen in the debates and passage of the Emancipation Act of 1829, had emerged in controversies over the Tractarians and the 1850 reestablishment of the Catholic hierarchy in Britain. The reappearance of casuistry in Browning reflects the concern over the Catholic presence in England, and the figure of Blougram represents both the theological problem of casuistry and the perception of casuistry as a seditious discourse. There are at least three elements of casuistry in Browning's poem. First, Blougram's attempt to accommodate his argument to Gigadibs's skepticism is reminiscent of the Jesuits in Pascal's Provincial Letters. To approach Gigadibs, Blougram makes assumptions about Gigadibs's secular values and tries to fit his argument to Gigadibs's temperament. Second, Browning puts the bishop's own thinking on display, and the casuistic method of Blougram's decision-making reflects what Andrew Miller identifies as the Victorian obsession with "the display of thinking."29 Third, the rhetorical method itself, which pits Blougram's professional public persona against his profane private thoughts, recalls the doubts over Catholic citizenship in the history

28 Gallagher, 2. 29 Miller, 79.

76 of casuistry in England. In portraying Blougram's attempts to convince Gigadibs of the preferability of belief, Browning reveals Blougram's concern with maintaining his social position in the society that he serves. Describing his standing as bishop, Blougram says: There's power in me and will to dominate Which I must exercise, they hurt me else: In many ways I need mankind's respect, Obedience, and the love that's born of fear: While at the same time, there's a taste I have, A toy of soul, a titillating thing, Refuses to digest these dainties crude. The naked life is gross till clothed upon: I must take what men offer, with a grace As though I would not, could I help it, take!30 Blougram outlines the conflict between the claims of ecclesiastical authority and the maintenance of those claims in a society in which ecclesiastical authority shares and even succumbs to other venues of authority and power. The negotiation between ecclesiastical authority and secular power was at the center of the seventeenth-century controversy over casuistry, and Browning's representation of Blougram repeats the dilemmas that the rhetoric of casuistry presented to Pascal. When Blougram explains his method of assessing moral decisions, he develops the casuistry that Caramuel describes as judging according to the premise that "men may form different judgments of affairs among themselves, and believe themselves to be acting rightly." Browning posits in Blougram a vacuum of spiritual authenticity which Blougram's clerical dress, liturgical rites, and contrived affinity for miracles and supernatural dogmas cover. In his approach to himself and others, Blougram's evaluation of religious conviction relies on the fear that if one fails to be convincing in one's convictions, "the world detects him clearly."31 As a result, choosing one's convictions is a fluid matter because the purpose of convictions is "to suit the world which gives us good things."32 "We can't be too decisive in our faith,

30 322-31. 31 276. 32 274.

77 conclusive and exclusive in its terms," Blougram explains.33 When Blougram clarifies his criteria for evaluating moral behavior, he presents the view of the casuists on the subjective nature of moral culpability: But certain points, left wholly to himself, When once a man has arbitrated on, We say he must succeed there or go hang. . . . Then, he must avouch, Or follow, at the least, sufficiently, The form of faith his conscience holds the best, Whate'er the process of conviction was.34 Blougram's aspirations for power and his reliance on his secular "brothers," the benefactors who "administer the means" of his life, lead him to an adaptability concerning convictions and their evaluation. The internal conscience succeeds or fails not according to its apprehension of and adherence to universal laws but instead according to its fidelity to its own subjective convictions, regardless of the process which formed those convictions. Browning's portrait of Blougram finally resonates with Cardinal Wiseman's installation in London. By showing that Roman Catholic doctrines arise from pragmatism and not from credible spiritual authority, Browning's portrait works both to raise and to trivialize fears that Wiseman's installation represents a viable threat from Romanism on the grounds of religious doctrine. Browning casts Catholic religious practice as a strategy for gaining secular power, and in light of the Emancipation Act of 1829, Browning portrays Wiseman's bishopric as the culmination of Catholic resurgence in England. Finally, Blougram's reliance on Pascal for the elements of probability in the wager and for the rhetoric of casuistry assigns Blougram's character a deceptive identity by which Blougram's public persona presents something other than his genuine thoughts. This element of his character reflects both Blougram's alterity and his willingness to efface his alterity to achieve social and political advantages. Browning therefore mitigates the Roman Catholic claim to authentic

33 272-73. 34 289-87.

78 spiritual authority but nevertheless asserts the necessity of an external measure of spiritual authenticity in evaluating Blougram's internal personal faith.

79 V: FREEDOM AND PAPAL AUTHORITY IN WILDE

Oscar Wilde's early essay, "The Rise of Historical Criticism," anticipates Wilde's later writing by proposing a notion of disinterestedness in criticism and by framing questions of authority and intellectual freedom that appear throughout Wilde's work. The essay engages in the English political debates, prominent in Arnold, over the relevance of moral forces in history. Wilde's reading of the Greek historians from Herodotus to Polybius offers an understanding of Greek history and literature that corresponds to decadence and the Aesthetic Movement. Wilde's view is that the improvement in the historical writing of the classical authors consists in the gradual divestment from the writing of moral judgments and supernatural events. Wilde also invokes the controversies over authority, reason, and faith that the First Vatican Council raises and that, in England, arose in the public debates between Gladstone and Cardinal Manning on papal infallibility. "The Rise of Historical Criticism" thus allows for an examination of Catholicism in Oscar Wilde's work. By creating a model that separates intellectual freedom from political freedom, Wilde links the classical author Polybius and his authoritative position as a historian to Pius IX and the post-conciliar affirmation of papal authority over Church doctrine. From this perspective, Wilde appears sympathetic to the pope's claims to infallibility. Wilde's idea of freedom from dictatorship means freedom to pursue extrinsic truth without the interference of political concerns. Therefore, Wilde portrays Pius IX as in a better position to discern and pronounce truth after the papacy's loss of the Papal States. Ideas of the incompatibility of English citizenship and the Roman Catholic faith exploit the Gelasian formula which establishes the separation of Church and State but which also sees temporal power as subordinate to spiritual power. Questions of Catholic loyalty to the state appear in Byron's "Roman Catholic Claims Speech" and Browning's Bishop Blougram's Apology. By proposing that a loss of civil power leads to an increase in intellectual power, Wilde agitates feelings of anti-Catholicism by emphasizing the pope's absolute spiritual authority just at the time Pius IX had finally lost the papacy's temporal power

