Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity: The Shock of the Old 9781009306454, 9781009306430, 9781009306447, 1009306456

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Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity

The nineteenth century was a period in which ideas of history and time were challenged as never before. This is the first book to explore how the study of classical antiquity and the study of the Bible together formed an image of the past which became central to Victorian selfunderstanding. These specially commissioned, multidisciplinary essays brilliantly reveal the richness of Victorian thinking about the past and how important these models of antiquity were in the expression of modernity. In an age of progress, cultural anxiety and cultural hope were fuelled by the shock of the old – new discoveries about the deep past, and new ways of thinking about humanity’s place in history. The volume provides a rich and readable feast which will be fundamental to all those seeking a greater understanding of the Victorians, as well as of the reception of classics and the Bible. simon goldhill is a Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College, as well as the Foreign Secretary of the British Academy. He is one of the best-known classicists of his generation who has lectured all over the world, and he has appeared on TV and radio from Canada to Australia. His books have been translated into twelve languages and have won three international prizes. His most recent is The Christian Invention of Time (Cambridge, 2022). ruth jackson ravenscroft is an Undergraduate Tutor and Bye-Fellow in Theology, Religion, and Philosophy of Religion at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. She is a theologian and philosopher of religion whose research has focused primarily on nineteenthcentury Germany. More broadly, she has also written on issues of gender, epistemology, and the relationship between theology and politics. She is the author of The Veiled God: Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Theology of Finitude (2019).

Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity The Shock of the Old

Edited by

simon goldhill University of Cambridge

ruth jackson ravenscroft Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009306454 DOI: 10.1017/9781009306430 © Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Goldhill, Simon, editor. | Jackson Ravenscroft, Ruth, editor. Title: Victorian engagements with the Bible and antiquity : the shock of the old / edited by Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge, Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023000657 | ISBN 9781009306454 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009306447 (paperback) | ISBN 9781009306430 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Bible – Criticism, interpretation, etc. – History – 19th century. | Classicism – United States – History – 19th century. | Classicism – England – History – 19th century. | Civilization, Classical. Classification: LCC BS500 .V53 2023 | DDC 220.6–dc23/eng/20230417 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023000657 ISBN 978-1-009-30645-4 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures [page vii] List of Contributors [xi] Acknowledgements [xii]

1 Introduction: History, God, and Me [1] simon goldhill and ruth jackson ravenscroft part i antiquity’s modernity [17] 2 Genealogy, Translation, and Resistance: Between the Bible and the Greeks [19] simon goldhill 3 Herodotus, Historian of the Hebrew People, Without Knowing It [47] suzanne marchand part ii making the past visible [81] 4 The Bible, Classical Antiquity, and the Invention of Victorian Art at the 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition [83] kate nichols 5 The Classical and Biblical in Dialogue: A Conversation in Victorian Sculpture [122] caroline vout part iii materiality and spectacle [159] 6 Dionysia in Bavaria: Greek Theatre, German Catholicism, and the Cultural Uses of the Oberammergau Passion Play, 1830–1910 [161] robert d. priest

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7 ‘Popes and Caesars’: St Paul, Protestant Bible Culture, and the Building of the American Episcopal Church in Rome [184] g. a. bremner part iv travelling the world [209] 8 Protestant Travellers to Rome and the Legacies of the Apostolic Church [211] dorothy m. figueira and brian h. murray 9 HMS Bacchante: Religion, Time Travel, and the Victorian Monarchy [235] michael ledger-lomas part v manuscripts, morality, and metaphysics [259] 10 ‘Whoso Humbleth Himself Shall Be Exalted, Whoso Exalteth Himself Shall Be Abased’: F. D. Maurice and the History of Philosophy [261] jocelyn paul betts 11 ‘The Borderland of the Bible’: M. R. James, the Apocrypha, and Christian Antiquity in the Late Nineteenth Century [284] alison knight and scott mandelbrote part vi intellectual superstars: the limits of religion [309] 12 Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah [311] laura mccormick kilbride 13 Hellenism, Hebraism, and Heathenism in Nineteenth-Century England: Connop Thirlwall, George Grote, and the Religions of Antiquity [358] brian young 14 Epilogue: Bible, Antiquity, and the Shock of the Old [385] ruth jackson ravenscroft Bibliography [404] Index [448]

Figures

4.1 Ground plan of Central exhibition building, Manchester Jubilee Exhibition. Source: Official Guide to the Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Manchester 1887 (Manchester: John Heywood, 1887). Image courtesy of University of Birmingham, Library Services. [page 86] 4.2 Plan of Fine Art Galleries, Manchester Jubilee Exhibition. Source: Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Manchester, 1887: Fine Art Section (Manchester: Excelsior, 1887). Image courtesy of University of Birmingham Library Services. [88] 4.3 George Tinworth, Release of Barrabas (1882), clay, 365 × 172 cm. Image from Edmund Gosse, A Critical Essay on the Life and Works of George Tinworth (London: Fine Arts Society, 1883), 58. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. [89] 4.4 Albumen silver print, by Caldesi and Montecchi (1858) of William Dobson, The Prosperous Days of Job (1855), oil on canvas. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles: 84. XB.582.2.59. [100] 4.5 Frederick Goodall, Rebecca at the Well (1879–80), oil on canvas, 72.5 × 60 cm. Image courtesy of Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery. [101] 4.6 William Holman Hunt, The Shadow of Death (1873), 214.2 × 168.2 cm. © Manchester Art Gallery / Bridgeman Images. [102] 4.7 Engraving of Briton Riviere, Daniel (1872). Source: ‘Daniel. From the Picture by Briton Riviere, A.R.A., in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1872. By kind permission of Messrs. Agnew & Sons’, The Magazine of art (Jan. 1879), 256. Image courtesy of University of Birmingham, Library Services. [104] 4.8 Engraving (1896) of Briton Riviere, Circe and the Companions of Ulysses (1871). From the New York Public Library, vii

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4.9

4.10

4.11

4.12

4.13

4.14

available at https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47 e4-2fed-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99. [105] Frederic Lord Leighton, Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis (c.1869–71), oil on canvas, 132.4 × 265.4 cm. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1982.46. Photo credit: Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum. [110] Frederic Lord Leighton, Elisha Raising the Son of the Shunamite (1881), oil on canvas 127 × 174 cm. Leighton House Museum, Kensington & Chelsea, London, UK. © Leighton House/Bridgeman Images. [111] Edwin Long, Diana or Christ? (1881), oil on canvas, 121 × 211 cm. Image courtesy of Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery. [113] Photograph of the Central Hall of the Fine Arts Department, Manchester Jubilee Exhibition, 1887. Image courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council GB127.m61864. [114] Key to paintings and sculpture in 4.12, drawn by Rhiannon Nichols (2016) and used with her permission. 1. Edwin Long, Diana or Christ? (1881); 2. John Collier, Thomas Huxley (1883); 3. John Collier, Charles Darwin (1883); 4. Harry Bates, The Aeneid (1884); 5. Edwin Landseer, Scene at Braemar (1857); 6. Edwin Long, Babylonian Marriage Market (1875); 7. George Richmond, Earl Granville (1876); 8. J. E. Millais, George Grote (1871); 9. G. F. Watts, The Duke of Argyll (c. 1860); 10. G. F. Watts, Lord Lyndhurst (1862); 11. G. F. Watts, Viscount Sherbrooke (1874); 12. Edwin Long, The Gods and Their Makers (1878); 13. John Lucas, Robert Stephenson (1853); 14. James Dromgole Linton, The Benediction (1881); 15. W. M. Tweedie, William Cavendish, Seventh Duke of Devonshire (1856); 16. T. H. Munns, The Marquis of Hartington MP (1883); 17. J. E. Millais, John Bright MP (1880). [114] Photograph of the Central Hall of the Fine Arts Department, Manchester Jubilee Exhibition, 1887. Image courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council GB127.m61866. [116]

List of Figures

4.15 Key to paintings in 4.14, drawn by Rhiannon Nichols (2016) and used with her permission. 1. Edward Poynter, The Dragon of Wantley (1873); 2. Edward Poynter, Atalanta’s Race (1875); 3. Edward Poynter, Perseus and Andromeda (1872); 4. Edward Poynter, Nausicaa and Her Maidens (1873); 5. Edward Armitage, Julian the Apostate Presiding at a Conference of Sectarians (1875); 6. John Everett Millais, Winter Fuel (1873); 7. Frederic Leighton, Daphnephoria (1876). [116] 5.1 George Frederic Watts, Clytie (1868–75), painted plaster (said to be the original model). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Walter L. Palmer, 1908, inv. no. 08.131. Photo: public domain. [130] 5.2 Hamo Thornycroft, Lot’s Wife (1877–8), marble. Victoria & Albert Museum, on loan from the Leighton House Museum, London. Photo: Caroline Vout. [131] 5.3 Benjamin Edward Spence, Psyche at the Well (c.1864), marble. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, inv. no. WAG 4239. Photo: Image by ART UK. Courtesy National Museums Liverpool. [134] 5.4 Harry Bates, Pandora (1900), marble. Tate Britain, London. Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1891, inv. no. N01750. © Photo: Tate. [135] 5.5 Eugène Delaplanche, Eve Before the Fall (1891), marble. Musée D’Orsay, Paris, inv. no. LUX 36. Photo: Alamy. [136] 5.6 Thomas Brock, Eve (1900), marble. Tate Britain, London. Presented by Sir Henry Tate 1900, inv. no. N01784. © Photo: Tate. [137] 5.7 Thomas Woolner, Civilisation (A Mother Teaching Her Child to Pray) (1856–67), marble. Wallington Hall, Northumberland, inv. no. NT 584949. Photo: Caroline Vout. [139] 5.8 William Bell Scott, The Romans Cause a Wall to Be Built for the Protection of the South (completed 1857), mural, Central Hall, Wallington Hall, Northumbria. Photo: Caroline Vout. [140] 5.9 Thomas Woolner, Achilles Shouting from the Trenches (1868), marble. Royal Academy of Arts, inv. no. 03/1858. © Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer: Paul Highnam. [144] 5.10 John Gibson, Suffer Little Children to Come to Me (1862–4), plaster version of the marble in the Walker Art Gallery,

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5.11

5.12

5.13 5.14

5.15

5.16

5.17 7.1

7.2

8.1

8.2

Liverpool, inv. no. 7273, Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. no. 03/1930. © Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer: Paul Highnam. [145] John Gibson, Aurora, 1842, marble, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, inv. no. NMW A 2527. Photo: Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales. [147] Emmeline Halse, reredos of St John’s Church, Lansdowne Crescent, Ladbroke Grove, London, 1890. Photo: Caroline Vout. [151] Detail of Halse’s reredos. Photo: Caroline Vout. [152] The Arrotino or Knife-grinder, plaster. Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge, inv. no. 381. Photo: Caroline Vout. [153] Mary Grant, reredos in St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh. Photo: Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 4.0, https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. [154] Aurelian panels on the Arch of Constantine, Rome, dedicated in 315 CE. Photo: Alessio Nastro Siniscalchi – user: Belmonte77, CC BY-SA 2.5 IT , via Wikimedia Commons. [155] Harry Bates, Altar of Church of Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, London. Photo: Graham Miller. [155] St Paul’s Within-the-Walls, Rome (1872–6), by G. E. Street. PRJ/1/21, Paul Joyce Archive, GB3010, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, UK. [188] Robert Jenkins Nevin (1839–1906), Rector of St Paul’s Within-the-Walls, American Episcopal Church, Rome. Clerical Biographies, MSS C569, Special Collections, Christoph Keller, Jr. Library, General Theological Seminary, New York. [195] St Peter Enthroned, St Peter’s Basilica, Rome, bronze. Attributed to Arnolfo di Cambio (c.1240–1300). Photo: Antoine Taveneaux (2014). Creative Commons Licence (Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported), https://creativecom mons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode. [224] St Peter Enthroned, English Martyrs Catholic Church, Walworth, London. [233]

Contributors

Jocelyn Paul Betts Scholar of intellectual history, with a long-term research interest in nineteenth-century British political thought. G. A. Bremner Professor of Architectural History in the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA), University of Edinburgh. Dorothy M. Figueira Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia, USA. Simon Goldhill Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, Foreign Secretary and Vice-President of the British Academy, and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft Undergraduate Tutor and Bye-Fellow in Theology, Religion, and Philosophy of Religion at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge. Laura McCormick Kilbride Assistant Professor in Literary Theory at the University of Durham. Alison Knight Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Early Modern Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London. Michael Ledger-Lomas Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London. Scott Mandelbrote Fellow, Director of Studies in History, and Perne and Ward Librarian, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. Suzanne Marchand Boyd Professor of European Intellectual History at Louisiana State University, USA. Brian H. Murray Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature in the English Department at King’s College London. Kate Nichols Associate Professor in History of Art, University of Birmingham. Robert D. Priest Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Royal Holloway, University of London. Caroline Vout Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge and Byvanck Chair, Leiden University. Brian Young Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Oxford and C. H. Stuart Student of Christ Church.

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Acknowledgements

This book is the final publication of the ERC-funded project ‘The Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture’, an Advanced Grant (FP7/20072013) / ERC grant (agreement no. 295463), for which Simon Goldhill was the PI. This grant, held at the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), allowed all the contributors to this volume the time and space to collaborate in a productive, supportive, and critical atmosphere that was a true privilege. It is all too rare to be able to record real pleasure in the process of working together. The editors also offer their thanks here to other colleagues in the project – which was affectionately styled as ‘Biblant’ – who have been crucial to its development but who happen not to have written in this volume, especially Shinjini Das, Theo Dunkelgrün, Janet Soskice, Jeremy Morris, and Gareth Atkins. They also offer thanks to the visiting scholars and symposium participants who contributed so generously and extensively over the course of the project, and to all the staff of the Centre, especially Catherine Hurley, who was so instrumental in producing the centre’s happy atmosphere of those days. For their intellectual camaraderie during the time in which this volume was compiled, Ruth would also like to extend her personal thanks to the Fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, to her colleagues – especially her fellow DoSes – in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, and above all to Simon Ravenscroft.

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Introduction History, God, and Me simon goldhill and ruth jackson ravenscroft

The nineteenth century has often been described as an era of heightened historical self-consciousness – the first century to be aware of itself as a century, an era when historiography becomes a best-selling and professionalized genre, a time when being ‘of the period’ becomes a compelling issue of public discussion.1 It was also a century when measuring, regulating, and calculating time itself arises as an enthralling problem for science, for technology, and for lived experience. Railway timetables, a demand for punctuality, and the display of clocks and watches all enter public life with an unparalleled insistence.2 Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) is thus a paradigmatic novel ‘of the period’: a plot that depends on travelling to time, with a twist dependent on the International Date Line and the precision of a chiming clock. Against these increasingly precise regulations of the moment, however, the ‘abyss of time’ that is geological history, and man’s evolution within it (as the new biology argued), formed a lasting challenge to the theological certainties of the past.3 How to see oneself in 1

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See from a large bibliography, Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi (eds.), Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History (University of Chicago Press, 2020); Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Peter J. Bowler, The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and Their Past (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1989); J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge University Press, 1981); Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Sue Zemka, Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2011); Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (London: W. W. Norton, 2003); Ian R. Bartky, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford University Press, 2000); Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and the Modern Temporal Order, trans. Thomas Dunlap (University of Chicago Press, 1996); more generally, François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); François Hartog, Chronos: L’Occident aux prises avec le temps (Paris: Gallimard, 2020). Clive Gamble, Making Deep History: Zeal, Perseverance and the Time Revolution of 1859 (Oxford University Press, 2021); Martin J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2005); James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (University of Chicago Press, 2000).

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time became the iconic cultural question, epistemological anxiety, and social demand of the nineteenth century – the medium for its sense of its own modernity. This historically self-conscious era characterized itself as an ‘age of progress’ and was obsessed with how to recognize modernity. Yet at the same time, the ideal of a classical education, with its fascination with the past of Greek and Roman antiquity, flourished – and was, of course, also questioned – as a guide to morals and to political and social endeavour.4 For the modern child, a proper classical education was necessary (at least for the elite or aspirational modern child). This was enacted to the degree that the exasperated Kaiser Wilhelm II eventually spoke out in favour of his national school system educating little Germans rather than ‘little Greeks and Romans’ (although his speech had little immediate impact on policy).5 It is similarly iconic that Eliza Lynn Linton’s trend-setting essay, The Girl of the Period, starts its attack on the feminist liberalism she decried in modern society with the declaration: ‘The Girl of the Period is a creature who dyes her hair and paints her face, as the first articles of her personal religion.’6 The attack on women’s make-up as falsehood and vanity is a familiar commonplace of misogynist rhetoric back to antiquity. But the second phrase, ‘the first articles of her personal religion’, should not be read as merely a cliché. When many families still institutionalized family prayers as a morning ritual, and when ‘personal religion’ could be a sign of an intense spiritual journey (a personal engagement with a personal god was the aim of many a religious call to faith), Linton is knowingly mocking the trivial materialism of the girls she despises by setting their daily routine in contrast with religious normativity, a different liturgy of the self. Religion and classics, the past of the Bible and the past of Greco-Roman antiquity, the mainstays of education across Europe, together provided authoritative foundations for nineteenth-century historical self-awareness and historical argument: starting points, ideals, normative horizons. Because of this, and because of the interventions of new discoveries and understandings about the past, classics and the Bible 4

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Christopher Stray, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities and Society in England, 1830–1960 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Simon Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction and the Proclamation of Modernity (Princeton University Press, 2011); Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). James C. Albisetti, Secondary School Reform in Imperial Germany (Princeton University Press, 1983), 3. Elizabeth Lynn Linton, The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays, 2 vols. (London, 1883), vol. I, 3. Nancy Fix Anderson, Women Against Women in Victorian England: A Life of Eliza Lynn Linton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), sets what has become the usual tone for discussion of Linton’s gender politics.

Introduction: History, God, and Me

together also became a privileged site of contestation, both cultural and scholarly. For all the Victorian pride in progress, in technology, in travel – the newness of modernity – it was a critical engagement with the past that most challenged how Victorians understood the world and their place in it. The anxiety of progress was fuelled and shaped by the shock of the old. The central claim of this book, consequently, is that these self-definitional modern encounters with the past can only be properly understood through the nineteenth century’s passionate exploration of the interaction between religion and historicity, between the theological and the classical, between the Bible and classical antiquity. Such encounters with the past were partly a matter of coming face to face with the books and material remnants of antiquity. The new discovery of ancient biblical manuscripts threatened the very status of the church and its beliefs.7 It became clear, for example, that the ending of the Gospel of Mark, time-honoured in liturgy as in reading, was an interpolation. Critical history undermined the hagiography of saints’ lives in the name of ‘myth’ or even in the name of ‘pious fraud’. What, then, was the textual foundation on which the church had been built? By contrast, the uncovering of the cities of Nineveh and Troy by archaeologists was taken as startling, material proof of the truth of the Bible or Homer.8 Against the scholars who found multiple layers of composition in biblical and Homeric texts, incriminating signs of inauthenticity, stood the walls of Troy, the mask of Agamemnon, the very stones where Jesus stood: the real of history. At the grandest scale, the geology of Lyell and the fossils of the deep past redefined the age of the earth, and the span of man’s history on it, against the chronology developed by years of ecclesiastical analysis. The attempt of some few Christians to argue that God placed fossils on the earth as a challenge to faith were laughed out of court by serious scientists – Edmund Gosse’s memory of the humiliation of his father, a distinguished biologist as well as a passionate fundamentalist Christian, humiliated for publishing such an argument, is especially poignant (and a telling sign of the times).9 Darwin’s evolution 7 8

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See Simon Goldhill, ‘Ad Fontes’ in Buckland and Qureshi (eds.), Time Travelers, 67–85. David Gange and Michael Ledger Lomas (eds.), Cities of God: Archaeology and the Bible in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2013); Frederick N. Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Shawn Malley, From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain: The Case of Assyria 1845–1854 (Farnham: Routledge, 2012); Simon Goldhill, The Buried Life of Things: How Objects Made History in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Edmund W. Gosse, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (London: Heinemann, 1907), on which see Ann Thwaite, Edmund Gosse: a Literary Landscape, 1849–1928 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1984).

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declared that there were an ‘infinite number of generations’ of humans – in contrast to the Bible’s genealogical certainties, sure in its numbers of years: the deep past was dizzying because of its unsettling of the ground on which so much had previously been constructed.10 There is no doubt that the shock of the old is a defining characteristic of the nineteenth century, which has lasting implications for our contemporary culture. This book sets out to demonstrate thus how religion’s past, set against the privileged classical past, became a key battleground of this cultural ferment of modernity’s self-understanding. In order to approach what is a vast terrain, we have chosen six major and interrelated arenas, each of which is treated by a pair of especially commissioned essays. The first pair, under the heading Antiquity’s Modernity, considers a grounding set of ideas for the volume as a whole: how the study of classical antiquity became intertwined with religious history. In a chapter that also acts as a broad introduction to the book’s central concerns, Simon Goldhill considers how genealogy provides an essential model for thinking about the past in the nineteenth century – a model which establishes the past as an explanatory and authoritative origin. Thus the early church tells us still how to worship and how theology should function now; Greek culture is where Western civilization has come from, and now longs to return to its ideals. To explore, then, how the pasts of antiquity and the Bible are to be interrelated, the chapter considers nineteenth-century strategies of translation and appropriation between the biblical and the classical, from Arnold’s Hebraism and Hellenism, through Gladstone’s description of Homer as a precursor of Christianity, to the actual practices of turning the Bible into Greek verse. This chapter thus looks directly at how the pasts of the Bible and of classical antiquity are mobilized together as a matrix of self-understanding in nineteenth-century culture. Suzanne Marchand focuses down more closely on to the historiography of the period and looks at how the father of history, Herodotus, from the fifth century BCE, becomes in the hands of nineteenth-century historiographers a sign and symptom of changing historical values. Through the middle of the nineteenth century (with roots going further back into the Enlightenment) Herodotus was understood by Christian scholars not as tracing the clash of Eastern and Western civilization – we have long learned to place critical question marks around the oversimplifications and Orientalism of such a summary, commonplace though it still is! – but rather as acting as a ‘historian of the Hebrew people without knowing it’, 10

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), 207.

Introduction: History, God, and Me

providing crucial evidence of the biblical past, embodying the authority of a classical master. As archaeologists and other historians struggled to show the truth (or falsehood) of the biblical narrative according to new historiographical principles, Herodotus ceased to function as such an authority – indeed as modern historiography developed its critical methodology, Herodotus became more ‘the father of lies’ (already an ancient denigration), an unreliable historian who was inadequately critical, and thus not authoritative, especially for sacred history. Herodotus becomes in Marchand’s hands a telling test case for how ancient Greek historiography is intertwined with religious ideology and is likewise subject to shifting ideological constructions of historical authority. The second section, entitled Making the Past Visible, moves from a focus on writing to a focus on material culture and how Victorian artistic production made a spectacle of the past. The visual arts were fundamental in the formation of the imaginary, the circulation of images of the past instrumental in society’s thinking about historicity. Kate Nichols turns our attention to the Manchester Jubilee Exhibition of art in 1887 which was seen by a staggering 4.7 million people – truly a cultural event. The exhibition set out to capture national art, as befitted the Jubilee’s agenda – ‘essentially English’ one reviewer boasted. The many reviews and more private comments on the exhibition’s works reveal a preoccupation with history, also informed by the Jubilee’s celebration of achievement over time. But, as Nichols argues, this sense of history was dominated by the double lens of classical antiquity and the biblical past, both conceived as ‘living histories’ – that is, as genealogies inhabited by the viewers. Significantly, these pasts were thus not in conflict with the modernity proclaimed in the exhibition’s display of new technology and scientific advances. In the art works themselves, an Orientalism distinguished the representation of the Holy Land as a frame for religious art, along with a classicism – columns, robes, bodies – which made a picture like Edwin Long’s marvellous Diana or Christ?, our front cover, particularly telling (Figure 4.11). The picture dramatizes a choice between pagan religion and the new religion of Christianity, a scene set in Ephesus, a city between Greece and the East. It suggests that the decision to take up Christianity was made painful by the lure and power of classical culture, and it captures the moment of the hard division of the ways (hence the question mark of the title). The picture spoke intently to the passionate Victorian discourse of religious doubt, focalized as so often on the young and virginally pure woman. Yet the picture itself is fully classicizing in its aesthetics and allows its viewers to celebrate their appreciation of classical art and its

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understanding. It is as if the painting allows us to answer the question of its title with a ‘both’, rather than simply choosing one. Caroline Vout’s chapter in turn looks more specifically at sculpture, which is so often the handmaiden of art history, but which is certainly a flourishing mode of production in the nineteenth century both for private houses and for church interiors and other public buildings. She notes how often biblical subjects and classical subjects are juxtaposed – many of her examples are statues of females – and how hard it is for sculptures of biblical figures not to echo the form of classical models. But she also saliently argues that the biblical sculptures inhabit time differently from their classical exempla – and sees the two modes ‘in conversation’ with one another. This intriguing and productive notion of conversation allows Vout to describe how the sculptures of biblical figures do not merely mimic classical form, but become carefully invested with a power to preach (to the converted?) and to work against the sexuality of the classical figures, goddesses of love, victims of rape and metamorphosis. According to Vout’s argument, the statue’s embodiment thus becomes for the Christian viewer a matter of selfrecognition – it becomes a performance of understanding and inhabiting time as a sinner, a struggler, a repentant. Here we have another version of the question mark of Long’s title, now phrased as ‘Venus or Mary?’. Indeed, both Nichols and Vout in their respective essays show how Victorian aesthetics, in their public display of classical antiquity and the biblical past, become a site for the exploration of a relation between past and present. This is a historicist mode of viewing or looking that dramatizes the question of inhabiting time. Seeing the past, now, was the promise of this art: giving material expression to what the past can mean for the present. The third section of this volume, Materiality and Spectacle, picks up from the exhibition of Manchester and the various sites of display explored by Vout, and looks at two different forms of material spectacle, namely the theatre – in the shape of the Oberammergau Passion Play – and the building of religious architecture – in the shape of the American Episcopal Church in Rome. In these two chapters we move from England to Bavaria and to Italy, and away from the particular institution of the gallery or specific sites for the display of art. The Oberammergau Passion Play, notes Robert Priest, had become ‘an international sensation’ by the nineteenth century, and hundreds of thousands of tourists flocked to the site each tenth year for its performance. As with the Manchester Jubilee Exhibition, the sheer size of the audience makes it an event of significance. But in this case, not only were many of the spectators foreign elites who

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could afford the time and cost of travel, but also the rarity of the performances – their place in time and as a sign of a long tradition across time – meant that stories about the Passion Play and the experiences of its audiences disseminated across Europe, and helped create an idea of European theatrical history. In the nineteenth century, however, Priest argues, theatregoers increasingly began to see the play not simply as a sign of Christian religiosity or German Volkskultur, but rather as an event to be understood through the classical model of the Great Dionysia, the ancient Athenian festival of drama. Priest shows how German writers tried to turn what was a Catholic occasion into an expression of connection between German culture and the privileged past of classical Athens. Readers of Nietzsche will see the thrust of such arguments immediately. The Philhellenic gaze metamorphoses a local, German, Catholic, Christian event into a sign of a national genealogy with roots in ancient Greece and its ceremonials – a move made easier by their German education as ‘little Greeks’. The value of culture – always a fantasy of the imagination – is being formed between competing pasts. G. A. Bremner takes us to an even more striking spectacle of cultural aggression. The Church of St Paul’s Within-the-Walls was built on the Via Nazionale between 1872 and 1876, to a design by the celebrated English Gothic-revival architect, George Street. It was built for the American Episcopalian community led by a staunchly anti-Catholic agitator, Robert Nevin. Bremner shows with a delightful richness how this gesture against the might of papal Rome took shape in response to the post-conquest Rome of 1870, and specifically how values of liberal, Bible-oriented Protestantism were projected through architecture as much as through agitation or dogma. Rome – in the imagination of this argument, as explored by Bremner – is the home of ‘Caesars and Popes’. The history of Rome is summed up in a catchphrase that aims to link the tyranny of ancient imperial rule with the autocracy of the infallible Pope (in contrast, of course, with the constitutional freedom of Protestant Britain and America). Rome – the very word, as much as the place – becomes invested with a religious and classical past that is the epitome of negativity, and St Paul himself is suborned to this ideological skirmish. Arguments over history and the present, historicity and theology, church and antiquity – as Bremner concludes – took on architectural form, a spectacle of bricks raised against the sky and against the enemy. The volume’s fourth section is called Travelling the World, and it picks up from Priest’s account of the tourists at Oberammergau and Bremner’s narrative of an American in Rome, to study how important travel was for the Victorian experience of the world and the understanding of its history.

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Dorothy Figueira and Brian Murray specifically take up the implications of the catchphrase ‘Caesars and Popes’ to investigate how Protestant travellers went to Rome and viewed it through the lens of their Protestant ideology, barely tempered by their classical training. Where Bremner focuses on the act of church-building as a statement, Figueira and Murray concentrate on the visitors to churches, and how their verbalized responses trace their contrasting reactions specifically to apostolic history. While Catholic apologetics emphasized the apostolic succession as a demonstration of papal authority, Protestants wished to make their claim over the history of the church too. Yet seduced also by the music and aesthetic spectacle of Catholic ritual, Protestant engagement with Rome became far more complicated and indeed often far more confused than the simple opposition of Protestants to the Papal See might lead one to expect. Between hostility, temptation, and conversion, a swathe of emotional aggressions and lures are activated in this process of seeing history. In particular, Frederick Douglass, a black American and former slave, whose committed Protestantism was laced with a distaste for the nationalism with which such religious feeling was often complicit, provides an example of just how intensely Rome’s ceremonials could evoke deeply conflicted feelings of repulsion and attraction – and thus of selfreflection. For Douglass, seeing himself seeing Rome was a troublesome moment of implication and self-assertion. If Douglass’ complex response to the expectations formed by generations of white tourists was overdetermined by his own life’s experience, Michael Ledger-Lomas’ account of the HMS Bacchante (wonderful name!) presents us with two more travellers burdened by history – Prince Albert and Prince George, the future King George V. The princes travelled as part of a programme of royal tours designed to foster a unified empire loyal to the crown. To project this ideal of a unified kingdom, Ledger-Lomas demonstrates, a policy of conscious support for what would now be called religious diversity was developed and enacted. The Queen was to be seen as a friend to all her subjects. The expanse of space crossed by the royal travellers also involved a journey of the imaginary through time, as the history of religions became increasingly on display to the tourist’s gaze – for all that this history was packaged, stagemanaged, and manipulated by authorities and commentators. Indeed, the royal visits became news, and not least through the publication of memoirs of the trips by the princes’ advisors like John Dalton, or the vastly more authoritative Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of St Paul’s and great liberal churchman. Royal visits thus became ‘a technology of rule’. But it was a technology of rule that depended on the dissemination of a historical perspective of the world and its religions, which was embedded in the

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accounts of the places visited and the princes’ reflections on them. Where once pilgrims travelled to experience the religious awe invested in a topography by the narratives of passion associated with the places, and the theology that explicated their passion, now religious sites were acknowledged and experienced through the lens of a modern geographical and historical comprehension of religion – a nineteenth-century self-placement in time through nineteenth-century epistemological systems. The fifth section of our book bears the title Manuscripts, Morality, and Metaphysics. The guiding principle of this section is not (merely) the contingency of alliteration, but an intellectual matrix that is specific to Victorian writing on history and religion. The three trajectories interlink: manuscripts are the basic source of scholarship, the authoritative texts of the past to which philology, the ‘queen of the sciences’ in this era, gives a special privilege.11 Critical history depends on textual criticism which is the centre of philology.12 Discovering manuscripts is the treasure-hunting of this world. Yet in a way which twenty-first-century scholarship is likely to find less immediately palatable, nineteenth-century historiography is all too ready to turn towards morality, especially where religious history is concerned (which for some Christian authors, of course, committed to Providence as a force, is the only possible history). But this morality in the hands of the great liberal thinkers also moves towards metaphysics. F. D. Maurice is a grand example of this move upwards towards metaphysics. Maurice, liberal thinker and theologian, wrote Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, which, as Jocelyn Betts describes, became a guidebook for his many followers. It combines an idiosyncratic view of the Hebrew Bible with an unconventional reading of early Greek philosophy in order to promote a wide blueprint for the family, the nation, and the church, that goes to the heart of Maurice’s religious message, his sense of the place of Anglicanism in the world. For Maurice, it proved inevitable that a comprehensive view of modern society had to be formed through a creative combination of Hebraism and Hellenism, theological morality, and metaphysical reflection. The recognition that philosophy always speaks in Greek puts a question to Christianity, to which Maurice responds with a characteristic hybridity and tolerance that none the less leads to an Anglican supersessionist answer. 11

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Paul Michael Kurtz, ‘The Philological Apparatus: Science, Text and Nation in the Nineteenth Century’, Critical Inquiry 47 (2021): 747–76. Goldhill, ‘Ad Fontes’; James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2014), and with a national focus, Dirk van Hulle and Joep Leerssen (eds.), Editing the Nation’s Memory: Textual Scholarship and Nation Building in NineteenthCentury Europe (Leiden: Brill: 2015).

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Alison Knight and Scott Mandelbrote turn to another and quite different contributor to theology, M. R. James, who is probably best known today for his ghost stories. James’ lifework, however, was on manuscripts and especially the manuscripts of the biblical apocrypha, and in particular Greek texts from the earliest centuries of Christianity, which are no longer in the canon. On the one hand, James is thus an archetypal figure of the critical philological scholarship we have been discussing: he analysed how texts that were once part of the religious life of a community, had been excluded by later generations of scholars, and thus he set not just the practice of reading but also the status of scripture – the word of God – in an intricate historical frame. On the other hand, as Knight and Mandelbrote carefully articulate, stories were key to James’ practice. He told his ghost stories, worked on stories, and also saw stories as a way of bringing life to ancient evidence. He also told his own story, and repeatedly reflected on how all such stories could fire an audience’s imagination – formed their imaginary, as we might say, or stimulated their own passion to know. James also wrote – in a way that looks back to the chapters by Vout and Nichols – how statues in a church could prompt stories, stories that led to morals. For both Maurice and James, living with and through the texts of antiquity was integral to their engagement with modern living. Our sixth and final section, Intellectual Superstars: The Limits of Religion, aptly ends with a return to the home key, as Matthew Arnold and other celebrated arbiters of cultural value who appeared in the opening chapters now reappear, and here reveal how they dealt with their own sense of belonging in religion, or in the rejection of it. Laura McCormick Kilbride takes on two of Matthew Arnold’s less well-known texts, which she sets in animated conversation with each other. Literature and Dogma (1873) outlines Arnold’s approach to reading the Bible; from 1872 onwards, he published increasingly detailed versions of a child’s version of Isaiah. By putting his theory and practice together, Kilbride examines how Arnold’s typological readings hover between secular and religious criticism, constructing a place for Isaiah in world history. Brian Young’s discussion of two close friends, Connop Thirlwall and George Grote, proceeds to dramatize the tensions in Arnold’s thinking. Grote, who was the most celebrated and influential historian of ancient Greece, redefined the politics of antiquity and its consequent impact on modern political thought. He was also a proclaimed atheist: history, for him, was a secular project. Connop Thirlwall, also a passionate Hellenist (a historian and a philologist), had an oblique relation to Anglican norms – he gave up his fellowship at Cambridge over the issue of compulsory attendance at Chapel – but nonetheless became a bishop in Wales, although

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he was never quite comfortable with the theology of his colleagues. These two historians of Greece remained friends and were buried in the same grave in Westminster Abbey. Young elegantly outlines how their friendship intertwined their engagement with Christianity and with Greek history, a shifting interaction over time, until they were linked (ironically enough) under the auspices of the national church at Westminster. Where Arnold, for Kilbride, seeks to find a secular form of reading for the biblical book of Isaiah, Grote and Thirlwall compete over how much or how little Greek historical texts require a religious framing. Arnold, Grote, and Thirlwall were all ambitious writers who had significant impact at a national level, as they indeed purposed, on how a broad public understood what it meant to be modern, and what it means to live as political subjects – historically sensitive subjects – in a modern world. Their explorations of the limits of religion were worked out through an engagement with the texts of ancient Greece and ancient Israel, together, affording us a fine closing icon of this book’s overall concerns. It will be clear that this book is very much focused on the Victorians – on the case of British self-understanding and self-regard in this period. Indeed, even the turns to Oberammergau and Rome in these chapters are mediated in part at least through tourist responses. We therefore do not make any claim to be exhaustive in our approach to the era or to its questions. We do argue, however, that it is through such a deep dive into a national case that we can see the degree to which the interplay of biblical antiquity and the classical past are enmeshed throughout the cultural institutions and genres of society: its scholarship, its education system, its art, its buildings, its spectacles, its different modes of writing and representation. Through such a rich variety of interrelated materials and people, we can see most vividly how historicist ways of seeing and knowing become part of the lived experience of a culture – a space of engagement with the past as a way of understanding, contesting, and projecting modernity’s contours. We also acknowledge, however, how much else could further have been included in this volume. We have not discussed at any length the role of the Greek past in modern nineteenth-century erotics. Greek love and its attempts to remain within – or smash beyond – the Christian framework of morality that so strongly rejected it (along with the law that enshrined such rejection), has of course been extensively discussed in other places.13 13

Linda C. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton University Press, 1999); Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009);

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The appropriation of a charged term such as ‘doing philosophy’ by Oscar Wilde and others finds its broad frame in the studies of this book. Although we have looked closely at public art, the quieter forms of classicism in book illustrations, or – more noisily – in music also have excellent existing studies dedicated to them.14 So, too, the stranger margins of neopaganism or theosophy with their different appropriations of the past would add to the richness of our argument.15 And perhaps most pressingly, the way in which Germany, France, or Italy in particular would tell different stories of their engagement with the classical and biblical past – and with the British case – would require further books. The range and depth of what would be required is already demonstrated by the outstanding volumes that have illumined specific areas of this long and profoundly complex story of Europe’s intellectual and cultural interactions with biblical and classical antiquity across the nineteenth century.16

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Sebastian Matzner, ‘From Uranians to Homosexuals: Philhellenism, Greek Homoeroticism and Gay Emancipation in Germany 1835–1915’, Classical Receptions Journal 2/1 (2010): 60–91; Daniel Orrells, ‘Greek Love, Orientalism and Race: Intersections in Classical Reception’, Cambridge Classical Journal 58 (2012):194–230; Daniel Orrells, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (Oxford University Press, 2011); Iain Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kathleen Riley, Alastair J. L. Blanshard, and Iarla Manny (eds.), Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2017); John Pemble (ed.), John Addington Symonds: Culture and the Demon Desire (Cambridge: St Martin’s Press, 2000); Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861–1913 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Simon Goldhill, A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain (University of Chicago Press, 2016). William Fitzgerald, The Living Death of Antiquity: Neo-Classical Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2022); Simon Goldhill, Victorian Culture; Kate Nichols, Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace: Classical Sculpture and Modern Britain 1854–1936 (Oxford University Press, 2015), each with further bibliography. Robert Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (London: Routledge, 1991); William Musgrave Calder (ed.), The Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1991); Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1988); Ronald Hutton, The Triumphs of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 1999); More generally, Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Our exemplars from a huge bibliography would include, especially on Germany: Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton University Press, 1996); Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Miriam Leonard, Socrates and the Jews: Hellenism and Hebraism from Moses Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud (University of Chicago Press, 2012); Constanze Güthenke, Feeling and Classical Philology: Knowing Antiquity in German Scholarship, 1770–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2020); Joshua Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2014); G. W. Bowersock and Tim Cornell (eds.), A. D. Momigliano: Studies on Modern Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Susan A. Stephens and Phiroze Vasunia (eds.), Classics and National Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2010);

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The six sections of this book do however construct an argument and a narrative, even if we cannot hope to be fully comprehensive in our case in terms of our range of material. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft concludes this argument by reflecting further on temporality and technology in the context of national identities – a topic which this introduction briefly preannounced in its opening paragraphs, and which runs through much of what follows. In her epilogue, she explores how Victorian cultural engagements with the Bible and antiquity were always mediated through specifically modern ways of knowing. If the chapters of this volume offer a series of critical engagements with biblical and classical pasts through the long nineteenth century, then Jackson Ravenscroft seeks to conclude the discussion by analysing the particular frameworks and epistemological paradigms which shaped such engagements. At this juncture, however, we would like to prepare the reader for what follows by offering three general conclusions from this introduction, to take forward into the reading of this book. The first is to underline the importance of seeing the biblical past and the classical past in interaction with each other, rather than as discrete or niche and thus negligible interests. This is important on the one hand because, as the book shows, it was a fundamental reflex of nineteenth-century thinking, embedded in its education system, to engage with the past through this modelling – that is, it was a crucial structuring of self-understanding, of seeing oneself as a historical subject in time. It is important on the other hand, because twenty-first-century educational insufficiencies and silos have resulted in an evident difficulty for many scholars to appreciate the role of the Bible and classics in the culture of the nineteenth century – a point most clearly demonstrated in scholarly discomfort with classical languages, the scholarship of philology, and with the contentious arena of theology that motivated so much Victorian cultural production. In this sense, the culture of the Hellmut Flashar (ed.), Altertumswissenschaft in den 20er Jahren: Neue Fragen und Impulse (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995); Anthony Grafton, ‘Polyhistor into Philolog: Notes on the Transformation of German Classical Scholarship’, History of Universities 3 (1983): 159–92; Katherine Harloe, Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity: Aesthetics and History in the Age of Altertumswissenschaft (Oxford University Press, 2013); V. Lösemann, Nationalsozialismus und Antike: Studien zur Entwicklung des Faches Alte Geschichte 1933–1945 (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1977); Helen Roche, Sparta’s German Children: The Idea of Ancient Sparta in the Royal Prussian Cadet-Corps, 1818–1920 and the National Socialist Elite Schools (Napolas) 1933–1945 (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2013); Johannes Zachhuber, Theology as Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany: From F.C. Baur to Ernst Troeltsch (Oxford University Press, 2013); Kurtz, ‘Philological Apparatus’; Paul Michael Kurtz, Kaiser, Christ and Canaan: The Religion of Israel in Protestant Germany, 1871–1918 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018).

