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The Impasse of Roman Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature Maxwell P Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2007 The Impasse of Roman Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature Maxwell P. Wheeler Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY 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
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