80 in the Italian States. When Wilde's poetry depicts Pius IX, it links political disenfranchisement with moral authority. This view of papal authority reflects the conservative, Ultramontane agenda that successfully promoted the definition of papal infallibility at the Vatican Council. Wilde presents the pope's secular authority as a hindrance to intellectual progress. For Wilde, the obstacle lies in the pope's having secular responsibility for governing the Italian States. By examining the opposing sides of nineteenth-century Catholicism and by showing Wilde's interest in them, I will demonstrate that "The Rise of Historical Criticism" reflects Catholic concerns as much as it relies on contemporary English criticism and the ideas of Matthew Arnold. "The Rise of Historical Criticism" is a lengthy essay that Wilde wrote for the 1879 Chancellor's English Essay Prize at Oxford. The main portion of the essay tries to demonstrate an improvement in the methodology of the classical historians as Greek historical writing progresses from Herodotus to Thucydides and, finally, to Polybius. Wilde claims that the later historians more acutely separate historical facts from mythology and that this separation represents an intellectual and stylistic improvement in historical criticism. Wilde therefore focuses on a period of Greek history which sees the transition from Athenian ascendancy to Roman dominance over Macedonia and the Peloponnese. Wilde displays a breadth of erudition in Classical Studies, and he includes references to the Eleatic and Milesian schools, Plato and Aristotle, Euhemeros, and Alexandrian literature. He concludes his writing with a brief dismissal of Roman historians like Pliny and Tacitus. Norbert Kohl claims that "The Rise of Historical Criticism" has "very few features" that link "this early work with Wilde's later writings,"1 but Kohl fails to account for Wilde's preference in the essay for Hellenistic art and literature. Kohl overlooks the resonance that this preference has with Wilde's decadence and aestheticism. Wilde's contention that the later classical period advances over, rather than regresses from, the earlier runs counter to a more conventional esteem for the age of Pericles. Wilde rejects the typical

1 Norbert Kohl, Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 69.

81 argument that the eventual loss of Greek sovereignty resulted in lesser works of art and literature. Herbert Newell Couch offers an example of the conventional preference for the Athenian era of Greek civilization. In his analysis of the Fallen Warrior of Aegina and the Dying Gaul of Pergamum, Couch proposes that the two sculptures are respective emblems of the height and decline of Greek art.2 The Fallen Warrior is a piece from the fifth-century B.C. Couch calls this era "the period of highest artistic achievement."3 The Fallen Warrior was originally part of the depictions of the Trojan War on the eastern pediment of the Temple of Aphaea at Aegina and is now at the Glyptothek in Munich. The Dying Gaul dates from the end of the third century B.C., the Hellenistic Period of Greek civilization. This later figure comes from Pergamum, which is now the city of Bergama in modern Turkey. It commemorates the victory of Attalus I over the Galatians. An extant, late copy of the Dying Gaul sits today in the Capitoline Museum, Rome. The technical differences in these two pieces partly rest with the advancement in technology and technique over the course of almost two-hundred years. In his description of the pieces from Aphaea, J. C. Stobart explains the state of art in the fifth century: The "archaic smile" still hovered over the lips of contemporary sculptures, the eyes were too prominent, the eyelids were still cut to meet at the corners instead of overlapping, hair was still conventionally rendered by parallel grooves, or spirals, or roughly blocked out for colouration.4 By the third century, archaic features give way as the technology of art advances from the earlier age. The Dying Gaul incorporates these changes because the facial features and texture of the body achieve a greater realism. When Couch takes up his study of these works, he argues that despite advances in technical skill in the later period, the earlier statue embodies a superior plan, partly because it comes from a time

2 Herbert Newell Couch and Russel M. Geer, Classical Civilization: Greece (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1951), 336. 3 Couch, 330. 4 J. C. Stobart, The Glory that Was Greece (London: Sidgwick, 1964), 140.

82 when the Greek artists were not under foreign rule. Couch elaborates: In the figure from Aegina there is a rugged honesty of purpose, which is lost in the Dying Gaul by the very abundance of technical devices available to create the illusion of pain, as, for instance, the representation of blood flowing from the wound.5 After separating the "purpose" of the respective pieces and their technological advancement, Couch resumes his evaluation by using abstract terms of value for the works and the people who produced them. He continues: While technical capacity actually increased in the Hellenistic Age, there was a decline in the inherent excellence of the work. The genius of the people had diminished since the fifth century, and it is not to be expected that technical skill will of itself produce great art any more than mechanical facilities for printing will produce great literature.6 Couch's judgments come in part from a xenophobic perspective, evident in his distaste for the "interest of the Hellenic artists in foreign peoples,"7 and Couch also engages in a mode of historical criticism that Herbert Butterfield identifies in English criticism as "interested in the promulgation of moral judgments."8 For Couch, the loss of Greek independence and the collapse of the Athenian state render later Greek art inferior because the pieces lose, according to Couch, their political and ideological utility. The "rugged honesty of purpose" at Aphaea is missing from the Dying Gaul of Pergamum. The avoidance of moralistic judgments as a criterion of art and criticism particularly concerns Matthew Arnold, and the moralistic historical criticism that Butterfield criticizes has its manifestation in Edmund Burke and appears in Lord Acton in mid-nineteenth century England. It is a type of criticism that Wilde eschews in "The Rise of Historical Criticism." Through a combination of historical theory and readings of Greek art and literature, Wilde evokes an English debate on