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nineteenth century is becoming harder to appreciate, as the modernity of today arguably self-servingly fashions the oversimplified image of Victorian Britain that it wants. This book, we hope, will open a revealing and necessary vista onto the nineteenth-century concerns which have been divided or marginalized by more recent disciplinary formation. Second, this nineteenth-century turn to classical and biblical antiquity insists that these pasts are foundational as genealogies or groundings for the present. That is to say: modernity inherits from this past and promotes or contests this past as a justification for an idealized modelling for the present. It has become a commonplace of current academia to question any such claims concerning the origins of Western culture. It has been very rightly pointed out that such narratives create a hierarchical authority for the West, constructed by the West, that is integral to Western imperialism and domination, and, indeed, to practices of violent depredation of other cultures. It has also been cogently argued that to seek to find the roots of Western civilization in a linear and patrilineal chain back to classical Athens, say, is a self-definitional and self-serving myth that selectively represents the past – the multiple pasts – and modernity’s partial construction of them, in order to invent and establish tradition as a ground of authority and the status quo of power. Yet the work of uncovering the inheritance of ‘speaking Greek’ – a phrase that is intended to sum up the deep embedding of principles formed from antiquity in the discourse of philosophy, theology, historiography, along with other cultural values – is not yet ended. Nor is the need to understand such discursive structuring answered by turning one’s eyes away from it, or by hoping to replace its privilege with another, different privileged origin. We therefore also hope that this book will encourage a more nuanced recognition of the uses and abuses of the past in the culture of today too. That it will facilitate a greater recognition of the dynamic interactions of forgetting and remembering, and of how hard it is to understand one’s own place in time. The partiality of claims on the past is unending, but perhaps this book will encourage a deeper self-reflection about the more stridently assertive claims of the present day to take a place in history. Third – and this follows on from both of the previous conclusions and specifies a moment of their purchase – this book demonstrates how slow, inconsistent, and often ineffective was the process of the so-called secularization of knowledge.17 The modern research university can be said to start with the Humboldtian project in Berlin, which in its foundational vision of 17

For discussion of various tensions and issues underlying the liberal secularization narrative, see for instance Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton

Introduction: History, God, and Me

the relationship between the sciences deliberately deselected theology as their queen, and also separated vocational religious training from the central scientific aims of a university. But the Berlin project also saw no paradox in having one of the century’s most influential theologians – the Reformed minister and renowned preacher, Friedrich Schleiermacher – to oversee the process.18 All modern disciplines maintain their place in the academy seemingly under the guise of professing a commitment to the secular aims of the modern research university, even if theology or rabbinics goes through painful and often failing exercises of disavowal to maintain such a stance.19 Yet as this book demonstrates, the role of religion in the British university is not merely a question of the private beliefs of some academics, or their will to express them. Not only do the institutions of the university provide a religious framework in and by which people and ideas continue to be shaped, but also – and most tellingly – what might be called religious thinking continues to inform the horizons of expectation, styles of argument, and gestures of rejection, in philosophy, literature and, above all, history. And it does so throughout the nineteenth century, however much a figure like George Grote offers another potential route. As the Swiss theologian Karl Barth professed to his Reformed Protestant peers in the 1920s: If I am not mistaken, the university is secretly glad that someone is willing to be so unscientific as to talk aloud and distinctly about the demonstrable central Fact upon which all other facts depend – and to suggest that the whole academic system might have a meaning.20

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University Press, 2015); Joan Wallach Scott, Sex and Secularism (Princeton University Press, 2018); Cécile Laborde, Liberalism’s Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); and Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2003). It is worth noting Talal Asad’s assertion, pace Charles Taylor’s belief-centred articulation of secularisation in A Secular Age, that ‘one may wonder whether the story of secularity is best told not as a shift from “transcendent” to “immanent” imaginaries whose contents are continually being reinterpreted, but as a series of shifts in ways of sensing and living’. Talal Asad, ‘Thinking about Religion, Belief and Politics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, ed. Robert Orsi (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 36–57 (at 47). For an account as to how it was in a post–French Revolution context that universities in Germany ‘most conspicuously’ began their journey towards being liberal, scientifically oriented, and ‘secularized’ research institutions, see Zachary Purvis, Theology and the University in NineteenthCentury Germany (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Thomas A. Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford University Press, 2006). For a classic text on theology’s disobedience to the modern liberal secular project in the academy, see John Milbank’s 1990 work, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1935), 192.

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In this light, the current volume is also therefore a contribution towards recognizing the messiness of the history of science, and it offers an opportunity to explore further why the contemporary university has such difficulties in expressing the place of religion in it. How a particular past becomes (or refuses to become) passé, or passed over, or passive in or for any particular modernity remains a vexing problem both for historiography and for our understanding of society and its values. Hence the title of this our introduction, ‘History, God, and Me’, designed to invoke the point that the study of history and religion, together, will inevitably pose a question about human self-understanding as subjects in time.

part i

Antiquity’s Modernity

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Genealogy, Translation, and Resistance Between the Bible and the Greeks simon goldhill

I. Genealogies The intimate relationship between classical antiquity and the biblical past was enacted – fought out, embraced, rejected – through multiple institutional and disciplinary forms across Victorian elite intellectual culture.1 This was an era obsessed with origins – from the origin of species in the hands of Darwin or Chambers, to the origin of the earth itself led by Lyell’s geology, to personal psychological formation with Freud’s primal scenes, to society’s or civilization’s origins thanks to Maine or Marx or Bagehot or Spencer or Buckle or Tylor . . .2 At the most general level, ancient Greece and the Bible offered two differing, privileged models of an originary past through which the West could assert its sense of its own destined cultural and political primacy. Ancestry grounded authority: religious, cultural, and political power was rooted in genealogy. There is, however, an evident tension in this double trajectory of pagan (to use a Christian word) and Christian beginnings. The self-description of Christianity from its earliest days demanded its own disjunction from the values, culture, and intellectual apparatus of the society of Greece and Rome in which it took shape (and, even more violently, from the Judaism in which it was born). Christianity is oppositional in its revolutionary fervour. Yet from the start, too, there was a profound complicity both with the culture of Greek in which Christianity’s founding texts were 1

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From a large bibliography, see Simon Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction and the Proclamation of Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2011); Edmud Richardson, Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in Pursuit of Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2013); Edith Hall and Henry Stead, A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939 (London: Routledge, 2020); Christopher Stray, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities and Society in England, 1830–1960 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); and the seminal Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981) – each with further bibliography. See for bibliography and discussion Simon Goldhill, ‘Ad Fontes’, in Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History, ed. Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi (University of Chicago Press, 2020), 67–85.

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written and, as Christianity developed, with the structures of Roman power it took over to establish Christendom. The tension runs deep: for the first centuries, the very word “Greek” (Hellên) is used in the normative treatises of Greek Christianity as the standard term for “pagan”, as if even self-identification is fissured. The rediscovery of Greek in the Renaissance was instrumental in the schism of Christianity between Protestant and Catholic churches. One nineteenth-century icon for this continuing anxiety is the great German Protestant theologian, Adolf von Harnack, who worried even about the Gospel of John for its excessive indebtedness to Greek philosophy: the very fons et origo of Christianity, the Gospels, written in Greek, could be found to be impure because of an excessive, damaging Greekness.3 The question of how Greek Christianity could be challenges a sense of history and a person’s self-placement within it. How the pasts of Greco-Roman history and the Bible are to be negotiated together is an old question that goes with new intensity to the heart of Victorian intellectual fascination with the past and its idea of authority. The imbrication of these two always already intertwined genealogies, the Bible and classical antiquity, was dramatically played out in the three dominant sciences of genealogy in the nineteenth century, as they developed into disciplines with authorizing structures of regulation: philology, archaeology, history. It is impossible to tell the story of the institutional and methodological disciplinary formation of knowledge in the nineteenth century without giving a central place to philology, the “queen of the sciences”4: “The founders of the modern spirit are the philologists”, stated Renan, the philologist, emphatically, “The modern spirit, that is, rationalism, criticism, liberalism, was founded on the same day as philology.”5 In recent years, not only has there been a repeated call for a return to philology (in practice or as a way of understanding the scholarship of the past), but also the role of philology as a link between theology and classics has become increasingly 3

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The most surprising remarks in the Regensburg Address by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006 were not his comments on Islam but his redefinition of the Catholic Church’s relation to Hellenization: see Renaud Gagné, ‘Whose Handmaiden? “Hellenization” between Philology and Theology’, in Classical Philology and Theology: Entanglement, Disavowal and the God-like Scholar, ed. Catherine Conybeare and Simon Goldhill (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 110–25. See Paul Michael Kurtz, ‘The Philological Apparatus: Science, Text and Nation in the Nineteenth Century’, Critical Inquiry 47 (2021): 747–76; Lorraine Daston and Glenn Most, ‘History of Science and History of Philologies’, Isis 106 (2015): 378–90; a more general overview in James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2014); Conybeare and Goldhill (eds.), Classical Philology and Theology. Ernest Renan, The Future of Science (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1891), 131 (his emphasis).

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emphasized and analysed.6 For the purposes of this chapter, what needs to be emphasized from this long and complex history of epistemic formation are three interrelated issues. First, the methodology of philology, shared and developed between theology and classics, insisted on stemmatics – the belief that genealogy, expressed through the form of a tree of descent, was the model of transmission.7 A single point of origin branched into different lines which could cross-pollinate. There is a descriptive rhetoric that slips easily into normativity: manuscripts, organized into families – the “family tree” is a paradigm here – can be “corrupted” and needed “correction”, “emending”. Textual criticism, based on stemmatics, was regarded as the height of scholarly attainment, especially in German-speaking universities, the world-leading institutions of science. The scholarship that freshly bolstered the place of classical antiquity and the Bible as the origins of Western culture was itself obsessed with the methodology of tracing a genealogy towards an origin: ideology and methodology, as ever, move hand in hand. Second, philology demonstrated that language itself offered a key portal onto history. Language had a history, its own development, through which one could move back to view the earliest history of man (it is emblematic that the eighteenth-century search for an Adamic language becomes in the nineteenth century a nationalist and racial project).8 A language, as Herder insisted, was a defining characteristic of a people [Volk] (along with a land and a set of cultural practices). Philology was thus key to understanding the families of man. Philology discovered IndoEuropean, through the comparative analysis primarily of Sanskrit and Greek and Latin, which gave rise to the separation of the Aryan and Semitic families of languages – and thus races. Philology provided a scientific basis on which the cultural claims of European imperialism’s civilizing mission were founded (money-making was a compelling motive 6

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See Paul de Man, ‘The Return to Philology’, in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 21–6; Jonathan Culler, ‘The Return to Philology’, Journal of Aesthetic Education 36 (2002): 12–16; and Edward Said, ‘The Return to Philology’, in Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 57–84; Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Sean Gurd (ed.), Philology and Its Histories (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010); Sheldon I. Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-ming Keven Chang (eds.), World Philology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) – and further bibliography in Kurtz, ‘Philological Apparatus’, fnn. 9, 10, 11, 12. See Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, trans. Glenn Most (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Princeton University Press, 1967); Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology and Scholarship (University of Chicago Press, 1999).

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too . . .). Greek indeed could be said to have the model of syntax and grammar, against which other languages could be determined to fall short linguistically or culturally (sometimes ludicrously, as with James Harris’ dictum that ‘any language with less than five moods and twelve tenses is necessarily corrupt’)9. Here, too, methodology and ideology are mutually and insidiously reinforcing. As Sir Henry Maine pronounced in 1875: “The new theory of Language has unquestionably produced a new theory of Race.”10 Third, with few exceptions, philology also promoted a rhetoric of purity that could easily be translated into a violent domestic and imperial project. Much as manuscript traditions could become corrupted, so the purity of a language could lose its strong roots in tradition if it became mixed with outside influences: the inherent link between a people and its voice would be lost.11 The Jews became a particularly pressing and exposing question for Europe within this nexus of ideas. On the one hand, there was no language as mixed as Yiddish; Jews had no land of their own; Jewish customs varied from community to community: they were a wandering people (an idea that found its source in the curse on the descendants of the Jews uttered in the Gospel of John at the Crucifixion). Yet the Jews maintained a bloodline and were denigrated for their separation from broader society (however much such separation was enforced by society). Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the hugely influential theorist of racism, concluded in his aptly titled Foundations of the Nineteenth Century that the Jews and the Teutons were in fact the only two races that had maintained purity and thus were destined to fight against each other (though both were threatened by despised “mongrelization” in modernity).12 The Jews are too rigidly pure or too unstably mixed, a rhetoric that reveals the impossible and violent contradictions of such 9 10

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Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791–1819 (Oxford University Press, 1984), 23. Henry Sumner Maine, Lectures on the Early History of Institutions (London: John Murray, 1875), 9; Sayce’s assertion – A. H. Sayce, Reminiscences (London: Macmillan, 1923), 156 – to have proved in 1877 that ‘language is no test of race’ proved overconfident, and, rather, an indication of what was taken for granted in the period. See Tuska Benes, In Babel’s Shadow: Language, Philology and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008); Dirk van Hulle and Joep Leerssen (eds.), Editing the Nation’s Memory: Textual Scholarship and Nation-Building in NineteenthCentury Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2015); Maurice Olender, Les langues du paradis: Aryens et Sémites (Paris: Gallimard-Le-Seuil, 1989); Pier Carlo Bontempelli, Knowledge, Power and Discipline: German Studies and National Identity, trans. Gabrielle Poole (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Geoffrey Galt Harpham, ‘Roots, Races and the Return to Philology” Representations 106 (2009): 34–62. See Geoffrey G. Field, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

Genealogy, Translation, and Resistance

racism. Here, too, the science of philology and the politics of national identity share a dangerously complicit way of knowing and regulating the world through the search for purity – or, through equally demanding regimes of nationalist acculturation that insisted on conformity as a form of aggressive “toleration”, and “toleration” is always, as Goethe recognized, a form of offensiveness.13 Yet philology was also a serious threat to established order. As a mode of analysis, it revealed that the earliest texts of Western culture, the Homeric epics, were composed by different people at different times: at the very source, there was hybridity. More worryingly, philologists went on to challenge the status of the founding texts of Roman history, as Niebuhr discovered legends – unreliable or false stories – in Livy’s history of Rome; so too knowledge of early Greek was reduced to “utter havoc” – Gladstone’s judgment – by Grote’s epoch-setting history;14 and, as churchmen had already anticipated with horror, the philological zeal for truth turned on the Hebrew Bible, followed by Saints’ Lives, and finally the New Testament itself. Authoritative, holy texts were subject to searching critical examination and were revealed to be unreliable, flawed, unbelievable. For evangelical fundamentalists especially, the attack on the unmediated truth of the Word of God was deeply dismaying, to the extent that even John Gibson Lockhart, the celebrated biographer of Walter Scott and editor of the Quarterly Review, and better described as a Tory churchman, could call Homeric philology an “Antichristian conspiracy”.15 Philology may have been instrumental in the racial and cultural theory of the West, but it also systematically and successfully chipped away at and, indeed, undermined the very bastions of cultural value. Philology, like mythology and other sciences of the past, whatever claims to scientific objectivity were made for them, became caught up in the more divisive politics of the time. Philology, that is, marks the crisis in Victorian thinking about the past: it both established a methodology for approaching antiquity through the analysis of language, to create a view of national history, and at the same time 13

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J. W. Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (London: Martin’s Street, 1989), no. 356. W. E. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, ed. M. R. D. Foot and H. C. G. Matthew, 14 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968–94), 12 September 1872. Epoch-setting was Freeman’s judgment of Grote: E. A. Freeman, ‘Grote’s History of Greece’, North British Review 25 (1856): 141–72 (at 172). Typical of Gladstone’s rhetoric is his dismissal of Lachmann, who should, he says, be received with ‘no other sign than the shrug or the smile, which seems to be the proper reward of perverted ingenuity’. W. E. Gladstone, Homer and the Homeric Age (Oxford University Press, 1858), 45. J. G. Gibson, ‘Review of A Critical History of the Language and Literature of Ancient Greece, by Mure’, Quarterly Review 87 (1850): 437.

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critically exposed the fictions that supported the most privileged foundational histories of the West. Archaeology also bridged the Bible lands and the centres of Greek and Roman society, and developed a scientific methodology of increasing rigour as the nineteenth century progressed. Yet the motivating principle of both biblical and classical archaeology was to discover in the ground facts that would ground history – against the threat of “myth” or “fiction” inculcated by critical philology. (As the search for plunder became an agenda of preservation over the century, so too the motive of treasurehunting was systematically disavowed as the search for truth.)16 Archaeology set out to find proof of the Bible’s narratives and of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. As Kate Nichols has illustrated vividly, the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham was a wonder-inducing demonstration of the ability of such material discoveries to make the stories of the past real to a huge public, to let viewers realize the past.17 Layard’s remarkable uncovering of the biblical city of Nineveh, like Schliemann’s subsequent proclamation that he had found Homer’s Troy, were designed to be irrefutable proofs of the truth of the Bible’s and Homer’s narratives – and were received precisely as such rejoinders to the critical cynicism that philology enjoined.18 Gladstone, the prime minister, introduced Schliemann’s lectures in England to a captivated audience, the very height of political power giving his authority to an assertion of the value of a very particular story of the past and its continuing significance.19 Archaeology was a material science in service of an ideologically laden history: it gave a physical reality to the genealogies that mattered. The religiously motivated arguments over where exactly in contemporary Jerusalem Jesus had been crucified, to take only one 16

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See Astrid Swenson and Peter Mandler (eds.), From Plunder to Preservation: Britain and the Heritage of Empire, Proceedings of the British Academy 187 (Oxford: British Academy, 2013). Kate Nichols, Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace: Classical Sculpture and Modern Britain (Oxford University Press, 2015). See Shawn Malley, From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain: The Case of Assyria 1845– 1854 (Farnham: Routledge, 2012). Set in context by David Gange, ‘Odysseus in Eden: Gladstone’s Homer and the Idea of Universal Epic, 1850–1880’, Journal of Victorian Culture 14/2 (2009): 190–206, along with Simon Dentith, Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Schliemann and Gladstone fell out over the Balkans. To the well-known story of Schliemann ceremoniously ripping Gladstone’s photograph and throwing it into the toilet – see Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1982), 110–26 – we can add Flinders Petrie’s story that when Schliemann visited his dig in Egypt, Schliemann said “it was a shame & disgrace to Englishmen that they have not hung Gladstone long ago”, to which Flinders Petrie adds “Bravo!”: M. Drower, Flinders Petrie: a Life in Archaeology (Madison, 1995): 138.

Genealogy, Translation, and Resistance

especially charged example, did not dim the lure of archaeology’s claim on the real. The new vision of the Parthenon in Athens, cleared by the archaeologists, announced the pristine truth of a Western origin in Greece, just as the Holy Land itself, measured and explored by its archaeologists, became the guide to and authorization of the Bible’s historical and thus lasting truth.20 The third discipline of genealogy is history. It is a commonplace both that historicism is a defining modality of Victorian thinking, and that historiography, the discipline of history, is decisively formed within such an intellectual milieu.21 Like philology, history provided the definitional narratives of nationhood, imperialism, political and personal identity, on the one hand, and challenged such self-understanding with critical recalibrations of the foundational past, on the other. We could – with all due recognition of the huge oversimplification – contrast Macaulay and Renan, two hugely influential figures (although Renan should probably be categorized as a philologist, his Life of Jesus was one of the most influential historicist manifestos of the century).22 From one side, Macaulay’s history of England is paradigmatic of a new, normative, national understanding, just as his Lays of Ancient Rome provided in English a version of a Roman past to imagine a modern, Anglophone, Anglocentric imperialism, in which Macaulay certainly played his part. As the incisive and aggressive generalization of Dipesh Chakrabarty summarizes: “Historicism enabled European domination of the world in the nineteenth century”.23 And, from the other side, Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus was one of the most polemically successful books in using historical method to redraft scripture into a historical source, open to challenge and critique. Renan summed up his own journey tellingly: “My faith has been destroyed by historical criticism, 20

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For discussion and bibliography on the biblical, see Simon Goldhill, The Buried Life of Things: How Objects Made History in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and, for Greece, the seminal Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton University Press, 1996). For disciplinary formation, see also Philippa Levine, Amateur and Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (Cambridge University Press, 1986). Seminal is Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); see also Theodore Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2011). See Robert D. Priest, The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2015); and, more generally, Daniel L. Pals, The Victorian ‘Lives’ of Jesus (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 1982). Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000), 7, a case now extended by Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).

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not by scholasticism nor by philosophy.”24 For Renan, the Gospels and other early Christian texts could be treated as historical sources, open to critical evaluation and not just the exercise of faith. This process indeed opened Renan’s readers to challenging questions about their own place in religious history. Historicism also enabled liberal self-doubt and concern about a person’s place in the temporal order of things. For many revolutionaries of politics, art, music, it was a philhellenic idealism – an inspirational gaze at the past – that motivated their desire for transformation in the future. For many Christians, the early church provided a similar promise to transcend a less satisfactory modernity. After Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii, more than 200 novels about early Christianity in the Roman empire were published – a fight for the hearts and minds of a reading public. These books, along with classicizing art, music, theatre, construct a rich imaginary space to dramatize the interaction of a classical past and a biblical promise.25 In striking contrast to today, for nineteenth-century Britain an idealistic image of the early church and the idealistic hope of classical antiquity were crucial and compelling factors in the expression of self-understanding and social normativity through the past. When genealogy is determinative, the truth of the historical past provides the necessary fundamental authority. Philology, archaeology, and history each develop into institutionalized scientific disciplines through the nineteenth century and each – severally and together – map a space of contest about the past. Together, they show elite intellectuals striving to recalibrate the relation between Greece, Rome, and early Christianity, in order to explain, or regulate or transform the present through genealogy. (Nietzsche’s different sense of genealogy is more deeply and combatively embedded in nineteenth-century thinking than his appropriation by the high priests of modernism usually allows.) The very development of the fields of knowledge as disciplines with institutional regulation and structures of authorization is fully part of this contest, not least in the slow disentanglement of classics and theology as separate and carefully separated arenas.26 The assumption that a serious scholar would move easily between classical and Christian texts, between theological and philological concerns, between Hebrew and Greek and Latin, was a commonplace of social normality in the universities of the 1870s, say, but it had become a rarity, even an embarrassment by the 1930s. 24 25 26

Ernest Renan, Recollections of My Youth, 3rd edn (London: Chapman & Hall, 1897), 224. Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity, 153–264. Simon Goldhill, ‘The Union and Divorce of Classical Philology and Theology’, in Classical Philology and Theology, ed. Conybeare and Goldhill, 33–62.

Genealogy, Translation, and Resistance

The single most influential piece of Hellenistic writing, the Septuagint, finds no place now in the curricula of Hellenistic Greek taught in departments of classics. These briefest of snapshots, that I have offered here by way of necessary introduction, are designed to do no more than set the stage, first to look at ways in which in the latter part of the nineteenth century classical antiquity and the Bible can be creatively linked or opposed to one another with a new force – or, better, how, for at least the circle of elite intellectuals, Greece and Scripture need to be negotiated together as a site of tension in selfunderstanding. Second, and at far shorter length, I want to see how translation itself can become a model for understanding and performing the relation between the linguistic and cultural worlds of Greece in particular and the Bible.

II. Continuity and Contrast William Gladstone was obsessed with Homer. Throughout his political career, he continued to write, think, and talk about ancient Greek epics. His most extensive contribution turned out to be his three-volume Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (1858; SHHA) which stretches to more than 1,700 pages (the contents page alone of the first volume runs over ten pages). Over the next forty years, he went on to publish three more books, each of which restated the central theses of his magnum opus for a wider audience, as well as a string of articles and pamphlets, and at his death in 1898 another near completed manuscript on the Olympian gods was among his papers. He studied especially German scholarship on Homer as it appeared, and engaged in critical polemics. Homer and the Homeric Age was widely discussed; his shorter pieces more widely read; and, as one might expect for a figure of such importance in the political and public life of the country, his theories were widely reported – and, as we will see, widely derided. Gladstone was committed to the belief that there was a single poet who composed both epics (although he allowed for some interpolations and changes over the time of their transmission); he was also committed to the historicity of the poems – in his view, the epics provided a picture of a real society, described by someone who was close to that society. In both of these grounding theses, Gladstone was certainly not alone. But he was also consciously rejecting the dominant liberal position, both the philology of Wolf, which argued for multiple authorship over multiple eras, and, more intently, the critical history of Grote, who saw only myth in the tales of

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Troy. Against the analysts who saw the epics as loosely stitched together and inconsistent, Gladstone argued that “there is no limb of the Iliad separable from the body without destroying the symmetrical, masculine and broad development of the general plan” (SHHA III:378–9). Against the critics who saw a mythic, imagined past in Homeric narratives, for Gladstone Homer was “the greatest chronicler that ever lived, [who] presents to us, from his own single hand, a representation of life, manners, history, of morals, theology and politics, so vivid and comprehensive . . . ” (SHHA I:22). For Gladstone, the discoveries of Schliemann were a triumphant, material vindication of his own position and this motivated his very public championing of the new archaeology. He had to defend his commitment to the historical reality of the epics (“a solid nucleus of fact”)27 because, for him, Homer offered a true picture of humankind at a crucial point in its development. Homer provided access to the genealogy of humanity. “Life, to be rightly understood, should be studied in its beginnings”, and in the Homeric poems “lie the beginnings of the intellectual life of the world” (SHHA I:14). “It is Homer that furnishes the point of origin from which all distances are measured” (SHHA I:15): the “first authority in the cultivated world”.28 At the start, Gladstone argued most directly for a change in Homer’s place in the university curriculum, demanding a more serious and extensive engagement with Homer for students. But underlying this local educational concern was a broader political agenda. In his conservatism – to simplify his complex journey from theocratic Toryism to the leadership of the Liberal party29 – he saw in Homer a model of a political regime, where kingship and the family took a central normative role. Homer contained “the kind of vital human and social knowledge which could be deployed to charter a theory of the state, power and political culture”.30 Grote, of course, wrote his Greek history to defend a paradigm 27

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W. E. Gladstone, Homeric Synchronism: An Enquiry into the Time and Place of Homer (London: Macmillan, 1876), 9. W. E. Gladstone, Address on the Place of Ancient Greece in the Providential Order of the World (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1865), 54. Jonathan Parry, Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party, 1867–1875 (Cambridge University Press, 1986); Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Perry Butler, Gladstone: Church, State and Tractarianism: A Study of His Religious Ideas and Attitudes, 1809–1859 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Deryck M. Schreuder, ‘Gladstone and the Conscience of the State’, in The Conscience of the Victorian State, ed Peter Marsh (Syracuse University Press, 1979), 73–134. Deryck M. Schreuder, ‘History and the Utility of Myth: Homer’s Greece in Gladstonian Liberalism’, in F. West ed., Myth and Mythology, ed. Francis West (Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1987), 73.

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of democracy against the tradition embodied in Mitford’s disdain for Athenian popular sovereignty; and against the growing influence of Grote, Gladstone was staking a claim for a more conservative political vision. Gladstone also opposed the divorce bill. (It is indicative that in Gladstone’s analysis Persephone appears solely as the “severely pure”, “majestic”, and “terrible” wife of Hades, not as a raped girl, and that Aphrodite shows “no trace of her worship, or of any influence by her over mortals, either in Greece or among the Greeks”, and “is never once exhibited by Homer in a favourable light”; her inclusion in the Olympian family, he asserts, is “apparently of Phoenician importation, and of Syrian origin” – damagingly Oriental.31 The Olympians get something of a family values make-over.) The reality of the social picture in the epics was crucial thus to the authority of Homer as a historical origin, in order to support a political agenda, based in reality, that is, in Gladstone’s vision of the nature of humanity, from the beginning. Had Gladstone maintained this position alone it is unlikely his arguments would have produced the consternation they did: his stance was conservative, against the tide of academic travel, but scarcely shocking, for all that it is expressed with a certain rhetorical fervour.32 But it was his further insistence that Homer was crucial to understanding the religion of humanity on which the dismayed response to his work focused. Gladstone determined that what was evident in Homer was “not strictly a false theology but a true theology falsified” (SHHA II:82). That is, he saw in Homer not a parallel development of morality, ethics, and the conception of god, between say, the Hebrew Bible and Greek culture, but a continuum between the Christian revelation and Homer. Gladstone took seriously the ontological claim, officially adopted in the Nicene Creed, that the Logos, who is Jesus, is coexistent with God the father, outside time, and thus present too in Homer’s era, from the beginning. There was a single origin of mankind in Eden, and Homer represented a degenerate descent of post-Fall man, in which nonetheless could be seen signs of the one true religion, which would be fulfilled in the incarnation of Jesus as the Messiah. All (Christian) philosophy, he declared, “regards the history of our race, from its earliest records down to the Incarnation and Advent of Our Lord, as a preparation for that event, on which were to be 31

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W. E. Gladstone, Juventus Mundi: The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age (London: Macmillan, 1869), 309–17. For unifying models of myth, and their continuity, see Colin Kidd, The World of Mr Casaubon: Britain’s Wars of Mythography, 1700–1870 (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

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hung hereafter the destinies of man”.33 Homer was a “bastion of true religion”.34 As with his historicism, this theology was a polemic, in this case against the influential liberalism of Benjamin Jowett’s “natural religion”, or the more profound engagement of F. D. Maurice who allowed Christianity to be the perfection of other religions. Against such comparative models, beginning to have real purchase as anthropology began to formalize responses to other cultures, Gladstone saw in Homer “a picture, even though a defaced picture, of the primeval religious traditions”, which “afford a most valuable collateral support to the credit of the Holy Scripture, considered as a document of history” (SHHA II:4). The historicity of Homer and the historicity of the Bible are made co-dependent. What is at stake for Gladstone, when he argues for the historicity of Homer, is nothing less than the historical authority of the Bible, which grounds his religious belief. Gladstone’s theological insistence on historical continuity led him to hazard some extraordinary arguments, which transfixed and amazed his contemporaries. He determines first that the Scriptures present “three main objects . . . God, the Redeemer and the Evil One” (SHHA II:39), along with “some mysterious combination of Unity with Trinity in the Divine Nature”. He goes on to expound that (a) the Deity requires the unity and supremacy of the godhead, a unity expressed in three persons (SHHA II:42); (b) the redeemer releases man from the curse of death; is expressed through “A Wisdom, which is personal as well as divine, the highest and first in order, concerned in the foundation and continuing government of the world” (SHHA II:42); and is born of woman; (c) the Evil One is a rebellion of angels or powers, which attempt to lure men to destruction. This essentially Christian (and solely Christian) reading of Scripture may seem immediately hard to relate to Homer. Gladstone shows little hesitation, however. The unity and supremacy of divinity is located in Jupiter (he uses Latin names for the Greek gods throughout), for all that Jupiter is tricked by his wife, laments his inability to change fate, and lists his rapacious sexual conquests. The trinity is to be found in the sharing of power between Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, born of the same parents, who share authority, respectively, over the skies, the sea, and the underworld. The redeemer is represented chiefly by Apollo, though thanks to “a marked disintegration by severance” (SHHA II:44), some of the qualities of the redeemer are transferred to Apollo’s sister, Diana. Wisdom, now named as 33 34

Gladstone, Address on the Place of Ancient Greece, 6. David Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2004), 168.

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the Logos of St John, is embodied in “the sublime Minerva”. Latona (Leto) is the woman from whom the redeemer is born. The Evil One is particularly open to “the process of disintegration, followed by that of arbitrary reassortment and combination of elements” (SHHA II:4–5). But the rebellious side of things is to be found in the Titans and Giants, while the element of deceit is represented by Atê (the strain in making the abstract force of error, atê, parallel to the collective of primal divinities, who barely play a role in Homer, is marked). Lastly, adds Gladstone, the rainbow of Holy Scripture is represented by the Homeric Iris (SHHA II:45), although Iris is scarcely a sign of God’s covenant. Thus, Homer is historical evidence of how the true religion of revelation degenerated through its expression in Greek culture, awaiting its fulfilment in the arrival of Jesus Christ. The beauty and wonder of the Greek achievement is informed by its inheritance of Christian theological truth. “I claim for ancient Greece a marked, appropriate, distinctive place in the Providential order of the world”.35 One consequence of this case is the denigration of the Jews, who may be necessary for the maintenance of the revelation, but are despised for their commitment solely to its dry laws and their rejection of the Messiah. Homer is thus key to understanding the genealogy of the Christian religion – or, as Gladstone would have it, the one true religion of humanity. Gladstone, in short, attempted to construct a genealogy that placed Homer between Paradise and later paganism, in a single world history of revelation and the establishment of the Christian church. Now, this example could certainly be analysed further – Gladstone spends many hundreds of pages defending what he lays out first in such lapidary style – and the relation between his Homeric studies and his political, aesthetic, and religious views, expressed elsewhere in his writing and actions, has been well analysed by a string of distinguished modern scholars.36 There are two reasons, however, why this example of Gladstone’s Homer is chosen here. First, although it is evident that in nineteenth-century theorizing there was a deep and broad investment both in asserting the origins of value in Greece and in the Bible, and in exploring connections between these two ideologically charged genealogies, it was clear that Gladstone, whatever his authority as prime minister and a public intellectual, had gone too far. His claims were seen as 35 36

Gladstone, Address on the Place of Ancient Greece, 6. Bebbington, Mind of Gladstone; Schreuder, ‘History and Utility’; Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts, 110–26; John L. Myres, ‘Gladstone’s View of Homer’, in Myres, Homer and his Critics, ed. Dorothea Gray (Abingdon: Routledge, 1958); Turner, Greek Heritage, 159–70; Boyd Hilton, ‘Gladstone’s Theological Politics’, in High and Low in Modern Politics, ed. Michael Bentley and John Stevenson (Oxford University Press, 1983), 28–57; more generally, Parry, Democracy and Religion; Hilton, Age of Atonement.

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extreme, and thus potentially questioning the sense – the logic and direction of travel – of such a project of historical self-understanding. Intellectual luminaries lined up to dismiss the book. Max Müller in Oxford misread Gladstone, and, to Gladstone’s intense annoyance, thought the book argued either that biblical characters found dim echoes in Homer or even that it was euhemeristic – both, according to Müller, trivial misprisions of how narratives of theological importance functioned.37 Matthew Arnold sarcastically mocked its lack of real evidence. The question of “whether the Goddess Latona in any way prefigures the Virgin Mary”, he suggested, was vitiated by the awkward fact “that there really exist no data for determining” an answer.38 Jowett was blunter: “It’s mere nonsense” – or, only slightly more circumspectly (and publicly), a “shallow and imaginary explanation” with “the fabric of a vision”.39 Cornewall Lewis was equally abrupt: “his view of Homer as an historian and as an exponent of religion, etc, is fundamentally wrong”;40 Tennyson, whose friendship did not stop him arguing vitriolically and performatively with Gladstone about Homer, dismissed it as “hobbyhorsical”.41 Jane Ellen Harrison, who knew of what she spoke, thought Gladstone had “gone dotty over the Logos and Divine Wisdom”.42 Even his friends and supporters urged more hesitation. Robert Scott wrote to ask “Are not the words used of ‘the tradition of the Logos’ likely to be understood in a sense inconsistent with the age of Homer?” – did not Victorian historicism and its recognition of anachronism trump the Nicene commitment to the eternity of the Logos?43 The publicity of Gladstone’s central claims and their 37 38 39

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Discussed at length in Bebbington, Mind of Gladstone, 154–60. Matthew Arnold, ‘On Translating Homer’, in Complete Prose Works, edited by Super, vol. I, 100. Jowett quoted in Lionel A. Briggs (ed.), Gladstone’s Boswell: Late Victorian Conversations by L. A. Tollemarche and Other Documents (Brighton: Harvester, 1984), 12; Benjamin Jowett, The Epistles of St Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Romans, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1859), vol. II, 437, 461; in a long discussion of the relation of Christianity to pagan thought (including, at 442, an attack on Kingsley’s Hypatia). On Jowett see also Peter Hinchcliff, Benjamin Jowett and the Christian Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). G. F. Lewis (ed.), Letters of the Rt. Hon. Sir Cornewall Lewis, Bart (London, 1870), 346. So too (333): “He moreover assumes that Christianity was in some way revealed by anticipation. Hence he finds the doctrine of the Trinity in Homer, and holds that Latona is compounded of Eve and the Virgin Mary. It seems to me a réchauffée of old Jacob Bryant.” Briggs, Gladstone’s Boswell, 16; see Gerhard Joseph, ‘The Homeric Competitions of Tennyson and Gladstone’, Browning Institute Studies 10 (1982): 105–15, for Tennyson’s disagreements with Gladstone over Homer. Jessie Stewart, Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portrait from Letters (London: Merlin Press, 1959), 66. She is writing to Gilbert Murray, with whom she shared a very different sense of religion’s antiquity: see Robert Parker, ‘Gilbert Murray and Greek Religion’, in Gilbert Murray Re-assessed: Hellenism, Theatre, and International Politics. ed. Christopher Stray (Oxford University Press, 2007), 81–102. Robert Scott to Gladstone, 16 October 1869, quoted by Bebbington, Mind of Gladstone, 191, to whose account of the reception of SHHA I am indebted.

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ridicule are summed up in a poem which appeared in a London paper and was then quoted in the Dublin University Magazine. It is a poem celebrating the removal of the duty on paper, hence the refrain; but the target of its doggerel mockery is clear enough: Poseidon, Aïdes, and Zeus, are the Trinity, According to Gladstone – a comical caper; If he wants to print more of such heathen divinity, Why there’s plenty of paper, there’s plenty of paper. Latona was Eve, or the Virgin: how rich! And Gladstone, of marvellous theories shaper, Perhaps in his kindness will now tell us which, For there’s plenty of paper, there’s plenty of paper. Few ages have ever produced such a gem as his ‘Studies in Homer’, all vagueness and vapour; But he cannot disprove the existence of Nemesis, Though there’s plenty of paper, there’s plenty of paper.44

Gladstone’s work was lambasted; he returned nonetheless to make the case repeatedly across the next decades, increasingly out of kilter with the times, even when Schliemann’s discoveries might have appeared to support one strut of his edifice, and then again, undaunted, when Schliemann too had been increasingly criticized and distrusted. The responses to Gladstone’s studies of Homer show how the comfortable Philhellenism, so often on show in Victorian writing, could also explode into political, theological, and aesthetic discomfort as well as disagreement. How the past could and should be mobilized was a question that produced the fractures of polemic in the present. The extremism – in methodology as in conclusion – of Gladstone’s attempt to connect Greece and the Bible painfully exposed to view the self-implicating desire that motivated such genealogical insistence – and its consequent incoherencies. This leads directly to my second point. The more Gladstone tried to show the interconnections of the double genealogy of the Bible and Greek antiquity, the more he succeeded in demonstrating the abyss between them. To seek for the redeemer in Apollo immediately found him killing men with plague, and later reflecting – famously – that he and Poseidon, his uncle, should not fight or care about humans because “pitiful men are like leaves, now full of flaming life, eating the fruit of the field, then they fade away, without spirit” (Il. 21.461–5). Divine disregard, an unheavenly 44

Anon., Dublin University Magazine 62 (1863), 372, quoting ‘a London newspaper’.

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afterlife, a god fighting with a god – Apollo demonstrates the profound difference between Homeric divinity and Christian theology: in Homer, there is, as Achilles specifically says in the Odyssey, “No talking away death” (Od. 11.488). Gladstone, by attempting and spectacularly failing to bridge this gap between Homeric and Christian conceptualization of the divine, made the abyss all too clear to his readers. Matthew Arnold also wrote about the education system, lectured and published on Homer, and, above all, used the opposition of Hellenism and Hebraism to express the cultural map of modernity. Culture and Anarchy, a collection of previously produced essays, was published in 1869, the same year as Juventus Mundi: The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age, Gladstone’s first restatement of the principles of Homer and the Homeric Age for a broader audience. Arnold’s work is “a sustained protest against what he saw as the intellectual, aesthetic and emotional narrowness of English society – against its puritan moralism, its provincialism, its smugness and its complacency, its lack of interest in ideas or feelings for style, its pinched and cramped ideals of human excellence; against, in short, its ‘philistinism’”45 – and we will return to Arnold and his own reading theory and practice far more fully in Chapter 12 of this book. In Culture and Anarchy (C&A), Arnold divided British society into three classes: he rebranded aristocracy, the middle class and the working class, as “barbarians”, “philistines”, and “populace”. Each title is negatively troped: nobody is given a comfortable position from which to speak, as each reader is encouraged to place themselves on a map of insufficiency. The discomfort that Arnold was aiming at in his polemic – “it is very animating to think that one at last has a chance of getting at the English public”, he wrote46 – was effective in that there can be no happy position beyond Arnold’s dismissive and ironic description of England and Englishness for his English audience – except, as critics retorted, his own de haut en bas sniffiness. Henry Sidgwick, with disdainful flair, saw Arnold’s stance as no more than “shuddering aloof from the rank exhalation of vulgar enthusiasm and holding up the pouncet-box of culture betwixt the wind and his nobility”.47 Much as Arnold’s critique required each discomforted reader to evaluate his or her personal place on a map of culture, Arnold opened 45 46

47

Stefan Collini, Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 78. Letter, 29 October 1863, in The Works of Matthew Arnold, 15 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1903), vol. II, 186. Henry Sidgwick, ‘The Theory of Classical Education’, in Essays on a Liberal Education, ed. F. Farrar (London: Macmillan, 1867), 271–80, replied to in Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1938), 145–8.

