THE SPIRITUAL HISTORY OF ENGLISH

“The chief glory of every people arises from its authors” Samuel Johnson, 1755

One fundamental aspect of our culture to have escaped close attention in recent times is the relationship between religion and literature. This may be because each has receded from its former place at the forefront of the culture and because these recessions are related. In his 1948 Notes Towards the Definition of Culture T.S. Eliot described the “culture of a people as an incarnation of its religion,” adding that the, “way of looking at culture which I have been trying to adumbrate is so difficult that I am not sure I grasp it myself except in flashes, or that I comprehend all its implications.” While modern people might like to believe that they can do without Christianity this does not mean that religion can be so easily avoided, although it may be that literature can.

In 1927, at the time of his own conversion to Anglicanism and naturalisation as a British subject, in a Criterion review of Bertrand Russell’s ‘Why I am not a Christian,’ Eliot argued that ‘…one ceases to be Christian only by becoming something else definite – a Buddhist, a Mohammedan, a Brahmin…’ The recession from Christianity has not resulted in a mass of such conversions, let alone Russell’s, merely the attenuation of Christianity into a variety of sub-cults that coalesce around the simple premise that belief in the Christian religion is either outdated or irrelevant, with little or no agreement as to why or what should take its place. From Eliot’s perspective this is merely an extreme form of Protestantism and the variety of doctrines that have taken the place of orthodox Christianity are more or less explicit versions of lapsed Christianity, with genuine atheism or actual conversion being equally rare, and a generalised agnosticism the consequence of a determination not to think about religion.

The attempt of these secular or godless religions to ignore religion and concentrate on making the best of this world has not however resulted in the successful transcendence of belief in the supernatural, merely the relaxation of the spiritual discipline theology provides as a bulwark against superstition: belief in human progress or perfectibility may for instance depend on faith in the ability of technology to liberate us from history or to alter human nature. Meanwhile the plethora of beliefs and doctrines that has succeeded Christianity constitutes the disagreement that lies at the heart of its civic aspect, liberalism, and the democratic system it implies. Without that disagreement there would be no need for the religious impartiality that liberalism proposes, which almost imperceptibly becomes a doctrinal attack on religious belief per se: the pursuit of political freedom becoming a veil for relativism.

It may also be that modern politics have made the existence of a literary high culture impossible, consisting as they do in the rejection of all authority beyond that of the 'will of the people,' and thereby undermining those standards necessary to establish literary excellence: popularity becoming the chief criterion of literary success. This is the political incarnation of modern religion and a common feature of the recession of Christianity and Literature; its literary incarnation is similarly predicated on the denial of authority external to the individual, in matters artistic as well as spiritual or political. While the artistic culture is created by and for people whose sole external political or spiritual authority is the negative one of democratic liberalism, no artistic authority is acknowledged beyond that of individual taste; the attempt to establish any sort of hierarchy being elitist, racist, patriarchal, or otherwise an affront to the dignity of free-thinking or feeling individuals. Furthermore for many the pursuit of art has itself become a form of religion whereby the individual explores, uncovers and is ultimately united or re-united with his own true self, whether in creation or consumption (note the similarity with some redemptive political creeds.) Art becomes a form of autonomous spiritual exploration that is fundamentally incompatible with the religious order that existed prior to the modern period, and with orthodox Christianity per se, where religion is a separate and prior activity, with prior moral claims. It is rather a religion of art, a religious belief in writing and the self-becoming of the individual writer or artist, its significance for society and its status as a moral end in itself.

This culture achieved its clearest incarnation in Romanticism, which had its ostensible origins in the Eighteenth Century, but was first observed in the Renaissance and has never really left us. Its early stages of development were largely a fruition of what had gone before, albeit with a new element, Renaissance Humanism, effectively a revival of Classical Humanism, which went on to triumph at the Civil War and was made fully incarnate in literature by Cowley and Milton. Their Elizabethan and Jacobean antecedents had been formed by the combination of the old and new cultures, and their particular achievement, as well as the Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised Version, were perhaps a consequence of the fine balance between the two. Carlyle described it as “…the outcome and flowerage of all that had preceded it…attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle Ages.” Romanticism proper was partly a literary reaction to the Enlightenment, but was also associated with the revival of interest in, and newly acquired knowledge of, ancient Greece. This was convenient for its political associations with democracy and republicanism, radicalism and individualism, liberty and equality, all of which were in turn, a reaction to the remaining legacy of Roman Imperialism from the Middle Ages. It was accompanied by a revival of interest in and regard for literature in the vernacular, including Anglo-Saxon and Celtic literature, or what sometimes passed for it, a preference for the Elizabethans and Jacobeans over the English Augustans, an acknowledgement of the spiritual paternity of Milton, and was thus a further rejection of the Latin cultural tradition that had been associated with ecclesiastical Christianity for over a thousand years: Southey described it in 1807 as being a school “half –Greek half-Gothic,” and it was equally corrosive of Latin classical tradition.