5 Couch, 543-44. 6 Couch, 549. 7 Couch, 544. 8 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Norton, 1965), 107.

83 criticism, and he links this rather derivative debate to an interpretation of Greek literature and art. At the same time, Wilde touches on issues that arise in the First Vatican Council and that appear in the debates over the council between Gladstone and Cardinal Manning. When Wilde discusses the period of the Dying Gaul, he demonstrates a preference for such later Greek works, and Wilde's preference hinges anachronistically on his aestheticism. Speaking not of the nineteenth century but instead of the Hellenistic period, Wilde writes: The new age is the age of style. The same spirit of exclusive attention which made Euripides often, like Swinburne, prefer music to meaning and melody to morality, which gave to the later Greek statues that refined effeminacy, that overstrained gracefulness of attitude, was felt in the sphere of history.9 For Wilde, the "new age" is the third century B.C., and the historian Polybius is one of the later figures who prefer melody and whose work reflects a "refined effeminacy." Through the connection between art and history, Wilde makes his case that Polybius represents an improvement in the critical method because of Polybius' insistence that every historical event is the "logical and inevitable result of rational antecedents."10 Tracing Polybius' methodology to historical causes, Wilde ascribes Polybius' rejection of mythology in history to the consolidation of political interest that the ubiquity of the Roman Empire brings. "Now, for the first time," Wilde writes in summarizing Polybius' critical posture, "the universal empire of the Romans rendered a universal history possible."11 For Wilde, the loss of the old Greek political ambitions brings a more objective critical method: a movement from Herodotus, the "supernatural historian," to Polybius, the most "rationalistic" of the historians.12 This development, says Wilde, allows Polybius to pay better attention to stylistic concerns, to achieve "that refined effeminacy, that overstrained gracefulness of

9 Oscar Wilde, "The Rise of Historical Criticism," in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Dudley Edwards and others (Bishopbriggs: Harper 1999), 1224. 10 Wilde, "Rise," 1225. 11 Wilde, "Rise," 1225. 12 Wilde, "Rise," 1202; 1204.

84 attitude" of the Hellenistic Period. Beyond the expressions of decadence and the Aesthetic Movement, though, lie certain assumptions about progress, authority, and freedom. These conceptions share in a progressive political legacy, and Wilde is forthright about aligning his version of the progress of Greek civilization with progressive values. He begins "The Rise of Historical Criticism" by linking the state of historical methodology to the relative freedom of a society: Historical criticism . . . is part of that complex working towards freedom which may be described as the revolt against authority. It is merely one facet of that speculative spirit of an innovation, which in the sphere of action produces democracy and revolution, and in that of thought is the parent of philosophy and physical science; and its importance as a factor of progress depends not so much on the results it attains . . . as on the tone of thought it represents, and the method by which it works.13 In making these claims about the relationship of historical criticism to freedom, revolution, and democracy, Wilde appears to contradict the connection he identifies between universal Roman rule and Polybius' superior critical methodology, but Wilde's paradoxical view that the Republican conquest offered the Greeks greater critical freedom provides a rejoinder to the anti-Catholic argument of Gibbon who in his Decline and Fall argues that the authority of the late Roman Empire stifled "public spirit, freedom, and the advancement of knowledge."14 Gibbon links the Roman government's increasing authority to the Christian Middle Ages and argues that the similar despotic authority of the respective eras stifled freedom and therefore creativity. Wilde argues that even the Roman Republic stifled civil freedom but that the limits on political participation paradoxically led to greater aesthetic freedom and achievement. Wilde also adopts this argument in his depictions of Pius IX. The influence of Matthew Arnold's "The Function of Criticism" appears in Wilde's opening passage as it does throughout "The Rise of

13 Wilde, "Rise," 1198. 14 Hugh Trevor-Roper, Introduction to Vol. 1 of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (New York: Knopf, 1993), xci.

85 Historical Criticism." For Arnold, "disinterestedness" is the rule of "last importance" for English criticism. Criticism achieves disinterestedness by "steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior political, practical considerations about ideas . . . which criticism has really nothing to do with."15 When Arnold takes up the question of why the French Revolution produced no "works of genius" equal to those of Greek civilization or the Renaissance, he attributes this failure to the "political, practical character" of the Revolution.16 Arnold's resistance to creative work that serves political ends appears in Wilde. In a long catalog of Polybius' virtues as a critic, Wilde says that Polybius is "free from all bias towards friend and country" and that he is not "misled by patriotic and other considerations."17 Arnold's influence appears in such passages and allows Wilde to overcome the seeming paradox in his claim that Polybius, a hostage, has the greatest critical freedom of the historians. Declan Kiberd remarks that Wilde "seemed at all times anxious to feed back his most subversive ideas to the ruling class."18 Placing his critical and aesthetic ideals with Polybius not only aligns Wilde with Arnold's claim that political investment detracts from criticism, but it also somewhat paradoxically covers up Wilde's initial association between critical technique and freedom. While Herodotus was an Athenian soldier in the Persian Wars and Thucydides in the Peloponnesian War, Polybius was taken to Rome as a hostage when Megalopolis was destroyed by Rome after the defeat of the Achaean League. Wilde engages in some conspicuous irony when he attributes greater critical freedom first to Thucydides, an exile from Athens, and then to Polybius, a hostage of Rome. Wilde broadens this extenuation of his progressive opening sentences when he further attributes Polybius' impartiality to his being "a man of great courtesy and refinement of taste--as, indeed, befitted one who had lived always in

15 Matthew Arnold, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," in Prose of the Victorian Period, ed. William E. Buckler (Boston: Houghton, 1958), 429. 16 Arnold, 424-25. 17 Wilde, "Rise," 1234. 18 Declan Kiberd, "Oscar Wilde: The Artist as an Irishman," in Wilde the Irishman, ed. Jerusha McCormack (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989), 19.