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himself to personal critique as he tried to change the shape of cultural values. Arnold fought back; the Puritan, whom Sidgwick represents, “is, I say, a victim of Hebraism” (C&A 148). Obedience and duty could make a man into an unknowing victim of his own ideology. The book, and the heated discussion it provoked, cemented Arnold’s position as an arbiter of cultural taste and value. Arnold viewed each class and its achievements and moral selfpositioning through the matrix of Hellenism and Hebraism, which became instantly recognizable slogans, repeated, brandished, and parodied, as did the phrase “sweetness and light” which he used to capture a key defining aspect of Hellenism. Hellenism is characterized by “spontaneity of conscience”, while Hebraism embodies “strictness of conscience” (C&A 124). He found varied ways to oppose these two understandings, “rivals dividing the empire of the world between them” (C&A 121). “The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience” (C&A 123). “The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is that they hinder right thinking; the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder right acting” (C&A 123). “Hellenism, and human life in the hands of Hellenism, is invested with a kind of aërial ease, clearness and radiancy; they are full of what we call sweetness and light” (C&A 127). Hebraism “speaks of becoming conscious of sin” (C&A 129), leading, however, to Christianity which “offered its spectacle of inspired self-sacrifice” (C&A 130). He summarizes: “Of two disciplines laying their main stress, the one, on clear intelligence, the other, on firm obedience; the one, on comprehensively knowing the grounds of one’s duty, the other, on diligently practising it; the one on taking all possible care . . . that the light we have be not darkness; the other, that according to the best light we have we diligently walk” (C&A 131). Like Gladstone – and many other intellectuals – he saw the opposition as racial and philological: “Hellenism is of Indo-European stock; Hebraism is of Semitic growth” (C&A 137). And the opposition is conflictual. The success of the church is seen as “the defeat inflicted on Hellenism by Christianity eighteen hundred years ago” (C&A 139). The Renaissance was Hellenism fighting back against a dominant Hebraism. Puritanism “checked and changed amongst us the movement of the Renascence which we see producing in the reign of Elizabeth such wonderful fruit” (C&A 138). As with so many oppositions, the polarization turns out to be hierarchically structured. Arnold is careful to parade a designed even-handedness, but nonetheless repeatedly argues for Hellenism’s “sweetness and light”, its “simple and attractive ideal”, its “delicate discrimination”, to become the chosen values of British society.

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For Arnold, Hellenism invoked beauty, wit, aesthetic excellence, seriousness of ideas, lightness of spirit, where the Hebraism of the British dragged them towards a dull and dark Puritanism. Yet the opposition cannot hold. “We English”, declares Arnold, “a nation of Indo-European stock, seem to belong naturally to the movement of Hellenism” (C&A 137). But “Puritanism”, he goes on, “which has been so great a power in the English nation, and in the strongest part of the English nation, was originally the reaction in the seventeenth century of the conscience and moral sense of our race, against the moral indifference and lax rule of conduct which in the sixteenth century came in with the Renascence.” England, the strongest part of England, was distinctive for its Puritanism – that is, Cromwell and the foundation of the modern parliament. This political turn was also a moral turn against the laxness introduced by the Renaissance, which, it will be remembered, was the reintroduction of Hellenism into European life. Puritanism was thus “a reaction of Hebraism against Hellenism”. The history of Englishness is as much marked by Hebraism as Hellenism. The racial and cultural genealogy of Hellenism founded on its Indo-European origin is muddied by the formative role of Hebraism in the national history – the “moral sense” of the Indo-European English. Arnold tries to argue that the two forces of Hebraism and Hellenism are not equivalent, and concludes that “the main stream of man’s advance has moved towards knowing himself and the world, seeing things as they are, spontaneity of conscience” (C&A 139), that is, Hellenism in all its glory – but the mixture of Hellenism and Hebraism is the condition of the nation. Hellenism could not save paganism “from selfdissatisfaction and ennui”. To them “the severe words of the apostle came bracingly and refreshingly” (C&A 131). St Paul – on Arnold’s particular and very slanted reading – offered the chance to bring Hellenism into Christianity, but, as he argues stridently, British Christianity shows only a misunderstanding of this potential.48 Thus, “through age after age, and generation after generation, our race, or all that part of our race that was most living and progressive, was baptized into death” (C&A 131). Despite the sting of “into death”, Arnold has to confess that Christianity, its literature and art, are at the centre of Western culture. Hebraism, of which Christianity is a necessary development, is endemic and integral to “our race”. The more Arnold acknowledges the triumphs of Christianity and its formative role in English society, the more his plea for Hellenism 48

Matthew Arnold, St. Paul and Protestantism, with an Essay on Puritanism and the Church of England, 3rd edn (London: Smith, Elder, 1875) – where the preface is particularly and cantankerously polemical.

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resists genealogical authority and become an adversative attempt to redefine the qualities of the English race proleptically according to the agenda of his own cultural politics. Gladstone sets out to assert the continuity of Greek culture and the religious tradition of the Bible, and ends up demonstrating the lasting cultural abyss between the two forces. Arnold sets out to insist on Hellenism and Hebraism as different cultural forces – and ends up demonstrating their necessary hybrid intermixing in the history and selfunderstanding of Englishness. Both projects teeter into incoherence. As Arnold’s prose reflects more strikingly, these two enterprises were produced in the decades when a theory of race was taking shape, in relation to nationalism and religious commitment, as well as the sciences with which this chapter opened, namely, philology, history, and archaeology.49 Genealogy is integral to racial theory. Both Gladstone’s attempt to show a single genealogy for the West which combines Greece and the Bible, and Arnold’s attempt to show a dual genealogy which recognizes the separate forces of Hebraism and Hellenism, have to struggle to turn their eyes from the inconsistencies such genealogical thinking produces.

III. Translation There are many other examples of how the hope to bridge Greece and the Bible leads into desperately strained positions about the origins of Western cultural value and its genealogy of authority. Brooke Foss Westcott, Bishop of Durham, was the editor of the Revised Version of the New Testament, a philological project which involved a deep reckoning with the Greek texts of Christianity (and discussed in Chapter 11). Close friends from school days with Edward White Benson, who became the Archbishop of Canterbury, and J. B. Lightfoot, who preceded him as Bishop of Durham, Westcott was at the centre of the more evangelical wing of the church, though his combination of scholarship, school teaching, and public works makes him paradigmatic of Anglican church activism rather than any strictly Evangelical party. He was, like Gladstone and Arnold, also a public intellectual. 49

See P. Mandler, ‘“Race” and “Nation” in Mid-Victorian Thought’ in History, Religion and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 224–44; and for the connection of Christianity and race, see Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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Although Westcott had the reputation of a severely sober and sensible scholar – a man to lead the project of editing the Gospels, which after a century of philological analysis and new manuscript discoveries, was a project of potentially severe political and theological controversy – he also followed Gladstone in attempting to forge a link between the ideals of classical Greece and his Christian heritage. This led him too into an extraordinary position (which is, however, surprisingly familiar among clerical classicists). Westcott insisted that there was a close connection between the coming of Christianity and the institution of Greek tragedy, which, since Hegel, was a privileged genre of antiquity for the nineteenth century. (He was not alone in this. Chapter 6 traces the connection between Oberammergau and Greek tragedy in the minds of its visitors.) The tragedians, Westcott wrote, in Essays on the Religious Thought of the West (RTW) – and this is as late as 1891 – were “national preachers” in a “national temple”(RTW 52) – a little like the grand Anglican bishops in England, as it were. Thus, what he actually calls the “sermon” of Aeschylus’ Oresteia is, he declares, “a ‘natural testimony of the soul’ to the reality of sin and inevitable penalty it carries in itself” (RTW 94). This is a carefully poised judgment, however odd it may sound. He marks “natural testimony of the soul” as a quotation. It is a translation of a standard phrase, testimonium animae naturaliter Christianae, “proof of a soul that was naturally Christian”, from a long tradition of Christian recognition that there were some truly good men before the coming of Jesus, and that these men might escape the eternal punishment due to unbelievers.50 Yet he leaves out the key adjective Christianae. Whether this is because Westcott cannot frame his thought outside Christianity – what else could “natural testimony” mean? – or because Westcott hesitates to assimilate Aeschylus of all people so directly to Christianity, the gap in the quotation marks the space of his contentiousness. Aeschylus here is taken to evidence the “reality of sin”. Arnold, it may be remembered, made consciousness of sin a determining sign of Hebraism, something missing from Hellenism’s sweetness and light. For Westcott, sin is necessarily a cross-cultural, transhistorical reality. What is more, sin brings its own inevitable punishment – a claim that should be read in the context of the nineteenthcentury anxiety about theodicy and the threat of damnation. Yet this judgment constitutes a quite baffling reading of the Oresteia, a play in which, on any understanding of its plot, Orestes kills his mother and is yet exonerated in a court where a split jury allows Athene, the 50

Originating in Tertullian, Apology 17.6.

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goddess of the city, the deciding vote, which she uses for him to escape punishment. Theodicy is a question at the heart of the drama. As with Gladstone, the attempt to forge a link between ancient Greece and the Christian tradition requires bizarre gymnastics of interpretation. Westcott’s conclusion, however, indicates precisely what is at stake for him in tragedy. Turning to Euripides, he states, “We can then study in Euripides a distinct stage in the preparation of the world for Christianity” (RTW 140). The moral progress of the world makes the Greek theatre not just a stage in human development, but, more precisely, a praeparatio evangelica, a preparation of the good news to come. For Westcott – and in this he is paradigmatic of much late nineteenth-century thinking about the past – ancient Greece can be fitted into a history of Western value as a key and positive development in the teleological journey towards the modern Protestant church.51 Charles Kingsley, by contrast, was a chartist supporter, who walked and talked happily with Darwin, as well as a committed, muscular Christian, who rose to be both chaplain to Queen Victoria and the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, although he had not written a book of academic historical analysis; and he was a polemicist who clashed most stridently with John Henry Newman, whose magnificent Apologia pro Vita Sua was composed in response to Kingsley’s hectoring criticisms of Catholicism – but whose best-known work these days is the children’s moral fable, The Water-Babies.52 Kingsley was as interested in Englishness as Arnold, and as interested in the genealogy of value in antiquity as Gladstone. The programmatic dream of Alton Locke in his novel, Alton Locke, has been called “a schematic view of English racial development”, sketched along Lamarckian lines.53 Westward Ho!, his most swashbuckling historical novel, has his English, Protestant heroes violently adventure around the seas, “replenishing the earth and subduing it for God and Country”.54 Kingsley’s politicized Protestantism is linked to a passionate sense of national destiny and right. The introduction to his novel Hypatia 51

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Westcott’s view is contextualized in Simon Goldhill, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 2012), 209–13. On Kingsley, see Susan Chitty, The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974); J. M. I. Klaver, The Apostle of the Flesh: A Critical Life of Charles Kingsley (Leiden: Brill, 2006); and, most recently, Jonathan Conlin and J. M. I. Klaver (eds.), Charles Kingsley: Faith, Flesh and Fantasy (London: Routledge, 2020). C. J. W. Wee, ‘Christian Manliness and National Identity: The Problematic Construction of a Racially “Pure” nation’, in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Christian Age, ed. Donald E. Hall (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 66–90 (at 75). Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! (London, 1855), 305.

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lays out the racial theory underlying the book’s narrative.55 Hypatia tells the story of the pagan female philosopher and mathematician, Hypatia, who was murdered by a Christian mob in Alexandria. The book focuses on the complex political and personal intrigues between the different Christian groups, Jews, and traditional Greek families in the late antique city, against the backdrop of the invasion of the Roman empire by the Goths. The grand historical narrative is explained by Kingsley as the necessary miscegenation of races, in which the collapsing moral and masculine strength of the Romans is revitalized into a new strong Christian strength through the influx of fresh Teutonic blood. Kingsley contrasts vividly the effete Eastern philosophical, corrupt Christianity – he calls it “Greco-Egyptian” – with the “purity of morals, sacred respect for women, for family life, law, equal justice, individual freedom, and, above all, for honesty in word and deed; bodies uncontaminated by hereditary effeminacy, hearts earnest though genial”, that is, the triumph of Western Protestantism in its ideal self-image.56 His racial theory is – as with Arnold – the story of “our race” – where Anglo-Saxon Protestantism seems to stand in for humanity. Kingsley cannot get to this opposition without reverting to a more dangerous and interesting hybridity. He is fully aware that “the sister of an emperor had found her beauty, virtue, and pride of race, worthily matched by those of the hard-handed Northern hero who led her away from Italy as his captive and bride, to found new kingdoms.”57 Mixed marriage is the necessary start of the journey. Even the first Christians were “not out of a race of pure and separate creatures”. The Teutons had to “learn, even from those they despised”.58 It was an “infusion of blood”, not a purity of blood, that made Kingsley’s Christians strong. In constructing this particular model of racial development, Kingsley is contributing to a debate which had flared into significance in the late 1840s and 1850s about Anglo-Saxonism. Sharon Turner, to take one influential example of the growing interest in race, argued that the English “language, our government, and our laws display our Gothic ancestors in every part”, and that the conquest of Rome by the Teutonic tribes was a “healthy recasting of human society rather than a barbarization”.59 Thomas Arnold, Matthew 55

56 58 59

The following paragraphs recapitulate some of Simon Goldhill, ‘How Odd is Kingsley’s Hypatia?’ in Charles Kingsley, ed. Conlin and Klaver, 86–103. Charles Kingsley, Hypatia (London, 1853), xii. 57 Kingsley, Hypatia, ix. Kingsley, Hypatia, xii. Sharon Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest, 5th edn. 3 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, et al., 1828), vol. I, 88.

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Arnold’s father and an anathema to Gladstone, in 1841 had made a similar case: “Our English race is the German race”, he declares ringingly.60 To maintain this position he has to hold two contrasting opinions about the genealogy of the English. On the one hand, his argument requires a devaluation of the Roman past: “Our history clearly begins with the coming over of the Saxons; the Britons and the Romans had lived in our country, but they are not our fathers; we are connected with them as men indeed, but nationally speaking, the history of Caesar’s invasion has no more to do with us than the natural history of the animals which then inhabited our forests.”61 On the other hand, like Kingsley, he requires a story that praises the admixture of German and Roman blood: “The one addition [the German race] was of such power, that it changed the character of the whole mass.”62 F. D. Maurice, liberal guru (the subject of Chapter 10), saw the power of this hybridity too: “the Latin mind could meet the Gothic and combine with it while the Greek regarded it as merely uncouth and frightful”.63 In 1862, Kingsley wrote a whole book of essays, The Roman and the Teuton, to argue his case even more intently than in his novels – as his own views became more extreme. In contrast to the high church thinking led by Gladstone and continued by Westcott, this group of liberal, elite, committedly Protestant writers saw English strength in a genealogy that combined Roman and German (Gothic, Teutonic) forces, and consequently dismissed the Greek tradition as too effete or philosophical or speculative to build a nation’s religion. Hence Kingsley associates the Greeks with Egypt as the despised oriental other. “That very peculiar turn of the Greco-Eastern mind, which made them the great thinkers of the then world, had the effect of drawing them away from practice to speculation.”64 This recognition of at least the intellectual achievements of Greek Christianity is quickly reduced, however, to a more typical Orientalist disdain: “the races of Egypt and Syria were effeminate, overcivilized, exhausted by centuries during which no infusion of fresh blood had come to renew the stock. Morbid, selfconscious, physically indolent, incapable, then as now, of personal or political freedom, they afforded material out of which fanatics might easily 60

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Thomas Arnold, Introductory Lectures on Modern History, 7th edn (London: Longmans, Green, 1885), 26. Arnold, Introductory Lectures, 23. 62 Arnold, Introductory Lectures, 27. Frederick Denison Maurice, The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, Chiefly Told in His Own Letters, ed. Frederick Maurice, 3rd edn, 2 vols. (London, 1884), vol II, 109–10; on Maurice, see also Jeremy Morris, F.D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority (Oxford University Press, 2005). Kingsley, Hypatia, xiv.

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be made . . .”65 Without fresh blood to renew the stock, the race has degenerated, and what is at stake is the personal and political freedom which contemporary political thought made integral to Teutonic society. For Kingsley, celibacy was a particular sign of such degeneration that allowed him to link the Catholicism he hated to this other, oriental, corrupt genealogy. For Kingsley, the genealogy of the English must not seek its roots in Greece, but rather in a later muscular, masculine combination of German and Christian values; and, even more strikingly, in this enterprise he praises not the purity of source and descent, as so much racial thinking later will, but hybridity, as the source of racial strength.66 In contrast to German thinking that strove to find a Greek origin for their values especially in the Dorians – Karl Otfried Müller’s seminal book Die Dorier was translated into English by George Cornewall Lewis whom we met earlier criticizing Gladstone’s genealogical theorizing – Kingsley is extreme in his insistence not just on the admired Teutonic strand of Englishness but also on a corollary disdain for Greek elements in his image of Christianity. Kingsley was as roundly criticized for the extremism of his rejection of Greece, as Gladstone was for his embrace of Greece in the history of early Christianity.67 In the later nineteenth century, then, the attempt to use genealogical thinking to link the Greece of antiquity to the history of Christianity in order to ground the supremacy of Western values repeatedly produced strained arguments that flared into contentiousness. (When you see very smart intellects making such extraordinary cases, it is a good sign of the pressure of ideology in action.) Philhellenism and its relation to the history of the church, not least thanks to the twin forces of Hegel’s ideas of historical development and the desire to ground Christianity in a nonSemitic soil, opened out into ideologically charged debates about nationalism, racial thinking, aesthetics, the politics of cultural value. How antiquity provided a genealogical vector for modernity proved a compelling, widely debated question that engaged each writer’s religious and political selfunderstanding in history. I want to conclude, however, with a different sense of translation between Greece and Christianity, which will take us back to Gladstone 65 66

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Kingsley, Hypatia, xiv. For the development of racial theory, see Mandler, ‘“Race” and “Nation”’; and Kidd, Forging of Races. E. A. Freeman, ‘Mr Kingsley’s Roman and Teuton’, Saturday Review 9 April 1864: 446–7, wrote nastily ‘Mr Kingsley is such a Teutonic enthusiast that we think he must be himself sprung from other than Teutonic blood.’

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and Matthew Arnold and the formation of this network of elite intellectuals. Translation from English (or other modern languages) into Greek and Latin was a mainstay of British education in elite schools, where classics took up some 70 per cent of the curriculum.68 It was so dominant a practice in England that the American classicist, Basil Gildersleeve, in his youthful pro-German fervour, could snort that “Classical education in England has been, for long years, one huge polyp of verse-making”.69 Writing such verses pervaded education. Some fifty handbooks teaching the skill were published. Many journals included “versions” of English poems in Greek or Latin. Moving between the private and public realms, between school days and adult leisure, between remembered past and proclaimed expertise, translation ran through the life of British men as a thread of self-conscious civilized attainment. The translation exercises that created the hierarchies of remembered success and failure at school, became a form of bonding between men, not least in the heightened male environments of university, the law, the army, empire. Men, especially in such homosocial environments, exchanged poems in Greek or Latin: Gideon Nisbet, for example, has insightfully traced how men translated Greek epigrams, often of a carefully erotic nature, and circulated them first in letters and then in small, often privately published volumes, thus creating a select homosocial community of literary self-expression.70 Henry Montagu Butler was a superstar in this context. As headmaster of Harrow and then Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, he was at the very centre of the educational establishment, and he both wrote Latin and Greek verse and about such verse-writing as an educational and cultural practice all his life. “I can scarcely remember the time when I did not make, love and soon after do my best to teach Latin and Greek verses”, he wrote.71 In an extraordinary tour de force, he produced twenty-one versions of a single Tennyson poem, each in a different Greek or Latin metre, to show the rich ambiguity of Tennyson’s language and how the different metres, each with its own soul, could find a different expressivity for the poem.72 Montagu 68 69

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See Stray, Classics Transformed. Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, The Selected Classical Papers of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, ed. W. W. Briggs, Jr. (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1992), 13; see W. W. Briggs, Jr., ‘“Second-Hand Superiority”: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the English’, Polis 19 (2002): 109–23. Gideon Nisbet, Greek Epigram in Reception: J. A. Symonds, Oscar Wilde, and the Invention of Desire, 1805–1929 (Oxford University Press, 2013). Henry Montagu Butler, Some Remarks on the Teaching of Greek and Latin Verses and on the Value of Translations from the Classics (London, 1913), 5. Henry Montagu Butler, Some Leisure Hours of a Long Life: Translations into Greek, Latin and English Verse, from 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1914).

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Butler also composed a translation of the David and Goliath episode, turning the Bible’s narrative into Greek hexameters – Homeric verse.73 He sent it out to his friends to read in a privately published pamphlet. Gladstone, who had published a collection of his own such translations together with George Lyttleton (his brother-in-law and personal secretary), invited him to breakfast to express his admiration. John Addington Symonds, who has been witness to Tennyson and Gladstone arguing petulantly about Homer over dinner, wrote back, “The Homeric rendering of the David and Goliath episode seems to my taste perfect. Unlike the armour of Saul upon David, the Greek of the Iliad fits the Bible narrative without cumbrousness of any kind”74 – as if Homer’s poetic form could translate the Bible without cost, without the treachery of translators. (Symonds, of course, attempted to create a place for his homosexuality in a Christian environment by discussing it as a “Problem in Greek ethics” – another, moral, sexual interface of the Christian and Greek.75) Matthew Arnold, however, who had, of course, written about how (conversely) to translate Homer, took a more leery view of Montagu Butler’s gift, and called it “a rather strange tour de force”. The exchange of a Homeric version of a Bible story becomes a philological gift to bond the men in reflective discrimination. In contrast to their committed, politically charged public disagreements about the cultural translations between classical antiquity and Christianity, this network of elite men could share more comfortably the intellectual pursuit of the translation of Scripture into Greek. The translation is a fascinating read, not least for how it translates between significantly different narrative and cultural worlds – an opposition that Auerbach would later theorize in the opening chapter of Mimesis. Montagu Butler saw his poem as “a Homeric whole breathing the spirit of the Scriptures”.76 What does this mean in practice? The Bible introduces Goliath like this (to translate the Hebrew of 1 Samuel 17): “and there went out a champion out of the camp of the Philistines, named Goliath, of Gath, 73

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Henry Montagu Butler, Six Translations from the Old and New Testaments into Homeric Verse (Cambridge: C. M. Clay, 1876). Edward Graham, The Harrow Life of Henry Montagu Butler, D.D. (London: Longmans, 1920), 372–4. On Symonds, see Phyllis Grosskurth, John Addington Symonds: A Biography (London: Longmans, 1964); Jonn Pemble (ed.), John Addington Symonds: Culture and the Demon Desire (Cambridge: St Martin’s Press, 2000); Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861–1913 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 157–209; and set in a context, in Simon Goldhill, A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain (University of Chicago Press, 2016), 123–68. Butler, ‘Six Translations’, vii.

Genealogy, Translation, and Resistance

whose height was six cubits and a span”. In Greek, the description is expanded into a Homeric discursive form, replete with a different emotional register and sense of awe. Goliath comes forth from the Philistines, “a wonder to behold” (thauma idesthai) – a very common expression in Homer which dramatizes the act of viewing inherent to the spectacle of war. “He was on the one hand (men) awesome (deinos) in his body, monstrous (pelôrios), his head in the heights (hupsikarênos); he was on the other (de) ten-foot in height, and he lived in Gath.” The first sentence of Greek here has no equivalent in the Bible: it again imagines Goliath through the eyes of a scared enemy, with emotive terms that suggest a mixture of amazement, terror, and recognition of his arrogance. It supplements the Bible’s narrative with a different style of description, a different way of seeing. Similarly, “of Gath” becomes the standard Homeric “he inhabited . . . ”, a glimpse of a life-story that is often expanded in Homer into a vignette of a life to be lost on the battlefield. In my translation into English of Montagu Butler’s Greek, I have emphasized his use of men and de, “on the one hand”, “on the other hand”. This structuring device of polarization, articulated through these two particles, is one of the most distinctive signs of Greek, eagerly taught in schools, and instantly recognizable as a way of ordering a sentence in an un-English, unHebrew manner. The opposition is emphatically introduced by Montagu Butler here to signal the act of reordering language syntactically into a Greek way of thinking. Montagu Butler’s translation, circulated among his network of friends, provides a specific form of double reading. For those who read the Bible avidly and read Homer avidly, what is evident in his tour de force is the contrast between the two languages, the two ways of seeing and expressing the world. This translation does not make available an unreadable text into a familiar language, but allows its readers to move between two different known languages and to acknowledge and appreciate the difference. The act of translation – and its circulation among friends – is a cultural performance that dramatizes the double genealogy of English values in Greek and the Bible – as double. In a less contentious way than the sermons, monographs, lectures, and reviews that I have been discussing so far, the shared gift of translation, through the privilege of philology, opens a space for reflection on the paradigms of the past. Montagu Butler was a cleric whose election as Master of Trinity was the first in the new dispensation which allowed a non-cleric to be appointed (to the dismay of the supporters of Henry Sidgwick for the post); he preached a great deal in Trinity Chapel, and his religious beliefs were well aligned with the liberal Anglicanism of

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Maurice, Stanley, and Jowett. For Montagu Butler, holding classics and Christianity together had an ideological grounding that spoke directly (albeit moderately, of course) to the politics of the age. Fewer Christians today, I suspect, would insist that the early church was determinative of their Christian commitment, although the Nicene creed remains integral to liturgy and belief; fewer English people in contemporary Britain would reckon that the early history of England expressed the fundamental nature of a national identity; fewer still would see ancient Greek society as a guide and model for modern values; vanishingly few would see these three concerns as inherently and significantly interrelated – and basic to self-placement or self-understanding in history. How such genealogical thinking was lost to modernity is another story – replaced perhaps by different anxieties about race, the foundations of the nation, national boundaries and movement – but the contrast between Victorian public debate and contemporary discourse remains striking. Each time we record surprise or bafflement at the arguments mobilized about the past in these nineteenth-century texts, we are also calibrating our selfconsciousness of history against this Victorian fascination with the Bible and classical antiquity as genealogical paradigms of value. Perhaps this is also what is meant in this book by the shock of the old.77 77

Thanks to Sue Marchand and Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft for helpful comments and criticism.

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In 1907, the American popular writer Denton J. Snider lectured his readers: We repeat then that the separation of Orient and Greece, the groundtheme of Herodotus, is the birth of History as conscious, self-knowing and self-recording, is the real sun-up of the historic Ego of man. In this complete sense the Oriental man has had no History, not in Egypt, Babylon, China. The Orient lacks just this development of the historic Ego . . . At most are found in the East some national records, but no World’s History.1

We might recognize Snider’s secular, Hegelian prejudices as fully consonant with views held by western scholars and readers in the high imperial age about how to read this key classical text – and we would be right to do so. Like many English and American popular writers from the 1830s forward, Snider found Herodotus’ so-called ‘oriental prelude’ to the wars proper in Books 1–4 of the Histories a jumble of recalcitrant adiaphora and implausible marvels, and a distraction from the critical story told in Books 5–9 of Greece’s triumph, “the historic birth of Europe.”2 But by no means was Snider’s reading the only one of Herodotus, even in his era. Indeed, his dismissal of the Orient as part of world history would have been utterly baffling, not only to Herodotus himself, but to the vast majority of modern European readers and writers of world history down at least to the midnineteenth century. Many more of them, in fact, would have made the case for Herodotus’ importance in a very different way, one suggested by a 1786 publication whose title I have taken for my own in this essay: “Herodotus, Historian of the Hebrew People, Without Knowing It.” Originally composed in French, Hérodote, historien du peuple Hébreu sans le savoir was in fact a compilation of passages drawn from a very popular eighteenth-century treatise, the Abbé Pierre-Marie Stanislas Guérin du Rocher’s Histoire véritable des temps fabuleux (The True History of Mythical Times, 3 vols., 1776–7). The writing of these two books, and the controversy that motivated their Jesuit authors, will be 1 2

Denton J. Snider, The Father of History: An Account of Herodotus (St. Louis: Sigma, 1907), xi. Snider, Father of History, lix.

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described below. But what it is important to observe immediately is that Herodotus, here, was decidedly not just (if at all) the narrator of Greece’s victories, and the Orient was decidedly figured as central to Christian Europe’s history. For Guérin and his readers, what was interesting in the Histories were Egyptian kings, Persian religious rites, Babylonian temples, mentions of Cyrus and Sennacerib – all subjects that could be brought into rapport with the Old Testament. In fact, this tradition was very old, and can be traced back to Josephus, for whom Herodotus was essential in proving the historical reality of the Jews (“the Syrians of Palestine”) who, Herodotus testified at 2.104, had followed the Egyptian custom of circumcision.3 It was given a massive shove forward by reformed scholars such as Melanchthon and David Chytraeus, who believed Herodotus could be mined for a sort of pagan Ten Commandments,4 and by attempts to flesh out the statement in Acts 7:22 that “Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.”5 Most important of all in the development of an apologetic Herodotus was the early modern obsession with chronology, which drew Herodotus, and especially his crucial passage about the chronology of Egypt’s kings at 2.142, into the fray.6 Mythographers of the era also hugely valued Herodotus’ information about Near Eastern religions, almost all of it in the first four books, which were easily the most popular for readers of the pre-1830 era.7 Guérin du Rocher, that is to say, was in good company in his use of Herodotus to reaffirm the truth of the scriptures – and a long line of successors would follow him. At present, these early modern chronological, mythographic, and theological uses of Herodotus have been little explored; Herodotus reception has received some attention, but not as much as the reception of 3

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This does not mean, however, that Josephus had much respect for Herodotus in general, but thought him, like the other Greeks, an inveterate liar. See Flavius Josephus, Against Apion, trans. John M. G. Barclay, in Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary, vol. X (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 12–13, 93. On Herodotus’ upgrading in the sixteenth century, also partly inspired by the discovery of the New World, see Arnaldo Momigliano’s classic essay, ‘The Place of Herodotus in the History of Historiography’, in History 43/147 (1958): 1–14; on Herodotus’ importance for Reformation scholars, see Anthony Ellis, ‘Herodotus Magister Vitae, Or: Herodotus and God in the Protestant Reformation’, in Histos, Supplement 4 (2015): 173–245. On uses of this passage in and before the eighteenth century, see Mordechai Feingold, ‘“The Wisdom of the Egyptians”: Revisiting Jan Assmann’s Reading of the Early Modern Reception of Moses’, Aegyptiaca 4 (2019): 99–124. See Suzanne L. Marchand, ‘Finding Truths among the “Lies”: Fact-Checking Herodotus’s Egypt in the Long Eighteenth Century’, History of Humanities 6/1 (2021): 269–93 The excerpts printed in Louis Ellies Dupin’s Bibliothèque universelle des historiens (Paris: Pierre Giffart, 1707), for example, heavily favoured Books 1–4.

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Thucydides, which, owing to the different nature of the texts, is actually rather more straightforward.8 But what is really almost unknown is the subject this essay seeks to map, and that is the apologetic uses of Herodotus after Voltaire, during a period in which we have largely presumed that Saidian readings, like that of Snider, took hold. What we find in this era is the use of Herodotus in a defence of the scriptures which takes as its starting point the need to combat philosophical and critical attacks on the Bible not with force, or tradition, or the authority of the church, but with extra-biblical data. In response to the scepticism sowed by enlightened critics, the approach increasingly became that of offering positive evidences, whether geographical, philological, archaeological, or historical. This campaign grew all the more urgent with the evolution in the first part of the nineteenth century of what came to be known as ‘the higher criticism,’ critiques of Mosaic and evangelist authorship which simply added to and exacerbated textual problems identified by rationalist critics. And Herodotus was given up, or better sidelined, by apologist writers not because new decipherments and archaeological excavations proved his testimony faulty – on the contrary, new scholarship seemed to ratify many of his findings. Defenders of scriptural history, indeed, continued to rely on this classical author until, that is, they found ‘oriental’ archaeology a much better hammer for their nails. This, then, is a story of when and why these intertwined tales of classical and biblical texts endured so long, and how they, and their partisans, finally drifted apart.

I. Voltaire vs. Herodotus I start my story in the 1760s, a pivotal decade in many respects, but crucially, for us, the one that saw the publication of Voltaire’s Philosophie d’histoire (1765) – originally intended to be the introduction to his constantly revised Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations. The philosophe seems to have envisioned this purportedly objective historical piece as the best way, in his words, to “tomber sur l’infâme,”9 by way of demonstrating the insignificance of the ancient Israelites in the eyes of others and their backwardness, 8

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See Emily Greenwood, Thucydides and the Shaping of History (London: Duckworth, 2006); Katherine Harloe and Neville Morley (eds.), Thucydides and the Modern World: Reception, Reinterpretations and Influence from the Renaissance to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2012); Neville Morley, Thucydides and the Idea of History (London: Tauris, 2014). J. H. Brumfitt, ‘Introduction: History and Propaganda’, in The Complete Works of Voltaire, vol. LIX: La philosophie de l’histoire, ed. J. H. Brumfitt (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1969), 14.

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fanaticism, and poverty as compared to other nations. But the work was also a direct challenge to the biblical scholarship of the day, following, as it did, on the heels of nearly two centuries of erudite work on Hebrew antiquities and sacred geography, much of it drawing extensively on Herodotus and other classical as well as biblical authorities. The fact that Voltaire, for various reasons, also seems to have despised the Egyptians, against whom he championed the Indians and the Chinese, made him especially pointed in his criticism of the reliability of the key European source for this civilization, and Greece’s borrowings from it – Book 2 of the Histories.10 The real target, of course, was the Bible, and particularly the Old Testament; but ancient Near Eastern history and its ‘profane’ witnesses were collateral victims Voltaire was willing to sacrifice in the attempt to ‘ecrasez l’infâme.’ Voltaire, however, was heir to an emerging strand of liberal, Whiggish historiography which did not want to do without its classical proponents of liberty. Nor, in a period in which pyrrhonist threats to the factuality of all history were abroad,11 did he want to undermine the veracity of the more plausible (meaning for him, the more rational) reports of the classical historians. Thus in his entry on “History” in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, written at the same time as The Philosophy of History, Voltaire offered a verdict on Herodotus’ trustworthiness consistent with Enlightened values: “Almost all that he relates on the authority of strangers is mythical [fabuleux], but all that he saw himself is true.” The implications of this principle were profound: this meant that as far as history was concerned, only after Xerxes’ crossing of the Hellespont did history, proper, begin. “One does not find before these great events anything but some vague reports, enveloped in puerile tales.”12 The ‘mythological’ material concerning the Near East was not to be trusted, especially because in Voltaire’s Orientalized view, these “strangers” invariably exaggerated the richness and profundity of their ancestral cultures. At the end of the day, he wrote, what one really learned from Herodotus were not facts, but a larger moral lesson: “The superiority of a small but generous people, free while all of Asia was enslaved, is one of the most glorious [stories] among men”; Salamis reminded one of the victory at Lepanto. “There, perhaps is the only fruit one can glean from the knowledge of these distant times,” he concluded.13 10 11

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Brumfitt, ‘Introduction’, 62–3. Anton Matytsin, The Specter of Skepticism and the Sources of Certainty in the Eighteenth Century, 1697–1772 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Voltaire, ‘Le pyrrhonisme dans l’histoire’, in Les œuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. LXVII (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2007), 369, 371. Voltaire, ‘Pyrrhonisme’, 372.

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Voltaire had not articulated directly the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, but stands as one of the eighteenth-century forerunners who pioneered this line of thought, thereby divorcing the half of the Histories most germane to ‘orientalist’ and theological scholars from the more secular, national story of the defeat of the Persians that would be so dear to nineteenth-century writers such as Denton Snider. That Voltaire’s Philosophy hit a nerve is clear, not only in long-echoing German (and British) attacks on ‘French’ history-writing but also in the responses he received at home, among both clerics and scholars of ancient history.14 After all, beyond being an irreverent philosophe, Voltaire was to this point exclusively a historian of the modern era, and those who had mastered Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and perhaps Arabic and had invested decades in careful study of ancient texts and material culture might justifiably have believed that he had no business mucking about in things ancient. One of the first to rise to Voltaire’s bait was Pierre-Henri Larcher, who, as one of the few decent Greek translators in Paris, had just been commissioned to finish – in reality to completely restart – a previous translation of Herodotus.15 Although it seems that several scholars of a Jesuit hue were responsible for persuading Larcher to write his Supplément à la Philosophie d’histoire (1767), in the text Larcher insisted that being just an ordinary believer, he would leave the defence of religion to others. Instead, what Larcher did want to defend – perhaps because he had spent the last several years enmeshed in translating Books 1–3 of the Histories – was the tradition of erudition, against that of impious, ignorant philosophy. Until this century, Larcher wrote, philosophy had contented itself with sophisms, and erudition “was always employed in illuminating the obscure parts of history, and clearing up points of chronology, in restoring corrupted passages . . . Huet, Bochart, Warburton & company have sometimes employed it with success to secure the triumphs of religion,” he continued; but then came Voltaire’s new wheeze: “jealous [of these successes], impiety wanted to try the same weapons.”16 Emphasizing Voltaire’s 14 15

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For a partial list of respondents in the first years, see Brumfitt, ‘Introduction’, 64. As José-Michel Moureaux has demonstrated, Larcher was not, as Voltaire would later repeatedly claim, a pedant employed at the Collège Mazarin, but a misanthrophic érudit who enjoyed extensive connections with the Encyclopedia’s circle of natural scientists. José-Michel Moureaux, ‘Introduction’ to La défense de mon oncle, in Les œuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Moureaux, vol. LXIV (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1984), 21–63. Larcher’s story is also told, briefly, in Jed Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz, The Zodiac of Paris (Princeton University Press, 2010), 122–35. Pierre-Henri Larcher, Supplément à la philosophie de l’histoire, de feu M. l’Abbé Bazin (Amsterdam: Changuion, 1767), 32–3. This passage was also quoted in the anonymous review in The Monthly Review 36 (1767), 566–69 (at 567).

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many plagiarisms and deliberate misunderstandings of this erudite literature and his “errors heaped upon errors” with respect to ‘oriental’ prehistory,17 Larcher insisted that all the facts were on the side of the scholarly clerics rather than that of the impious and reckless philosophers. There were, he readily admitted, problematic passages in the scriptures and in the works of the ancients; but patient work, such as he was doing to illuminate Herodotus’ Histories, would vindicate the serious-minded, critically competent, learned Christians. Voltaire might have ignored the reproaches of a little-known translator, but the great philosophe felt his prestige and pride injured and responded with a Défense de mon oncle (1767), supposedly penned by the nephew of the now-deceased Abbé Bazin (the pretended author of The Philosophy of History). Voltaire opened with an attack on Larcher for his impiety – admitting that scripture could err!18 But there was more. By this time Voltaire surely knew of his opponent’s translation project, which would culminate in the publication of seven fat volumes in 1786 (nine in the 1802 edition), for Herodotus now came in for special insults.19 The Abbé, said his nephew, considered Herodotus’ fables, like those of Bluebeard, “the fruit of a crude and disorderly imagination, which amused children, and also, unfortunately, adults.”20 Larcher issued a rebuttal (Réponse à la défense de mon oncle, also 1767), as well as a second edition of the Supplément (1769). Voltaire could and did win the battle of wits, adding a pedant named Larcher to his story “The Princess of Babylon” and a paragraph to the entry on Herodotus and Diodorus in his Philosophical Dictionary in which he lampooned his ‘pious’ defence of the pagan fabulist. “[Larcher] treats those who defend the honor of women of Babylon as a bad Christian, a damned soul, and an enemy of the state.”21 He reiterated many of his historiographical claims in another important long disquisition, Pyrrhonisme dans l’histoire (1768), repeating gleefully all of his witty gibes about the Histories, including the long passage underscoring their 17

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Moureaux tabulated Larcher’s criticisms, arriving at twenty-three passages for pre-Hebraic prehistory, five for Egyptian history, twelve for Greek history proper, and only six for the history of the Jews. Moureaux, ‘Introduction’, 75; Larcher also took on Voltaire eleven times on the subject of pagan religions, which had largely to do with ancient Near Eastern affairs. Voltaire, ‘Défense de mon oncle’, 189–90. As Moureaux notes, Voltaire’s earlier treatments of Herodotus had been much milder. Moureaux, ‘Notes’ to Voltaire, ‘Défense de mon oncle’, 274, n.11. Voltaire, ‘Défense de mon oncle’, 257. Voltaire, ‘De Diodore, et d’Hérodote’, in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. XVIII (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1878), 393. Voltaire concluded this entry with the remark: “The honest history of Thucydides, which offers several glimmers of truth, commences with Xerxes; but before this era, it’s lost time!” (394).