Even Eliot did not entirely overcome its criticism of Johnson, who in his Late Renaissance Latinity had believed that “modern English poetry began not with developments in the vernacular but with Cowley and Milton, ‘of opposite [political] principles; but concurring in the cultivation of Latin poetry in which the English, till their works…appeared, seemed unable to contest the palm with any other of the lettered nations.’” Indeed Eliot in his poetry self-consciously fell foul of Johnson’s criticism of the Metaphysical’s use of “heterogeneous images yoked by violence together” and “thoughts, so far fetched as to be not only unexpected but unnatural.” In doing so he set out to re-discover the essence of the Metaphysical Poetry that he considered to be so “highly civilized” and especially relevant to the complex society of his day. “What it makes manifest, and this is its great importance in the history of civilisation, is the intimate relation between our philosophical beliefs and our private feelings and behaviour. That is, indeed, one way of testing our philosophical beliefs.” He developed a view of poetry with its apex at the time of Dante, when the mind and the emotions were fused in a sensibility that saw the “senses thinking” or “sensuous thought,” such that Dante could offer “the most comprehensive and the most ordered presentation of emotion that has ever been made,” partly as a consequence of the order and comprehensiveness of Thomist, or Catholic, theology and philosophy. The ongoing “disintegration of the intellect” meant that this supremely “metaphysical” moment was to be repeated, but to a much lesser degree of perfection in the Schools of Donne and of Baudelaire, while there was “as sad a decline in subtlety of feeling between the Metaphysicals and Gray and Collins as in ‘elegance and dignity’ between them and the Romantics.’”

It was said that the problem with espousing “classicism” in the Twentieth century, perhaps even in the Eighteenth, was that whilst, “the ‘romantic’ mood is always with us, as an impulse to break down accepted conventions, the ‘classical’ requires a settled and self-confident society with widely shared assumptions to sustain it” and it thus “amounted to nothing more than another version of romantic nostalgia.” Eliot accepted some of this in his essay on Baudelaire, saying that “…a poet in a romantic age cannot be a ‘classical’ poet except in tendency.” But he also viewed the distinction as one, “between the complete and the fragmentary, the adult and the immature, the orderly and the chaotic," which depended on the willingness to accept external authority in aesthetic, moral, social, political and spiritual life: a distinction essentially between Protestantism and Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy.  Romanticism is by contrast a sanctification of the imagination, akin to the sanctification of other faculties such as reason or empathy, which would be impossible to the orthodox believer, despite his recognition of the power of art to communicate his own message. This sanctification for Eliot was part of the “disintegration of the intellect,” part of the “dissociation of sensibility” from the intellect: the abandonment of intellectual and spiritual engagement for the pure pursuit of self and sensation through creation, the rendering helpless of criticism through the rejection of external standards beyond apparent authenticity and power of expression. There had been a “progressive deterioration of poetry…since the thirteenth century…” which had “produced the poetry of Dante, and of that greatest of English poets who came so soon after him…Chaucer,” and, “this deterioration was probably only one aspect of a general deterioration.”

From another angle Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate in 1993 described the metrical aspects of this history, the challenge to orthodox metre from unorthodox, the challenge to quantitative, classical or continental metre from native, alliterative forms, which he somewhat controversially related to the struggle between the English Church and “what it would call Paganism resurgent,” Which “had been the dominant theme of European poetry ever since” Shakespeare. While Chaucer “was the sensitive underside of the [Norman] courtiers,” whose “innovation was to naturalise in an English poetry the up-to-this-point alien culture of the court.” This was one of his last critical forays; in his first in 1962, in the last years of Eliot’s life, he had himself addressed “Context”. Speaking of the relationship between the French Revolution and the English Romantics, the apparent unrelatedness of the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake to the “important issues”, “social and political” of the day and the later obviousness of that connection in spirit, Hughes remembered that “strange observation” whereby  “Damon, quoted by Plato, says that the modes of music are nowhere altered without changes in the most important laws of the state.”

Formal qualities of works of art and their subject matter are thus closely, if mysteriously, related to the broader values they incarnate. The most profound criticism is that which elucidates this relationship most clearly, the relationship between beliefs (and their practical or political, incarnation for example in morality and laws) and literature, whether that relationship is direct or indirect. The latter occurring, according to Eliot, in Metaphysical poetry when “you have a philosophy exerting its influence, not directly through belief, but indirectly through feeling and behaviour,” in other words the “tincture of human emotions by philosophy…may or may not be accompanied by belief in that philosophy.” Our subject is specifically the spiritual history of English, but this approach might be applied more widely, and indeed to the other arts, while a consideration of the spiritual pre-history of the literature, and a comparison with its sister literatures, especially the Latin tradition, will be important. Finally, the spiritual poverty of language is itself of the highest spiritual significance, the widespread use of jargon and code especially in academic presentations of intellectual, cultural and spiritual matters being a deliberate impairment of communication, a refusal to speak intelligibly, a practical rejection of the possibility of a common criticism and judgement, and a disdain for truth itself. And we are living with the consequences of that now.