86 the society of those who were of great and noble birth."19 In what amounts to typical fashion for him, Wilde builds his essay's premise on a paradox in which each historical critic finds himself with fewer political rights but with greater latitude, and consequently greater achievement, in his criticism. This paradox turns Wilde's revolutionary talk away from issues of institutional freedom because Wilde tries to disassociate freedom from political action. In his depiction of Pius IX, Wilde uses the same model to show that the pope's loss of secular power has strengthened his spiritual authority. Wilde's version of the development of historical criticism has a relationship to nineteenth-century Catholicism. Wilde's letters from his time at Oxford attest to Wilde's interest in Catholicism and Cardinal Manning. Wilde tells of seeing Henry Edward Manning preach, and Ronald Gower, an acquaintance, describes Wilde as "full of nonsense regarding the Church of Rome."20 "His room," Gower adds, "[is] filled with photographs of the Pope and Cardinal Manning."21 Cardinal Manning was one of the proponents of papal infallibility during the Vatican Council, and Ellis Hanson describes how at Oxford "Wilde and a friend, David Hunter-Blair, got caught up in the excitement over the declaration of papal infallibility by Pius IX."22 The debates over infallibility inform "The Rise of Historical Criticism" on at least two concerns. First, the paradox of bondage leading to authority is a theme of Francesco Nobili-Vitelleschi's account of the First Vatican Council. Wilde mentions reading the English translation of Nobili-Vitelleschi's The Vatican Council in an 1876 letter to William Ward.23 The book appeared under the anachronistic pseudonym Pomponio Leto. The name refers to a Renaissance philosopher who was imprisoned by Paul II for materialism. By using the name, Nobili-Vitelleschi signals his disapproval of the papacy's contemporary claims to infallibility. Wilde, however, takes a more supportive view of Pius IX's claims.

19 Wilde, "Rise," 1231. 20 Quoted in Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (New York: Holt, 2000), 19. 21 Quoted in Complete Letters, 19. 22 Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997), 244. 23 Wilde, Complete Letters, 22-23.

87 Second, the council dealt with the issue of reason and faith, and much of the pontificate of Pius IX involved the Vatican's assertion of the incompatibility of the Catholic faith with a modern, rationalistic dismissal of the supernatural. In Italy, the influence of the debate appears, for example, in novelist Alessandro Manzoni's Morale Cattolica which defends infallibility on rationalistic grounds. These concerns and the text of the council's original doctrinal schemas appear in Nobili-Vitelleschi's book. Nobili-Vitelleschi defends reason against the council's attempts to limit it, and he also claims that the doctrine of infallibility hinders the Church's intellectual growth by deterring episcopal collegiality. For Nobili-Vitelleschi, Pius IX is sometimes a heroic figure who attempts to restore collegiality by reversing the conservative policies of his predecessor, Gregory XVI, but who finally joins the aggressive Ultramontanists. At other times, Nobili-Vitelleschi's Pius is an authoritarian figure who forcefully advocates for the power of infallibility. In "The Rise of Historical Criticism," the figure of Polybius resembles Nobili-Vitelleschi's presentation of Pius IX because Polybius is a persona who, like Pius, loses his civic freedom but gains intellectual authority. Tension between secular and spiritual authority dominated the pontificate of Pius IX. Outside the magisterium of the Church, this tension broke into rioting and violence as the revolution in the Papal States led both to Pius IX's loss of his temporal rule and to the imposition of the 1871 Italian Law of Guarantees which officially encoded the separation of Church and State.24 In the Church, there was a battle between the Ultramontanists, who promoted papal authority and resisted change in the Church, and the Liberal Catholics, who advocated collegial authority and fought the definition of papal infallibility. The council's final decrees proclaimed the strict authority of the papacy which had the power to act without the college of bishops, while the college could act only in conjunction with its head, the pope, and not without him. The usual claim about Wilde's early references to Catholicism in

24 For the complete text of the law, see Sidney Z. Ehler and John B. Morrall, trans., Church and State Throughout the Centuries (New York: Biblo, 1954), 285-291.

88 his sonnets is that Wilde's verse is "sensuous rather than devout."25 In addition to this view of J. D. Thomas, Hanson, Richard Ellman, and John Sloan also claim that Wilde's depiction of Catholicism in his early work focuses on the ritualistic, sensual, and sometimes homoerotic elements of Catholicism and that Wilde downplays doctrinal concerns. This common view, however, neglects Wilde's poetic depictions of Pius IX's fall and his references to the historical and theological effects of the pope's loss of secular power. It sees the ritualistic passages in Wilde's verse as unconnected both to Wilde's prose and to the historical and doctrinal passages in his poems. The critical responses to Catholicism in Oscar Wilde's work participate in a kind of criticism that Wilde's essay rejects because decisions about moral intent frequently enter examinations of Wilde's life and texts. Sometimes this results in a preoccupation with questions of personal faith. These questions often turn on Father Cuthbert Dunne's account of Wilde's deathbed conversion. "I was fully satisfied," writes Dunne, "that he understood me when told that I was about to receive him into the Catholic Church. . . . I was satisfied as to his full consent."26 In Decadence and Catholicism, Ellis Hanson touches on the problem of Wilde's faith when he tries to distinguish his assessment of Wilde's Catholicism from the assessments of other critics: I am not, however, going to claim that Wilde's Catholicism was a meaningless pose, or that he was somehow immune to faith, doubt, shame, or remorse, all of which he described in religious terms with considerable eloquence. Those critics who have described Wilde as a consummate poseur have been especially eager to trivialize his religious beliefs. . . . Another strategy . . . has been to discuss Wilde as if he were Cardinal Newman.27 "Both these strategies," Hanson continues, "are obligated to debate the genuineness of his Christian beliefs according to some presumed standard of orthodoxy that is itself highly questionable."28 Here,

25 Thomas, J. D., "Oscar Wilde's Pose and Poetry," The Rice Institute Pamphlets 41, no. 5 (1955): 43. 26 Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters, 1224. 27 Hanson, Decadence, 231-32. 28 Hanson, Decadence, 232.