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unreliability with respect to events before Xerxes’ invasion. But when he revised his Philosophy in 1769, and more extensively in 1775 and 1785, he took Larcher’s criticisms to heart.22 After the second edition of his Supplément, Larcher himself retreated from the fight, perhaps recognizing that the best response was simply to complete his Histore d’Hérodote, volume I of which appeared in 1786, eight years after Voltaire’s death. Larcher’s Histoire certainly was an erudite work, drawing on commentaries and evidence from writers of all centuries, and all fields, including zoology, archaeology, botany, and philology. Pretending that what was really an argument against pyrrhonism (and Voltaire) was a defence of Herodotus’ character, Larcher indignantly defended Herodotus as “a friend of truth” who “took all measures to instruct himself”; “we have no other writer, ancient or modern,” he wrote in his introductory volume, who gave this country [Asia] so exact and wonderful [curieuse] a description. He has brought us knowledge of its geography which has an exactitude rare even among professional geographers, and of the produce of the land, its customs, the rituals and the religion of the inhabitants, and the history of the princes before the Persian conquest, and the particularities of that conquest, which would be lost to us if he had not transmitted for posterity.23

While in his early volumes, Larcher took a moderately critical attitude toward biblical chronology, as he aged (and the Revolution took hold), he retreated into a more ardent Catholicism; by the time his second edition appeared in 1802, he had become a firm believer in the correspondence between Herodotean and biblical chronologies. In the second edition, produced almost immediately after the first, Larcher excised datings and softened passages which he now believed to be impious.24 Although he was challenged in his own day – including by the Comte de Volney and the atheist astronomer Joseph de Lalande, with whom he had bitter fights, predictably about chronology25 – almost all of the battles, we might note, revolved around information reported in Herodotus’ first four books. 22 23

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Moureaux, ‘Introduction’, 76–7, 113; Brumfitt, ‘Introduction’, 73–5. Pierre-Henri Larcher, Histoire d’Hérodote, traduit du grec, avec des remarques historiques et critiques, et un essai sur la chronologie d’Hérodote et une table géographique, vol. I (Paris: Musier, 1786), xii, xl. Moreaux, ‘Introduction’, 119; Jean François Boissonade, ‘Notice sur la vie et des écrits de feu M. Larcher’, in Catalogs des livres rares et précieux de feu M. Pierre-Henri Larcher (Paris” De Bures, Frères, 1814), xxix. Buchwald and Josefowicz, Zodiac, 163.

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We might describe Larcher’s defence of Herodotus as motivated in the first instance by more secular and scholarly concerns, if religious certainties later came more clearly to the fore. In the meantime, however, the more directly religious responses to Voltaire that Larcher had, at first, rebuffed, came thick and fast. The most interesting, for our purposes, was Abbé Pierre-Marie Stanislas Guérin du Rocher, a learned Jesuit scholar who had recently returned from exile in Poland. Planned for twelve volumes, Guérin’s Histoire véritable des temps fabuleux took up the challenge of documenting the reality of Mosaic history by filling in exactly what Voltaire had said was missing, namely external, pagan confirmation. In the absence of older Greek sources or readable Egyptian, Assyrian, or Persian texts, Guérin relied heavily on the one ancient writer who supplied the earliest and most extensive reportage on Moses’ birthplace: Herodotus. Over three fat volumes – Guérin did not complete the additional nine he had planned – the Jesuit érudit invoked Herodotus more than 650 times, milking the Histories to provide secure facts about such things as the Egyptian diet, climate, and royal chronology. These details, he argued, demonstrated “constant and tangible rapport”26 with Old Testament passages; indeed, as a later Jesuit writer glossed the book’s intent, that Egyptian history from Menes to the time of the founding of the Persian empire “is nothing but an altered and disfigured version of the passages of sacred scripture that concern these nations.”27 Already in 1777 Guérin’s publications were assaulted in the Journal des Sçavans and the philosophe-friendly Journal de politique et de littérature by reviewers who claimed his proofs of scripture remained arbitrary and conjectural, and his Egyptian history nonsensical.28 A 50-plus-page pamphlet defending Guérin followed, and was again widely reviewed; scholars vigorously took sides, with the sinologist Joseph de Guignes and the translator of the Zend Avesta, Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, siding with the anti-Guérinists. But we ought not to overlook the probably larger party of pro-Guérinists, including the rather intemperate Abbé Chappell, who credited Guérin with having “brought light into the shadows . . . In the study of theology, we were seeking direct responses to a mass of difficulties that our modern unbelievers were playing on by setting profane authors and sacred history in opposition to one another . . . we wanted to find 26

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Guérin du Rocher,’ Histoire véritable des temps fabuleux, vol. I (Paris: Charles-Pierre Berton, 1776), xxxviii. Anon., ‘Guérin du Rocher’, in Bibliothèque de la compagnie de Jésus: Bibliographie, vol. III (Brussels: Oscar Schepens, 1892), 1909. Journal des Sçavans (1777), 587.

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something positive to prevent them from taking advantage of the silence of the most ancient historians on the great events, the prophecies, and the astonishing changes reported by Moses.”29 For this lobby, Herodotus, with Guérin’s mediation, had been so thoroughly and usefully mustered to the cause that in 1786 another, a slightly more moderate cleric (Abbé Bonnaud) compiled Guérin’s main findings in the book referred to in our title.30 So helpful were Guérin’s facts drawn from Herodotus to the apologetic crowd, and so welcome was his defence of scripture, that he was awarded with a royal pension, and eventually became Marie Antoinette’s confessor – though this would result in his execution along with other priests close to the court in September 1793.31 Although Larcher’s edition came under fire in the 1820s from highly sceptical classical philologists,32 we would be wrong to think its impact fleeting. Larcher began work on a third edition, finally published (though shorn of most notes) in 1850; the translation itself was ceaselessly reproduced, and another French edition followed in 1889. William Beloe leaned heavily on Larcher in his 1791 English translation (the first English translation to aim at accuracy), and there were stand-alone German and English translations of the notes, handily combined into two separate volumes. The collected notes – and especially volume I, which treated Books 1–3 – were of particular interest, it seems, to seminary students, orientalists, and geographers, and were reprinted and then re-edited in the 1840s by the Irish geographer William Desborough Cooley;33 indeed, even in Cooley’s much more critical and secularized edition of the Notes, some 600 pages are 29

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Abbé L. Chappell, Histoire véritable des temps fabuleux, confirmée par les critiques qu’on en a faites (Paris: Charles-Pierre Berton, 1779), reprinted as Histoire véritable des temps fabuleux, vol. IV (Paris: Gauthier Frères, 1826), vi. We have forgotten just how common, and how voluminous, works such as the Abbé du Constant de la Molette’s La Genèse expliquée d’après les textes primitifs (1777, 3 vols.), which tried to show that Moses’ reports were not contrary “to reason, nor to law, nor to mythology, nor to history” – review in Journal des Sçavans (1777), 392–8 (at 393) – were in both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Anon, rev. of Guérin du Rocher, Histoire véritable des temps fabuleux in Ami de la Religion et du Roi, vol. 41 (1824), 35. This story bears out Mark Curran’s reminder that even during the height of the Enlightenment, the religious book trade was just as lively as was the anti-clerical one. Mark Curran, Atheism, Religion, and Enlightenment in Pre-Revolutionary Europe (London: Royal Historical Society, 2012), 69. By 1823, F. C. Dahlmann was describing Larcher’s work as little better than fiction, designed to wish away Herodotus’ errors, and a few years later, George Grote called the Frenchman’s chronology a feeble effort to vindicate Herodotus, and the Old Testament. Dahlmann, Herodot: Aus seinem Buche sein Leben (Altona: Johann Friedrich Hammerich, 1823), 96; George Grote, A History of Greece, 4th edn, 12 vols. (London: John Murray, 1846–56), vol. I, 493. William Desborough Cooley (ed.), Larcher’s Notes on Herodotus, 2nd edn, vol. I (London: Whittaker, 1844).

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devoted to Books 1–4, and only 335 to Books 5–9. Larcher’s translation still appealed sufficiently to French readers that it was used as the basis of François Hartog’s 1980 excerpted edition.34 But Guérin’s work – together with Hérodote, historien du peuple Hébreu, was also reprinted, in 1824, in 1831, and in 1834. Herodotus had proved a solid foundation on which to build a staunch defence of the possibility of secure knowledge in Near Eastern history in the face of wildly speculative, and often religiously radical, euhemerism, the exposure of so many forgeries, and the continuing inability of Europeans to read ancient oriental languages. For the generation to follow, Larcher had established Herodotus as a last, best island in that sea of chronologists’ – and perhaps apologists’ –shipwrecks.35 On his Histories, virtually alone, one could build credible histories, geographies, and perhaps theologies that would last.

II. Herodotus and the Liberals As the eighteenth century closed, debates continued to rage over the chronology of Chinese and Indian civilizations and the trustworthiness of newly discovered or translated texts such as the Zend Avesta; many scholars, including Herder, despaired over the probability that hieroglyphics would never be readable.36 Mythographers and linguists tried to fill prehistorical gaps by mapping the diffusion of the gods, rituals, and languages, but few arguments found general credence. In all of these debates Herodotus’ first four books continued to play a central role, offering myriad details about sundry tribes (Arioi) and shadowy deities (Cabiri) to quarrel about. Seen as a pious man – deeply interested in the religious practices of others, but wary of criticizing Providence, or divulging cultic secrets – Herodotus was a particular favorite of Romantic writers who wanted to trace the origins of all religions – as opposed to all superstitions – to the East. The Romantic scholars Friedrich Creuzer, Joseph Görres, and 34 35

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François Hartog, Hérodote: Histoires (Paris: François Maspero, 1980). As William Robertson confirmed opening his 1791 An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India, it had become unsafe for historians to credit anyone writing before the time of the first historian, Herodotus; “If we push our inquiries concerning any point beyond the area where written history commences, we enter upon the region of conjecture, of fable, and of uncertainty.” James Rennell quoted this very passage in his The Geographical System of Herodotus Examined; and Explained by a Comparison with Those of Other Ancient Authors, and with Modern Geography (London: W. Bulmer, 1800), 1–2, n. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts. Erster Band” (1774), in Herders Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, 33 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1883), vol. VI, 448–9.

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the young Carl Ritter, for example, repeatedly invoked Herodotus in their attempts to trace the origins of all religions back to the Near East; as in earlier universal histories, the Orient here certainly did have a deep and distinguished history, one to which the West was deeply linked. These diffusionary tours de force were refuted, however, by Graecophile liberals, who feared this speculative theorizing played into the hands of the Catholic reaction. Hoping to save the scientificness of their field, and to substitute a more secular narrative for the older forms of universal history, liberal classicists and historians in the 1820s and 1830s moved to cut history off from myth and to restrict the canon of credible sources to those that were datable, composed within a decade or two of events, and which interpreters could read in the original language. The upshot, particularly in the German states, was to label oriental ‘prehistory’ as a subject for amateurs or only for orientalist experts, who were in turn hampered by lack of decipherments, fragmentation of the fields, and lack of university positions, especially outside of the theological faculties.37 Well-loved Hellenistic sources such as Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris, Eusebius’ Preparation for the Gospel (and the sources therein), and Herodotus’ first four books became suspect – except for information specifically known to derive from Herodotus’ eyewitness observations. Even two of the great Herodotus readers of the early century, K. O. Müller and B. G. Niebuhr, offered mixed assessments of the ancient Greek’s trustworthiness, and in any case defended the splitting off of the study of speculative oriental prehistory from knowable classical histories. Niebuhr (d. 1831) and Müller (d. 1840) would become historiographical heroes in the next generation, revered even by that prolific writer of orientalist prehistories, C. J. von Bunsen – whose work, notably, took care to depend not on Herodotus and Hellenistic sources, but on his coterie of orientalist clients, including Max Müller (Indology), Wilhelm Martin Haug (Iranology), and Karl Richard Lepsius (Egyptology).38 In Prussia and in Great Britain, the later 1820s marks the point at which liberal nationalists and philhellenes moved to cordon off the ‘oriental prelude’ and to insist upon a Whiggish and Voltairean reading of Herodotus. This change was particularly evident in Britain, where liberalism, and the writing of history, were so tightly bound up with the advocacy of empire.39 37

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See Suzanne L. Marchand, ‘Herodotus and the Embarrassments of Universal History’, Journal of Modern History, forthcoming (2023). On Bunsen, see Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 95–7. See Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).

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Thomas Macaulay’s 1828 essay simply entitled “History” announced this new era, emphasizing Herodotus’ immaturity and his embeddedness in a naïve, oral culture: “As was the historian, such were the auditors, – inquisitive, credulous, easily moved by religious awe or patriotic enthusiasm.”40 With no evidence for his supposition, Macaulay argued that Herodotus’ narrative became more “absorbing” for his contemporaries as it approached the war proper; “The chronicler had now to tell the story of that great conflict from which Europe dates its intellectual and political supremacy, – a story which, even at this distance of time, is the most marvellous and the most touching in the annals of the human race.”41 Macaulay did not say explicitly that the last five books were more believable, but that line would increasingly be drawn as liberal historians such as George Grote, C. G. Lewis, and Connop Thirlwall moved to apply the historiographical strictures of the Germans. Popularizers and schoolbook compilers moved gradually in this direction as well and began to attenuate their coverage of the ‘prelude’ in order to get more swiftly to the wars proper.42 Indeed, from this time forward, English retellings of the Histories and excerpted editions increasingly call themselves not The Histories but The Persian Wars. To cite just one of these prolific popularizers, the Reverend George Cox, is to see that even as the most plausible statements of Herodotus were subjected to philological and rationalist criticism, liberals were eager to emphasize the utility of the Histories as a morally inspiring story of western greatness, rather than an archive of precious facts. Herodotus’ narrative, Cox writes, is a tale in which every incident must be submitted to a searching test before we can admit without reserve, and in which the most plausible statements will be found sometimes the most questionable. From the beginning to the end, we find an ethical or religious purpose overlaying or putting out of sight all political causes and motives . . . We find legend and fable interwoven with the unadorned details of political intercourse and the movements of fleet and armies. But we find also, in the great men of that city on which was centred the hope and salvation of the Hellenic world . . . a foresight which took the true measure of their enemy’s power 40

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘History’, in Macaulay’s Miscellaneous Essays & Lays of Ancient Rome (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1910), 4. Macaulay, ‘History’, 5. See for example, George Cox, The Greeks and the Persians (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1876). “In the present volume,” Cox noted, “the non-Hellenic peoples are noticed only in so far as their history bears on that of the Greek tribes, or as their characteristics illustrate the relations and even the affinity of the latter with races which they regarded as altogether alien and barbarous” (v).

Herodotus, Historian of the Hebrew People and their own, – a character as real and as tangible as that of the great men who have done good service to our own country or to any other land in Christendom.43

Notable in Cox’s hyper-critical account is not only the highlighting of the story of Greek triumph, but the attribution of Herodotus’ naïveté to his comprehensively religious perspective. This is repeated in many texts of the mid-century, such as that of George C. Swayne, who in 1870 reiterated the now conventional wisdom that the Greek victory was the turning point in world history: “By Salamis and Plataea the world may have escaped being orientalised for ever, and bound in the immobility of China . . . These battles, by saving freedom and securing progress, anticipated the overthrow of the Saracens before Tours, and of the Turks before Vienna.”44 And yet, Swayne concluded his volume by saying that “His blood plainly boils at injustice or cruelty; and whatever superstition he may have inherited with his religious creed, he has an intense faith in an overruling Providence . . . ”45 This odd mixture of secular western heroism and the conversion of Herodotus into a childlike proto-Christian was by no means uncommon in a nineteenth century in which even many of the liberal history writers – including Cox – were also clergymen. That this worked to justify empire is obvious; that it was not the view of Herodotus’ value shared by all needs further exploration.

III. The Apologists between Old and New Sources Voltaire, George Cox, and G. W. F. Hegel might perhaps have been content to treat ancient ‘oriental’ history essentially as a dream; but that was certainly not true of many of their contemporaries, who were quite sure that reason had no right to censure history, or to trump revelation. Since the 1760s, there had, of course, been more radical challenges to faith and to the churches, in the forms of late enlightened materialism and revolutionary atheism and deism. Napoleon’s Concordat had reopened the French churches, and Christian Romanticism found new means by which to prove the truth of faith, though Chateaubriand’s Rousseauvian panegyrics and Schleiermacher’s psychologizing did little to restore the credibility of the 43

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George Cox, The Tale of the Great Persian War, from the Histories of Herodotus (London: Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861), 381–3. George C. Swayne, Herodotus (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1870), 6. Swayne, Herodotus, 180.

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Old Testament in particular. More challenges – indirect and indirect – to Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch had arisen in the wake of F. A. Wolf’s claims in the 1790s that ‘Homer’ was no individual genius, nor a teller of veiled history, but simply expressed the poetic spirit of the Greek folk. In 1806, the radical theologian W. M. L. De Wette transferred this Herderian insight to the Old Testament; as Jewish folk poetry, it was invaluable, but its literal truth was not meaningful.46 He would be followed by a series of critics highly sceptical of Mosaic authorship and willing to jettison portions of the text that were historically, philologically, or naturalistically implausible. Thus did a German critical school – often later reviled, like Voltaire, as “rationalists” – launch a wave of reactions in defence of the historicity of the scriptures. Meanwhile, as the extension of western power and the lapsing of Ottoman and Egyptian hostility towards Europeans made possible new travel and research in Asia Minor and North Africa from the 1780s onward, scholarly as well as popular interest in the ancient oriental past seems to have been on the rise. The Napoleonic expeditions, of course, hauled home masses of material, and received significant public coverage from 1802 onward. Especially after some of the Napoleonic era’s disruptions ended, geographers fanned out to map ‘white spaces’ and proto-archaeologists to find lost sites. But for some time, classical sources, and especially Herodotus, remained vital in these endeavors, and perhaps one of the first instincts traveling Europeans exhibited was the desire to fact-check his data. In these early endeavors, Herodotus usually got good marks. His general veracity was demonstrated at great length by James Rennell’s 1800 The Geographical System of Herodotus, in which the retired Surveyor General of Bengal followed the Greek traveler across Asia Minor and North Africa. Generally positive too was Claudius Rich, British Resident in Baghdad, who visited Babylon twice, in 1811 (for ten days) and in 1817.47 James Silk Buckingham, on his way to India, also visited Babylon, and enthused at length about the ancient writer’s accuracy.48 Readers thrilled to the illustrations supplied by the artist Robert Ker Porter, who traveled through Iran, Armenia, and Iraq in the same period, giving this 46

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The reference here is to De Wette’s Beiträge zur Einleitung in das Alte Testament, 2 vols. (Halle: Schimmelpfenning, 1806–7), which more orthodox critics would refer to frequently, with horror, throughout the century. On de Wette, see Marchand, German Orientalism, 48–9, 76. “Herodotus,” he wrote, “will ever appear to greater advantage the more he is examined and understood ” – Claudius James Rich, from his ‘Second Memoir of the Ruins of Babylon’, pp. 139–79, in Rich, Narrative of a Journey to the Site of Babylon in 1811 [and other texts], ed. Mary Rich (London, 1839), 144–5. For e.g., James Silk Buckingham, Travels in Mesopotamia, vol. II (London: Henry Colburn, 1827), 253ff.

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region new reality in his illustrated travelogue of 1821, featuring Cyrus’s tomb at Pasargadae and the ruins of Persepolis and Babylon.49 So eager were readers to understand this ancient writer that at least two book-length attempts were made to fill in his biography, F. C. Dahlmann’s scholarly Herodot: Aus seinem Buche sein Leben (1823) and James Talboys Wheeler’s popular two-volume ‘imaginary’ life of 1855, in which the Greek historian even ventured to Susa and Jerusalem, and learned about Hebrew history and beliefs from Nehemiah.50 None of these works, however, with the exception of that of Talboys Wheeler, were written with apologetic intent, and in general, too, religious writers of this period remained dubious about the value of the new orientalism for their purposes. For most English theologians and mainstream Christians, David Gange has argued, the new Egyptological work remained rather too iffy, and too potentially threatening to biblical ‘facts’ and chronologies into the 1860s. Some of the late Enlightened and early nineteenth-century writers on such subjects – the Comte de Volney, for example – were worryingly radical or all too ecumenical, and in any case, controversy raged for decades over the decipherments of hieroglyphics and cuneiform. Even the great Egyptological publication of the first half of the century, John Gardner Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (6 vols., 1837–41) avoided discussions of Egyptian – or Christian and Jewish – religious matters, and in any case still depended heavily on classical writers. Baron Bunsen’s esoteric five-volume Egypt’s Place in World History (German volumes 1844–57, English translations 1848–67) invoked many of Champollion’s texts, but was seen to offer dangerously deep dates for Egyptian civilization; Regius Professor of Hebrew E. B. Pusey denounced the diplomat-scholar as “a rationalist” and intimated that he exhibited “very considerable leanings to something worse.”51 A. H. Layard’s finds, and Henry Rawlinson’s partial decipherment of Sennacerib’s account of the invasion of Judah, were tantalizing, but very few cuneiform tablets had yet been read (or readings agreed upon), and unresolvable theological disputes ensued.52 49

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Ker Porter, Travels in Georgia, Armenia, Persia, Ancient Babylon, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821). J. Talboys Wheeler, The Life and Travels of Herodotus in the Fifth Century before Christ: An Imaginary Biography Founded on Fact, Illustrative of the History, Manners, Religion, Literature, Art and Social Condition of the Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Babylonians, Hebrews, Scythians and Other Ancient Nations in the Days of Pericles and Nehemiah, vol. II (London: Longman, 1855), 368–82. David Gange, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922 (Oxford University Press, 2013), 79–89, 95–120. Pusey quoted, 100. Mark W. Chavales, ‘Assyriology and Biblical Studies: A Century and a Half of Tension’, in Mesopotamia and the Bible, ed. Mark W. Chavales and K. Lawson Younger, Jr. (Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 21–67 (at 26–7). The main impact of one major work of Christian

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The English, it seems, were not alone in their squeamishness about depending on newer ‘oriental’ sources and ‘orientalist’ interpreters. There is virtually no sign of the new finds in works such as Austrian orientalist Johann Jahn’s five-volume Biblische Archäologie (1797), which was condensed and translated into Latin and English and enjoyed considerable popularity into the 1870s. Jahn instead drew chiefly on biblical and classical sources (“particularly Herodotus”) to throw light on biblical worlds and to answer “the objections of the opposers of Revelation, the greater part of which originate in ignorance of antiquity.”53 We can also see the longevity enjoyed by classical authorities in the continued publication of works that continued to collect the older data, including Berlin geography professor Carl Ritter’s twenty-one-volume Erdkunde, begun in 1817 and completed in 1852. Ritter did include the results of modern travelers, as did Ferdinand Hoefer in his 1852 Chaldée, Assyrie, Médie, Babylonie, Mésopotamie, Phénicie, Palmyrène, which compiled classical and travelers’ accounts of these lands. But both of these works treated ancient historians and geographers as at least as reliable as modern travelers. Among the ancients, as usual, playing a starring role was Herodotus, whom Ritter hailed as “the father” of his own field, geography. Herodotus also took center stage in one of the odder defences of the scriptures penned in the 1820s, Isaac Taylor’s The Process of Historical Proof Exemplified and Explained, with Observations on the Peculiar Points of the Christian Evidence (1828). In this curious volume one can observe Christian resentment of Voltaire’s challenges to the historicity of Near Eastern antiquity still at work, more than a half century after the publication of The Philosophy of History. Taylor, a polymath-philosopher, opened the book with a hearty defence of Herodotus’ accuracy against Voltaire’s ignorant and flippant criticisms, using Larcher as his guide. A hundred pages in, Taylor was ready to spring his trap: having seen how wrong Voltaire was about Herodotus, who could believe his attacks on Holy Scripture?54 The rest of the book was then devoted to demonstrating the

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orientalism, Edward Robinson’s topographical Biblical Researches in Palestine and in the Adjacent Regions (2 vols., 1841) would be felt after the publication of the enlarged edition, in 1857. Jahn’s Archäologie was condensed and translated into Latin. I cite here from one of the many English-language translations of the Latin abridgment: Johann Jahn, Jahn’s Biblical Archaeology, trans. Thomas C. Upham, 2nd ed (New York: J. Leavitt, 1827), 2, 3. Isaac Taylor, The Process of Historical Proof Exemplified and Explained, with Observations on the Peculiar Points of the Christian Evidence (London: B. J. Holdsworth, 1828), 108, 110. This book, interestingly, conceded to Voltaire the problematic nature of Herodotus’ first books and defended his trustworthiness on the basis of his last five.

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credibility of the latter. The very next year, Taylor produced a 766-page translation of Herodotus “for general readers” with the intent of assisting “the middle ranks of society” to “retain their relative position in the scale of intelligence,” given the spread of education to the lower classes. This was to be “a family book,” with minor omissions that only the prurient would regret.55 Why exactly he felt called to this endeavor is unclear, but it evidently made sense to a writer who would go on to write against enthusiasm, Methodism, and the Tractarians, and to write books about Hebrew poetry and the Pentateuch.56 Herodotus, indeed, continued to be deployed heavily by the faithful right through the century’s first half, at the very least, even as Realien and deciphered inscriptions began very gradually to creep in. Although a host of new religious travelogues – some of them illustrated – began to hit the market by the 1830s, many of these were too expensive for the vast majority of readers, or consisted of illustrations made, or ‘corrected’ and enhanced, by persons who had never visited the Near East.57 Those like the very popular Evidence of the Truth of the Christian Religion derived from the Literal Fulfilment of Prophecy (1823) of Alexander Keith drew on recent travelogues to supplement internal biblical evidence with generalized proofs that Palestine, Assyria, and Egypt had been fruitful in biblical times.58 Mary Fawley Maude’s Scripture Manners and Customs (1841) and her follow-up, Scripture Natural History (1848), provided a host of ethnographic, botanical, and zoological detail to document the endurance of biblical tent pegs and mulberry groves, despite the depredations of the Arabs. For those who could afford it – or who were treated to increasingly detailed geography lessons in Sunday schools – this literature supplemented or replaced many of the details offered by ancient travelers. But this literature still depended on the scriptures, or classical writers, to demonstrate the conditions in antiquity; and it did nothing to clarify ancient chronologies or nail down most biblical locations. 55

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Isaac Taylor, ‘Preface’, in Herodotus: Translated from the Greek for the Use of General Readers, trans. Isaac Taylor (London: Holdsworth & Ball, 1829), iii, ix. Thomas Seccombe, ‘Taylor, Isaac (1787–1865)’, in Dictionary of National Biography, 1885– 1900, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/Taylor,_ Isaac_(1787-1865). Eitan Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture, 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 64–70. Keith interestingly especially valued the testimony of Volney, an unbeliever, who accidentally confirmed the truth of prophecies; “He who so artfully could pervert the truth, falls the victim of facts stated by himself.” Alexander Keith, Evidence of the Truth of the Christian Religion derived from the Literal Fulfilment of Prophecy, Particularly as Illustrated by the History of the Jews, and by the Discoveries of Recent Travelers, 3rd edn (Edinburgh: Waugh & Iness, 1828), 224n.

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W. C. Taylor’s 1838 Illustrations of the Bible from the Monuments of Egypt did draw on costly new Egyptological publications, recognizing that these offered “not only valuable illustrations of the earliest stages of civilization, but that they afforded important, because undesigned, confirmations of the historical veracity of the Old Testament.”59 Taylor’s illustrations came from the publications of Champollion, the Italian Egyptologist Ipppolito Rosellini, and the French traveler and naturalist Frédéric Cailliaud, but all of his textual citations were to the Bible itself – or to Herodotus. In his 1841 Die Bücher Moses und Ägypten, similarly, Berlin professor of theology Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg argued that it was irresponsible for biblical scholars not to take account of the new discoveries, and did incorporate some material from the publications of the French expedition, from Rosellini’s I monumenti dell’Egitto e della Nubia (1832–44), and from Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs. But the bulk of Hengstenberg’s proof for his claim that Egyptian monuments ratified Old Testament accounts came, once again, from Herodotus’ Book 2, and Herodotean fans such as Creuzer, Creuzer’s favorite student Hermann Bähr, and the universal historian (and yet another Herodotean devoté) A. H. L. Heeren.60 Typical for Hengstenberg, and for argumentation at the time, were statements such as the following, responding to Indologist Peter von Bohlen’s claim that Egyptians rarely ate meat: “How can one doubt that the Egyptians consumed meat dishes, since Herodotus offers a multitude of proofs for this?”61 Not surprisingly, Hengstenberg’s conclusion was not only that “Egyptian antiquity offers no testimony against the books of Moses.” In fact: “The unbiased [unbefangene] critic will from now on not be able to avoid recognizing that the relationship between the Pentateuch and Egypt is one of the most important arguments for its credibility and for Moses’ authorship.”62 The astute reader would perhaps also be unable to 59

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W. C. Taylor, Illustrations of the Bible from the Monuments of Egypt (London: Charles Tilt, 1838), vii. Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, Die Bücher Moses und Ägypten (Berlin: Ludwig Oehmigke, 1841). Hengstenberg’s volume was largely a polemic against the work of the Indophile Peter von Bohlen, whose 1835 Die Genesis historisch-kritisch erläutert had suggested problematic relationships between the text and its presumptive place of origin, and also a swipe at Young Hegelian (philosophical) biblical criticism. He also looked back to the eighteenth century for source materials, for example to the work of J. D. Michaelis. Hengstenberg, Die Bücher Moses, 8. Hengstenberg, Die Bücher Moses, 21, 236. Another example of a similar text from this period is: Reginald Stuart Poole, Horae Aegyptiacae, or The Chronology of Ancient Egypt, discovered from Astronomical and Hieroglyphic Records upon its Monuments (London, John Murray, 1851); Poole argues that while his results agree in many points with ancient authors, especially with

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avoid noting that the authority who bridged the gaps in Hengstenberg’s historicizing operation was none other than Guérin du Rocher’s go-to source, Herodotus. Following the leadership of Félicité Robert de Lamennais in the 1820s, French liberal Catholics looked to a universalist history of primitive revelation as a means of establishing the ‘supernatural’ facts of the Old Testament (and the traditions and authority of the church in establishing the truth of the New Testament). This approach offered an openness to ancient Near Eastern materials harnessed, as in Creuzer’s Symbolik, to an anti-rationalist agenda, and imbued with confidence that universal concordances would and could be found.63 Lamennais and his followers, however, took little notice of the new orientalism until the 1830s, inspired by the work of the Indologist and historian of Buddhism Eugène Burnouf and especially the epigrapher, numismatist, and proto-archaeologist Charles Lenormant. Lenormant had himself accompanied Champollion to Egypt in 1828 and had also traveled to then almost unmapped Morea with the French expedition in 1829. He was thus well placed to incorporate material remains, and as a keen believer in the interconnectedness of the ancient Mediterranean, he had no time for liberal philhellenism. In an 1837 course of lectures on ancient history, Lenormant expressed his support for Creuzer’s inquiries, insisting, however, that a secure method and firsthand sources were needed to remove the Orient’s veil.64 Now, thanks to Champollion, he wrote, Egypt was yielding secure data; Ker Porter had made it possible for readers to walk through Babylon and the city of Nimrod; Bopp and Schlegel were working out the secrets of IndoEuropean descent, and cuneiform would soon be deciphered. Travel reports had so marvelously confirmed the testimonies of Herodotus and Hippocratus that one could trust these authors even on “particulars that modern voyagers haven’t yet verified.”65 It was time to dispense with unproven generalities and theories, and to seek certitude on the relationships between the Greeks and others. This would especially be a job for the French, as the Germans were too pedantic, and (philhellenic) opinion there was too tyrannical.66 In Asian geography Lenormant gave Herodotus full

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Herodotus and Manetho, his most important finding is that they vindicate the Bible, “shewing that the monuments of Egypt in no manner, on no point, contradict that sacred book, but confirm it” (210). François Laplanche, La Bible en France entre mythe et critique (XVIe–XIXe siècle) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 116–22. Charles Lenormant, Cours d’histoire ancienne (introduction a l’histoire de l’Asie occidentale) (Paris: J. J. Angé, 1837), 6–10. Lenormant, Cours, 14. 66 Lenormant, Cours, 29, 33.

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credit, arguing that his digressions were crucial to the Greeks of his time who needed exact knowledge of their rivals in order to calculate their own forces, and were helpful to understand modern Asia as well.67 In a move that would be widely imitated by Christian writers in the future, Lenormant argued that the faithful need not fear the same sort of fact-checking of the Bible. Not all criticism was destructive, Lenormant wrote, separating the faithful exegetes (such as Richard Simon) from meanspirited sceptics such as Hobbes and Spinoza. Indeed, those who sought to defend purely literal readings only opened the door to specious accusations that the Bible was full of lies; faith and critical scholarship could be complementary, as demonstrated in the case of archaeological work: “Since the progress of archaeological and oriental studies has expanded its field of research, the importance of the Bible hasn’t been diminished one bit,” he instructed; and in fact, the more Europeans have learned about the ancient Orient, the more the providential mission of the Jews becomes clear.68 The best defence was, in fact, investment and trust in more science; objectivity would, in the end, obliterate blind scepticism. Charles Lenormant wrote many other works in his relatively short life, which ended abruptly in 1859, as did that of Otfried Müller twenty years earlier, while collecting his own data in Greece. Born in 1837, Charles’ son François, trained from an early age to follow in his father’s ‘archaeological’ footsteps, would prove an even more productive and popular Christian scholar. Lenormant fils devoted the early part of his career to locating and publishing Greek coins and inscriptions, in the course of which endeavors he committed a considerable number of forgeries;69 but it is his ‘orientalist’ work, to which he turned in about 1865, that concerns us here. His first work in this genre, Manuel d’histoire ancienne de l’Orient jusqu’aux guerres médique (1867), would prove to be his most influential.70 Meant, at first, to replace the outdated schoolbooks on preclassical history used in France’s elite schools, by the third edition Lenormant had decided to create a separate, concise edition for students and a lengthier full edition for clerical scholars and lay autodidacts who wanted to learn about the progress made recently in oriental ‘archaeology.’ Like his father, Lenormant the younger assured his readers that he was a Christian, for whom, as for all 67 69

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Lenormant, Cours, 39, 115. 68 Lenormant, Cours, 118, 124. See Olivier Masson, “François Lenormant (1837–1883), un érudit déconcertant,” in Museum Helveticum 50/1 (1993): 44–60. He was working on a ninth edition, to be much expanded and with numerous illustrations, when he died in 1883. J. De Witte, ‘Notice sur François Lenormant, Associé de L’Académie’, L’Annuaire de l’Académie royale de Belgique 53 (1887): 13.

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Christians, “the whole of ancient history was a preparation for, and [all of] modern history was the consequence of, the divine sacrifice of Golgotha.”71 But his faith did not stand in the way of accepting critical discoveries; as he would put it in a later text, “this is a book of science; read it, and find a single point where my Christian convictions are an embarrassment, an obstacle to my free research as a scholar, or forced me to refuse adopting the results clearly proved by critical scholars.”72 Writing in 1867, François Lenormant was able to draw on a more extensive warehouse of orientalist work than was his father; available to him now were the excavation reports of A. H. Layard and P. E. Botta from Nineveh and Babylon, Karl Richard Lepsius’ great haul of artifacts and information from his Egyptian expedition of 1842–5, and C. J. von Bunsen’s five-volume work on Egypt, extensively based on hieroglyphic sources. The material was timely, for Lenormant fils was also writing in the age of D. F. Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Ernest Renan, all of them insisting upon the ‘mythical’ nature of both halves of the Bible. Lenormant collected and crunched a considerable amount of recent orientalist scholarship on subjects ranging from ancient Abdera to Zuzim, a ‘primitive’ Palestinian people, and rounded out his analysis with an extensive discussion of the habits and lineages of ‘Aryan’ peoples. Having demonstrated his wide-ranging erudition, he felt confident readers would be convinced that “Science has retaken possession of the ancient world and ages that had disappeared.”73 But by no means was this a science that could do without Herodotus. Indeed, in the English translation of volume II of Lenormant’s Manual the translator included appendices listing passages of only two sources; the list of passages from the Histories is only slightly shorter than the one of scriptural passages.74 That at mid-century the time had not yet come for Herodotus to lose his function in securing the victory of Near Eastern history over scepticism can be demonstrated by the most important nineteenth-century English edition of The Histories, overseen by the Oxford divine George Rawlinson. In fact, the idea for this project seems to come from the entrepreneurial Scottish publisher John Murray, who had made a market splash with 71

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Charles Lenormant, Manuel d’histoire ancienne de l’Orient jusqu’aux guerres médiques (Paris: A. Levy, 1867), xxiv. François Lenormant, Les origines de l’histoire d’après la Bible et les traditions des peuples orientaux, 2nd edn (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1880), xxi. Lenormant, Manuel, xi, xvi. François Lenormant and E. Chevallier, A Manual of the Ancient History of the East, to the Commencement of the Median Wars, vol. XI: Medes and Persians, Phoenicians, and Arabians, 2nd edn (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1871), 395.

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Gardner Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, in the 1830s, and in 1849 had published another blockbuster, Austen Henry Layard’s Nineveh and Its Remains. Murray’s first instinct had been to engage George’s far more famous older brother Henry, who was a great celebrity in the later 1840s, having played a major if sensationalized role in the defense of Kandahar, served as a director of the East India Company, and discovered and translated the Behistun inscription, which many had hailed as proof of Herodotus’ veracity. As George reported many years later, Murray engaged Henry “to contribute a series of notes and essays on Oriental Antiquities to a work upon Herodotus in four large octavo volumes, which I had undertaken to edit, and Mr. Murray to give to the public when completed.”75 Murray had undoubtedly heard grumblings about the insufficiencies of existing English translations, and saw a profitable opportunity in producing an edition which could boast the collaborative contributions of Henry Rawlinson and Gardner Wilkinson; George – a lowly tutor with a growing family and good Greek – probably signed on in the hopes of making money and connecting himself more closely with his famous brother.76 Murray’s instincts and George’s ambitions would be richly rewarded in years to come. Published in four volumes in 1858–60, Rawlinson’s translation,77 like Larcher’s, devoted its greatest attention to the first four books, even though he admitted that here Herodotus was often at the mercy of his informants, who sometimes deliberately or unwittingly led him astray, while with respect to the last five books, Herodotus’ accuracy was such that there “he has almost the authority of a contemporary historian.”78 The apologetic intent of Rawlinson’s translation was sufficiently clear for the ambitious (but not so clubbable) medieval historian E. A. Freeman to sneer in a venomous review in 1862, “One would fancy, from his volumes, that the object of Herodotus was to write a history of Assyria, Persia, and Egypt, with a special view of confirming the Old-Testament history.”79 But this 75

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George Rawlinson, A Memoir of Major-General Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (London: Longmans, Green, 1898), 163. Thomas Harrison beautifully contrasts the personalities and ambitions of the two brothers in ‘Exploring Virgin Fields: Henry and George Rawlinson on Ancient and Modern Orient’, in Ancient Ethnography: New Approaches, ed. Eran Almagor and Joseph Skinner (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 223–55. George Rawlinson, The History of Herodotus, 4 vols. (London: John Murray: 1858–60). Rawlinson, History of Herodotus, vol. I, 72. Anon., ‘Herodotus and his Commentators’, in National Review 15 (July–Oct. 1862), 293. Freeman also expressed the hesitancy of many non-orientalists like himself to accept conclusions experts had drawn “without knowing whether they are obtained by the only methods which we can accept as safe” (286), that is, canons of philological criticism. Although

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intent would be revealed by the author himself in his extensive use of the translation and notes in his other work, beginning already in his 1859 Bampton lectures, titled The Historical Evidences of the Truth of the Scripture Records Stated Anew, with Special Reference to the Doubts and Discoveries of Modern Times. The preface of these fascinating – and extensively footnoted – lectures addressed itself directly to the serious threat posed by the German ‘Mythical School’ (that is, D. F. Strauss and company) which spread the nefarious idea that no objective standpoint remained on which a theological science could be built. “Meanwhile [the author’s] own studies, which have lain for the last eight or nine years almost exclusively in the field of Ancient History, had convinced him more and more of the thorough truthfulness and faithful accuracy of the historical Scriptures.” Cuneiform and hieroglyphical studies, Rawlinson wrote, had multiplied “minute points of agreement between the sacred and the profane.”80 Distressed by the recent critical tendencies fomented especially by B. G. Niebuhr and K. O. Müller “to push doubt and incredulity beyond due limits,” Rawlinson undertook to respond by “meet[ing] the reasoning of the historical sceptics on their own ground,” that is, with external evidence.81 This evidence – lavishly annotated in the author’s notes – was heavily drawn from the author’s Herodotus, complemented by lashings of Eusebius, and Bunsen’s Egypt; that Rawlinson’s notes contained attacks on F. A. Wolf, Müller, Niebuhr, and C. G. Lewis made the lectures something of a general defence of universal prehistory and oral tradition against the critical school tout court.82 Like the Lenormants, Rawlinson was confident that more progress in oriental studies would wholly discredit the sceptics: “As discovery proceeds, these points of agreement are multiplied; obscurities clear up; difficulties are solved; doubts vanish.”83

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this review was published anonymously, Freeman later admitted to writing it in his Historical Essays, vol. II, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1880), p. viii. George Rawlinson, The Historical Evidences of the Truth of the Scripture Records Stated Anew, with Special Reference to the Doubts and Discoveries of Modern Times (Boston, MA: Gould and Lincoln, 1860), 12. Rawlinson, Historical Evidences, 29, 38. As Thomas Harrison has noted, for George as for Henry Rawlinson (though for different reasons), “ancient history was one undifferentiated field, embracing the Near East, Egypt, Israel and the classical Greek and Roman worlds.” Harrison, ‘Exploring Virgin Fields’, 241. Rawlinson, Historical Evidences, 128–9. A reviewer in The Westminster Review was not at all convinced, arguing that his proofs in no way confirmed “either the character of supernatural revelation or the genuineness and authenticity so confidently ascribed to the Pentateuch.” “The moral effect of the Bampton Lectures for 1859 is to establish beyond the reach of cavil, that neither Sir Henry Rawlinson, nor any one of his associates in discovery, has done anything

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Indeed, George Rawlinson, who was elected Camden Professor by convocation in 1861, in the middle of the Essays and Reviews controversy, retained this confidence for the rest of his very prolific career, and made it his mission to convey these historical evidences to the public at large, churning out myriad other histories of the Near East in subsequent years. His Herodotus – together with copious citations from François Lenormant, Bunsen, and others – provided Rawlinson with the ‘facts’ related in these histories, making them, in his view, more trustworthy than the speculative work of the philosophes and the higher critics; if some thought his work pedantic, this was a price Rawlinson was willing to pay to secure real, historical truths. “To deal with facts is thought to be a humdrum and commonplace employment of the intellect,” he wrote in introducing his synthetic Religions of the Ancient World (1883), “one fitted for the dull ages when men were content to plod, and when progress, development, ‘the higher criticism,’ were unknown.” Today we need to be patient, as the Orient is only gradually divulging its true histories: “While the facts of ancient religions are only just emerging from the profound obscurity that has hitherto rested upon them, fancy is busy constructing schemes and systems, which have about as much reality as the imaginations of a novelist or the day-dreams of an Alnaschar.”84 In the book’s final sentence, Rawlinson declared that the scientific method had vindicated his theory of ur-monotheism: “The only theory which accounts for all the facts – for the unity as well as the diversity of Ancient Religions, is that of a primeval revelation, variously corrupted through the manifold and multiform deterioration of human nature in different races and places.”85 Rawlinson’s translation of the Histories had reached its fourth edition by 1880, and his works – including A Manual of Ancient History (1869), histories of Persia (1875) and Phoenicia (1889), and a two-volume History of Ancient Egypt (1881) –continued to pour out in new editions. Meanwhile, across the channel, his near contemporary Georg Ebers was producing popular works of a different kind, historical novels and illustrated travelogues that gave the biblical world, and especially Egypt, both greater reality and deeper popular appeal. A consideration of Ebers’ oeuvre would take us far afield, but it is perhaps instructive to note that when, in the early 1860s the

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towards the demolition of Rationalism.” Anon., ‘Rawlinson’s Bampton Lectures for 1859’, Westminister Review (new series) 18/1 (July 1860): 33–49 (at 37, 44). George Rawlinson, The Religions of the Ancient World (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883), 1–2. Alnaschar is a peddler in the 1,001 Nights whose dreams of grandeur lead him to destroy the little he has. Rawlinson, Religions, 244.