89 Hanson mentions Ellman's "unfortunate tendency to regard Wilde as essentially a 'pagan' and aesthetic clown, whose writings on religion are all shallow and insincere."29 Beyond this tendency, though, Ellman goes as far as to attribute a renunciation of Catholicism to Wilde's having contracted syphilis from a prostitute, a biographical claim that Joseph Pearce later disproves. In a punning description of Wilde's paganism, Ellman writes, "He adopted mercury rather than religion as the specific for his dreadful disease."30 Ellman evaluates Wilde's life and ultimately his work according to the effect that a hypothetical event had on Wilde's religious sincerity. The confusion between text and unaccountable biographical questions appears in Ellman again when he imposes sentiments from Wilde's fictional characters onto the events of Wilde's life, sometimes without regard to chronology. For example, Hanson mentions that "when Ellman loses patience with Wilde's attempts at conversion, he quotes from the ritualistic passages in The Picture of Dorian Gray, as though Dorian were the last word on Wilde's religious sincerity."31 Like Ellman, Sloan claims that Wilde rejected faith and objective morality. Sloan writes that Wilde felt "the age demanded a new hedonism unbounded by the maladies of medieval and puritanical conscience."32 Hanson also distances Wilde from an investment in personal faith by saying, "Roman Catholicism was very much part of Wilde's characteristic pose as an aesthete and a decadent."33 For Hanson, in particular, ritualism is Wilde's foremost religious interest because Wilde, according to Hanson, conceives of Catholic ritual as homoerotic performance. In contrast to this skepticism, Joseph Pearce offers an analysis of Wilde in which Wilde emerges as a proponent of moral law and a person infused with faith.34 Stephen Goode unselfconsciously summarizes Pearce's assessment of Wilde's lifestyle and final conversion by saying, "Wilde's life, in Mr. Pearce's telling, is a powerful tale of

29 Hanson, Decadence, 231. 30 Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1998), 95. 31 Hanson, Decadence, 248. 32 John Sloan, Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 140-41. 33 Ellis Hanson, "Oscar Wilde and the Scarlet Woman," Journal of Homosexuality 33, no. 3/4 (1997): 122. 34 Joseph Pearce, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde (London: Harper, 2000).

90 Christ's warning that man cannot serve two masters."35 Edward Oakes goes as far as to make a conclusion about "Wilde's essentially religious and moral self."36 The imposition of decisions about Wilde's personal faith onto Wilde's biography and work reflects a tendency in the criticism to confuse questions of intention with textual questions, as if a reading of Wilde's texts affords a judgment on the biographical question of Wilde's personal faith. These examinations seem to take for granted the possibility of a critic's knowing Wilde's intentions regarding faith. There is also an expectation that this knowledge might have some definitive effect on readings of Wilde's texts. In making these divergent claims about Wilde's life, behavior, and disposition toward Catholicism, critics depend on moralistic questions that "The Rise of Historical Criticism" and Wilde's other work often critique. Such questions seem out of place in textual studies of Wilde's work because they sometimes rely on speculations about Wilde's temperament more than on textual data. When Romano Amerio gives his critique of this method of criticism, he notes the distance between the author as an authentic persona and the text. Without strictly adopting Amerio's formulation that biography obscures the fact that the text "does not have to be confronted, measured, or verified by something other than itself,"37 I intend to examine how the text of "The Rise of Historical Criticism" engages in the wider rhetoric of nineteenth-century Catholicism. Wilde's essay proposes a model of intellectual authority that sees intellectual freedom as a paradoxical result of political disenfranchisement. The election of Pius IX to the pontificate encouraged liberal Catholics who expected a reversal of the strident Ultramontanism of Gregory XVI. Gregory XVI had condemned Lammenais's doctrines of the separation of Church and State and freedom of conscience. By the 1850s, however, Pius IX's policy of appeasing the independence movement

35 Stephen Goode, "Oscar Wilde, Moralist," The Washington Times, 27 June 2004, n.p. 36 Edward T. Oakes, "Looking Beneath the Mask of Oscar Wilde," The Weekly Standard, 15 November 2004. 37 Romano Amerio, Stat Veritas: Suite à « Iota Unam » (Rome: Courrier, 1996), 21. The original text reads as follows: "La parole . . . n'a pas à être confrontée, mesurée, vérifiée avec quelque chose qui soit autre qu'elle-même."

91 in the Papal States had resulted in rioting and assassinations. Pius's ineffective response both to the Italian Revolution and to the independence movement led to a collapse of security in the Papal States. As the papacy lost its secular power in the decades that followed, the Church began to assert more forcefully the pope's power over doctrine and government in the Church. Pius IX moved toward strict doctrinal positions and issued several anti-modernist documents. In his allocution "Singulari Quadam," for instance, Pius IX attacks those "who . . . hold human reason at so high a value, exalt it so much, that they very foolishly think that it is to be held equal to religion itself."38 With regard to the separation of Church and State, the encyclical Quanta Cura and its Syllabus of Errors condemning the spirit of the age condemn the proposition that "[t]he Church is to be separated from the state, and the state from the Church."39 At first, Pius IX was an emblem of the hopes of liberal Catholics. As a cardinal, he had opposed Gregory XVI's unprogressive policies, even going so far as to craft his own policy of reform.40 As pope, however, he presided over a reactionary program which set out to curb political and religious liberalism. Within the milieu of nineteenth-century Catholicism, the Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni often writes from a conservative point of view. Some critics even attribute a stern Jansenism to Manzoni.41 When Manzoni takes up the question of papal infallibility in his Morale Cattolica, he echoes Pius IX's syllabus and begins from the premise that "the spirit of the age should not be judged historically, but by a timeless criterion."42 Proceeding from there, Manzoni argues that for human beings to access this noumenal criterion, there must be a supernatural, but accessible revelation which, to Manzoni, requires an authoritative, human voice. Manzoni then limits this authority to the pope and claims that a denial of papal infallibility really signifies a denial of noumenal truth. Manzoni's argument is as follows:

38 Henry Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, trans. Roy F. Defarrari (Fitzwilliam: Loreto, 2004): 414. 39 Denzinger, 440. 40 The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., s.v. "Pius IX" 41 See Alexander Lernet-Holenia, "Manzoni and Christianity," trans. John S. Barrett, Southern Humanities Review 39, no. 2 (2005): 131. 42 Romano Amerio, Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the XXth Century (Kansas City: Sarto, 1996), 37.

92 Whoever refuses, with the protestants, the charismatic infallibility of the pope falls into the system of the infallibility of all men, . . . a principle which either destroys logical value and religious credence or which . . . decides religion with sentiment and enthusiasm.43 Manzoni's insistence on the timelessness of truth and the necessity of authority also informs his Aristotelian view of historical criticism as incapable of conveying the timeless truth that dramatic and fictional writings convey.44 Manzoni's conception of the pope corresponds to the defense of infallibility by Cardinal Manning. Questions of civic power, civic allegiance, and intellectual freedom dominate the public debate between Gladstone and Manning over infallibility. In his response to Gladstone's claim that the definition of papal infallibility had made civil allegiance impossible for English Catholics, Manning responds that the definition of infallibility was not a decisive act but rather the confirmation of a sure, pre-existing fact. "The doctrine of the infallibility of the Church has never been defined to this day," Manning writes. "The infallibility of the pope was likewise never defined," he continues, "but it was never an open question."45 For Manning, the consensus for infallibility and the truth of infallibility precede the council's historic definition of it. The premise that truth and authority arise democratically from the collegiality of the Church is the liberal view. At the council, the proponents of the liberal view failed to assemble an effective opposition, and some cardinals like Newman who might have challenged the council refused even to attend.46 Nobili-Vitelleschi's The Vatican Council is a criticism of the "Infallibilists" at the council. The

43 Alessandro Manzoni, Vol. 3 of Osservazioni Sulla Morale Cattolica, ed. Romano Amerio (Milano: Ricciardi, 1965), 355. The original text reads: "Chi rifiuti, coi protestanti, l'infallibilità carismatica del Papa cade nel sistema dell'infallibilità di tutti gli uomini, . . . principio che o distrugge affatto il valore logico delle credenze religiose o, che . . . risolve la religione nel sentimento e nell'entusiasmo." 44 Alessandro Manzoni, On the Historical Novel, trans. Sandra Bermann (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984), 121. 45 Henry Edward Manning, The Vatican Decrees and Their Bearing on Civil Allegiance (New York, 1875), 21-22. 46 For an analysis of the opposition to infallibility, see Gloss 12 of Amerio's Stat Veritas, 53-56.

93 book questions the necessity of defining papal infallibility. A large part of Nobili-Vitelleschi's focus is Cardinal Manning whom Nobili- Vitelleschi sees as over-zealous, foreign, and immune to progressive, continental ideals. One of the conflicts that drives the book is Pius IX's eventual transformation into a conservative supporter of the proponents of papal infallibility. In Nobili-Vitelleschi's version, Pius IX initially calls the council to reverse the conservatism of his predecessor, Gregory XVI. Nobili-Vitelleschi's depiction of the two sides relies on the opposition between absolute authority and progress that Wilde employs in "The Rise of Historical Criticism." When he describes Pius IX's calling of the council, for instance, Nobili- Vitelleschi portrays the pope's anti-authoritarian intentions: [T]he spontaneous act of the Pope in calling together the Council . . . was an act of liberal tendency--a step backwards in the path of absolutism, a step in advance towards a larger and more complete restoration of the ecclesiastical constitution, because that is founded in the combined opinion of many rather than in the absolute power of one.47 Nobili-Vitelleschi portrays the prevalent expectation that Pius IX would reverse his predecessor's totalitarian, anti-intellectual policies. Early in Pius IX's papacy, Frédéric Ozanam, a socialist leader of the French neo-Catholic movement, described the new pope as "the envoy sent by God to conclude the great business of the 19th century, the alliance of religion and liberty."48 The obstacle that absolute authority represents to progress is a theme that also opens Wilde's essay. There, the contrast is between the Greek "revolt against absolute authority" and the "material despotism" of Asia. Wilde attributes the absence of "free criticism" in Asia to the dictatorship there compared with the freedom of Greek democracy: "It is from democracy that the spirit of criticism borrows its intolerance of dogmatic authority."49 Critics often assume that Wilde's rejection of authority reflects

47 Pomponio Leto, The Vatican Council, Eight Months at Rome During the Vatican Council (London, 1876), 10. 48 Quoted in The New Catholic, "Pius IX." 49 Wilde, "Rise," 1198.

94 a turning away from Catholicism. Ellman examines Wilde's comparison in the poem "Humanitad" of Pius IX and Giuseppe Mazzini and claims that Wilde depicts Pius IX "in sharp contrast to the patriot Mazzini."50 For Ellman, this "turning away from Catholicism" results from Wilde's aversion to the anti-democratic flavor of Catholicism. Ellman, however, fails to account for Wilde's preoccupation in the 1870s with the council and Manning. "The Rise of Historical Criticism" and Wilde's Catholic verse counter the liberal Catholicism that Wilde encountered at length in Nobili-Vitelleschi. In his criticism of Manning, for instance, Nobili-Vitelleschi attacks Manning's fascination with absolute authority as inimical to "real" Catholicism: He did not appreciate the good effects of allowing a moderate degree of liberty, and the constant exercise of the conscience and reasoning powers; neither did he understand the dangers arising from the excessive authority. . . . In fact, he was enamoured of the principle of authority as the slave adores the idea of liberty; and this want of discrimination and of real Catholic perception in his dealings with the Council were a matter of reproach to him even by the most faithful and devout clergy at Rome.51 Nobili-Vitelleschi warns against the authoritarian and anti-modern tendencies of the council's schemas, and The Vatican Council is an apology for the Liberal Catholics who suffered defeat at the council. Nobili-Vitelleschi's Catholicism is anti-authoritarian, and the anti- authoritarian sentiments in Wilde's early work engage with Nobili- Vitelleschi's Catholicism in a way that readings of them do not recognize. In "The Rise of Historical Criticism," Oscar Wilde offers an interpretation of Greek historical writing that takes part in the English Greek Revival and that shares Matthew Arnold's concern for objective criticism. Wilde expresses the latter interest by paradoxically linking the political fall of the Greek city-state to an increase in the liberty and achievement of the historians. Wilde's preference for the art and literature of the Hellenistic period