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young Egyptologist despaired of writing a sufficiently fulsome and concrete Egyptian history on the basis of Egyptian sources, he instead wrote a historical novel based almost exclusively on Herodotus’ Book 2.86 Ebers’ slightly later scholarly work Aegypten und die Bücher Mose’s (1868) partook of an emerging trend amongst Egyptologists and Assyriologists to highlight the contributions of their fields by doing without the well-known classical sources, and made an even bolder assault on theologians who, he argued, could no longer monopolize the work of explicating the biblical world. Hengstenberg’s 1841 work – which had boasted the same title – lacked the objectivity and expertise that Egyptologists could now provide, for Egyptian documents and writings, many older than the Old Testament, had “left behind a legacy whose worth for the understanding of Genesis and the Exodus cannot be over-estimated.” Ebers was pleased to conclude that the Egyptian documents did bear out the scriptures, remarkably so in the case of the Joseph story; at last, the constant ‘rapport’ Guérin wished to show between the Hebrew Bible and profane Egyptian history could now be documented without recourse to Herodotus as an intermediary.87 In the 1870s, however, this remained a tenuous claim; indeed, in that decade, the Herodotean popularizer George Swayne could still write: “Of all the nine books of Herodotus, the second . . . is incomparably the one of deepest interest to the modern reader, as giving glimpses, such as are found nowhere else but in Scripture, of the infancy of the human race, and as propounding important scientific problems, which can, if ever, only find their solution in remote futurity” (my italics).88 In his very long essay “On the Bearings of Egyptian History upon the Pentateuch,” published in the official set of commentaries on biblical books sponsored by the bishops and clergy of the Anglican church, Frederic Charles Cook, Canon of Exeter, deployed Ebers’ work along with other Egyptological material to suggest that the contradictions and lack of positive evidence offered by Egyptologists simply reaffirmed the need to embrace the historical truth of the scriptures.89 But E. B. Pusey, in his last years, had begun to interest 86

87 88 89

See Suzanne L. Marchand, ‘Georg Ebers, Sympathetic Egyptologist’, in For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton, ed. Ann Blair and Anja-Silva Goering (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 917–32. Georg Ebers, Aegypten und die Bücher Mose’s (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1868), 295. Swayne, Herodotus, 40. Frederick Charles Cook, ‘On the Bearings of Egyptian History upon the Pentateuch’, in The Holy Bible, According to the Authorized Version (A.D. 1611), With an Explanatory and Critical Commentary, ed. F. C. Cook, vol. I, part 1: Genesis–Exodus (London: John Murray, 1871), 443–72.

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himself in Assyriology, and the esoterically inclined Samuel Birch, on the founding of a new archaeological society to work in Egypt, Palestine, and the eastern Mediterranean, insisted upon calling it The Society of Biblical Archaeology, in order “to attract subscriptions.”90 In the wake of highly publicized excavations at Nineveh, Nimrud, and Babylon, and especially after George Smith’s sensational decipherment of the Babylonian Flood tablets (1872), Christians were beginning to find the new orientalism more comforting than threatening.91 Another sign of the changing times was the coming to prominence of Fulcran Vigouroux, who had studied with and succeeded Arthur-Marie Le Hir as professor of scripture at the Saint-Sulpice.92 In 1873, Vigouroux was charged by the Bishop of Paris with overseeing a new French edition of the Bible, published in forty volumes (1873–85). This edition was to display the growth of erudition since the seventeenth century, and it was as a spin-off of this work that Vigouroux decided to provide more ammunition to Bible defenders by surveying the most recent Near Eastern finds. Published in 1877, the first edition of Vigouroux’s La Bible et les découvertes modernes en Palestine, en Égypte, et en Assyrie (2 vols.) assured readers that the pious author was offering them a fully ‘scientific’ treatise, a cornucopia of what he called “preuves indirectes” of the historical truth of the scriptures.93 As such, Vigouroux’s work was intended to counter the ‘rationalist’ attacks on the biblical books of the sort offered by De Wette or Julius Wellhausen, or worse (because local rivals always are), the Saint-Simonian Hellenist Gustave d’Eichthal and the polymath anti-Semite Jules Soury.94 Vigouroux’s means of answering these higher critical challenges was to juxtapose to them solid proofs of the historical truth of the scriptures, now to be primarily drawn not from classical scholars but from the new Egyptology and Assyriology.95 Relentlessly he surveyed biblical stories, 90 91

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Sayce, Reminiscences (London: Macmillan, 1923), 54–5. See H. V. Hilprecht, ‘The Resurrection of Assyria and Babylonia’, in Explorations in Bible Lands during the 19th Century (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1903), especially 87–200. Smith belonged to a generation of orientalists who certainly did hope to contribute to biblical studies. As Hilprecht (himself a Christian Assyriologist and excavator) wrote of Smith in 1895: “It was particularly his earnest desire to contribute something towards a better understanding of the Old Testament which influenced him to devote his whole time to the study of Assyrian monuments” (190). Le Hir was also the teacher of Ernest Renan, and famously the man who introduced him, and many other French seminarians, to German biblical criticism. For e.g., Fulcran Vigouroux, La Bible et les découvertes modernes en Palestine, en Égypte, et en Assyrie, vol. II, 6th edn (Paris: Berche et Tralin, 1896), 5. Direct proof was the church’s unwavering, continuous tradition of asserting scriptural truth (592). Vigorous, La Bible, 41, 197–213. Vigouroux gleefully returned, whenever possible, to Ebers’ claims, seeing those as justification of the position that Egyptology proved biblical truth.

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from the Joseph story to the Exodus to the Babylonian Captivity, showing that the details of biblical accounts tallied with now scientifically proven ethnographic and architectural details. Although he now had much less need to depend on Herodotus than did Guérin du Rocher, the father of history was called on often, especially in the Egyptian sections, and deployed to confirm details when inscriptions or excavation materials were lacking. By the time of the sixth edition in 1896, this vigorously apologetic work had swollen to four fat volumes, and the latest archaeological and philological works dominated. One of Vigouroux’s students, Alfred Loisy, had actually thrown himself into the study of Assyriology, in the hopes of responding to Renan with more science, and less outward apologetics, than he found in Vigouroux.96 For similar reasons, in the 1890s, the British Methodist James Hope Moulton and the Swedish Lutheran Nathan Söderblom both took to studying Avestan.97 The balance of proof had shifted to the new finds, not because Herodotus had shown himself lacking – indeed he was almost daily demonstrating his geographic and ethnological utility – but because the apologists now felt they had found a stronger, more authentic, external source of historical truth.

IV. The Triumph of Archaeological Apologetics David Gange is right to flag the period after Julius Wellhausen’s highercritical classic, Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1873), as the period in which Egyptology (and Assyriology) “became a powerful component in a broad fight-back of popular religion against received ‘irreligious’ tendencies in British intellectual life.”98 He also rightly underscores the seemingly unrelated heroicization of Heinrich Schliemann at about the same time; in fact, Schliemann’s finds at Hissarlik and Mycenae were seen by Christian believers – and not just in England! – as clinching proof that the hypersceptics and rationalists had been wrong. George Smith’s Flood tablets, published in 1872, provided yet another vindication (though also posed the thorny chronological problem of which Flood account came first). 96

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Jeffery R. Morrow, Alfred Loisy and Modern Biblical Studies (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2019), 58–72. Eric J. Sharpe, Nathan Söderblom and the Study of Religion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 41–48. Gange, Dialogues with the Dead, 163; Thomas Harrison also argues that by the fin de siècle, “the evidence of archaeology had, if anything, gained in power as a defense against biblical criticism” (‘Exploring Virgin Fields’, 236).

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Together, these real-historical ‘evidences’ showed that there was a true history of fabulous times, one that could not be written off as mythical. One could, indeed, reconcile faith and science, if not by way of evolutionary biology (by which most Christians were as yet wholly unconvinced), then certainly by orientalist scholarship. We can see this from the rising status, and popularity, of biblical, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian archaeology, and of those who deployed it. Vigouroux, in France, became a leading figure, publishing a four-volume attack on rationalist criticism (1886–90), and seeing his Manuel biblique (1879) for seminarians through 12 editions and 60,000 copies by 1902.99 In that year he was tapped to serve as secretary of the newly minted Pontifical Biblical Commission, established by the now ailing Pope Leo XIII to ensure the proper interpretation of the scriptures in the light of the massive new influx of information about the biblical world of the last decades. The Egyptian Exploration Fund (EEF), Gange argued, garnered public support and succeeded in extending and professionalizing its scholarly work precisely because Egyptology now seemed useful to believers, excavations in Egypt, according to the EEF’s honorary secretary, providing “a fresh nail” in higher criticism’s coffin.100 The German world may have been somewhat less given to such antisceptical scientific endeavors, but works such as Heinrich Brugsch’s Steininschrift und Bibelwort (1891), which invoked Acts 7:22 as its epigram, also sought to advertise Egyptology’s utility to writers of biblical history, and proved valuable for writers such as the Lutheran clergyman Hermann Josef Heyes. Heyes’ Bibel und Ägypten: Abraham und seine Nachkommen in Ägypten (1904) drew on Brugsch, Ebers, Flinders Petrie, and other recent Egyptological work, hoping “to strengthen readers in their conviction that the Old Testament is a historical source of the first order and that occupying oneself with the monuments of the ancient Orient ever increasingly demonstrates their high value.”101 And in the course of the ‘Babel und Bibel’ debates, Friedrich Delitzsch learned, to his frustration, just how eager the population was for science to confirm, rather than challenge, the priority and uniqueness of the people of Israel.102 The popularizing orientalism of Archibald Henry Sayce carries our story to the end of the century, and in some ways to the end of our account of Herodotus’ role as historian of the Hebrew people. Having taught himself 99 100 101

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Laplanche, La Bible en France, 170. Gange, Dialogues with the Dead, 175–95, Herbert McClure quoted at 191. Hermann Josef Heyes, Bibel und Ägypten: Abraham und seine Nachkommen in Ägypten (Münster: Aschendorffschen Buchhandlung 1904), vi; Vigouroux, La Bible 22. On this controversy, see Marchand, German Orientalism, 244–51.

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hieroglyphics and cuneiform as a young teenager, Sayce also began to study Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit, and in 1870 was ordained and appointed a tutor at Queen’s College, Oxford. He spent much of his early career writing for the press and traveling; although he was appointed professor of comparative philology in 1876, he gave this up in 1890, and thereafter spent most of his time in Egypt.103 He made his academic mark, however, chiefly by cobbling together texts and monuments to identify and give life to a fullblown Hittite Empire. As a schoolboy, Sayce, by his own account, devoured Rawlinson’s Herodotus, and one of his key Hittite monuments was the large carved figure in the Pass of Karabel Herodotus had recorded at 2.106. Nonetheless, in 1883, the now confident Assyriologist offered his own annotations on Books 1 to 3 in a book which marks a watershed in Herodotean reception.104 Rather recklessly, at a time Flinders Petrie was demonstrating Herodotus’ (relative) accuracy in his depictions of Naucratis and Daphnae, Sayce’s introduction asserted that new ‘oriental’ evidence “is on the whole against our author”; Herodotus had been vain and credulous (with respect to the Egyptian “half-caste dragomen” he had called priests), a mean-spirited plagiarist, and even a deliberate liar with respect to his travels. In Egypt he was “a mere tourist,” and alluding to Voltaire’s test, Sayce argued that we “can seldom tell what he really did see himself, or what he is not merely making the reader believe he had seen.” “Consequently,” Sayce concluded, “it is only where his statements are confirmed by the native monuments which modern research has brought to light that we can rely upon him . . . Egyptology and Assyriology have made it impossible for us ever again to accept the unsupported assertions of Herodotos [sic] in matters pertaining to the East.”105 Sayce’s character assassination resulted in furious denunciations by classicists (and orientalists); chastened by the experience, and perhaps 103

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Battiscombe Gunn (revised by O. R. Gurney), ‘Sayce, Archibald Henry (1845–1933)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published online 23 September 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093 /ref:odnb/35965. On the controversy, see Thomas Harrison and Joseph Skinner, ‘Introduction’, in Idem, eds., Herodotus in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 1– 19 (at 13–16). Sayce, Reminiscences, 224–5. Sayce notes that in 1882 he was regarded as a member of German critical theology and feared that Gladstone considered him too “unsafe” to receive the Oxford chair in Hebrew at Pusey’s death (Reminiscences, 213). S. R. Driver in fact received the appointment, which allowed Sayce, in his memoirs, to crow: “Little did either Gladstone or myself then foresee that the time would come when Driver would be the protagonist of a ‘German’ higher criticism, and I should be regarded as a champion of orthodoxy, or that in the nineties Gladstone would be my associate in writing an introduction to an American illustrated Bible” (214). Sayce, The Ancient Empires of the East: Herodotos I.–III. (London: Macmillan, 1883), xxi–xxxii (quotations at xxxii).

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hoping to prove his orthodox credentials, the Assyriologist next turned to what he called “quasi-theology,” a commission from the Religious Tract Society to write a short volume on the relevance of recent archaeological finds to the Old Testament. The Society offered him what Sayce perceived to be a lavish sum for a work that took him all of three weeks to write, but he subsequently discovered that he had been robbed; “The book,” he reported in his memoirs, “passed through many editions and was translated into a good many languages, European and Asiatic, attracting numerous imitations both in England and on the Continent.”106 Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments announced quite boldly that a new era in apologetics had opened. For millennia, Sayce wrote, scholarly readers had sought reliable evidence that would assist them in understanding the Hebrew Bible’s deeper meanings and its flaws – in vain. “Assailants and defenders had long to content themselves with such evidence as could be derived from a study of the book itself, or from the doubtful traditions of ancient nations, as reported by the writers of Greece and Rome. Such reports,” he wrote, departing from attempts to sort the more and less credible reports of classical writers and fragmentary ‘oriental’ texts compiled by Eusebius and other early Christian writers, were alike imperfect and untrustworthy . . . It was even a question of whether any credit could be given to the fragments of Egyptian, Babylonian, and Phoenician mythology or history extracted by Christian apologists from the lost works of native authors who wrote in Greek . . . All that is changed now. The marvellous discoveries of the last halfcentury have thrown a flood of light on the ancient oriental world . . . A dead world has been called again to life by the spade of the excavator and the patient labour of the decipherer.107

Highlighting, not surprisingly, cuneiform finds, Sayce denounced the “spirit of scepticism which had rejected the early legends of Greece and Rome” and had also “determined that the sacred histories themselves were but a collection of myths and fables.”108 But the stones had cried out, at last, and the critics were overthrown, above all by the progress of Assyriology. This brief text proved to be Sayce’s proof of orthodoxy and invitation to a lucrative next decade of publications, the most important of which would be his much longer 1894 treatise, The Higher Criticism and the Verdict of 106 107

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Sayce, Reminiscences, 226. Sayce, Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments, 2nd edn (London: Religious Tract Society, 1884), 18–19. Sayce, Fresh Light, 1.

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the Monuments. Like Fresh Light, The Higher Criticism was widely circulated, passing through three editions in the year of its publication, and five more by 1915. Once again Sayce’s ‘monuments’ were mostly cuneiform tablets and inscriptions, especially the Tell-el-Amarna correspondence; Sayce also relied heavily on Eduard Glaser’s newly found South Arabian inscriptions, and the excavations of Flinders Petrie and Édouard Naville. Classical authors, including Herodotus, were barely in evidence. But the argument was rather familiar, harkening back to Guérin du Rocher, and the aim was similar: to use an unimpeachable, “non-theological” source, to confirm the historical realities underlying the Hebrew scriptures against unlearned, overly sceptical nay-sayers. Sayce’s specific bêtes noirs were the German ‘higher critics,’ though he also took some swipes at Niebuhr, and English successors such as G. C. Lewis and George Cox, whose destructive method and classicizing prejudices had falsely invalidated all histories before the days of Solon. These critics had assumed the utter unlikeness of the oriental and the classical worlds, and the inferiority of the oriental, presuming “that no literature worthy of the name existed before Herodotus and Aeskhylos . . . That there was a literary age in the East long before there was a literary age in the West never entered the mind of the critic.”109 Sayce denounced the arrogance of such sceptics, who ought now to be retreating in the face of Schliemann’s rescuing of Greek prehistory, and the grand achievements of oriental archaeology, which had shown many of their claims to be utterly false.110 “The period of scepticism is over, the period of reconstruction has begun,” Sayce announced, and it was high time that both the older forms of apologetics and the higher criticism gave way to the facts of oriental archaeology.111 Thrilled by the success of this volume, Sayce would reprise his arguments in shorter form a few years later in his Monument Facts and Higher Critical Fancies (1900), and single out the Egyptian materials in his 1895 The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos, a book that perhaps closes the era 109 110 111

Sayce, The Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments (London: SPCK, 1894), 14. Sayce, Higher Criticism, 561. Sayce, Higher Criticism, 25, 562–3. Of course, his claims did not stand uncontradicted; a knowledgeable reviewer writing in The Edinburgh Review in 1894 outlined his many errors and sleights of hand and thought Sayce’s book had quite possibly “cast as much discredit on archaeology as it does on the less sound results of criticism.” Anon., rev. of The ‘Higher Criticism’ and the Verdict of the Monuments, Edinburgh Review, July 1894, 80–107. S. R. Driver agreed that Sayce had confused indirect historical elaboration of the context of pre-Mosaic and Mosaic times with proof of scriptural truth. S. R. Driver, ‘Part First: Hebrew Authority’, in Authority and Archaeology: Sacred and Profane: Essays on the Relation of Monuments to Biblical and Classical Literature, ed. David G. Hogarth, 1–152 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 150–1.

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of Herodotean apologetics we have been tracking. In this volume, Sayce argued that Herodotus was good for reporting “the folklore which grew and flourished in the meeting-place of East and West more than two thousand years ago, and in which lay the germs of much of the folk-lore of our own childhood.”112 But he completely separates the narrative of Egypt during biblical times from Herodotus’ much later reports. Having now spent a considerable time residing in Egypt, Sayce distrusted virtually all of the Greek’s supposedly eyewitness testimony: “He was but a tourist, not a man of science, and he cared more for the tales of his dragoman and novel sights than for scientific surveying and exactitude.”113 Herodotus was no historian – certainly not of the ancient Israelites in the relevant periods – and the scriptures did not need his questionable facts to uphold their historicity. While Sayce was again reproached for his unkind treatment of Herodotus,114 by the turn of the century many scholars in fact agreed with the Oxford don that Herodotus was useful and interesting in the main not as an historian of Egypt – or, unwittingly, of the Israelites – but as an ethnographer of Egypt in his own day. With the achievements of their fields now widely known and accepted, Assyriologists and Egyptologists could afford to give Herodotus his due.115 Christian writers had become confident enough in their use of new ‘non-theological’ sources to largely dispense with Herodotus. Archaeologists were persuaded by Flinders Petrie’s excavations that there remained vital hints in the Histories – but they were inclined to scepticism with respect to details. In the eighteenth century, wrote the British Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith in 1899, scholars had been almost entirely dependent on Herodotus to penetrate into the secrets of the forgotten past . . . To-day our museums are filled with the gatherings of a century, amongst which figure largely the mummies, the monuments, the furniture, the ornaments, the implements, and the papyri of Ancient Egypt; even the East End Londoner finds a peculiar fascination in contemplating these speaking relics of so remote a past. 112 113 114

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A. H. Sayce, The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos (London: Rivington, Percival, 1895), 285. Sayce, Egypt of the Hebrews, 189–90. Reviewing Sayce’s book in the first volume of The American Historical Review, J. F. McCurdy thought Sayce’s polemics against “good old Herodotos” were outdated; “The fact is that scholars have long since learned both to judge and to utilize the delightful old compiler, while those who are not scholars do not care whether he is accurate or not as long as he tells a good story.” McCurdy, rev. of The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos, American Historical Review 1/4 (July 1896): 702–4 (at 703). Herbert Cushing Tolman and James Henry Stevenson, Herodotus and the Empires of the East, Based on Nikel’s Herodot und die Keilinschriftforschung (New York: American Book Company, 1899), 5–11; Alfred Wiedemann (ed.), Herodots zweites Buch, mit sachlichen Erläuterungen (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1890).

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Newspapers and popular magazines spread abroad stories fresh from the papyrus on which they were written three thousand years ago. The authority of Herodotus is no longer what it once was, and it is from very different sources that the schoolboy of to-day imbibes his first notion of Egypt.116

Griffith, who inclined to a more severe position on Herodotus than his German contemporaries Alfred Wiedemann and Eduard Meyer, thought Herodotus, at least on Egypt, little more than “simply reporter to the Greek world of the current gossip of the traders, guides, and priests whom he met there, so far as it accorded with the plan of his history.” The writings of Herodotus, and the other Greeks, had, he conceded, given the study of the Orient prestige and inspired research into oriental subjects.117 But it was not Herodotus who had rescued the East from mythological status. Had the monuments of Egypt and Mesopotamia not been discovered and deciphered, he concluded, The critical faculty of endless Grotes and Niebuhrs could not decide finally whether to prefer Manetho and Berosus on the one hand, or Herodotus and Ctesias on the other. The history and archaeology of these unfortunate lands would, in fact, be a mass of more or less contradictory legend, the supposed bases of which would be discovered and re-discovered periodically in different forms until the happy day might dawn when scholars should cease at length from the hopeless and unprofitable quest.118

Of course, not all Egyptologists and Assyriologists have ever liked the idea of having their fields yoked to biblical studies, and since 1900 there have been endless attempts to decouple, as well as to couple, Near Eastern archaeology and biblical reality.119 In Vigouroux’s second year as secretary of the Pontifical Commission, the new Pope Pius X outlawed Catholic modernism and excommunicated Loisy, clearly declaring ‘thus far and no farther.’ The great era for excavation in Palestine really begins not in the nineteenth century at all, but after World War I.120 Unquestionably, 116

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Francis Llewellyn Griffith, ‘Egypt and Assyria’, in Authority and Archaeology, ed. Hogarth, 156–219 (at 162–3). Griffith, ‘Egypt and Assyria’, quotation at 187, 217. Griffith, ‘Egypt and Assyria’, 217–28. For three recent contributions to the discussion, see Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (eds.), The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origins of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Touchstone, 2001); Eric H. Cline, From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2007); Werner Keller, Und die Bibel hat doch Recht: Forscher beweisen die historische Wahrheit (Stuttgart: Bertelsmann, 1970; 2nd edn 1980, paperback, 2009). See Billie Melman, Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950 (Oxford University Press, 2020).

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however, archaeology and indigenous oriental texts have now become the ‘external’ sources of choice, leaving Herodotus to go on his merry, secular, way. It is perhaps this shift, one really only completed around 1890, that has obscured the long tradition we have been following in which it was Herodotus (of course with the help of Josephus, Diodorus Siculus, Eusebius, Strabo, and a few others) who served as the ‘historian of the Hebrew people, without knowing it.’ Having begun to serve in this capacity already in the later sixteenth century, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an era in which rationalist, philhellenist, and higher criticism challenged the reality of the Near Eastern past, his testimony was critical in keeping alive the hope that contradictory legends could be sorted out and given substantive, objective reality. Now, it is certainly the case that there remain discrepancies and uncertainties about virtually all ancient dates, including classical ones, and that biblical archaeologists have been unable to prove to the satisfaction of sceptics that the Israelites really undertook the Exodus, or that the Red Sea parted. But it is no longer possible to dismiss the Orient as a ‘dream,’ as Voltaire and Hegel were willing to do. Herodotus, and his fellow classical historians, have perhaps played a bigger role in the making of our modern history and our modern disciplines, as well as in the defence of scriptural truths, than we have yet been willing to admit.121 121

As is becoming clear in the case of Persian and Assyrian history, Herodotus’ testimonies have also been baked into many archaeological finds. See Wouter F. M Henkelman, Amélie Kuhrt, Robert Rollinger, and Josef Wiesenhöfer, ‘Herodotus and Babylon Reconsidered’ (449–70), and other essays in Herodot und das Persische Weltreich, eds. Robert Rollinger, Brigitte Truschnegg, and Reinhold Bichler (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011).

part ii

Making the Past Visible

4

The Bible, Classical Antiquity, and the Invention of Victorian Art at the 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition kate nichols

The Fine Arts Department of the Manchester Jubilee Exhibition of 1887 set out to provide a comprehensive exhibition of art made in Britain during Queen Victoria’s reign. This was the first ever exhibition of ‘Victorian art’; the national press regarded it as ‘one such as the world has never seen’.1 It marks a significant moment in the formation of a national ‘school’ of art in Britain, and of the presentation of this national story to a mass audience. 309,130 people visited the 1887 Royal Academy (RA) summer exhibition in London (2 May to 1 August), a significant number, but one which seems trifling compared to the 4.7 million who attended the Manchester exhibition (3 May to 9 November).2 Not all of these visitors would necessarily have visited the Fine Arts Department, but nonetheless, the exhibition’s huge audience renders it a significant moment in the construction of ideas about Victorian art. The Fine Arts Department exhibited over 2,000 works of art, spread over thirteen rooms. It was one of eight sections of a major exhibition to mark the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, and it sought, in the words of its Official Guide, ‘to illustrate, as fully as possible, the progress made in the development of Arts and Manufactures during the Victorian era’.3 It was avowedly commercial, concerned with progress and manufacture. Yet it was images of the past – and the biblical and classical pasts in particular – which dominated the Central Hall (Gallery 6) of the Fine Arts Department in this apparently ‘modern’ display. These pasts also appeared prominently throughout the rest of the art department. This chapter explores the relationships between the Bible, classical antiquity, and the mass audiences for art who thronged 1

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The Standard, 25 December 1886, 3. See also W. Arnold, ‘The Manchester Exhibition’, Art Journal (July 1887), 249–50; R.J.F., ‘Fine Art at the Manchester Jubilee Exhibition’, Illustrated London News, 7 May 1887, 515; Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Critical Notices of the Pictures and Water-Colour Drawings in the Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Manchester, 1887 (Manchester: John Heywood, 1887), 3; John N. Nodal (ed.), The Pictorial Record of the Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Manchester, 1887 (Manchester, 1888), 22. Exhibition Account Book, Royal Academy Archives RAA/TRE/13/1/1–6; Nodal (ed.) Pictorial Record of the Royal Jubilee Exhibition, 142. Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Official Guide to the Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Manchester, 1887 (Manchester: John Heywood, 1887), 4.

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to look at the nineteenth-century oil painting and sculpture on display in the Fine Arts Department. What role did the Bible and antiquity play in the invention of Victorian art at the Manchester Jubilee Exhibition? And what can responses to the exhibition at Manchester tell us about Victorian understandings of biblical and classical works? The Manchester exhibition’s 1887 date makes it significant for an analysis of the relationship between the Bible and classical antiquity in Victorian art. The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a classical revival in painting and sculpture. Despite assumptions about Victorian crises of faith and secularisation, Graham Howes has likewise traced a new popular flourishing of biblical art from 1850 to the late 1880s. He described the creation, for the first time since the Reformation, of ‘a cheap, accessible and above all genuinely Protestant iconography’. According to Howes, the new patrons for biblical painting were provincial rather than metropolitan, and were predominantly Nonconformist; the Jubilee Exhibition’s geographical location, and Lancashire’s large dissenting population, render it a particularly pertinent case study. Howes emphasises, however, a shift from ‘scriptural subjects’ being regarded as high art, to their entry into popular culture.4 This chapter examines the relationship between the apparently ‘low art’ of biblical painting, and classical subject painting, which occupied the pinnacle of high art. Were the two entirely distinct? How did they interact at an avowedly mass undertaking such as the Manchester exhibition? Despite their contemporary nineteenth-century significance, I am dealing here with aspects of Victorian art culture which are at best described as marginal in scholarship today, but which are nonetheless essential for a fuller understanding of Victorian cultural self-fashioning, of the reception of classical art, and visual engagements with the Bible. For all the Manchester exhibition’s grandiose contemporary claims, it has been entirely absent from subsequent histories of Victorian art.5 With the exception of the Pre-Raphaelites, art historians have paid scant attention to biblical subject-painting or sculpture in the Victorian period.6 And while 4

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Graham Howes, The Art of the Sacred: An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Art and Belief (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 34–6. The only detailed discussions of the Fine Arts Department to date appear in J. Treuherz, ‘The Manchester Royal Jubilee Exhibition of 1887’, Victorian Poetry 25 (Fall 1987), 192–222; James Moore, High Culture and Tall Chimneys: Art Institutions and Urban Society in Lancashire, 1780–1914 (Manchester University Press, 2018), 194–200. On the Pre-Raphaelites, see Michaela Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). For a recent overview and further reading, see Ayla Lepine, ‘Anglican Art and Architecture, c.1837–1914’, in The Oxford History of

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

there has been a renewed interest in Victorian classical subject painting over the past thirty years, there has been little attempt to analyse the conversations between the classical and biblical in Victorian fine art. Here I examine the connections and distinctions drawn between the two, as they were deployed in this self-styled first exhibition of art of the Victorian era. The chapter leads its readers on a guided tour through the Manchester exhibition, moving room by room through its Fine Arts Department to explore core themes which emerged in critics’ responses to its display of biblical and classical works, in the context of its new narrative of ‘Victorian art’.7 I have defined biblical art as that which visualises episodes from the Bible. I have not included post-biblical religious scenes from the lives of the saints, portraits of clergymen, or religious allegories. I have approached ‘classical antiquity’ in a slightly more capacious manner, to encompass scenes from classical texts and mythology, scenes set in a generic classical antiquity, or which self-consciously stake a claim to Greek and Roman antiquity. Each section here complicates and refines these initial definitions. Throughout, I am concerned with the ways in which contemporary commentators connected biblical and classical imagery to the exhibition’s new mass audience for art. Further, how did they align these images to the exhibition’s presiding argument that art, commerce and industry were intrinsically related? To begin to address this question, the guided tour begins outside the Fine Arts Department.

I. Entering the Exhibition: Art and Industry in 1880s Manchester The Manchester Jubilee Exhibition was divided into seven principal sections, in addition to an Irish department, which was added at late notice after the main categories of objects had been devised (see Figure 4.1). These were (1) industrial design (textiles, pottery, glass) (2) machinery in motion

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Anglicanism, vol. III: Partisan Anglicanism and Its Global Expansion 1829–c.1914, ed. Rowan Strong (Oxford University Press, 2017), 401–15. My guided tour ends at Gallery 6 of thirteen. The remaining seven galleries featured oil paintings by deceased artists, and watercolours, drawings, engravings and etchings by both living and deceased artists. Like my tour, most contemporary critical responses to the exhibition stopped in, or at least focused primarily on, the first six rooms, and on living artists. For the sake of brevity, I have followed their lead.

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Figure 4.1. Ground plan of Central exhibition building, Manchester Jubilee Exhibition. Source: Official Guide to the Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Manchester 1887 (Manchester: John Heywood, 1887). Image courtesy of University of Birmingham, Library Services.

(3) chemical and allied industries (with photography as a subsection) (4) handicraft (5) models (including a life-size recreation of Tudor Manchester and Salford) (6) Fine Arts Department (7) electric light, music and horticulture. The Fine Arts Department occupied roughly a quarter of the main exhibition space. The exhibition presented Victorian art as being both theoretically and literally immersed in a spectacle of commerce and industry. The official Fine Arts catalogue offered a compelling demonstration of this interconnectedness; its detailed lists of paintings were bordered by advertisements for machinery and products of particular Mancunian industrial and commercial interest, including bobbin makers and cottonpulling machinery. The RA summer exhibition catalogue, by contrast, never featured advertisements. The spectacular and commercial nature of nineteenth-century international exhibitions is a commonplace, thanks to their vast scale, mass audiences and the thrilling juxtapositions of moving machinery, villages of exhibited peoples, fairground rides and novel commodities. But fine art has

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

usually been understood as standing somehow apart. In a foundational work on world’s fairs, Paul Greenhalgh suggested that the presence of the fine arts at the Great Exhibition of 1851 prevented it from becoming a ‘mere’ trade fair; they ‘made culture into a hierarchical system, separating the high from the popular, the functional from the ethereal and the expensive from the cheap’.8 The rhetoric surrounding Manchester Jubilee Exhibition suggests a rather different relationship: ‘Never before has been seen such grand specimens of machinery, never again will be viewed so noble a display of English art’; ‘Art and commerce have been united . . . and have together created a memorial which will long be remembered as a worthy commemoration of the Victorian era.’9 Art and commerce are here regarded as equals, and part of the same undertaking. This is a remarkable context for the selfstyled first exhibition of Victorian art. The juxtaposition of art and commerce had a significant impact on the modes of art viewing at Manchester. Visitors could experience fairground rides, sport, the sublime thrill (for those who did not regularly work alongside it) of machinery in motion, and historically immersive re-enactments in ‘Old Manchester and Salford’; not to mention the attractions of shopping, and eating, all enjoyed alongside art as part of the spectacle. One rather evocative account by ‘A Lady Correspondent’ notes that: We should have found so close a study of the pictures very fatiguing but for the frequent visits we paid to the Manchester Creamery, where we enjoyed new milk junkets, or ices, while watching the separating process carried out by machinery, and to the Scotch bakery, where we had excellent buns and cakes of all kinds, while inspecting the modern improvements of baking and ‘firing’ bread.10

As this visitor makes clear, art and commercial, technological developments alike were all fitted into the overall premise of the exhibition: to demonstrate progress made in the Victorian era. She spent three days at the exhibition, and offers a detailed list of the paintings she encountered – closely followed by an account of the nausea induced by the toboggan ride (perhaps not surprising after all those ice creams and ‘excellent buns’). The ‘Lady Correspondent’ partook of the constituent parts that made up the muscular, participatory viewing-in-motion that Lynda Nead identified as 8

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Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester University Press, 1988), 198. ‘The Manchester Jubilee Exhibition’, Manchester Times, 14 May 1887; ‘Art Chronicle’, The Portfolio: An Artistic Periodical, 18 (January 1887), 145. ‘Lady Correspondent’, ‘The Manchester Exhibition’, Belfast News-Letter, 19 September 1887, 6.

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Figure 4.2. Plan of Fine Art Galleries, Manchester Jubilee Exhibition. Source: Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Manchester, 1887: Fine Art Section (Manchester: Excelsior, 1887). Image courtesy of University of Birmingham Library Services .

symptomatic of vision around 1900, developed through cinematic film, on fairground rides, in physiological and art historical writing, magic lantern shows, cars and more.11 New, hasty, thrilling modes of art viewing emerged at Manchester. But how did art related to the Bible and classical antiquity fit into this rapid mode of art viewing, and Manchester’s explicitly commercial and industrial vision of art? A sculpture displayed outside the entrance to the Fine Arts Department, in the East Nave’s ‘industrial arts’ section, is a useful point of departure (see Figure 4.2). George Tinworth’s vast (nearly 4 metres wide) terracotta plaque The Release of Barabbas (Figure 4.3) evokes liminality on many levels, perhaps most obviously in its almost cuckoo-clock-like depiction of Jesus and Barabbas, both at the moment of stepping across the same threshold towards crucifixion and freedom respectively. This plaque also troubled boundaries for those seeking to form a narrative of Victorian art; it blurred the distinction both between art and manufacture, and between artistic and religious modes of viewing. 11

Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c.1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 9–43.

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

Figure 4.3. George Tinworth, Release of Barrabas (1882), clay, 365 × 172 cm. Image from Edmund Gosse, A Critical Essay on the Life and Works of George Tinworth (London: Fine Arts Society, 1883), 58. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Sculpture in general occupied an attenuated position in the spectacle of a national art school set out at Manchester. It barely features in the narratives of progress articulated by critics and journalists, the confronting physical presences of such dramatic new works as Frederic Leighton’s Athlete (1877) or Hamo Thorneycroft’s Sower (1884) and Lot’s Wife (1878) going almost unremarked upon in the press. Tinworth’s plaque was at a remove from the already fraught fine art claims that even sculptors in more ‘elevated’ materials such as bronze and marble were asserting in the later nineteenth century.12 It was made in the humble material of clay, by an employee of ceramics firm Doulton of Lambeth (albeit one trained at the RA). Its association with Doulton linked it to their department in the exhibition’s art-industrial heart (see Figure 4.1), where visitors could watch the entire processes of art manufacture take place before their eyes, from clay model to fired piece – the very opposite of the mystifying ‘genius’ increasingly associated with artistic practice. To compound its disassociation from the otherworldly realm of fine art, Doulton-made reliefs also decorated the exhibition’s lavatories.13 Yet the official Fine Arts catalogue – which gave The Release of Barrabbas an entire page of excited explanation 12

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Martina Droth, ‘The Ethics of Making: Craft and English Sculptural Aesthetics c. 1851–1900’, Journal of Design History 17/3 (2004): 221–35. ‘The Manchester Jubilee Exhibition – VIII’, British Architect, 1 July 1887, 16.

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(more than any other painting or sculpture on display) was keen to insert Tinworth’s plaque into the category of fine art. The display of The Release of Barabbas outside (but on the threshold of) the Fine Arts Department made manifest the often-confused relationship between art and industrial production, a fundamental part of the ‘invention’ of Victorian art that took place at Manchester. And it demonstrates that biblical art was very much part of these more worldly, materialistic concerns.

II. Looking Biblically David Morgan has emphasised the embodied nature of religious viewing. This arguably intensifies the need to think about display and modes of encounter of religious art works in particular.14 In his analysis of Victorian religious painting, Howes suggests that, contrary to Max Weber’s 1910 assertion that art might replace or compete with religion, from 1850 to 1890, art ‘itself became a symbolically powerful and pervasive repository for religious values’.15 Biblical art, newly available to mass audiences via print (and, I would argue, spectacular events such as the Manchester Jubilee Exhibition), became part of Victorian belief. For religious viewers, there was not necessarily a pull between religious devotion and aesthetic contemplation; they might be mutually constituted. Even those who sought to divorce the aesthetic from the religious were often fixated on examining the connections between the two; as Hilary Fraser has identified, an ‘all-pervasive, deliberate, and rather self-conscious concern with the relationship between religious and aesthetic experience’ was ‘the hallmark of the Victorian age’.16 Were there, then, readily identifiable religious modes of looking at Manchester? How did visitors respond to the biblical art on display? The new vision of Victorian art set out at Manchester was one undoubtedly informed by faith, and by an evangelical approach in particular. Simon Gunn has argued that by the later nineteenth century, an evangelical outlook unified the numerous denominations present in the region.17 14

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David Morgan, The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). On the religious significance of exhibitions in Victorian Whitechapel, see Lucinda Matthews-Jones, ‘Lessons in Seeing: Art, Religion and Class in the East End of London, 1881–1898’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 16/3 (2011): 385–403. Howes, Art of the Sacred, 44. Hilary Fraser, Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2. Simon Gunn, ‘The Ministry, the Middle Class and the “Civilizing Mission” in Manchester, 1850–80’, Social History 21/1 (1996): 22–36.