50 Ellman, 140. 51 Leto, 41.

95 emphasizes technology and form and participates in the aestheticism of Wilde's later criticism. The link that Wilde establishes between freedom and intellectual advancement is a link that also dominated the debates of the First Vatican Council which Wilde followed attentively. When Wilde depicts the Church and Pius IX in his verse, he often regrets the pope's loss of civic power, but the resurgence of Pius IX after the definition of infallibility adds another dimension to the "imprisonment" of Pius IX in Wilde. In "Sonnet on Approaching Italy" and "Urbs Sacra Aeterna," for example, the "prisoned shepherd of the Church of God,"52 retains his power before kneeling pilgrims because he assumes his dogmatic role as "a second Peter."53 The contrast between the pope's diminishing secular power and his absolute dogmatic authority is a motif in Wilde and also in Francesco Nobili- Vitelleschi's The Vatican Council which Wilde was reading while he composed his early verse and "The Rise of Historical Criticism."54 In "The Rise of Historical Criticism," the loss of political freedom paradoxically accompanies the greater critical freedom of later historical writers like Polybius. The paradox of gaining greater intellectual power at the expense of civic power is also a theme of Nobili-Vitelleschi's account of the council, and it appears in Wilde's sonnets on Pius IX.55 The religious rhetoric in Wilde's early work, therefore, goes beyond the superficial display of pomp and ritual and is consistent with the nineteenth-century Catholic language of freedom and authority. When Gladstone criticizes the Vatican Council's definition of papal infallibility, his concern repeats a longstanding anti-Catholic expression of the incompatibility of English citizenship and Roman Catholic authority. From the beginning, Gelasian dualism maintains the superiority of the spiritual power, and the consistent repetition of this formula by the popes in a certain way enables an English

52 Oscar Wilde, "Urbs Sacra Aeterna," in The Complete Works, 770. 53 Oscar Wilde, "Sonnet on Approaching Italy," in The Complete Works, 768. 54 In his letter of July 17, 1876 to William Ward, Wilde recommends that Ward read The Vatican Council. See The Complete Letters, 22-23. 55 There is also a connection between the figures of Polybius and Pius IX, whose authority intensifies amid political adversity, and the career of Wilde's mother, whose poetic voice hinges on Irish disenfranchisement.

96 exploitation of the Roman Catholic doctrine of primacy. This exploitation most dramatically surfaces in events like the English Civil War and the Gordon Riots. In Wilde's poetry, the separation of Pius IX's civic and religious authority resembles Cardinal Manning's response to Gladstone. Whereas Manning maintains that the Vatican Council did not alter papal power, Wilde creates a formula that sees the pope's intellectual and dogmatic power grow as his civic power decreases. In this sense, Wilde confronts English anti-Catholicism because he ameliorates the papacy's loss of secular power by stressing the spiritual authority of the pope. The formulation whereby a loss of civic power brings an increase in intellectual authority also drives Wilde's essay, "The Rise of Historical Criticism," and the figures of Polybius and Pius IX attain an authoritative command of the truth of things in an inverse relation to their respective civil freedoms. In Wilde, these figures' access to authority assumes that questions of history and religious dogma have definitive answers that can be known. Wilde's depiction of Polybius and Pius IX therefore disaffirms the usual view of Wilde as someone who sees identity, society, and religion in performative rather than essential terms.

97 CONCLUSION

"Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away," Lord Henry tells Dorian in The Picture of Dorian Gray.1 For Lord Henry, death is vulgar because it unsettles his worship of youth and beauty as "a form of genius."2 Death destroys material differences and is therefore vulgar. This distinction between genius and its form, between the metaphysical and physical nature of things, offers insight to the self-immolation that is a theme in "The Rise of Historical Criticism" and throughout Wilde's work. In Lady Windermere's Fan and An Ideal Husband, Mrs. Erlynne and Sir Robert Chiltern sacrifice themselves for extrinsic ideals, and "De Profundis" displays Wilde's personal self-immolation. Herbert Stewart claims that Oscar Wilde represents how "the Romantic movement developed" into an "ideal of wayward autonomy" according to which "[n]ot only positive codes, but every sort of agreed on convention became an object of contempt."3 Similarly, Robert Pattison holds that "though Wilde is the self-proclaimed archenemy of vulgarity, in his work the vulgar wins a signal victory as Romantic sensibility is purged of the last remnant of reasoned classical restraint."4 Nevertheless, Wilde's commentary in "De Profundis" proposes the incompatibility of "wayward autonomy" and the individual's reception of extrinsic, transcendental meaning: "He who is in a state of rebellion cannot receive grace."5 In his assessment of Romanticism and religion, Hoxie Neal Fairchild argues that the "limitless self-expression" of Romanticism denies "transcendent objectivity,"6 and Pattison claims "Romantic pantheism" has developed into a "social and aesthetic power" that enables even the "dazzling progeny of America's democratic

1 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Isobel Murray (New York: Oxford, 1998), 174. 2 Wilde, 18. 3 Herbert L. Stewart, "Theology and Romanticism," The Harvard Theological Review 13, no. 4 (1920): 381. 4 Robert Pattison, The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1987), 19. 5 Oscar Wilde, "De Profundis," The Soul of Man, and Prison Writings, ed. Isobel Murray (New York: Oxford UP, 1990), 107. 6 Hoxie Neal Fairchild, Vol. 4 of Religious Trends in English Poetry (New York: Columbia UP, 1957), 4-5.