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

The evangelical middle classes were a significant feature of social and cultural life in late Victorian Manchester, while the broader context of Victorian Lancashire boasted large primarily lower-middle- and workingclass evangelical congregations.18 The exhibition catered specifically for this audience. The preferences and requirements of Lancashire’s Nonconformist populations in particular were woven into its fabric; the Official Guide proudly boasted that its cafeterias catered to both vegetarians and teetotallers.19 On Saturday 2 July 1887, it hosted a ‘Grand United Temperance Fete’ for some 39,000 visitors drawn from temperance groups across the North of England.20

II.i The Nave: The Evangelical Masses and the Devaluation of Art Manchester’s middle-class evangelical audience would likely have already been familiar with Tinworth’s work, images of which were widely circulated in the evangelical periodical press, to a far greater extent than they were discussed in the specialist art press. According to contemporaries, Tinworth’s appeal to this audience set his work apart; the critic Edmund Gosse deemed him to be ‘the only artist who has continued to express in his art the actual religious sentiment of the lower-middle class in England’.21 He was envisaged as ‘a man sprung from the toiling classes, and with a message for them’.22 The works of this ‘evangelist in art’ were widely described as ‘sermons’; ‘he is essentially an interpreter as well as an illustrator of the Bible’ and his works ‘would do credit to a professor of exegesis’.23 Tinworth’s works were understood as distinctly religious partly due to his strict upbringing in ‘one of the smaller nonconformist 18

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Gunn, ‘Ministry’; J. Lea, ‘Baptists and the Working Classes in Mid-Victorian Lancashire’, in Victorian Lancashire, ed. S. P. Bell (Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 1974), 59–82. Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Official Guide, 20. On Christianity, vegetarianism and Manchester, see Samantha Jane Calvert, ‘A Taste of Eden: Modern Christianity and Vegetarianism’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 58/3 (2007): 461–81. ‘The Manchester Royal Jubilee Exhibition. Temperance Fete’, Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 4 July 1887, 8. Emphasis mine. Edmund W. Gosse, A Critical Essay on the Life and Works of George Tinworth (London: Fine Art Society, 1883), 27. Gosse’s delight in Tinworth’s work makes even more complex the status of his work, since in art historiography this critic is usually associated with the bravura and high art status of ‘The New Sculpture’, the term he went on to coin in 1894 to refer to works like Leighton’s Athlete. Frederick Hastings, ‘George Tinworth’, The Sunday at Home: A Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading, 6 June 1885, 359. Edward Salmon, ‘George Tinworth and his Work’, Strand Magazine, July 1891, 449; Hastings, ‘George Tinworth’, 359; A. B. Cooper, ‘George Tinworth’s Latest Work’, Quiver, January 1909, 150–1.

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sects’.24 Every religious discussion of his work evokes his working-class roots, and the strength and solace provided by his faith throughout his misery memoir of a childhood. The narrative set up around Tinworth suggested that he read only the Bible, and that his works were invocations of scripture, divinely inspired, standing distinct from the art world.25 Commentators used Tinworth’s faith to promote his work to the religious, and particularly evangelical, middle class. Indeed, this audience, combined with the biblical subject matter of Tinworth’s plaque (Figure 4.3), arguably constituted another reason for this sculpture’s uneasy ‘artistic’ status. This was not because art critics regarded biblical subject matter as inherently unartistic, but because many disparaged the overtly religious, narrative-driven mode of art appreciation associated with Tinworth’s audience. Tinworth’s work was intensely popular, and it was the only sculpture singled out for enthusiastic discussion in a number of non-specialist reviews of the exhibition, which focused on its ability to convey a living sense of biblical narrative.26 Questions of the relationship between artistic status, commercial manufacture, mass audiences and religious viewing were raised before visitors had even entered the Fine Arts Department to examine the first ever exhibition of Victorian art.

II.ii Gallery 1: Religious Looking and Artistic Looking Different, but no less fierce discussions continued over the artistic status of works depicting biblical subject matter, even as commentators moved into the Fine Arts Department, to consider works officially classified as ‘art’, and in the less materially ambiguous medium of oil-on-canvas. By the 1880s, William Holman Hunt was widely acknowledged as ‘the painter of the Christ’.27 Local art dealers Thomas Agnew and Sons had gifted his 1870–3 painting The Shadow of Death to Manchester Art Gallery in 1883. Given its local and religious significance, it is perhaps not surprising that this was one of the most widely discussed images in reviews of Gallery 1, the Official 24

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Gosse, Tinworth, 7. Gosse himself had been brought up in a ‘nonconformist sect’, as explored in his memoir Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (London: Heinemann, 1907). See Hastings, ‘George Tinworth’, 363; ‘Things New and Old’, Sunday at Home, 3 March 1894, 286; Frederick Hastings, ‘The Bible in Clay: A Chat with George Tinworth’, Sunday at Home, 1 January 1897, 48; Cosmo Monkhouse, ‘Exhibition of the Works of Mr George Tinworth’, The Academy, 21 April 1883, 282. ‘Lady Correspondent’, ‘Manchester Exhibition’, 6; ‘The Manchester Exhibition’, Daily News, 3 May 1887, 3; ‘A Visit to the Manchester Exhibition’, Wrexham Advertiser, and North Wales News, 28 May 1887, 3. Bayliss (1902), cited in Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible, 127.

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

Guide describing it as ‘perhaps the finest religious picture of the present day’.28 The Penny Guide to the Pictures – which was aimed at a nonspecialist, general audience – noted that viewers would likely already be familiar with this image thanks to its wide circulation in print form.29 The Manchester exhibition transformed domestic religious print-viewing into public fine art consumption. The painting’s religious status, however, could also trouble its artistic status among critics connected to the ‘aesthetic’ movement. From the late 1860s onwards, this movement argued that ‘perfection of forms and colours – beauty, in a word – should be the prime object of pictorial art’.30 Art was primarily a matter of visual and sensual pleasure, and not necessarily religious or moral experience.31 The critic and art historian Walter Armstrong penned a series of reviews of the exhibition for the Manchester Guardian, which were later published in a souvenir volume. He selected Hunt’s Shadow of Death as a test for an aestheticising approach to art. He noted that it might seem a ‘hard’ or even ‘immoral’ standpoint, but argued that ‘all works into which art enters have to stand or fall by their art’. Hunt’s painting ‘depends for its sense entirely on our knowledge’; its meaning could not be communicated through visual means alone. He concluded, however, that ‘looking at the canvas with the eyes – from a religious standpoint – of a Brahmin or a Buddhist, we can admire the picture warmly’.32 It was a commendable painting despite its religious content. The exhibition of this painting in Manchester alongside Holman Hunt’s 1850 Shakespearian subject Claudio and Isabella prompted Armstrong to compare these two paintings, which had not previously been seen together. He formulates an argument against narrative-driven, (and in the case of The Shadow of Death) biblical modes of looking at this seemingly most Christian of art works. 28 29 30

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Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Official Guide, 36. Royal Jubilee Exhibition, A Penny Guide to the Pictures (Manchester: John Heywood, 1887), 6. Sidney Colvin, ‘English Painters and Painting in 1867’, Fortnightly Review, October 1867, 465. For a useful overview, see E. Prettejohn, ‘Introduction’, in After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 1–14. Art as a religion, and the aestheticisation of Christianity, however, were core features of two of the most famous aesthetes, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. See Fraser, Beauty and Belief, 183– 228. Religious feeling could certainly be present in works connected to the aesthetic movement – a prime example being Simeon Solomon’s 1860s and 1870s series of contemplative single male religious figures, including A Deacon (1863), The Mystery of Faith (1870) and Hosannah! (1861; exhibited in Gallery 4 at Manchester). See Colin Cruise, ‘“Pressing all religions into his service”: Solomon’s Ritual Paintings and Their Contexts’, in Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites, ed. Cruise (London: Merrell, 2006), 57–63. Walter Armstrong, Celebrated Pictures Exhibited at the Manchester Royal Jubilee Exhibition . . . with Notes and Criticisms (London: Virtue, 1888), 23.

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Although there were fewer biblical art works at Manchester than other genres, the centrality and significance attributed to both Holman Hunt and Tinworth by critics and guidebooks testify to the important place that ‘scriptural subjects’ occupied in the narrative of Victorian art set out at Manchester. The varied approaches to these works suggest that they were part of an ongoing art critical discourse. But how did these religious modes of looking relate to classical subject matter?

III. Classical Looking Is there a specific mode of looking at art that is definitively ‘classical’? Further, what does it mean to say that a painting or sculpture looks ‘classical’? In his Fifty Years of British Art, as Illustrated by the Pictures and Drawings in the Manchester Royal Jubilee Exhibition, RA Professor of Painting John Evan Hodgson identified Frederic Leighton as the preeminent ‘classicist’ on display: Leighton is essentially a Classicist. In the importance he attaches to form, in the balancing of his masses in composition, and in the rhythmical flow of lines . . . he has been able to revive something of the old Greek feeling, the worship of beauty for its own sake, as a softening and humanising influence on human life.33

Leighton’s work looked classical due to its rationalised, rule-based composition, and its focus on ‘beauty’; that is, on aesthetic experience rather than solely storytelling. This is a more capacious vision of classicising art than my initial definition outlined in the introduction here, which focused on classical subject matter and explicit references to antiquity. Hodgson’s definition is noteworthy because it brings together both his views on: (1) what makes a work look classical (its emphasis on form, composition and flow), and (2) how one looks (or indeed feels, as he puts it) classically, via a focus on aesthetics rather than narrative content.

III.i Gallery 1: Classical Ways of Seeing By the late 1880s, critics debated and brought to prominence a form of detached ‘aesthetic’ viewing, divorced from any inherent moral needs. They explicitly attached this mode of viewing to the ancient Greek 33

John Evan Hodgson, Fifty Years of British Art, as Illustrated by the Pictures and Drawings in the Manchester Royal Jubilee Exhibition, 1887 (Manchester: J. Heywood, 1887), 62.

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

appreciation of sculptural form – or, as Hodgson had put it, ‘the worship of beauty for its own sake’. To many Victorian visitors, this insistence on ‘Greek’ ‘beauty for its own sake’ would likely have been understood in relation to a number of recent high-profile public outcries over the display of paintings depicting unclothed, lone female bodies with limited narrative content. There had been a passionate condemnation of the exhibition of Alma-Tadema’s A Sculptor’s Model at the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition of 1878 (this work was not on show at Manchester in 1887), and again in 1885 in response to a large number of nudes on display at the RA summer exhibition and the Grosvenor Gallery, including Charles Mitchell’s Hypatia, exhibited in Gallery 1 at Manchester.34 These new Victorian forms of the nude were variously connected to a ‘classical’ mode of vision. Critics increasingly understood the depiction of the nude body in classical sculpture as a product of ancient Greek ‘aesthetic’ viewing, disengaged from any inherent moral purposes. More specifically, many of these paintings employed classical settings (e.g. baths and temples), classical subjects (e.g. Venus), or made use of classical sculpture as the model/basis/referent for the unclothed body. Albert Moore’s A Venus (1869), also in Gallery 1 at Manchester, is a prime example. The figure’s body is clearly based on the Venus de Milo, and as Liz Prettejohn has noted, ‘Moore goes to considerable lengths to prevent the spectator’s mind from wandering away from the “finite image” on his canvas. There is no hint of the narrative context that Victorian audiences would have expected in an ambitious picture featuring the human figure.’35 This specialised mode of detached ‘Greek’ viewing and appreciation of ‘beauty’ was definitively not connected to the mass audiences for art who thronged Manchester’s Fine Arts Department. Concerns about the detrimental effect of looking at the nude had been raised throughout the nineteenth century in response to the display of the unclothed human body to mass audiences. A whole range of critics considered these audiences not to have the necessary cultural knowledge or way of seeing to appreciate the nude as an art form. Further, many ‘social purity’ campaigners deemed working-class viewers to be particularly vulnerable to the 34

35

See Alison Smith, ‘The “British Matron” and the Body Beautiful: The Nude Debate of 1885’, in After the Pre-Raphaelites, ed. Prettlejohn, 221–34. Mitchell’s Hypatia could readily, however, be read in moralising terms, through its literary connection with Charles Kingsley’s 1879 novel, Hypatia. Like Long’s Diana or Christ? (discussed below), this painting spans both the categories of ‘classical’ and ‘Christian’. See Victoria Mills, ‘Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia, Visual Culture and Late-Victorian Gender Politics’, Journal of Victorian Culture 25/2 (2020): 240–63. Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Walter Pater and Aesthetic Painting’, in After the Pre-Raphaelites, ed. Prettejohn, 36–58 (at 45).

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dangers and temptations of sexual indulgence. Protests against the nude had often (although not exclusively) hailed from evangelical Christians.36 This religious distaste for the nude, so closely associated with the classical, might seem to further rend asunder the Bible and classical antiquity. Yet in none of the numerous primary sources that I have consulted – including newspaper articles, evangelical periodicals, letters to editors, poetry, sketches – was any concern raised about the display of nudes to a nonspecialist audience at the Manchester Jubilee Exhibition. A classical mode of looking, which prioritised aesthetics over content, was abundant among art critics at Manchester, and clearly among the hanging committee who selected these works for public display with no apparent concern about any controversy. With the exception of Tinworth, sculpture attracted very little critical discussion at Manchester. Walter Tomlinson, a Manchester artist, author and social commentator, noted the disparity between the ‘magnificent’ and ‘grandly representative’ display of British painting at Manchester, and the ‘few and scattered pieces of sculpture’. He attributed these omissions to the elevated, idealising status of sculpture, which required ‘a long education in taste and refinement’ as well as intellectual capacity. This ‘refinement’ was particularly required to understand the nude as a detached art form. The nude (especially the male nude) was an increasingly significant feature of late Victorian sculpture; even among the few examples at Manchester, this new Victorian art form made its muscular presence felt in Gallery 4, which featured Leighton’s Athlete Wrestling with the Python (1877) and Hamo Thorneycroft’s Teucer (1881), both drawing carefully on classical form and subject matter. The requirement for education and leisure time, according to Tomlinson, made sculpture a London taste. The exhibits at Manchester were borrowed primarily from industrial Northern collectors, who had, apparently, been slower to develop an enthusiasm for sculpture; both Leighton’s Athlete and Thorneycroft’s Teucer were on loan from the RA in London.37 For Tomlinson, this apparently elite, refined mode of viewing was connected to a particular classical Greek appreciation of beauty and mode of looking.38 Classical modes of seeing dictated (and according to 36

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On the complexity of evangelical engagements with the arts, see Doreen Rosman, Evangelicals and Culture (London: Croon Helm, 1984). For further explorations of the intersections between classical sculpture and evangelicals in Victorian Britain, see Kate Nichols, Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace: Classical Sculpture and Modern Britain 1854–1936 (Oxford University Press, 2015), 188–98. Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Manchester, 1887: Fine Art Section (Manchester: John Heywood, 1887), 33. Walter Tomlinson, ‘Sculpture’, in Pictorial Record, ed. Nodal, 39–40.

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

Tomlinson, restricted) the works that might be assembled in Manchester’s new narrative of Victorian art.

III.ii Galleries 1 and 3: Classical Sculpture and the Body Gallery 1 thronged with depictions of bodies, biblical and classical. The juxtaposition of biblical and classical bodies raises the question of the fundamental relationship between classical sculpture and the body in postclassical art; is it possible to depict the body without making connections through its form to classical antiquity? Greek and Roman sculpture was fundamental to the making of both painting and sculpture in Victorian Britain – regardless of its subject matter. Drawing and modelling in clay from classical sculpture was the foundation of artistic training in Victorian Britain, at the RA, and art and design schools across the country.39 Classical sculpture permeated artistic visions of the human body in Victorian art – and avowedly so in the spectacle of Victorian art created at Manchester. Artists who rejected the predominantly muscular forms of the classical body were viciously criticised for such deviations. Edward Burne-Jones, whose work dominated Gallery 3, is a prime example; Armstrong described his rejection of classical form in the classical subject Pygmalion series as ‘foreign to all healthy human nature’.40 Hamo Thorneycroft’s 1878 sculpture Lot’s Wife encapsulates the intersections between classical form and biblical subject matter. Thorneycroft drew on various Greek sculptural and textual prototypes and eighteenthand nineteenth-century textual, sculptural and painted engagements with classical sculpture, to conjure an entirely compositionally new vision of the infamous episode told in Genesis 19:26, where Lot’s wife turns back to look at the Cities of the Plain and is transformed into a pillar of salt.41 The sculpture is insistently both biblical in subject matter, and classical in form – especially in the hairstyle, floor length chiton, and its selfconscious emphasis on its marble material. Prominently exhibited in the 39

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Ian Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes: In the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum 1800– 1939 (London: British Museum, 1992), 30–40; Rebecca Wade, Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). Armstrong, Celebrated Pictures, 32. See further Amelia Yeates, ‘Health and Manliness in the Reception of Edward Burne-Jones’s Work’, in Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities: Constructions of Masculinity in Art and Literature, ed. Amelia Yeates and Selina Trowbridge (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 81–100. David J. Getsy, Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 54.

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middle of Gallery 1, its physical appearance must surely have drawn the Bible and classical antiquity into conversation.

III.iii Galleries 1 to 6: Racialised Bodies Biblical bodies, like Lot’s Wife, appeared in classical guises at Manchester. This was not simply a matter of artistic preference. By the mid-nineteenth century, the body represented in Greek sculpture was understood in connection to the new ‘science’ of physical anthropology. It was widely regarded as the perfection of the human form – and some Anglican thinkers – especially those connected to what was known from 1857 onwards as ‘muscular Christianity’ – also considered the Greek body to represent the divine body.42 By the 1880s, some artists – drawing on racial thought from the 1850s – took this a step further, arguing for a biological connection between ancient Greek sculptural bodies and British bodies.43 In his 1883 Presidential Address to students of the RA, Leighton discussed at length the impact of race – among other factors – on art production. He concludes that fifth-century Athenian sculpture exhibits a ‘new ideal of balanced form wholly Aryan, and of which the only parallel I know is sometimes found in the women of another Aryan race – your own.’44 He relates Greek sculpture to the bodies of ancient Greeks, and then to modern Britons, who take on a biological relationship with classical Athenians. Classical sculpture had become fundamental to envisaging white northern European bodies, as part of a racial discourse which deemed northern Europeans superior to and distinct from all other peoples. A ‘classical look’ had racialised implications for the ways in which artists might depict people, including figures from the Bible. Athena Leoussi argues that in late nineteenth-century British culture, Greek subjects (with classical Greek sculptural form) had both Christian and national, racialised ‘British’ significance. Core to her argument is Edward John Poynter’s cycle of paintings Perseus and Andromeda; The Fight between More of More Hall and the Dragon of Wantley; Atalanta’s Race; and Nausicaa and Her Maidens Playing at Ball, created during the 1870s for the Earl of Wharncliffe’s billiard-room at Wortley Hall, South 42

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Athena Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism: The Classical Body as National Symbol in Nineteenth-Century England and France (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 87–103. Debbie Challis, ‘“The Ablest Race”: The Ancient Greeks in Victorian Racial Theory’, in Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire, ed. Mark Bradley (Oxford University Press, 2010), 94–120. Frederic Leighton, Addresses Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy by the Late Lord Leighton (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1896), 89.

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

Yorkshire. These were prominently displayed at Manchester in the Central Hall of the Fine Arts Department, discussed widely by critics, and identified as among the most popular paintings of the exhibition.45 The dragon-slaying aristocratic British Christian heroics (referencing St George) of the Dragon of Wantley and Perseus in particular bleed into each other, ‘the juxtaposition of the two heroes indicating the identity of Greek and Christian principles and hence the Christian meanings of Perseus’ conduct and muscular body’.46 Here classical looking and Christian looking became co-constitutive, and invested in questions of racial and national British identity. Leighton and Poynter in particular championed classical forms as inherently representing northern European people. They also reaffirmed and promoted the notion that classical (and thus European) bodies were the most beautiful and artistically appropriate of human forms. In an 1874 lecture to the Slade School of Art on ‘The Objects of Study’, Poynter noted the superior beauty of classical sculpture as a universal model for all people represented: ‘It is not Greeks or Romans we wish specially to paint, it is humanity in the form which gives us the best opportunity of displaying its beauty.’47 Non-Europeans needed to be ‘classicised’ in order to be aesthetically appealing. This had particular consequences for the racially diverse populace of biblical narratives. In an 1857 article, the writer, critic and founding member of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood William Michael Rossetti posed the question ‘Is our Madonna to be a Jewess?’ He went on to query the benefits – and disadvantages – of making ‘our biblical costume oriental, our scenery that of the Holy Land’.48 His writings were part of a wider culture debating archaeological and anthropological accuracy in re-envisioning biblical subject matter. William Dyce’s 1860s paintings, which entirely decontextualise, de-archaeologise, and show Christ in the Scottish highlands, are a visual response to such debates (at Manchester, Dyce’s Christ and the Woman of Samaria, 1860, was on display in Gallery 10). At the same time, Holman Hunt was one of numerous artists travelling to the Holy Land and attempting – with varying levels of success – to secure Jewish models for his biblical paintings in order to confer authenticity upon them.49 The 1870s revival of classical painting, however, posed something of a threat to the use 45 46 47 48

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See Treuherz, ‘Manchester Royal Jubilee Exhibition’. Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism, 150. Edward J. Poynter, Ten Lectures on Art (London: Chapman & Hall, 1879), 196. William Michael Rossetti, ‘The Externals of Sacred Art’ (1857), in Rossetti, Fine Art. Chiefly Contemporary: Notices Reprinted, with Revisions (London and Cambridge: Macmillan, 1867), 44. See F. V. Altman, ‘William Holman Hunt, Race and Orientalism’, in Worldwide PreRaphaelitism, ed. T. J. Tobin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 45–68.

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of Jewish models in images of the Bible. Poynter in particular regarded Jewish models as a threat to artistic beauty. A Pall Mall Gazette interview reports the artist contrasting the cultural and physical inferiority of London’s Jewish population with ‘The Greek type’; he preferred to use ‘Anglo-Saxon’ models for his Old Testament figures.50 There were few explicit discussions of race and the Bible at Manchester. But the paintings featuring biblical bodies foregrounded a particular paleskinned, classical sculptural body type, and classical facial profile. These attributes could be readily identified in Gallery 1 in William Dobson’s The Prosperous Days of Job (1855, Figure 4.4), where an anonymous black man

Figure 4.4. Albumen silver print, by Caldesi and Montecchi (1858) of William Dobson, The Prosperous Days of Job (1855), oil on canvas. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles: 84.XB.582.2.59. 50

‘About Mr Poynter’s Great Picture. By one of his Models’, Pall Mall Gazette, 23 May 1890, 2.

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

Figure 4.5. Frederick Goodall, Rebecca at the Well (1879–80), oil on canvas, 72.5 × 60 cm. Image courtesy of Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery.

throws into further contrast the whiteness of the surrounding protagonists, while the woman sprawled across the floor evokes the Sleeping Ariadne, a classical sculpture celebrated in the Victorian period. These characteristics could also be seen in Frederick Goodall’s statuesque and astonishingly pale Rebecca at the Well (c.1879–80, Figure 4.5) in Gallery 2; and in the bulging muscular forms of Frederick Sheilds’s Lazarus (1880) in Gallery 3. Barely any of the biblical canvases on display were Pre-Raphaelite works of the 1840s and 1850s with their scandalously medievalised biblical bodies, such as millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50) or Rossetti’s Girlhood of the Virgin Mary (1848–9).51 In Gallery 1, the representation of Christ’s body in Holman Hunt’s prominent and widely celebrated Shadow of Death (Figure 4.6) perhaps 51

Burne-Jones’s Morning of the Resurrection (1882–6, Gallery 3) draws explicitly on these earlier ‘Gothic’ bodies – but even here Christ’s body is entirely concealed beneath classical drapery. Millais’s Victory O Lord! (1870) ‘primitivises’ its Moses, Aaron and Hur, looking down on the Battle of Rephaim (Exodus 17:1–13.) See Paul Barlow, Time Present and Time Past: The Art of John Everett Millais (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 146–9. In all the primary material considered for this essay, I have not come across detailed contemporary comment on this painting; however, its prominent position in the Central Hall is worth noting.

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Figure 4.6. William Holman Hunt, The Shadow of Death (1873), 214.2 × 168.2 cm. © Manchester Art Gallery / Bridgeman Images.

typifies this muscular vision; it jettisons the earlier Pre-Raphaelite medievalism for a classicising vision of Christ as a stretching, semi-nude athlete, displaying his body.52 It was classical in bodily form, but at Manchester, concerns emerged about Christ’s skin tone. The popular Penny Guide was particularly anxious, noting that ‘the colouring is more intense than belongs to our dull climate, and it is difficult at first to reconcile ourselves to the bronzed central figure’.53 There was something un-English about the colouring of the painting in general (which the guidebook explained as a result of Hunt’s extensive travels in the Holy Land), while Christ’s shockingly non‘English’ and defiantly un-classical skin tone might initially alienate viewers coming into contact with this image, familiar through black and white prints. 52 53

Barlow, Time Present, 146; Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism, 153. Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Penny Guide, 6.

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

The brilliant colouration of Hunt’s work could shock anew at Manchester due to a bringing together of art and industry: the use of electrical, rather than the usual gas lighting, an innovation discussed proudly and at length by the Official Guide.54 The South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) had introduced some electric lighting in 1881, but this was not widespread. The impact of this brighter, less hazy atmosphere, was widely discussed in relation to Holman Hunt’s painting.55 The display and responses to The Shadow of Death at Manchester physically transformed one of the best-known Victorian biblical images, providing a new form of anxiety-inducing engagement with a ‘bronzed’ Christ. The biblical body at Manchester was primarily a pale, apparently ‘European’ one, based on classical sculptural models. Classical modes of looking at and making art inflected biblical sculpture and painting.

IV. Questions of Genre In his survey of the new developments of the era showcased at Manchester, Armstrong noted that ‘we have whole genres in excess of those to which the men of a generation ago could point. In the first place, there is a classic revival.’56 The new varieties of classical subject painting on display at Manchester were regarded as a specifically Victorian innovation.

IV.i Gallery 4: Biblical, Classical or Animal? Gallery 4 orchestrated another artistic genre-defying conversation between the Bible and antiquity. Briton Riviere was definitively not associated with the innovative Victorian classicism identified by Armstrong, and typified by Alma-Tadema (whose works hung opposite to Riviere’s in Gallery 4).57 However, unlike these ‘Victorian Olympians’, Briton Riviere had read classics at Oxford. He also regularly engaged with classical texts and visual culture in his works. He was more famous for his biblical subject paintings, but was rarely regarded as a painter capable of evoking serious religious feeling. When it was first exhibited at the RA in 1872, his Daniel in the Lions’ Den (Figure 4.7) was deemed a spectacle – but decisively not of a biblical nature: ‘we are less reminded of religious themes than of sensational scenes in Zoological Gardens’.58 54 55 56 58

Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Official Guide, 35. ‘Art at the Manchester Exhibition’, Athenaeum, 16 July 1887, 91. Armstrong, Celebrated Pictures, 59. 57 Hodgson, Fifty Years of British Art, 82. ‘The Royal Academy: III’, Saturday Review, 25 May 1872, 662.

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Figure 4.7. Engraving of Briton Riviere, Daniel (1872). Source: ‘Daniel. From the Picture by Briton Riviere, A.R.A., in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1872. By kind permission of Messrs. Agnew & Sons’, The Magazine of art (Jan. 1879), 256. Image courtesy of University of Birmingham, Library Services.

By 1887, Riviere was emphatically identified both with the celebrated image of Daniel, and, importantly, as ‘the great animal painter’, widely proclaimed as heir to Landseer.59 This compounded his significance in the spectacle of Victorian art at Manchester. Armstrong suggested that previously animal painting in Britain had been associated exclusively with Landseer.60 Riviere’s dominance in Gallery 4 emphasised the new, humorous and even genre-defying developments in imaging beasts in the Victorian period. But what was the relationship between biblical, classical and animal painting in the later nineteenth century? Could they coexist? And how did the conditions of display at Manchester mediate this relationship? Critics at Manchester drew particular attention to the figure of Daniel, who, unusually, turns his back to the viewers.61 Further attention was undoubtedly drawn to this unusual composition thanks to the painting’s adjacent wall-mate, Riviere’s breakthrough work Circe (1871, Figure 4.8). Here another human protagonist turns her back to the audience. The two 59

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‘Lady Correspondent’, ‘Manchester Exhibition’, 6; W. W. Fenn, ‘Our Living Artists: Briton Riviere RA’, Magazine of Art, January 1879, 255. Armstrong, Celebrated Pictures, 54. ‘Manchester Exhibition’, Leeds Mercury, 14 May 1887, 12.

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

Figure 4.8. Engraving (1896) of Briton Riviere, Circe and the Companions of Ulysses (1871). From the New York Public Library, available at https://digitalcollections .nypl.org/items/510d47e4-2fed-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.

had previously been discussed and compared by commentators – but they had not previously been on display side-by-side.62 There are undoubtedly troubling ‘implications of relation’, as Michael Baxandall put it, for the faithful on viewing these two images in tandem.63 The subject matter of Circe was derived from that other great textual source, and one in complicated relations with the Bible by the later nineteenth century, Homer’s Odyssey. The magical transformation of men into pigs in Homer meant that their retention of apparently human, and unpleasantly lascivious expressions in Riviere’s painting was appropriate – if grotesque, as some noted.64 But these lusty part-human part-animal pigs might draw further attention to the apparently porous boundaries between human and other animal species. Earlier commentators on Daniel, as Poppy Mardall has explored, were disturbed by the hybrid qualities of its lions, which the Saturday Review described as ‘more and less than lions; they are endowed with emotions bordering on the human, and yet they have the sinuosity of 62

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‘The Royal Academy: III’, Saturday Review, 663; ‘The Royal Academy’, Athenaeum, 4 May 1872, 563. Michael Baxandall, ‘Exhibiting Intention: Some Preconditions of the Visual Display of Culturally Purposeful Objects’, in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 33–41 (at 34). ‘The Royal Academy: III’, Saturday Review, 663.

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the snake, the treachery of the reptile’. It decried ‘This confusion of species, this mingling of humanity with the brute creation’, noting that ‘the dignity of each creature resides in its distinctive individuality’.65 A lack of distinct species identity disrupted Christian expectations of human beings as separate from, and master of, other animals, further divorcing Daniel from its putative religious significance. At Manchester, Riviere’s Daniel occupied a strange position. It was ostensibly denied its religious valences, and deemed to be exclusively an animal painting, its conflicting, perhaps sacrilegious part-lion part-human part-snake creatures emphasised anew by its display alongside the hybrid swine in Circe. Did the compositional similarities between these two paintings undercut the religious potential of Daniel, who might appear to be equated to a classical sorceress? This lack of religious significance was compounded by the sensationalism and mass audiences associated with big cats, which might have been intensified in a setting where, as the press set out to present, a rabble of ordinary people encountered fine art, made grievous errors in interpreting it, and fixated on recognisable aspects such as animals.66 Armstrong’s new conceptions of Victorian art insisted on innovative styles and genres, including an aestheticised classicism and a revived animal painting. In the ‘invention’ of Victorian art at Manchester, biblical and classical narratives were refashioned to find new places in these genres. Both the Bible and antiquity were at least partly dissolved into the newly revived, proudly Victorian, genre of animal painting.67

V. Living Pasts Manchester’s new conceptualisation of Victorian art was preoccupied with the past. This was not, however, an ossified past, but two very particular living pasts, which guidebooks specifically related to biblical and classical antiquity. These living pasts entailed further expansion of the categories of 65

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‘The Royal Academy: III’, Saturday Review, 663. For further analysis see Poppy Mardall, ‘Briton Riviere (1840–1920) and the Unfixed Body’, British Art Journal 8/1 (2007): 57–62. Helen Cowie, Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Empathy, Education, Entertainment (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 179–294. Armstrong, Celebrated Pictures, 54. See further Diana Donald, Picturing Animals in Britain, 1750–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Martin A. Danahay and Deborah Denenholz Morse (eds.) Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); J. Keri Cronin, Art for Animals: Visual Culture and Animal Advocacy, 1870–1914 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2018).

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

biblical and classical art. The living past conjured by classical subject painting was – as discussed in section 4 above – perceived as a specifically new Victorian genre. This classicism was inflected, however, by another living past: that of the Bible. An emphasis on the classical and biblical living pasts was not perceived as contradictory to the narrative of modernity and technological progress which Manchester set out to illustrate. An invitation to reflect on the relationship between past and present was a fundamental part of the spectacle at Manchester, as demonstrated by the full-scale replica of ‘Old Manchester and Salford’, spanning Roman occupation to the eighteenth century.68 As the example of Tinworth’s Release of Barrabas (Figure 4.3) suggests, visions of biblical pasts could be forged anew in industrial manufacturing conditions. New technologies, such as photography, and the new ‘scientific’ discipline of archaeology, were a means by which artistic achievement might be measured. Hodgson suggested that Alma-Tadema’s painting Festival of the Vintage (1871, Gallery 4) ‘might be a photograph of the scene, only it is infinitely more personal, intelligent, intellectual, and delightful. Alma-Tadema has made dry bones live – he has taken the dust of archaeology and fashioned out of it human beings’.69 There was no assumption that the past was antipathetic to the exhibition’s vision, or that representing classical or biblical antiquity was inherently anti-progressive.

V.i Galleries 2 and 3: The Unchanging East Many Victorian artists who travelled to the Middle East perceived it to be essentially unchanged since biblical times. They tended to emphasise the disparity between what they regarded as a backward East, and the technologically advanced West. Hodgson’s ruminations prompted by paintings at Manchester are entirely typical: The East is an inexhaustible field for the artist – it is an old world in the midst of a new . . . when we step from the deck of a P&O steamer, with all its modern appliances, its nineteenth-century mechanism, and its latest artificiality of manners, we stride across the gulf of centuries, and set foot in a land where progress has no name, whose inhabitants sit blinking and dozing in a trance, which fell upon their forefathers two thousand years ago . . . Men are walking the streets clad in garments which have remained unchanged probably since the days of Abraham . . . Look at that long 68

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See David Wayne Thomas, Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 143–53. Hodgson, Fifty Years of British Art, 66.

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procession of camels . . . one precisely similar to it brought Joseph into Egypt.70

This living past was, according to Hodgson, artistically significant, and closely connected to envisioning the Bible. Artists travelling to the Middle East benefited (contemporaries believed) from the fact that it was itself a living history. Biblical subject painters could draw on this apparently ‘living past’ to create a convincing reality effect of biblical antiquity. Artists who painted biblical narratives often also produced more generic orientalist scenes that claimed to portray daily life in the contemporary Middle East. At Manchester, paintings were organised by artist, massing together works never previously publicly displayed side by side. This made particularly manifest connections between the same artists’ biblical and orientalist works. In Gallery 2, for example, viewers could encounter two works painted by Frederick Goodall, well known for his Egyptian travels, apparently undertaken ‘solely for the purpose of studying life in connection with Scriptural subjects’.71 His biblical Rebecca at the Well (c.1879–80, Figure 4.5) was accompanied by another image featuring women with water jars, The Subsiding of the Nile (1873), depicting an undated ‘daily life’ Egyptian scene, complete with camels, pyramids and palm trees. In Gallery 3, William Gale’s Abraham and Isaac on the Way to Sacrifice (1872) was accompanied by an Eastern Maiden (undated), whose title suggests a familiar ‘timeless’ orientalist scene. Nearby hung Gale’s ethnographic attempt at representing contemporary Jewish religious practice in The Wailing Place of the Jews at Jerusalem (1863). This was accompanied in the Manchester Fine Art Section catalogue with a quote from Murray’s handbook to Syria and Palestine, suggesting it was considered appropriately documentary and accurate, presumably a result of the authenticity conferred on his works by Gale’s two trips to Jerusalem in the 1860s.72 These examples suggest a confusion or expansion of the limits of what might constitute a ‘biblical’ painting on the walls at Manchester in particular. If a biblical painting grew out of the ‘living past’ of the contemporary Middle East, was it always possible to visually distinguish a biblical painting from an orientalist one?

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Hodgson, Fifty Years of British Art, 27–8. Goodall, cited in Arthur Fish, ‘A Painter of Bible Stories, Frederick Goodall, RA’, Quiver, January 1902, 273. Manchester Jubilee Exhibition, Fine Art Section, 24. On Gale, see James Dafforne, ‘British Artists – Their Style and Character. No. 89 – William Gale’, Art Journal, December 1869, 373–5.

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

V.ii Galleries 4 and 5: Resurrecting Classical Antiquity For classical subject painters, the task was somewhat different. They did not have a ‘living past’ to travel to, but were understood to be able to bring the past back to life in their paintings, firing the historical imaginations of their viewers.73 At Manchester, this version of the living past was discussed particularly in Gallery 4, which featured a large number of paintings by AlmaTadema. Alma-Tadema has long been interpreted by twentieth-century critics as a painter not of a living antiquity, but of Victorians in fancy dress.74 Several Manchester guidebooks, however, presented him as having brought the past back to life, offering new possibilities to the Victorian imagination: ‘AlmaTadema has re-peopled the past; he has re-built its cities and houses, and furnished them.’75 Other classical subject painters did not recreate such mundane aspects of ancient daily life, but were understood to make the past live again by creating nineteenth-century visions of classical antiquity. Hodgson’s description of Frederic Leighton’s Alcestis (1869–71, Figure 4.9) in Gallery 5 is particularly apposite here; this ‘might be an ornament to a Greek sarcophagus, so perfect is the co-ordination of parts to the whole, and so exquisite the balancing of masses and lines’.76

V.iii Gallery 5: Classicism and Orientalism, Bible and Antiquity Leighton’s Alcestis might seem a consummately ‘classical’ work, from an artist described as ‘fundamentally a Classicist in form’, drawing on both classical forms and subject matter in its engagement with Euripides’ tragedy of the same name, first performed in Athens in 438 BCE. But as recent reevaluations of Leighton’s work have argued, his classicism was fundamentally inflected by his orientalism. This is particularly the case for works like Alcestis, produced in the immediate aftermath of his artistically formative travels to Egypt in 1868.77 Alcestis provides a meeting ground for the ‘living pasts’ of the Bible and antiquity, and their two artistic genres of classicism and orientalism. 73

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As set out above, however, some artists such as Leighton and Poynter did seem to believe that the ancient Greeks were alive and well among the nineteenth-century British. However, this living biological heritage was understood as a carrier of British ethnic superiority, not social, cultural and technological stagnation as in the ‘Orient’. Elizabeth Prettejohn has argued convincingly against understanding Alma-Tadema’s work as ‘Victorians in Togas’. See ‘Lawrence Alma-Tadema and the Modern City of Ancient Rome’, Art Bulletin 84 (2002): 115–29. Hodgson, Fifty Years of British Art, 66; Manchester Jubilee Exhibition, Penny Guide, 20. Hodgson, Fifty Years of British Art, 62. Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, Painted Men in Britain, 1868–1918: Royal Academicians and Masculinities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), was the first significant re-evaluation of orientalism in

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Figure 4.9. Frederic Lord Leighton, Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis (c.1869–71), oil on canvas, 132.4 × 265.4 cm. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1982.46. Photo credit: Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum.

Leighton’s travels in Egypt transformed his visions of classical mythology, as Jongwoo Jeremy Kim has recently shown. In his Egypt diaries, Leighton fixated on the variety of skin colours which he observed in the people around him, describing each in terms of the commercially available paint-colours. Kim connects this obsessive enumeration of Egyptian physical difference to the dramatic range of skin tones in Alcestis.78 The ‘eternal’ east, and connections to biblical antiquity which many Victorians perceived in contemporary Egypt, are physically present in the form of the turbaned man (Pheres, Alcestis’ father-in-law), who stands behind her corpse. This orientalised vision of a Greek tragedy further confused the apparently separate categories of biblical and classical antiquity. The centrality of death and resurrection in Alcestis gave rise to comment about its connection to Christianity; Hodgson noted that the story ‘may be the prophetic foreshadowing of the final triumph over death which is celebrated at our Christian Easter’.79 These overlaps between Christianity and classics were reinforced by the painting’s position

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Leighton’s paintings (rather than in his well-known orientalist house). See further Madeleine Boden, ‘A Relief from Classicism: Frederic Leighton in the Near East, 1857–1895’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of York, 2019. Kim, Painted Men in Britain, 17–19. 79 Hodgson, Fifty Years of British Art, 62.

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

Figure 4.10. Frederic Lord Leighton, Elisha Raising the Son of the Shunamite (1881), oil on canvas 127 × 174 cm. Leighton House Museum, Kensington & Chelsea, London, UK. © Leighton House/Bridgeman Images.

alongside the sole biblical work by Leighton exhibited at Manchester: Elisha Raising the Son of the Shunamite (1881, Figure 4.10), a resurrection narrated in 2 Kings 4:36. Both Alcestis and the dead child lie horizontally across the canvas, both between life and death, shrouded in sculptural white drapery. There are clear thematic and compositional parallels between Alcestis and Elisha, despite one being ostensibly ‘classical’ and one ‘biblical’. Art historians have only recently begun to critically explore Leighton’s biblical subject matter paintings, as part of a re-evaluation and expansion of the boundaries of his status as pre-eminent classicist. Keren Hammerschlag has compellingly argued that Leighton’s classicism was not so much a matter of creating a living past, but was ‘beset by the impossibility of resurrecting the past’. She contends that Leighton’s idealised classicism was fractured by a Gothic tendency towards ‘manifestations of the dead that refuse to remain buried, the living that are more dead than alive’.80 The display at Manchester undoubtedly reinforced the overlaps between classical and Gothic, classicism and orientalism, the Bible and antiquity, setting up conversations between purportedly discrete classical and biblical works. 80

Keren Hammerschlag, Frederic Leighton: Death, Mortality, Resurrection (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 2, 4.