98 premises."7 These interpretations depend on a similarity in English Romanticism, German idealism, and Rousseau's emphasis on the general will, but contrary to M. H. Abrams's notion of the Romantic poets' transforming the story of external, religious salvation into an internal, secular process of doubt and recovery,8 Romantic literature sometimes affirms an essential ontology of the natural and supernatural, with respect both to the nature of things and to the law. In Wilde, the retention of extrinsic measures of law and identity also surfaces. Wordsworth's attempt in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets to achieve a unity of history and doctrine in the English Church reveals the tension between a simultaneous investment in historical progress and doctrinal standardization, especially when doctrine is an extrahistorical standard. Typically, analyses of Romanticism and the Oxford Movement either find in them a common nostalgia for England's past, or, like Fairchild, stress the irreconcilability of Romantic immanence and Christian transcendence. Horton Davies says that the Tractarian view of tradition comes from Romanticism which "was already beckoning the British public in the novels of Sir Walter Scott to take a long, appreciative look at their ancestors."9 Newman, however, articulates the problem of reconciling history and doctrine with which Wordsworth's sonnets struggle. In Tract 90, Newman writes: The present writer, for one, will be no party to the ordinary political methods by which professed reforms are carried or compassed in this day. We can do nothing well till we act "with one accord;" we can have no accord in action till we agree together in heart. . . . Our Church's strength would be irresistible, humanly speaking, were it but at unity with itself.10 Newman's rejection of voluntarism conceives of unity as an agreement on principles that do not derive from action, but precede and then direct it. In this thesis, I have tried to show the conception of unity at

7 Pattison, 212. 8 See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971). 9 Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England: From Watts and Wesley to Maurice, 1690-1850 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961), 256. 10 John Henry Cardinal Newman, Vol. 2 of The Via Media of the Anglican Church (New York, 1908), 270-71.

99 work in Price, Wordsworth, and Byron, and I have proposed that Catholic language and institutions arise in nineteenth-century England amid the problem of locating the institutional site of this transcendent unity. For Wilde, Byron, and, most dramatically, Newman, the Catholic Church is the material site. For Smith, Wordsworth, and Browning, the Catholic Church's claim to absolute authority looms over the retention of archetypal and doctrinal essences and presents the problem of fashioning foundational language in opposition to the Catholic claim. In the twentieth century, the question of essentialism enters the debate between H. G. Wells and G. K. Chesterton. Wells's "Scepticism of the Instrument" in which the human mind's tendency to classify objects fails to account for the infinite complexity within groups presents an essential materialism which Chesterton counters with the Platonic notion of "pontifical man" who accepts religion and reason as "both of the same primary and authoritative kind."11 Recently, Žižek has called on Chesterton and critiqued the view that "all our positions are relative, conditioned by contingent historical constellations, so that no one has definitive Solutions, just pragmatic solutions."12 The epistemological basis of Žižek's philosophy shares with Aristotle and Aquinas the ideas that certainty is possible and that knowledge comes when there is no more questioning or doubt.13 Žižek's criticism of the strategic essentialism of Spivak and others relies on a paradoxical facet of deconstruction which the term "strategic essentialism" implies and in which the view that the categories of Platonic essentialism are inviable still depends on those categorical distinctions in order to

11 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Vancouver: Regent College P, 2004), 40. See also H. G. Wells, "Scepticism of the Instrument" in A Modern Utopia (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1967), 375-393. 12 Slavoj Žižek, "The Rhetorics of Power," Diacritics 31, no. 1 (2001): 103. 13 The Aristotelian distinction between the contemplative life and the active life, however, is incompatible with the utilitarian purpose of theory in Žižek. This contrast reflects the difference between Aristotle's supernatural teleology and the anthropocentric teleology of Žižek. Nevertheless, the epistemological basis of Žižek's criticism shares Joseph Siri's skepticism of the "vertigo of 'perpetual research'" which, in contemporary criticism, eschews finality. See Joesph Siri, Gethsemane: Reflections on the Contemporary Theological Movement (Chicago: Franciscan Herald, 1981), 29.

100 conclude that rejecting them is preferable.14 This paradox, which Richard Rorty's philosophy and Ugo Spirito's theology also repeat,15 appears in the literature of the nineteenth century as Romanticism develops an opposition to the empiricism and voluntarism of the Enlightenment. In the essays of this thesis, I have attempted to reveal this opposition in the literature. Its presence deepens the analysis of English Romanticism's reaction to the Enlightenment as a voluntarist and pantheistic attempt to naturalize the supernatural or to make traditionally extrinsic measures of law and value immanent in nature or humanity.

14 In addition to Žižek, Amerio formulates this precise critique. See Romano Amerio, Iota Unum (Kansas City: Sarto, 1996), 387-93. 15 See Rorty, "Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 53, no. 6 (1980): 717-38. Also, see Ugo Spirito, La Vita come Amore: Il Tramonto della Civiltà Cristiana (Firenze: Sansoni, 1953). For an analysis of Spirito's work, see Patrick Romanell, "Ugo Spirito's Philosophy of Love," The Journal of Philosophy 54, no. 7 (1957): 188-93. In critical theory, the first part of Jacques Derrida's Dissemination (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983) offers another example.

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108 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Maxwell Wheeler was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He has taught English courses for the Florida State University English Department, the Florida State University London Study Centre, and the BEC program of Barry University. He has served as head of the English Department at John Paul II Catholic High School in Tallahassee, Florida. His publications include "Charlotte Smith's Historical Narratives and the English Subject," Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism, 10 (2002): 7-18.

109