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VI. Popular Pasts, Shared Pasts, Changing Pasts: Gallery 6, the Central Hall In 1887, the Manchester City News published the results of a poll in which some 12,000 people voted for the top twelve paintings of the Jubilee Exhibition.81 Some of these images have the strong narrative drive often (rather sneeringly) associated with popular appreciation of art. But the only obvious linking factor is their large size, their relative contemporaneity (with one exception all hailed from the 1870s and 1880s), and their prominent positions in the exhibition; five of these works were located in Gallery 6. The supposedly ‘elite’ status of classical subject matter and visual culture is not borne out by the City News poll. Five of its top twelve engage with classical antiquity, and in varied ways. Poynter’s Atalanta’s Race (1876) draws on mythological narratives and classical sculptural precedents, while Long’s Babylonian Marriage Market (1875) refers to Herodotus’ Histories. Leighton’s Daphnephoria (1874–6), depicting a procession in honour of Apollo in a non-specific ancient Greek context, displays erudite references to classical sculpture, its flattened, frieze-like appearance rendering it perhaps the most abstract and aestheticising in the top twelve. These three were all located in Gallery 6, and are visible in Figures 4.12–4.15. None of the top twelve depicted specifically biblical narratives, but two focused on early Christianity in the context of Roman imperialism. Edwin Long’s Diana or Christ? (Figure 4.11; 1881, Gallery 6) and Charles Mitchell’s Hypatia (Gallery 1) both presage violent martyrdom, proposing a direct conflict between the classical and biblical worlds. In addition to its classical textual references, Long’s Babylonian Marriage Market drew on biblical archaeology, featuring Assyrian artefacts excavated by Austen Henry Layard in the 1840s and 1850s.82 The few visual records of the Fine Arts Department all focus on Gallery 6 (Figures 4.12–4.15).83 It appears to have been the most visited and remembered section of the exhibition; the Official Guide noted that its ‘large pictures . . . always attract crowds’.84 As the plans (Figures 4.1 and 4.2) show, it was a key thoroughfare through the exhibition. Most visitors would have entered and departed from the Fine Arts Department via this 81 82

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See Treuherz, ‘Manchester Royal Jubilee Exhibition’. Mark Bills (ed.), The Price of Beauty: Edwin Long’s Babylonian Marriage Market (1875), exhibition catalogue (London, 2004). In addition to Figures 4.12 and 4.14, a sketch of the Central Gallery is provided in Nodal (ed.) Pictorial Record, 26. Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Official Guide, 39.

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

Figure 4.11. Edwin Long, Diana or Christ? (1881), oil on canvas, 121 × 211 cm. Image courtesy of Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery.

room, some leaving into the gardens without venturing any further into other galleries. It was dominated by large-scale paintings set in classical antiquity. It is a fitting final location – before we leave the exhibition – to return to the connections between the exhibition’s mass audience and their viewing preferences. This room, and several of the key paintings selected by the City News poll, evoked a common (if fraught) ground between the biblical and classical past. Its juxtaposition of popular contemporary portraiture with these scenes orchestrated further conversations about the changing understanding of the Bible in particular in Victorian society. Set at Ephesus in the third century CE, Edwin Long’s Diana or Christ? (1881, Figure 4.11) centres on Roman imperial persecution of Christians, setting the Bible and classical antiquity as explicit rival forces, and apparently undermining the complex, interwoven relationship I have argued for here. However, this painting demonstrates the significance of classical antiquity in Victorian thought as a site for the development of Christian identity, establishing a common emotional thread between nineteenthcentury Britons and early Christians in the Eastern Roman Empire.85 The 85

See further Kate Nichols, ‘Diana or Christ?: Seeing and Feeling Doubt in Late-Victorian Visual Culture’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 23 (2016): http://doi.org /10.16995/ntn.772.

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Figure 4.12. Photograph of the Central Hall of the Fine Arts Department, Manchester Jubilee Exhibition, 1887. Image courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council GB127.m61864.

Figure 4.13. Key to paintings and sculpture in 4.12, drawn by Rhiannon Nichols (2016) and used with her permission. 1. Edwin Long, Diana or Christ? (1881); 2. John Collier, Thomas Huxley (1883); 3. John Collier, Charles Darwin (1883); 4. Harry Bates, The Aeneid (1884); 5. Edwin Landseer, Scene at Braemar (1857); 6. Edwin Long, Babylonian Marriage Market (1875); 7. George Richmond, Earl Granville (1876); 8. J. E. Millais, George Grote (1871); 9. G. F. Watts, The Duke of Argyll (c.1860); 10. G. F. Watts, Lord Lyndhurst (1862); 11. G. F. Watts, Viscount Sherbrooke (1874); 12. Edwin Long, The Gods and Their Makers (1878); 13. John Lucas, Robert Stephenson (1853); 14. James Dromgole Linton, The Benediction (1881); 15. W. M. Tweedie, William Cavendish, Seventh Duke of Devonshire (1856); 16. T. H. Munns, The Marquis of Hartington MP (1883); 17. J. E. Millais, John Bright MP (1880).

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

dress of its protagonists and its white marble columns obviously connote a generalised classical setting. More specifically, the fourth-century BCE column drum (on display at the British Museum’s Ephesian Gallery from 1884) makes a clear visual connection to classical Greece. Core signifiers of Roman militarism – standards, helmets and armour – are abundantly apparent. Paul’s rebuttal of the Artemis/Diana cult (Acts 19; 1 Corinthians 15:32; Ephesians) provides a scriptural connection. The choice of Ephesus as the site for the young woman’s trial reveals the multiple interconnections between Greece, Rome and the Bible in one location. On the other side of the room (see Figures 4.14 and 4.15) hung Edward Armitage’s Julian the Apostate Presiding at a Conference of Sectarians (1875). This did not have quite the same popular appeal as Long’s painting – but it too presented a Roman imperial context for the oppression of Christianity, its white marble columns and bronze sculpture of Athena making it an instantly recognisable classical scene. These shared classical and early Christian pasts were not just a matter for historians or theologians; Long’s painting in particular brought an emotionally engaging, narrative-driven vision of early Christianity to Manchester’s mass audience. The painting’s position in the Central Hall must have reinforced its appeal, and it was ranked second most popular in the City News poll. It later found its way into sermons, and was widely discussed in Religious Tract Society periodicals.86 Its popularity was based on sentimentality and narrative drive, which did not sit comfortably with dominant art critical developments of the later nineteenth century. Armstrong branded Diana or Christ? not to be ‘a work of art at all’, and held that Long’s works were ‘only fit for the crowd to which they are addressed’.87 The association with Manchester’s mass audience, and this audience’s preference for explicitly religious subject matter, once again denigrated the artistic status of a work. In this case, the classical forms presented on the canvas did not necessitate aestheticising classical modes of looking; religious content and narrativedriven modes of appreciation had overwritten the painting’s classical form. Populism and celebrity fuelled another criticism of the exhibition: the proliferation of ‘fashionable portrait painters’, at the expense of other, apparently more serious, genres of art.88 Portraiture occupied a significant position in the new story of Victorian art articulated at Manchester; Figures 4.12–4.15 show its prominence in the Central Room. Telling 86 88

Nichols, ‘Diana or Christ?’. 87 Armstrong, Celebrated Pictures, 5, 54. Ford Madox Brown, ‘The Progress of English Art as Not Shown at the Manchester Exhibition’, Magazine of Art, January 1888, 123; Claude Phillips, ‘The Progress of English Art as Shown at the Manchester Exhibition’, Magazine of Art, January 1888, 43.

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Figure 4.14. Photograph of the Central Hall of the Fine Arts Department, Manchester Jubilee Exhibition, 1887. Image courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council GB127.m61866.

Figure 4.15. Key to paintings in 4.14, drawn by Rhiannon Nichols (2016) and used with her permission. 1. Edward Poynter, The Dragon of Wantley (1873); 2. Edward Poynter, Atalanta’s Race (1875); 3. Edward Poynter, Perseus and Andromeda (1872); 4. Edward Poynter, Nausicaa and Her Maidens (1873); 5. Edward Armitage, Julian the Apostate Presiding at a Conference of Sectarians (1875); 6. John Everett Millais, Winter Fuel (1873); 7. Frederic Leighton, Daphnephoria (1876).

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

a national story of art seemed inescapably bound up in telling a (very selective) national history. With the exception of the Royal Family, only portraits of men appeared. They spanned the military, clergy, and famous scientists and engineers (the latter particularly significant for Manchester’s vision of technological progress during Victoria’s reign). Several of these portraits set up dialogues with the paintings that they were exhibited alongside. John Collier’s portrait of the deeply religious doctor and biologist Dr William B. Carpenter, for example, hung next to Poynter’s A Visit to Aesculapius, where a naked Venus consults the Greek god of medicine and healing. Was this an accident or a comment on the advances of modern medicine? Looming over Long’s Diana or Christ? is the instantly recognizable portrait, also by Collier, of Charles Darwin, accompanied by another Collier portrait of Darwin’s avid apologist Thomas Huxley (Figures 4.12– 4.13). This juxtaposition may have posed a new question: in an era of new biological knowledge, was the choice not between Diana/classical antiquity or Christ, but Darwin/evolution or Christ? At Manchester, images that drew together the classical and biblical past rubbed shoulders with portraits of contemporary Victorian figures, some of whom posed their own challenges to understandings of the Bible. The biblical and classical paintings and sculpture that I have explored here were not isolated instances of the Victorian historical imagination. They were surrounded by contemporary concerns – and, as art critics sniffed – large crowds of people.

VII. Conclusion At Manchester in 1887, biblical, classical and animal imagery hung alongside each other, while genre painters, social realists and some painters associated with the ‘aesthetic’ movement were given equal space. There was no discernible organising principle beyond medium (oil painting or watercolour), and whether the artist was dead or alive; there was, for example, no attempt to group together the works of the Pre-Raphaelites. Rather than providing a definitive greatest hits, a chronological or thematic arrangement, or narrative of movements, the exhibition presents to a twenty-first-century viewer a rather bewilderingly vast vision of British art. Contemporaries, however, identified some unity, in its creation of a national school: ‘a style of art which cannot be found abroad; it is essentially English, pure in sentiment, unsensational, and genuine in quality’.89 89

Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Critical Notices of the Pictures, 71.

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In the Central Hall, the core position allocated to the Bible and antiquity – and in several instances the co-existence of the two – demonstrates the significance of these two pasts in envisioning the new narrative of Victorian, and specifically national art set out at Manchester. Further, as the City News poll shows, both were immensely popular. It was not just prints of biblical art that were mass consumed in the late nineteenth century; the display at Manchester, and its audience of 4.7 million, demonstrates that a large number of people came into contact with oil paintings in this period. Both were intertwined and fundamentally inseparable from industry and commerce in this venue; both the Bible and classical antiquity were mass reproduced in the various stalls of the exhibition’s industrial section. The artistic categories of the Bible and classical antiquity were expanding, and bled into each other in ways unique to Victorian visual culture. For many artists in the 1870s and 1880s, creating a biblical body necessitated classical sculpture, which for some Victorian artists meant an inherent British connection. But increasingly, as the example of Leighton’s Alcestis suggests, classical subject painting was illuminated by an orientalism which conjured Egypt and Palestine as living biblical presents. The Bible and classical antiquity offered viewers two living pasts and opportunities for transhistorical engagements; for lovers of beauty, with ancient Greek sculpture; for religious people, with early Christian worship, feeling (and persecution). As Diana or Christ? (Figure 4.11) demonstrates, the two weren’t necessarily distinct. Victorian classicism was presented as a distinct new genre at Manchester, but, as the discussion of the intersections between Riviere’s Daniel (Figure 4.7) and Circe (Figure 4.8) suggests, the classical was bound up with other refashioned genres, produced and displayed in conversation with both biblical and, perhaps more surprisingly, animal painting. The two pasts were perceived and presented sometimes as complementary, sometimes adversary, but could nearly always be understood in relation to each other. Attention to the Bible and antiquity in Victorian painting and sculpture foregrounds the range of modes of art appreciation which were present at exhibitions in the period. Classicising sculpture continued to be regarded as an elite taste requiring cultivated knowledge to appreciate it, and it was thus not particularly present or engaged with at Manchester; yet classicising painting was understood both in an aestheticizing and more narrativedriven manner. Biblical subjects were comparatively thin on the ground, but several of those works that were present attracted considerable attention, from both art critics and the religious press. Although biblical scenes

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

did have additional religious valences, critics situated them within – and sometimes used them as test cases for – ongoing art critical debates. It was only when they were deemed too sentimental and too closely associated with un-aesthetic, often evangelical modes of art viewing that they were ignored or rejected by some art critics; as was the case with Long’s Diana or Christ? (Figure 4.11) and Tinworth’s Releases of Barrabas (Figure 4.3). An evaluation of responses to biblical works on display highlights the importance of art-viewing publics and the production of what was acceptable as art, a key consideration when evaluating an exhibition with such vast attendance figures. Hodgson singled out one work from the Central Hall to embody his aspirations for, and confidence in, the art historical legacy of the Manchester Jubilee Exhibition (Figures 4.14–4.15, no. 7). He evoked an imagined pleasure of seeing the ‘Daphnephoria’ in the middle of the twentieth century. Perhaps another great Exhibition will then be held in Manchester, and the daily balloon or the pneumatic popgun will bring people there from all parts of the world. By that time the picture will have got enamelled by the glow of age; it will be an old master, and a glorious one.90

His choice of Leighton’s frieze-like and emphatically classical work is testimony to the significant role played by classical antiquity in the creation of a canon of Victorian art. This exhibition, which set out to establish the importance of the art of its own era, drew extensively on a range of pasts – especially the classical and to a lesser extent the biblical – as it imagined the future. While Hodgson conceptualised a future with rather unusual technological developments in the ‘pneumatic popgun’ as a mode of transit, his artistic imagination was somewhat more limited. The irony of this passage, of course, is that Leighton’s reputation, and nineteenth-century classicising art more generally, was probably at its absolute nadir in the mid-twentieth century. His work was not considered an ‘old master’, and precisely because it was regarded as quintessentially Victorian. ‘Manchester has shown us, in the most exhaustive and satisfying way, all that this country has done in art during the last half-century’; such critics viewed the exhibition as entirely representative.91 Others were less 90 91

Hodgson, Fifty Years of British Art, 64. R.J.F., ‘Fine Art at the Manchester Jubilee Exhibition’, 515; Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Critical Notices of the Pictures, 3; Hodgson, Fifty Years of British Art, 15.

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convinced, and lamented the absence of a quite surprising range of artists – some, like J. M. Whistler, avant-garde, and central to narratives of modern British art today; others now obscure and more artistically conservative, such as William Blake Richmond.92 Art works connected to new trends in British art, such as the plein air painters associated with the New English Art Club, formed in 1886, were not included in the display. The tiny number of female artists who featured in the national story of art does not seem to have been noted by contemporaries. Artists who were women had a considerable presence in regional exhibitions (and collections) in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but evidently only a handful were considered worthy of inclusion in the new canon set out in Manchester.93 While Holman Hunt’s biblical painting remains well known, contemporary claims that the art works on show at Manchester would occupy a well-deserved, and important place in the history of art seem rather quaint, even in the sub-field of British art studies.94 Yet it had immediate, global impact on the formulation of a canon of British art. The 1888 Melbourne Centennial Exhibition featured a large British loan; the Melbourne press widely discussed this in relation to the Manchester Jubilee Exhibition, and there were significant overlaps between Manchester and Melbourne in the key organisers of the antipodean display.95 Works connected to the Bible and antiquity received radiant 92

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Arnold, ‘Manchester Exhibition’, 250; Phillips, ‘Progress of English Art as Shown’, 46; Brown, ‘Progress of English Art as Not Shown’, 123. There were no works by female artists in the Central Hall. The Fine Arts Department featured 16 (of 943) oil paintings by women (1.7 per cent). In watercolours, where women were typically better represented, there were 11 out of 678 (1.6 per cent) by women. This compares unfavourably with Liverpool’s Autumn Exhibition, where in 1873, for example, 7.9 per cent of the oil paintings displayed were by women (and 20 per cent of watercolours). Only one of the paintings at Manchester engaged specifically with the Bible or antiquity, Emma Magnus’s Licinia, Wife of Caius Gracchus, Begs Him to Avoid the Public Dissension, which was accompanied in the catalogue with a quotation from Plutarch’s Life of Caius Gracchus. I have been unable to find an image of this painting, and it seems to have gone entirely unremarked upon at Manchester. For an overview of women artists, regional exhibiting practices, and classicisms, see Kate Nichols, ‘A Cosmopolitan Victorian in the Midlands: Regional Collecting and the Work of Sophie Anderson (1823–1903)’, Midlands Art Papers, 1 (2017/18): www .birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-artslaw/historyofart/map/10-Nichols-Anderson.pdf. Since their deaths, neither Tinworth nor Riviere has been the subject of more than one journal article each. See Mardall, ‘Briton Riviere’; Miranda Goodby, ‘George Tinworth: An Artist in Terracotta’, Journal of the Tiles & Architectural Ceramics Society 3 (1990): 15–21. William Agnew, the Chair of the Fine Arts Section at Manchester, was one of the Royal Commissioners responsible for securing the loans to Melbourne, while Harry Gooden, listed as curator of the Fine Arts Department at Manchester, became custodian of the British Loan pictures. See ‘A Correspondent’, ‘The British Art Collection for the Exhibition’, Argus,

The 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

critical appraisal in Melbourne, with both Holman Hunt’s Shadow of Death (Figure 4.6) and Leighton’s Alcestis (Figure 4.9) making the epic journey overseas. Manchester’s vision of Victorian art is more than an individual exhibition case study history; it was an attempt to formulate a national, epochal story of art. This new vision of ‘Victorian art’ was exported through imperial networks, and widely discussed and critiqued in a wide range of publications, popular and specialist. The Bible and classical antiquity sat squarely at its heart.

9 June 1888, 5; J. Lake, Centennial International Exhibition, Melbourne. Official Guide to the Picture Galleries, and Catalogue of the Fine Arts (Melbourne: M. L. Hutchinson, 1888).

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The Classical and Biblical in Dialogue A Conversation in Victorian Sculpture1 caroline vout

A criticism that might be directed at both the curators and the reviewers of the exhibition, Sculpture Victorious: Art in the Age of Invention, 1837–1901, is their apparent indifference to religion.2 The emphasis was empire, an emphasis that meant that classical subject matter could continue to dominate, holding its own against orientalism, innovation and craft, and underpinning Britain’s cultural and political agenda as it had done since at least the seventeenth century. Yet issues intrinsic to religion emerged nonetheless, and in complex and subtle ways: for example, in a relief, after a design by George Frederic Watts, to which his wife added biblical quotations; or in Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave, where a tiny cross, dangling from her discarded clothing, marks her classical body as that of a Christian woman.3 The criticism then is perhaps better expressed in terms of the show’s embeddedness of religion. Certainly, industrialization and liberalism in nineteenth-century Britain led to a ‘secularization of the mind’ to which the Church itself, and its own evocation of liberal values, contributed.4 Political progressivism led to, and was fuelled by, artistic progressivism, and the emergence of forms such as ‘New Sculpture’.5 But – and this is the crux of what was underplayed – the Church’s social role depended on sculpture, in the nave, in domestic contexts, in memorials to believers and unbelievers, a dependence that created the conditions for 1

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The research for, and writing of, this piece was done in 2017–18. I thank Jason Edwards, Simon Goldhill, Robin Osborne, Elizabeth Prettejohn and the Press’s anonymous readers for their feedback. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 11 September to 30 November 2014, and Tate Britain, 25 February to 25 May 2015. I was responsible for some of the catalogue entries in the ‘Antiquity and the Ideal’ section. Martina Droth, Jason Edwards, and Michael Hatt (eds.), Sculpture Victorious: Art in the Age of Invention, 1837–1901 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), cat. nos. 145 (relief panel triptych by Mary Seton Watts) and 80–3 (slave). Also relevant are cat. nos. 51 (pastoral staff by John Dando Sedding), 49 (a copy of Noel Humphrey’s Parables of Our Lord bound in papier mâché) and 32 (a brass box containing a disc stamped with the Ten Commandments and another with the Apostles’ Creed, commemorating Victoria as spiritual and moral exemplar). Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church: Part II, 2nd edn (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1972). On ‘new sculpture’, see Susan Beattie, The New Sculpture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983); and David J. Getsy, Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

A Conversation in Victorian Sculpture

stimulating conversation between the classical and the biblical. This underplaying is of a piece with a social history of art that has reduced religion to ideology. Had the exhibition been Painting Victorious: Art in the Age of Invention, 1837–1901, this first paragraph would have read very differently. While it is true that the number of religious paintings listed in the Royal Academy exhibition catalogues of 1825–70 is surprisingly small,6 it is also true that William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World (1851–3), and The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1854–60), which bypassed the Academy to find fame on tour and in print media, are widely acknowledged as having had as momentous and controversial an impact on Protestantism, as Powers’s Greek Slave had on issues of race.7 It is not simply the ‘realism’ of Hunt’s style (an alternative truth to nature to Greco-Roman ‘naturalism’) that is at stake here, rendering Christ more mystical and approachable than neoclassicism would have enabled, but the New Testament inscriptions on his frames. It did not matter that these pictures were not made for churches.8 They created an archaeological filter through which to see the Bible, and, conversely almost, extricated religious painting from traditional history painting to hone its symbolic, spiritual, doctrinal possibilities. Hunt was a ‘priest’, his pictures, ‘sermons’.9 6

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Michaela Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 31. The original The Light of the World is today in the side-chapel at Keble College, Oxford, and the original The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple in Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, acc. no. 1896P80. See Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible, 127–88; Michaela Giebelhausen, ‘The Quest for Christ: William Holman Hunt and the Writing of Artistic Motivation’, in Writing the PreRaphaelites: Text, Context, Subtext, ed. Michaela Giebelhausen and Tim Barringer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009); and for the pamphlet, Frederic George Stephens, William Holman Hunt and His Works: A Memoir of the Artist’s Life, with Descriptions of His Pictures (London: James Nisbet, 1860). Unlike the paintings by inspirational artists across the Channel: on nineteenth-century French art in dialogue with Ultramontanism, see Michael Paul Driskel, Representing Belief: Religion, Art, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), who (123) notes how, when Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited Paris in 1849, they claimed two mural paintings by Hippolyte Flandrin (1809–64) in the choir of the Church of Saint Germain des Prés the most perfect they had ever seen. William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1905), vol. I, xv: ‘The office of the artist should be looked upon as a priest’s service in the temple of Nature’; and on the idea of his painting as ‘sermons’, see e.g. Alan Woods, ‘A Sermon in a Frame: Holman Hunt and The Light of the World’. Cambridge Quarterly 15/3 (1986): 246–60. For a revisionist view of Hunt and the relationship of his and other PreRaphaelite painters’ endeavours to science, see John Holmes, The Pre-Raphaelites and Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), esp. chap. 4 on the sacred and The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple; and for Hunt and religion, Nancy Davenport, ‘Holman Hunt: Layered Belief in the Art of a Pre-Raphaelite Idealist’, Religion and the Arts 16 (2012): 29–77.

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As a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt is but one of a number of British painters and art critics, most notably John Ruskin,10 whose desire to wake art from its Greco-Roman lethargy intersected with deep pockets of religious debate in both the Church of England and beyond about how to revive faith – debate that inevitably, given the intense flares of iconoclastic and iconophile feeling throughout Christianity’s history, involved questions about the role of the visual for belief and in ritual practice. It also put a premium on the appearance of churches as attractive containers and powerful communicators.11 The stakes were high, and the Pre-Raphaelites shocking: Hunt notes of The Light of the World, ‘the extreme High Church party regarded my humanistic treatment of the life of Christ as wanting in reverence’.12 But they, or at least second-phase Pre-Raphaelites such as William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, also dictated the look and feel of such High Church shrines as London’s Holy Trinity, Sloane Square and Christ Church, Southgate, as well as St Martin’s Church, Brampton in Cumbria. The gem-like colours of their stained-glass windows beg comparison with Sculpture Victorious’s focus on craft and manufacture and its vaunting of classical antiquity as ‘an ideal’.13

I. Setting the Scene, or Thinking Religiously about Religious Sculpture The contrast in the ways in which sculpture and painting of the period are talked about draws attention to the alternative remits and reaches of different media, but also asks that we bring together these media, or rather the questions of style, subject matter, meaning and context raised by these media, in an attempt to make sculpture’s religious import explicit.14 For all that sculpture’s production by teams of stonemasons and by pointing 10 11

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See e.g. Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible, 8–11. Benedict Read, Victorian Sculpture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 244–52. Relevant here, but with a focus on Catholic reform and church-building in Ireland, is Ann Wilson, ‘The Material and Visual Culture of the Construction of Irish Catholic Identity: St Colman’s Cathedral, Queenstown, County Cork’, in Material Religion in Modern Britain: The Spirit of Things, ed. Timothy Willem Jones and Lucinda Matthews-Jones, 37–55 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, vol. II, 410; and on the provocation of Pre-Raphaelite engagement with biblical subject matter more broadly, Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible, 2. Droth, Edwards, and Hatt (eds.), Sculpture Victorious, 176–241. Sculpture Victorious is not alone: when historians seek to show how the ‘content of the Scriptures loomed large in the visual arts’ of the Victorian period – see e.g. Timothy T. Larsen,

A Conversation in Victorian Sculpture

machine left it in danger of seeming second-rate compared to Hunt’s brush-marked canvases, there was still a thriving market, and not only for the heroic nudes and lithe lovelies of Greece and Rome, though these would continue to dominate until modernism triumphed, but also for Old and New Testament protagonists (Eve, Lot’s Wife, Rebecca at the Well, Ruth, Rachel . . .). Did these classical and biblical figures look similar to one another, and fulfil an analogous function?15 When the sculptor Thomas Woolner’s ship docked at St Vincent’s harbour on his way from Australia back to England in 1854, he described the scene that met him: ‘At this place I went along the plain some distance to a well where the town gets supplied with water: it was just such a one as we read of in extremely old books, such as Homer and the Bible: there I saw Rebecca.’16 For this particular founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whom Hunt had first seen in the British Museum’s Elgin Room,17 the Bible and antiquity presented themselves as equivalent stimuli. But what about the reception of these figures in Victorian culture more broadly, where the Bible, and the illustrated Bible, were not just everyday currency, in the home, in daily Bible readings, in widely disseminated sermons and Bible commentaries,18 but (and it is this, perhaps, that differentiates it from the Greek and Latin that still dominated the education of the upper and middle classes),19 at the heart of fiercely contested debate about faith, its fostering and potential loss, especially in the face of challenges posed by Catholicism and science? For every viewer for whom the ‘doubleness’ of Venus as Eve amplified the pleasure, there was another for whom their separation was fundamental. Given that even Greek tragedy was enlisted to a Christian cause in this period,20 what made this separation

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‘Literacy and Biblical Knowledge: The Victorian Age and Our Own’, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 52/3 (2009): 519–35 (at 524) – they reach for painting, not sculpture. See e.g. Read, Victorian Sculpture, 206, who talks of ‘the use of subjects from the Bible as excuses for the portrayal of nude or partly nude women, little different from the classical subjects current at the same time’. Wednesday 27 September: Amy Woolner, Thomas Woolner, R.A. Sculptor and Poet: His Life in Letters (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1917), 98. https://victorianweb.org/painting/whh/woolner.html (last accessed 1 May 2022). Catherine Mumford (b. 1829), who would go on to found the Salvation Army, was already reading it at home by the age of five and had read it eight times from cover to cover by the age of twelve; Bibles were even chained at railway stations: see lecture series (2010–11) by Richard Evans at Gresham College, https://gresham.ac.uk/series/the-victorians-culture-and-experience -in-Britain-Europe-and-the-world-1815-1914 (last accessed 1 May 2022). Although relevant here for thinking about the constituency that shared in a knowledge of Greek and Roman culture is King’s College London’s ‘Classics and Class’ project (www .classicsandclass.info). Simon Goldhill, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 2012), 212.

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possible? How did the classical remain distinct from the biblical at the same time as finding renewed force in delivering its message? Before we explore these questions in the discussion of specific examples, a little more by way of context. Woolner was the only sculptor among the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and from 1856 to 1867, worked intermittently on one of our case-studies, a marble group of a mother teaching her son to say his prayers, that has been said to make ‘the position of sculpture within Pre-Raphaelitism’ ‘unquestionable’.21 It is also a composition that chimes with the statues of Education that were swiftly becoming popular sights in the civic landscape. In the same period, neoclassical sculptor John Gibson finished a second of our case-studies, his last complete work and only Christian narrative subject, the relief Christ Blessing the Little Children (1862–4), and trained John ‘Warrington’ Wood, who would, within years, produce, as well as mythological subjects, the freestanding Sisters of Bethany, Little Jewish Captive Maid and Ruth and Naomi, each with a biblical quotation on its base similar to those on Hunt’s canvases.22 When Wood’s hometown commissioned him to make St Michael Overcoming Satan (1874–7), it was praised in familiar terms: ‘The sermon in this marble on the misuse and degradation allied to the brutalising passions, and on the ennobling dignity of strength sanctified by alliance with noble and Godlike purpose, is most eloquently preached’.23 Beyond the conservative tastes of private patrons and provincial bourgeoisie, sculptors (the names of too many of them now unknown to us) were contributing to the unprecedented boom in ecclesiastical building that in the 1860s would see a new Anglican church ‘consecrated every four or five days’.24 The employment of the figurative form in church was now part of a recognized revival in architectural decoration, figurative and non-figurative, fertilized by the collapse of art into manufacture, that would go some way towards freeing sculpture from the gallery and making it part of the furniture.25 Hamo Thornycroft (1850–1925) and 21

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National Trust, inv. no. 584949. See infra (fig. 5.7), Read,Victorian Sculpture, 185; and Raleigh Trevelyan, A Pre-Raphaelite Circle (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978), 137–8. Sisters of Bethany, exhibited 1871 (Kibble Palace, Glasgow Botanic Gardens) and 1875 (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery); Captive Maid, exhibited 1875, https://sculpture .gla.ac.uk/view/object.php?id=msib5_1227198535 (last accessed 4 May 2022); and Ruth and Naomi, 1884, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, inv. no. 4109. In Warrington Museum and Art Gallery: Edward Morris, Public Art Collections in North-West England: A History and a Guide (Liverpool University Press, 2001), 181, citing a contemporary local critic. William Whyte, Unlocking the Church: The Lost Secrets of Victorian Sacred Space (Oxford University Press, 2017), 1. See e.g. Beattie, New Sculpture, 6–8, 189.

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Harry Bates (1850–99), for example, whose Greco-Roman subjects, Pandora and Teucer, starred in Sculpture Victorious, were also responsible for the Apostles and the bas-relief of Christ on the altar-front for Sloane Square’s Holy Trinity, while others, like Woolner, specialized in church memorials.26 The shades of spirituality expressed in these memorials enabled the Church to celebrate its social role even where faith had grown shaky. In Henry Weekes’s Shelley Memorial in Christchurch Priory, Dorset (1853–4), Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley mourns over the body of her drowned husband in a piece reminiscent of ancient Endymion sarcophagi and of Michelangelo’s Pietà: as one scholar dryly observes, ‘a curious tribute to a notorious atheist’.27 The increased focus on church building design and contents as a productive space for worship and for honouring Queen and country, combined with the creation of new cemeteries due to chronic overcrowding in churchyards, meant that funerary sculpture too grew in prominence.28 At Highgate Cemetery, the wife of the Reverend R. C. Vaughan, who had died in 1858, was commemorated by a Joseph Edwards allegory of Religion, her left hand resting on a large Bible. The Art Journal of 1866 was effusive in its praise: In painting it is usual to nominate Christian Art as the highest style of Art; and surely the works of the sculptor who makes sacred subjects his theme are entitled to be ranked in the same category. No one, or at least none who entertain right views of things sacred and holy, would presume to say that a figure like this, grave and exalted in feeling and graceful in its form, is less worthy of admiration than a Venus or Dancing Girl.29

Although plenty of Victorian funerary monuments are not ostensibly religious, angels proliferate, many of them versions of Victory adjusting her sandal.30 26

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On Woolner’s Grasmere memorial to Wordsworth and its debt to medieval manuscripts, Anne Neale, ‘Thomas Woolner’s Wordsworth Memorial, 1851: Pre-Raphaelite Sources and Slips’, Burlington Magazine, 151/1275 (2009): 382–7. David Piper, as cited in Michael Benton, Literary Biography: An Introduction (Malden, MA, Oxford, and Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 98. Whyte, Unlocking the Church, 107–10, 122; and on the new cemeteries on the edges of cities, James Stephens Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (London: David & Charles, 1972); and Lee Jackson, Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). Art Journal 5 (1866): 92. See https://victorianweb.org/sculpture/edwards/2.html (last accessed 1 May 2022). It was widely reproduced in engravings as Hunt’s paintings and Woolner’s mother and son were reproduced in engravings. A fifth-century BCE relief from the parapet of the Athenian Temple of Athena Nike that is now in the Acropolis Museum, inv. no. 973, and was itself copied in marble in nineteenth-century

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If it is church as container we are talking about, however, it is not the classical but the gothic that dominates discussion:31 in 1865, ecclesiastical historian Edward Lewes Cutts could claim that ‘Gothic architecture’, and the ‘romantic’ state of mind that it expresses, were incompatible with its ‘opposite pole’, the ‘the highest style of sculpture’ (i.e. the classical). Yet as Cutts goes on to point out, neither of them was ‘in harmony with the mind of the present age’ – they ‘are not only inharmonious with each other, but they are inharmonious with ourselves’. The best one could do was ‘extract sound principles from all past phases of Art; to avoid prejudice and copyism; to study nature above all; and having cultivated our minds and souls with true and high feelings, and healthful tastes, then be not afraid to follow our own instincts’.32 Seen like this, it is impossible that varietals of classicism were not grafted onto the medieval for religious gain. Yet an arthistorical story of a ‘battle of styles’ is still favoured over accounts of eclecticism. Here we take a different approach. Already, it should be obvious that thinking religiously about religious sculpture is going to demand transcribing the ways in which classical and biblical subject matter, and the ever-shifting categories of classical and medieval style,33 speak to each other, and over each other, throwing down challenges and appropriating each other’s language. Often this was unpredictable: for example, when John Redfern made the Resurrection relief for the Tympanum of the Digby Memorial Chapel at Sherborne (1862), a work described at the time as ‘one of the best efforts we have yet seen of the modern Gothic school of sculpture’, he sought, he said, ‘to attain something of the flatness of treatment which the Elgin marbles possess’.34 Just as dangerous as aligning ‘biblical sculpture’ with medieval or Byzantine style,35 is assuming that its subject matter is a narrowly definable category. Instead, we embrace examples obvious and less obvious, and from

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England: www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2013/european-sculpture-works-of-artmedieval-to-modern/lot.114.html (last accessed 1 May 2022). Although note Gavin Stamp, ‘The Victorian Kirk: Presbyterian Architecture in NineteenthCentury Scotland’, in The Victorian Church: Architecture and Society, ed. Chris Brooks and Andrew Saint (Manchester University Press, 1995), 98–117 (at 108–13) on the enduring strength of the classical tradition in Glasgow. E. L. Cutts, ‘Ecclesiastical Art-Manufactors’, Art Journal 46 (October 1865): 293–6 (at 293–4). On the shifting style that is the ‘classical’, see Caroline Vout, Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2018). Cutts, ‘Ecclesiastical Art-Manufactors’, 296. Also Charles L. Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival (London: Longmans, Green, 1872), plate between pages 318 and 319. On their arrival in England early in the nineteenth century, the ‘marbles’ were gradually changing what classical style looked like. It is interesting here to note that Read, Victorian Sculpture, subdivides only the ‘Gothic’ (and not the ‘classical’) ‘architectural sculpture’ section of his book into ‘religious’ and ‘secular’.

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settings public and private, sacred and secular. We begin by going back to Venus and Eve, and tapping biblical heroines talking to Greco-Roman goddesses; we then listen in to Woolner and Gibson to see what they and their patrons have to say to each other. We wind up in church at the altar, where we converse with Christ.

II. Goddesses of Greek Myth Talk to Biblical Heroines II.i Clytie and Lot’s Wife In 2011, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London suggestively set Watts’s marble bust of the Greek nymph, Clytie, first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1868 (Figure 5.1), next to Thornycroft’s Lot’s Wife of 1877–8 (Figure 5.2).36 The corkscrew configuration of these pieces justifies their comparison, their strong shoulders and dramatically turned heads contorting their bodies as though to mark the moment that each is transformed, the former into a flower, and the latter into a pillar of salt. But whereas the water nymph writhes so as to draw attention to her bared breasts and Pre-Raphaelite neck, revisioning Ovid’s abject nakedness (sedit humo nuda nudis incompta capillis)37 as glorious nudity, Lot’s wife is a coiled spring of anxious energy. Both confront the divine: Ovid continues, ‘all she did was gaze on the face of the sun-god as he went, and turned her face towards him’.38 Lot’s draped wife disobeys the angels’ instruction in looking not to God, but back at Sodom, but she also defies classical convention, her strong Roman profile replacing any Hellenic beauty, as she too bears witness to God’s power by virtue of her impending metamorphosis, a change often conflated with the Greek myth of Niobe, who was turned to stone for her arrogance.39 Thornycroft claimed that inspiration for the figure lay in ‘a huge, straight boulder standing alone and 36

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The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900. Watts’s fascination with the nymph’s story led him to depict her in marble, bronze, terracotta, and on paper and canvas. Lot’s Wife, part inspired by Watts’s Clytie, – Beattie, New Sculpture, 145, 147; Caroline Dakers, The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 183; and Catherine Phillips, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World (Oxford University Press, 2007), 220 – belongs to Leighton House but is on loan to the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, where it is displayed across from a bronze Clytie. See Getsy, Body Doubles, 50–6 for a meta-sculptural reading of Lot’s Wife in dialogue with other sculptures by Thornycroft and with Frederic Leighton’s Athlete Wrestling with a Python. Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.261: ‘she sat on the bare ground, bare-headed, unkempt’. Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.264–5. Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Willie (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530–1700 (Oxford University Press, 2015), 496.

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Figure 5.1. George Frederic Watts, Clytie (1868–75), painted plaster (said to be the original model). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Walter L. Palmer, 1908, inv. no. 08.131. Photo: public domain.

weird on a sea-shore’.40 It would seem that form is everything, until we realize that it is her action that is marked as crucial. In her left hand she clutches a string of beads, a residual sign of the city’s luxury and a nod, perhaps, to the rosary.41 As well as being the subject of Genesis 19:26, Lot’s unnamed wife is again mentioned in Luke 17:32, where she is used by Jesus as a warning of the consequences of making poor choices: ‘Remember Lot’s Wife.’ Her ‘monument’, inscribed with this caution, also has a role to play in John Bunyan’s Christian allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, first published in 1678, a book that in the nineteenth century was regarded, like the Bible, as essential family reading (adapted in poetry, musical arrangements, and for school lessons) 40

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Figure 5.2. Hamo Thornycroft, Lot’s Wife (1877–8), marble. Victoria & Albert Museum, on loan from the Leighton House Museum, London. Photo: Caroline Vout.

and was a foundational text in the English working-class movement.42 It is unsurprising, therefore, that sermons on sin often began with this quotation, their message being to learn from her negative example. As one of the few women to comment on her story in print, Mary Cornwallis (1758– 1836), wife of the rector of an Anglican parish in Kent, noted in conclusion: ‘The Scriptures seldom comment upon the events they record; it is for us to judge of them by the revealed law, and, with that before our eyes, we can be at no loss to determine right from wrong.’43 This assessment is different from the lessons to be learned from classical literature, where authors such as Ovid self-consciously contribute to an ancient debate about suicide and rape, and nineteenth-century authors and artists exploit the exuberance of Greco-Roman mythology more broadly, often as a disruptive force for 42

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subverting dominant values and exploring the inner psyche, sexuality and so on.44 Cornwallis’s analysis searches for the historicity of Sodom and Gomorrah’s destruction as urgently as Hunt will search for the authentic Jesus.45 I realize that this withholds Thornycroft’s own motivation (a man whom critic Edmund Gosse would address in 1879 as ‘a great sculptor, born with a Greek heart into bigoted Christian times’).46 But there is no doubt that the ways in which Lot’s wife and Clytie inhabit, and impact on, the world are different, and not only because of the subtle differences in their appearances, but because of their respective textual traditions.47

II.ii Psyche and Rebecca Unlike Lot’s wife, Eve, Rebecca, Sarah and Rachel were biblical figures in whom Victorian women found self-understanding for their roles in the home and the church. In the words of popular English writer, Elizabeth Rundle Charles (1828–1896): ‘Christianity has exalted the ideal of womanhood, not by changing it but by showing that the true life of woman, which is love, is the very essential being of God; for it is written that “God is Love”.’48 Eve, of course, was the archetypal fallen woman, and the fallen woman an obsession of a period peculiarly anxious about its control of female sexuality. We need only think of novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, first published in 1740, but very popular later, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), or George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), or indeed Hunt’s companion piece to The Light of the World, Awakening Conscience (also 1853). Unsurprisingly, women writers of Bible criticism and biography fleshed Eve out differently from many of their male counterparts, giving her dimensions that complicated the misogyny of her story to have her stand for a shared humanity.49 Women were also responsible for important art criticism of the period, especially of Christian art (one thinks, for example, of Anna Jameson who also writes on women’s work and education). As founding matriarchs of Israel, Rebecca and Sarah were mapped onto the 44

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See e.g. Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch, ‘Ambiguous Heritage: Classical Myths in the Works of Nineteenth-Century American Writers’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 1/3 (1995): 98–108, for classical myths in the works of nineteenth-century American writers. Taylor and Weir, Let Her Speak, 403. On archaeology and truth, see also Goldhill in this volume (Chapter 2). 10 July 1879 as cited in Athena Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism: The Classical Body as National Symbol in Nineteenth-Century England and France (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 175. Not least due to the rise of biblical criticism in the period. Taylor and Weir, Let Her Speak, 3. 49 Taylor and Weir, Let Her Speak, 21–4.

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maternal ideals and ‘woman’s mission’ that dominated Victorian thinking about the family.50 In this climate of theological, social and gender debate, they and Venus belong to different species. One need only compare Liverpool-born Benjamin Spence’s Rebecca at the Well (1855) with his Psyche at the Well (c.1864) (Figure 5.3).51 Each figure is formulaic in its display of the female form, its introspection asking to be disturbed by the gaze. Yet each is also divergent from the other, not least vis-à-vis recent sculptural tradition. His Psyche reworks Bertel Thorvaldsen’s winged female, which the Danish artist had conceived of both as a solo subject and, following Antonio Canova, together with Cupid.52 She is allegorical of the soul (something that Canova makes explicit when he has her toy with a butterfly),53 and keeps her audience at arm’s length by bowing her head.54 If anything, it is Rebecca that has the body and drapery of a goddess: she does not bow so much as modestly avert her gaze, offering herself as she offers up the water pot. This is woman as vessel, as prospective wife and womb for Isaac: we remember her family’s good wishes as, reluctantly, they send her on her way, ‘Our sister, may you increase to thousands upon thousands; may your offspring possess the cities of their enemies.’55 Far more obviously than Psyche, Rebecca is a version of the many ancient statues based ultimately on the fourth-century BCE Aphrodite of Knidos, which capture the goddess bathing, the water pot at her side.56 But unlike these, she and the many ‘Eves’ that were produced in this period are caught at an identifiable moment in time, a moment in a teleological narrative. In contrast to the plot development they promote, we are given no idea about 50

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Rebecca Styler, ‘“A Scripture of their Own”: Nineteenth-Century Bible Biography and Feminist Bible Criticism’, Christianity and Literature 57/1 (2007): 65–85. Wonderful for my purposes is that Read, Victorian Sculpture, fig. 265 confuses the two pieces, illustrating Psyche with the label ‘Benjamin Edward Spence, Rebecca at the Well, 1860. Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery’. For the real Rebecca, see www.artnet.com/artists/benjaminedward-spence/rebecca-at-the-well-k311vuPoTTYLp_NJekIlPA2 (last accessed 4 May 2022). Bertel Thorvaldsen, Psyche, original plaster (c.1806), and Cupid and Psyche, original plaster (c.1807), Thorvaldsensmuseum, Copenhagen, inv. nos. A26 and A28; and Antonio Canova, Cupid and Psyche, marble (1797), Louvre, Paris, inv. no. M.R.1776. Ψυχή in ancient Greek means ‘life’ or ‘soul’ and ‘butterfly’. See e.g. Elizabeth Bartman, ‘Eros’s Flame: Images of Sexy Boys in Roman Ideal Sculpture’, in The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity, ed. Elaine K. Gazda (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 249–71. Genesis 24:60. On the type that is Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos, see Christine Mitchell Havelock, The Aphrodite of Knidos and Her Successors: A Historical Review of the Female Nude in Greek Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

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Figure 5.3. Benjamin Edward Spence, Psyche at the Well (c.1864), marble. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, inv. no. WAG 4239. Photo: Image by ART UK. Courtesy National Museums Liverpool.

whether Aphrodite is represented before or after her encounter with Anchises or her affair with Mars. Indeed, we may query whether ‘moments’ in a lifestory are relevant to her at all. We think of Walter Pater’s ‘Winckelmann’, first published in the Westminster Review in 1867 and then as the last essay in The Renaissance, and influenced by Hegel’s philosophy on classical versus romantic art forms: the actions or situations it [Greek sculpture] permits are simple and few. There is no Greek Madonna; the goddesses are all childless. The actions selected are those which would be without significance, except in a divine person – binding on a sandal or preparing for a bath. When a more complex and significant action is permitted, it is most often represented as just finished, so that eager expectancy is excluded.57 57

Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. D. L. Hill, 3rd edn (London and New York: Macmillan, 1888), 173.

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Figure 5.4. Harry Bates, Pandora (1890), marble. Tate Britain, London. Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1891, inv. no. N01750. © Photo: Tate.

In place of deeds, good, bad or otherwise, the stories that an Aphrodite tells are more likely concerned with the desire of the artist and the viewer (and we think here of anecdotes about ancient viewers’ reactions to the Knidia in authors such as Pliny and Pseudo-Lucian, and about her sculptor Praxiteles’ love for the model). Her raison d’être is to stand there and be beautiful, but also to be – by virtue of these anecdotes and stories such as the myth of Pygmalion – ‘a sculpture about sculpture’.58 With this distinction in mind, it is worth revisiting some of the standard ways in which classical and biblical sculpture are discussed. Take Susan Beattie who writes that Harry Bates’s Pandora (1890) (Figure 5.4) may well be ‘similar in subject and arrangement’ to Eugène Delaplanche’s Eve Before the Fall, shown at the Salon the following year (Figure 5.5), ‘the obvious symbolism [of the latter’s apple] an expendable and faintly ridiculous accessory lending biblical respectability to the coquettish Venus which is the sculptor’s true subject’.59 But as well as being a crouching Aphrodite, 58 59

Corbeau-Parsons in Droth, Edwards, and Hatt (eds.), Sculpture Victorious, 389. Beattie, New Sculpture, 167, who compares them (figs. 163 and 164).

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Figure 5.5. Eugène Delaplanche, Eve Before the Fall (1891), marble. Musée D’Orsay, Paris, inv. no. LUX 36. Photo: Alamy.

Delaplanche’s piece is a pendant for his Eve after the Fall of 1869, which shows the apple lying on the ground, as our protagonist curls up, like the snake on the statue’s base, in horror at her transgression.60 The sympathy solicited by this piece makes the ‘innocence’ of the other speak to the implications of its impending action, whereas in the Bates, the emphasis is again on timelessness, as the viewer is made to contemplate not the evil that Pandora might unleash, but her relationship, as the first female, created by the blacksmith god, Hephaestus, with the representation of that story on the ivory box in her hands. There too the figure of Pandora that has just been wrought is rendered as a crouching female in a work that, as Caroline Corbeau-Parsons maintains, ‘designates the marble Pandora as a sculpture, and not as the representation of a woman’, and engages ‘with 60

Like his Eve Before the Fall, in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, inv. no. RF 196.

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Figure 5.6. Thomas Brock, Eve (1900), marble. Tate Britain, London. Presented by Sir Henry Tate 1900, inv. no. N01784. © Photo: Tate.

sculpture as practice’.61 Its Christian theological (and therefore moral) implications mean that biblical subject matter struggles to participate like this – another reason perhaps why art historians can still fail to take it seriously. Such is their obsession with Victorian sculpture’s ‘metasculptural’ meaning (as David Getsy puts it, ‘the relation between the object of sculpture, its making, its figuration, and the viewer’s encounter with it’),62 that they often leave statues of Eve, Rebecca and their sisters to specialists of literature and gender, or worse than ignoring them, consider them vapid. By the time we get to Thomas Brock’s plaster of 1898 (a man responsible for the Victoria Memorial at the end of the Mall in London), Eve is a spikey girl who appears embarrassed to be part of a sculptural tradition (Figure 5.6).63 The arm across her chest is less in dialogue with the 61 62 63

Corbeau-Parsons in Droth, Edwards, and Hatt (eds.), Sculpture Victorious, 389. Getsy, Body Doubles, 6. I show here the Tate’s marble version. See Beattie, New Sculpture, 177.

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shielding/pointing gesture of the Venus pudica type, derived ultimately from the Knidia, than it is with Titian’s Penitent Magdalene, a picture said by Vasari to move one ‘to thoughts of pity rather than desire’.64 But even then, she is singular, stripped bare, ‘sickly’.65 This is not to deny that some viewers will have found her humanity sexy; that she too lends respectability to the representation of female ‘flesh’. But the more one looks at her, the more she appears defiant. This section has pinpointed a difference between sculptures of Eve, Lot’s Wife and Rebecca, and Aphrodite, Pandora, Psyche – in the ways in which they do time and story. Because of this, they relate to life differently. Whereas the figures from classical myth are more likely to speak of sculptural practice, and not incompatibly with that, to offer a challenge to, or escape from societal norms, their biblical ‘equivalents’ offer preaching over commentary. Whether in an exhibition space or a private home, they were ripe to be as didactic as they were suggestive.

III. ‘At Home’ with Woolner and Gibson III.i Woolner’s Fighting Talk We turn now to two examples of a different kind of religious sculpture, each in its original display context, where the conversations between sculptor and patron are more easily reconstructible. The first of these is Woolner’s piece of 1856 to 1867 for Wallington Hall in Northumberland (Figure 5.7). Variously known as The Lord’s Prayer, Mother and Child, Civilisation or the Trevelyan Group after its patron, Lady Trevelyan, it was commissioned as part of the decorative schema of the arcaded central atrium with its floral wall panels by Ruskin and Lady Trevelyan herself, and Scottish PreRaphaelite William Bell Scott’s paintings, commemorative of local history.66 Lady Trevelyan, or Paulina Jermyn as she was prior to her marriage in 1835, was a clergyman’s daughter, and her husband, Walter 64

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Titian painted several versions over four decades. The earliest autographed version, completed between 1530 and 1535, is in the Pitti Palace, Florence and represents its subject as more exposed than in later versions. For Vasari, see Lives of the Artists, trans. G. Bull, vol. I (London: Penguin, 1987), 459. www.theguardian.com/culture/2002/may/23/artsfeatures1 (last accessed 1 May 2022). Useful on this sculpture, and its local and national context, are Paul Barlow, ‘Grotesque Obscenities: Thomas Woolner’s Civilization and Its Discontents’, in Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque, ed. Colin Trodd, Paul Barlow and David Amigoni (Aldershot: Taylor & Francis, 1999), 97–118; and John Batchelor, Lady Trevelyan and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006), 125–44.

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Figure 5.7. Thomas Woolner, Civilisation (A Mother Teaching Her Child to Pray) (1856–67), marble. Wallington Hall, Northumberland, inv. no. NT 584949. Photo: Caroline Vout.

Calverley Trevelyan, an ‘Anglican evangelical’, who believed ‘true religious, moral, and intellectual training’ to lie at the heart of a kinder, more Christian society.67 He was also a geologist in a world in which science and religion were increasingly in tension: as an Oxford undergraduate, he had been friends with Charles Lyell, whose book, the Principles of Geology, when published in three volumes from 1830 to 1833, would lead to a paradigm shift which would influence Darwin.68 Pauline, as she was known, shared her husband’s intellectual and ethical agenda, and had as great a weakness as him for beauty. A diary entry, written in Rome at Easter 1836, reveals her 67

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Batchelor, Lady Trevelyan, 18, and letter to the editor of The Scotsman, 20 April 1840, cited in Batchelor, 12. Batchelor, Lady Trevelyan, 4–5. Woolner would go on to sculpt Charles Darwin, who would include Woolner’s drawing of the human ear in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871); see The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. XVIII, ed. F. Burkhardt et al. (Cambridge University Press, 2010), xviii; and Holmes, Pre-Raphaelites, 20–1. And on Lyell and the scientific debate of which he was a part, James A. Secord, Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014).

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Figure 5.8. William Bell Scott, The Romans Cause a Wall to Be Built for the Protection of the South (completed 1857), mural, Central Hall, Wallington Hall, Northumbria. Photo: Caroline Vout.

attraction to Roman Catholic liturgy.69 It would be another nine years before Newman’s conversion, but the Oxford Movement had begun publishing tracts in 1833, and Pauline was not impervious.70 She is also reputed to have saved Hunt’s The Saviour in the Temple from a fire in a Bond Street gallery.71 In this Pre-Raphaelite space, Woolner’s group becomes ‘an intensely moral sculpture’, a message that is not necessarily incompatible with it being ‘art for art’s sake’.72 Its utilitarian, everyday religiosity is amplified by 69

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As cited in Batchelor, Lady Trevelyan, 18–19. She also travelled with her husband to Greece, and an album of her drawings (e.g. of the Parthenon), some of them made with a camera lucida, is in the British Museum (inv. no. 1880,0911.1384–1479). See Batchelor, Lady Trevelyan, 17–18, 42–7; and Trevelyan, Pre-Raphaelite Circle, 20, 22, 27–8, 34, 43, 64, 90, 184. Raleigh Trevelyan, ‘Trevelyan, Paulina Jermyn [Pauline] [née Paulina Jermyn], Lady Trevelyan (1816–1866), art patron and critic’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published online 23 September 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/45577. Batchelor, Lady Trevelyan, 125; and, on the sculpture qualifying as ‘art for art’s sake’, despite Woolner’s and Scott’s dislike of Ruskin, with whom their patron was close friends, see Benedict Read, John Christian, and Joanna Barnes (eds.), Pre-Raphaelite Sculpture: Nature and Imagination in British Sculpture, 1848–1914 (London: Henry Moore Foundation, 1991), 29–30. Ruskin’s ‘Nature of Gothic’ (1853), with its intensely moral message, was one of the key works on sculpture produced in this period.

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the eight historical murals that surround it, a series that combines scenes of the iron and coal industry on the Tyne, of the building of Hadrian’s Wall (Figure 5.8), and of invasion by the Danes, with more Christian subjects: King Egfrid and Bishop Trumwine persuading Saint Cuthbert to leave his life of devotion in his hermitage to be made Bishop of Lindisfarne, complete with its legend, ‘Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth’; the Venerable Bede, still dictating his translation of the Gospel of St John as he nears his last breath, and its legend, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God’; and a scene of peace-making inside a church, in which the man reading at the lectern has the features of Trevelyan himself. Its accompanying inscription reads ‘Blessed are the peace-makers for they shall be called the children of God.’ Trevelyan’s features are replicated in a roundel in the spandrels between the hall’s arches, where he is one of several painted portraits, including Hadrian, Septimius Severus, theologians and bishops. Another mural is captioned with a fourth Beatitude from the Gospel of Matthew, ‘Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.’ It honours a female heroine this time – Grace Darling and her father rescue the survivors of a shipwreck, one of them, to the left of the canvas, raising their hands in prayer.73 Woolner’s sculpture was, to Pauline’s mind, ‘a crown and centre of all that the pictures tell’.74 In the sculptor’s own words, it aimed at embodying ‘the civilisation of England . . . because the position of women in society always marks the degree to which the civilization of the nation has 73

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On Scott’s murals, see Descriptive Catalogue of William Bell Scott’s Eight Pictures Illustrative of the History of the English Border (1861), National Gallery, NGA2/3/2/14/10; and Batchelor, Lady Trevelyan, 127–44. Pauline to Scott as cited in Trevelyan, Pre-Raphaelite Circle, 127. Note that the Trevelyans had viewed a sketch of the sculpture on the same visit to London that had seen them admire Hunt’s still unfinished Saviour in the Temple, a painting which Walter described approvingly as ‘highly illustrative of scripture history’ – Trevelyan, Pre-Raphaelite Circle, 137. At some stage in the hall’s recent history, a second, much smaller sculpture, Alexander Munro’s Paolo and Francesca – a plaster displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851, inspired by Canto V of the Inferno, and given to the Trevelyans by Henry Wentworth Acland, National Trust, inv. no. 584952: see Read, Christian, and Barnes (eds.), Pre-Raphaelite Sculpture, cat. no. 21, and essay by MacDonald in the same volume, as well as J. A. Gere, ‘Alexander Munro’s “Paolo and Francesca”’, Burlington Magazine 105 (1963): 509–10 – was also displayed there. Now back at the foot of the south stairs, where it was (contra Read) in the nineteenth century (see watercolour by J. M. Perceval, 1868, in Perceval and E. Trevelyan’s Sketches of Wallington – I thank Lloyd Langley of the National Trust for this information), this sculpture functions as a kind of Catholic equivalent of the Woolner. Its protagonists are captured at the moment that they read of Lancelot’s illicit love for Guinevere in the tales of King Arthur and are drawn to their first kiss. In the context, however, a viewer might be forgiven for thinking that it is the Bible they consult. They enforce, by virtue of their negative example, the idea of text as inspiration.

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reached.’75 A young woman, her ‘loose, generalised night-gown’ ‘the modern equivalent to Classical drapery’,76 embraces and teaches her son, who stands contrapposto, like a Renaissance putto. On the pedestal beneath his feet, a second mother and child are joined by a male figure (the father?), but are again the focus, gesturing up and out of the block in an appeal to their equivalents above. If the boy is a clone of his three-dimensional counterpart, his entreaty this time marked by kneeling, then his mother is an abandoned Aphrodite, her bare breasts, in this context, an affront to enlightened decency. Like the creation of Pandora depicted on Bates’s ivory box, the figure ‘represents the existence of evil and the possibility of catastrophe even in a patriotic . . . patriarchic paradise’.77 She feeds her son (raw?) meat on the end of a dagger, while on the other two sides, Druids sacrifice victims in a wicker cage, and a warrior in a scythe-wheeled chariot charges down his enemy. This is a vision of old England similar to that envisaged on Hadrian’s Wall, where ‘provincials’ work slavishly, or threaten the exercise with their unruly behaviour – a pagan world untouched by Christianity and populated by the kind of barbarians or ‘barbaros’ (to quote the image) that the wall was designed to keep out.78 At roughly the same time as the Trevelyans’ sculpture, Woolner would finish his memorial of future prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone, for Oxford University – a portrait bust on a base, carved, unusually for an artist not known for his classical subjects,79 with reliefs from the Iliad (Thetis imploring Zeus, Thetis rousing Achilles, and Achilles – with Athena at his shoulder – shouting from the trenches).80 Gladstone’s wife congratulated him 75

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As cited in Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), ix. Barlow, ‘Grotesque Obscenities’. Jeffrey M. Hurwit, ‘Beautiful Evil: Pandora and the Athena Parthenos’, American Journal of Archaeology 99/2 (1995): 171–86 (at 186). Although the Parthenon’s statue of Athena was lost long ago, Pausanias (1.24.7) describes it and its base. The legend above the painting, ‘Building a Roman Wall’, is in Latin and reads: ADRIANVS MURUM DVXIT QUI BARBAROS ROMANOSQUE DIVIDERET (Hadrian built the wall to divide the barbarians from the Romans). See Richard Hingley, Hadrian’s Wall: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2012), 160; Sam Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 144–6; and Rosemary Mitchell, ‘Marginal Masculinities? Regional and Gender Borders in William Bell Scott’s Wallington Scheme’, in Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities: Constructions of Masculinity in Art and Literature, ed. Amelia Yeates and Serena Trowbridge (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 101–26. Although note that a version of Achilles Shouting from the Trenches was, in time-honoured fashion, the work Woolner deposited as his diploma piece for election as a Royal Academician: Read, Christian, and Barnes (eds.), Pre-Raphaelite Sculpture, 155. Originally displayed in the Bodleian in Oxford, the bust was commissioned in 1863 and completed in 1866; the reliefs were completed in 1868. See Read, Christian, and Barnes (eds.),

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on the model: ‘you have searched deeply and stamped upon it what makes it so valuable, God’s gifts written upon that countenance! I shall long to see it in marble.’ Its Homeric foundations would add to this sense of godliness. The reliefs were not only ‘a compliment to Mr Gladstone’s study and knowledge of Greek art’ and of Homer, on which he had begun publishing in 1847,81 but also part of its Christian message: by the time Woolner was working on them, Gladstone was committed to proving ‘the notion of God’s revelation of Himself to the Greeks in the works of Homer prior and as a complement to the revelation accorded the children of Abraham in the Old Testament’.82 The relief of Achilles shouting from the trenches has been described as ‘the most successful of the three’.83 It shows a vigorous hero, whose vitality and reach, again up and out of the sculpture (Figure 5.9), reconfigure those of the barbarian mother on the Trevelyan base, doing for Victorian masculinity what the former does for femininity, to allude to modern conflicts overseen by Gladstone as Chancellor of the Exchequer (the Crimean War, 1853–6, in which Britain fought as ‘a Christian imperative’) and with a ‘vigour’ not that far removed from the ‘muscular Christianity’ that dominated Charles Kingsley’s work.84 As in the commission for Wallington Hall, however, several aspects of female agency are also privileged, in the shape of Athena, and, in the accompanying panels, of Thetis as seductress and mother. It would not be long before John Addington Symonds would publish his Studies of the Greek Poets with its chapter on ‘The Women of Homer’; and by the close of the century, Samuel Butler had completed his Authoress of the Odyssey, driven by ‘his own expectations of

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Pre-Raphaelite Sculpture, cat. nos. 73 and 75. Note that Gladstone, whose first term as prime minister began in 1868, had commissioned a marble version of Munro’s Paolo and Francesca sculpture (see fn. 74 above). On this and Gladstone as art collector, see Marcia Pointon, ‘W. E. Gladstone as Art-Collector and Patron’, Victorian Studies 19/1 (1975): 73–98. Amy Woolner, Thomas Woolner, 238, 237. Gerhard Joseph, ‘The Homeric Competitions of Tennyson and Gladstone’, Browning Institute Studies 10 (1982): 105–15 (at 109), whose article opens with a dinner party at Woolner’s house with Gladstone and Hunt in attendance. Also, Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 199–21; Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 159–70; David Gange, ‘Odysseus in Eden: Gladstone’s Homer and the Idea of Universal Epic, 1850– 1880’, Journal of Victorian Culture 14/2 (2009): 190–206; and Goldhill in this volume (chapter 2). https://victorianweb.org/sculpture/woolner/48.html (last accessed 3 May 2022). Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism, 173. And on ‘muscular Christianity’, David Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2004), 176; Donald E. Hall (ed.), Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Goldhill in this volume (chapter 2). On the ‘vigour’ of the scenes, The Athenaeum (1868), 769.

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Figure 5.9. Thomas Woolner, Achilles Shouting from the Trenches (1868), marble. Royal Academy of Arts, inv. no. 03/1858. © Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer: Paul Highnam.

normal male and female behaviour’.85 These were, in part, a natural response to a gradual ‘feminization of Homer’, or an understanding that one might find female, as well as male, subjectivities within it (in 1820, at the tender age of fourteen, Elizabeth Barrett (1806–61) had already written an epic in the style of Alexander Pope’s translation).86 If we are to keep the conversation between the classical and the biblical going, we must acknowledge the importance of women for Victorian Hellenism as much as for biblical and art criticism. Even today, in studies of Greco-Roman reception, classical education is regularly talked about as though a largely male phenomenon. In these ways then, Homer too was called into service, a different Homer from the Homer of the eighteenth century, one that made Pope’s couplets 85

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Turner, Greek Heritage, 184; John Addington Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets (London: Smith, Elder, 1873); and Samuel Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey (London: Longmans, 1897). See Isobel Hurst, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer (Oxford University Press, 2006).

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Figure 5.10. John Gibson, Suffer Little Children to Come to Me (1862–4), plaster version of the marble in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, inv. no. 7273, Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. no. 03/1930. © Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer: Paul Highnam.

newly heroic,87 and gave the carving of classical subject matter fresh meaning. Gladstone was not the only one to see life-lessons in the Iliad’s ‘humanity’, or even ‘the complement of the earliest portions of the sacred records’.88 It and the Bible were foundational texts rivalled only by the poems and plays of Shakespeare. ‘Homerology’, ‘bardolatry’ and Christianity were ‘models for one another in ways’ that went ‘beyond analogy’.89 Their stories lent themselves to visualization as spurs to belief and action.

III.ii Gibson Throws His Hat into the Ring Gibson’s Christ Blessing the Little Children or Suffer Little Children to Come to Me (Figure 5.10) is the only biblical relief to be credited to prolific sculptor of Greek and Roman topoi, John Gibson. Today in Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery, it was commissioned in honour of Henry Sandbach’s 87

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Although a sculpture such as Thornycroft’s Teucer (www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/thornycroftteucer-n01751) was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1882 with a quotation from Pope’s Iliad translation, this translation was widely criticized in the nineteenth century: Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece, 194–5. Bebbington, Mind of Gladstone, 148, quoting Gladstone. For the consolation that the Iliad was still providing in the Great War, see Elizabeth Vandiver, Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2013). Charles Laporte, ‘The Bard, the Bible, and the Victorian Shakespeare Question’, ELH 74/3 (2007): 609–28 (at 609).

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first wife, Margaret, who had died of breast cancer in 1852.90 Together, Henry and Margaret had been Gibson’s most important private patrons, and she and the sculptor close collaborators, encouraging each other’s talents in verse and stone respectively. The relief proved as popular with visitors to Gibson’s studio as he proved anxious about executing it (and this, despite the admiration he had previously expressed for the ‘beauty and truth’ of the figure of Christ in Michelangelo’s Pietà): in a letter to Henry, he claimed that the sculpting process was different from that of sculpting Mars or Jupiter. ‘When I began to model the head of Christ, the fear of failing came over me. I had to express the Divine form within, perceived through outward form – the form of man – elevated, beautiful, and benevolent.’91 He need not have worried: art critic Elizabeth Eastlake is positive: ‘The bas-relief shows that he could rise to the conception of Christian art. The Divine head is full of pathos, and some of the children beautifully felt. A naked boy resisting his mother’s efforts [far left] to bring him to the Saviour belongs to Gibson’s Grecian part, and would have been in place in an antique procession.’92 Still, there is a tension between this biblical experiment and his obdurate classical vocabulary. Or is there? Like the famous fifth-century BCE sculptor Pheidias, who is said by the later Greek writer Plutarch to have included portraits of himself and the Athenian politician Pericles on the shield of his gold and ivory statue of Athena inside the Parthenon, so Gibson included himself and Sandbach as bearded philosopher-types that frame the gathering.93 One is tempted to read the veiled and shallowly carved woman at Sandbach’s left shoulder as Margaret, and the female figure with whom he converses as his second wife, Elizabeth Charlotte. Back in 1840, Gibson had read to an ailing Thorvaldsen one of Margaret’s poems, inspired by the neoclassical sculptor’s statue of the resurrected Christ in the Church of Our Lady in Copenhagen.94 Its inscription, ‘Kommer til mig’ (‘Come to me’), references a section of Matthew’s Gospel a few chapters before the lines that give Gibson’s work its title (‘But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid 90

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Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, inv. no. 7273. On the patrons and their Hafodunos Hall, see M. Baker, Hafodunos Hall, Llangernyw: Triumph of the Martyr (Cardiff: Mark Baker, 2005). T. Matthews, The Biography of John Gibson: R.A., Sculptor, Rome (London: Read Books, 1911), 228; and Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, Life of John Gibson, R. A., Sculptor (London: Longmans, Green, 1870), 88, 238–9. Eastlake, Life of John Gibson, 239. On the shield, Evelyn B. Harrison, ‘The Composition of the Amazonomachy on the Shield of Athena Parthenos’, Hesperia 35/2 (1966): 107–33; and on Gibson’s relief, Eastlake, Life of John Gibson, 239. Eastlake, Life of John Gibson, 69–70.

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Figure 5.11. John Gibson, Aurora, 1842, marble, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, inv. no. NMW A 2527. Photo: Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales.

them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven’),95 a doctrine that put the child at the centre of texts by authors such as Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens as ‘belief in Original Sin’ shifted to ‘the belief in Original Innocence’.96 We sometimes forget that Thorvaldsen’s religious pieces were as successful as his Greco-Roman: versions of his angel 95

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Already, baptismal fonts were being inscribed with this same ‘Suffer little children’ tagline: Cutts, ‘Ecclesiastical Art-Manufactors’. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, BurneJones was exploiting the same scene for a pair of stained-glass windows for Hillhead Church in Glasgow: A. C. Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and His Circle, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), vol. I, 80, and vol. II, plate 612; and Katharine A. Lochnan, Douglas E. Schoenherr, and Carole G. Silver (eds.), The Earthly Paradise: Arts and Crafts by William Morris and His Circle from Canadian Collections (Toronto: Key Porter, 1993), 53–4. Linda M. Lewis, Dickens, His Parables, and His Reader (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2012), 23.

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font, the original in Copenhagen’s Church of Our Lady, continue to soothe countless babies.97 In 1865, Gibson’s relief was installed in Sandbach’s Gothic Revival house in Wales next to his classically inspired marbles and plasters. Until that point, Gibson’s ‘Aurora’ statue (Figure 5.11), a hovering precursor of Spence’s Psyche, commissioned for Margaret in 1842, together with the poem it inspired her to write, had proven her most fitting memorial. In it, she imbues the goddess with the ‘angelic’ sensibility of a Pietà, a type itself inspired by early images of Aurora’s Greek equivalent Eos, recovering the corpse of her warrior son Memnon from the battlefield at Troy. I give but a fraction of the world Aurora witnesses to show how its ecphrasis reads like a hymn.98 The triumph of the Martyr, Of him who will not barter His soul for earthly good; Whose holy heart is fixed, Possessed of peace unmixed, In its strong solicitude: Whose faith is ever-living, And knoweth no misgiving Because it is for God; For God, and in Him, wholly, Gazing high, kneeling lowly, Crowned while beneath the rod . . . ... ... . Yea, such the peace and gladness, And glory ’mid the sadness, And faith amid the fear; From out those troubled surges, And songs, and chaunts, and dirges, Such music do I hear.

Like Homer, Greek and Roman inheritance more broadly is here arranged to play to a new tune, and, more loudly than Gibson’s ‘conception of Christian art’, spells a stylistic shift from the Grecian to the medieval. For 97

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Thorvaldsen himself made but the one version (www.domkirken.dk/page/137/angel-baptism). Later versions include Inverness Cathedral, where the angel’s face is that of the donor’s wife. The angel was popular in Parian ware too: see e.g. National Trust inv. no.1149423. Gibson, ‘Aurora’, commissioned 1842, National Museum of Wales, inv. no. A 2527; and, for the poem, see Mrs Henry R. Sandbach, Aurora: And Other Poems (London: William Pickering, 1850), 7–10.

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the Sandbachs, as for the Trevelyans, the biblical nature of their commissions lies less in any distinct category of object than it does in the dialogue between categories of object, which, in turn, leads to a dramatization of a way of seeing that turns their performances of their different scripts into experience. This allusion to their ecphrastic power, to the site-specific ways in which they ‘speak out’ (from the ancient Greek, ‘ek-phrazein’), takes us back to those sculptures that use inscriptions to focalize the question of how verbal language and visual imagery relate. We remember Watts’s wife, who will in 1891 add biblical quotations to panels after her husband’s paintings of allegorical female figures, panels that remain for decades at the entrance of the cemetery of her family home,99 as well as Wood’s groups of the Sisters of Bethany, The Little Jewish Captive Maid and Ruth and Naomi with their legends, ‘The master is come and calleth for me’, ‘Would God my Lord were with the Prophet that is in Samaria, for he would recover him of his leprosy’, and ‘Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee.’ The quote on the earliest of these, a piece inspired as much by John Ross MacDuff’s popular book, Memories of Bethany (1859), as by the Gospel of John, and executed for at least four British patrons,100 was often also used on gravestones, and becomes the title of a poem by Christina Rossetti.101 This web of cultural production adds a further conversation to the mix – a constant back and forth between the ‘religious’ and the ‘literary’.102

IV. Conversing with Christ at the Altar A key factor to have emerged, as though incidentally, in the previous sections is the key role played by women. If it is religion as lived experience that is at stake here, then Victorian women, their patronage, poetry, criticism and artistry, are critical in dictating the agenda. From the 1860s, these agendas were fuelled by the ‘women’s influence’ that came of campaigning for female suffrage. Mary Seton Watts, for example, was a social reformer and artist in her own right, whose works have been read as ‘(proto)-feminist’.103 Yet, as with classical reception, so women are more 99 100 102

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Droth, Edwards, and Hatt (eds.), Sculpture Victorious, cat. no. 145. Art Journal 1 (1875): 57. 101 Published in anthology form in 1891. Compare, for example, Read,Victorian Sculpture, 203, who suggests that Spence’s Rebecca at the Well ‘may again be meant to be seen from the standpoint of literature rather than religion’. Lucy Ella Rose, ‘Subversive Representations of Women and Death in Victorian Visual Culture: The ‘M/Other’ in the Art and Craft of George Frederic Watts and Mary Seton Watts’, Visual Culture in Britain 17/1 (2016): 47–74, esp. 90–1. Also relevant is Rose, ‘The Diaries of Mary

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or less written out of British sculpture studies: the field lacks a Harriet Hosmer. As, finally, we enter the church, a borderland between public and private, in which women often felt especially able to exercise their agency, it should not amaze us to discover that many of the unsung sculptors are female. We lead off with two of these, Lord Elgin’s granddaughter, Mary Grant (1831–1908), who was for a period a pupil of Gibson, and Emmeline Halse (1853–1930), who attended the Royal Academy schools, where she was taught by Frederic Leighton. We end the section by returning to Bates, and his altar-front for Sloane Square’s Holy Trinity. Halse lived with her father, also a sculptor, in Notting Hill, where she could boast of Hunt, the Watts and the Thornycrofts as neighbours, and drew from the antique in the Academy, being as yet excluded, as a woman, from life-classes.104 This in itself might have made women sculptors conservative. One of her first professional pieces, a bronze miniature reconstruction of the recently discovered Hermes statue from Olympia, was displayed in the British Museum’s Elgin Room with a cast of the original.105 Her friend, the painter Helen Trevor, willed her to be more adventurous: But what is the good of eternally drawing those straight noses and oval eyes and perplexing lather of curls . . . That copying business was the mistake of the past generation; I maintain it is not so good practice as Nature. Did you ever see a Greek head with crow’s feet about the eyes, or two or three nicks in the foreheads, or with a slightly hollow cheek? – all of which are a thousand times more interesting and suggestive than those great bullet-headed gods and goddess who never were either sick, sore or sorry in their immortal days.106

Amongst her terracotta Aeneas, Anchises and Troy Burning and painted plaster relief of the Pleiades, first exhibited in 1886 and 1887, not to mention numerous child studies in the Hellenistic tradition, it is the reredos in the church in which she was baptised, St John’s Church, Lansdowne Crescent, Ladbroke Grove, that is perhaps her greatest legacy (Figure 5.12) (even if Pevsner credits the ensemble to the architect Aston Webb who made the traceried arch).107 Taking her some two years to complete (1888–90) and

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Seton Watts (1849–1938): A Record of Her Conjugal Creative Partnership with “England’s Michelangelo”, George Frederic Watts (1817–1904)’, Life Writing 14/2 (2017): 217–31 (at 220), citing Watts, 1 May 1891. See Elizabeth Farningham, Emmeline Halse Sculptor, 1853–1930 (Doncaster: L. E. Faningham, 2002). Farningham, Emmeline Halse, 10. Halse published a selection of their correspondence: Helen Mabel Trevor, The Ramblings of an Artist: Selections from the Letters of H. M. Trevor to E. H. London (Gay & Bird, 1901), 75–6. www.kingscollections.org/victorianlives/g-i/halse-emmeline (last accessed 4 May 2022).

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Figure 5.12. Emmeline Halse, reredos of St John’s Church, Lansdowne Crescent, Ladbroke Grove, London, 1890. Photo: Caroline Vout.

again in terracotta but painted to produce effects akin to bronze and gilding,108 it shows, in the centre, the Crucifixion, with the Virgin, Mary Magdalene and St John; on the right, St John as an old man writing his Revelation on Patmos; and on the left, St John as a fisherman mending his nets. It is this last figure that is most interesting for our purposes (Figure 5.13), a fusion as he is between the Uffizi’s ancient Arrotino or ‘Blade-Sharpener’ sculpture, a cast of which was in the Royal Academy’s collection (Figure 5.14), and a Mithras of the kind of that dominates the marble tauroctony that was acquired by the British Museum in 1825.109 In St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh, meanwhile, the sharp gradation of relief in Grant’s altarpiece (Figure 5.15) is reminiscent of Roman 108

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The reredos has recently been restored to remove its over-painting and produce an effect closer to the original: www.helenhughes-hirc.com/projects/projects-in-2012/st-johns-ladbrokegrove (last accessed 4 May 2022). On the Arrotino, an ancient Roman statue of Hellenistic style widely admired, and copied since the sixteenth century, see Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), cat. no. 11; and the ‘Arrotino’ entry in James Elmes, General and Bibliographical Dictionary of the Fine Arts, vol. I (London: Thomas Tegg, 1824); and on the British Museum’s group of Mithras slaying the bull, inv. no. 1825,0613.1. For an image, see www.britishmuseum.org/collection/ object/G_1825-0613-1 (last accessed 4 May 2022).

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Figure 5.13. Detail of Halse’s reredos. Photo: Caroline Vout.

historical relief sculpture. In particular, the soldier, right, with his back to the viewer picks up the standard-bearers in the Aurelian relief now reset into the late antique Arch of Constantine (Figure 5.16).110 Now, his role is to direct the viewer’s gaze not towards the emperor but towards God incarnate. Each of these buildings is Gothic in design, and Aston Webb’s arch ‘Perpendicular in character’.111 Not that this militated against the use of classical style, any more than it did in the versions of Thorvaldsen’s angel font in Inverness, Edinburgh’s St Giles Cathedral or the Church of St John the Evangelist in Barmouth. Indeed it gave classical style new purchase. When the architecture journal, The Builder, reported on Halse’s reredos, then still in the Doulton workshop, Lambeth Potteries, Albert Embankment, what it 110

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Grant was also responsible for the memorial to Henry Fawcett, campaigner for equal political rights for women, in London’s Victoria Embankment Gardens, with its portrait bust and inscription, ‘Erected to the memory of Henry Fawcett by his grateful countrywomen’. The Builder 59 (23 August 1890), 142.

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Figure 5.14. The Arrotino or Knife-grinder, plaster. Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge, inv. no. 381. Photo: Caroline Vout.

looked like was less remarkable than the technology that produced it, the new ‘cellular’ terracotta and improved dies for mouldings used in the architectural portion as well as the glaze with which the company was experimenting.112 In part, this was a feature of the journal’s readership, but it also suggests that what was paramount in these buildings, and reinvigorating of any classical idiom, was a ‘skillful use of different coloured stones and marbles’ that was peculiarly Victorian, creating an atmosphere shared by interiors of spaces from banks to museums.113 In this way, the allure of Hellenism spoke to that of Roman engineering and power at the same time as it became coextensive with British imperialism. The Anglican universalism of a Church of England afforded a more obviously communal heritage than could be embodied by secular classicism. The crouching angels in Bates’s altar-front too (Figure 5.17) resemble not only his Pandora of the same year, but his relief of Homer and the outer 112 113

The Builder, 59 (23 August 1890), 142. See e.g. the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Founder’s Building designed by architect George Basevi (1794–1845) and completed after his death by C. R. Cockerell (1788–1863). For the history of the Museum, see Lucilla Burn, The Fitzwilliam Museum: A History (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

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Figure 5.15. Mary Grant, Reredos in St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh. Photo: Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

panels of his Aeneid triptych and Psyche panel.114 If we think back to Wood’s statues, including the Little Jewish Captive Maid, a version of which stands inside the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Ormskirk in Lancashire,115 their inscriptions are in English and in slanted, lowercase script as though written by hand. There is a sense, perhaps, in which Latin would have seemed overly Catholic.116 But here, in contrast, the quotation from the Book of Isaiah above Christ’s supine body is in Latin (FECIT SEPULCRUM SUUM CUM MALEFICIIS ET CUM DIVITIBUS IN MORTE SUA). It is a decision that turns the scene from a dramatization of Jesus’ death into a memorial of what that death means for humanity. It echoes the section of the Tusculan Disputations where Cicero talks about Queen Artemisia, wife of the Carian dynast Mausolus, building his ‘mausoleum’ (fecit sepulchrum), and about the ways in which this monument 114

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‘He made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in death.’ On the Aeneid triptych of 1885, see (for Anna and Dido) the Fitzwilliam Museum, inv. no. M.17–1972. Richard Pollard and Nikolaus Pevsner, Lancashire: Liverpool and the South West, Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 533. Claire Jones, ‘Sculpting the Bible: John Warrington Wood’s Ruth and Naomi (1884)’, in the CRASSH colloquium, Cambridge, on ‘Visualising the Bible in the Nineteenth Century’, 13 June 2013.

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Figure 5.16. Aurelian panels on the Arch of Constantine, Rome, dedicated in 315 CE. Photo: Alessio Nastro Siniscalchi – user: Belmonte77, CC BY-SA 2.5 IT, https://creati vecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/it/deed.en, via Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 5.17. Harry Bates, Altar of Church of Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, London. Photo: Graham Miller.

served to prolong her grief.117 Although The Magazine of Art deemed the panel ‘far less successful’ than his ‘beautiful “Pandora”’,118 this may have had something to do with the fact that in the end it is not, like the latter, a ‘sculpture about sculpture’, but a work that owes as much to PreRaphaelite and Aesthetic ‘painterly classicism’ and stained glass as it does 117

Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.75.

118

The Magazine of Art, January 1890, 364.

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to Bates’s Greco-Roman subjects.119 It flirts with classical convention to overwrite that convention: Christ’s body floats between old and New sculpture, the Roman and Anglican, antiquity and modernity, death and resurrection.

Concluding Remarks We know that the biblical and the classical are no more at odds with each other than the classical and the Gothic are at odds with each other. But starting from their separation in the scholarship has allowed us to explore the ways in which sculptures of figures such as Venus and Psyche occupy space and time differently from figures of Eve and Rebecca. It has allowed us to think about the place of the biblical within grand houses of a kind that had long found beauty and status in the display of Greek and Roman sculpture; and it has led us, crucially, into the all too often anonymous terrain of the church, where sculptors male and female exploited the classical’s place in a rich and varied colour-palette. All of this is a necessary corrective to what is still a widespread tendency among Victorian specialists – to sideline sculpture,120 especially sculptures of Old Testament protagonists and the sculptural decoration of churches, the fixity of which means that it never was, and can never be, exhibited in a gallery. Putting it into dialogue with the classical has given us strategies for shaking religious art out of its ‘minority’ status, in ways that have also highlighted the role of women in production, patronage, reception studies and biblical exegesis, and revealed that sculpture was as important to ‘sermon-making’ as pictures. ‘Does anyone ask, for instance, what on earth pictures can have to do with sermon-making?’ observed the Right Reverend Anthony Wilson Thorold, Bishop of Rochester, in a lecture delivered in 1880 at the Church Homiletical society of St Paul’s Cathedral: I answer (may I say from long experience?), a very great deal indeed, since many of the qualities that go to make an artist, or that help us to appreciate his art, are invaluable aids to a sermon. The way, for instance, in which a great picture strikes the imagination with the breadth and width of the world, the infinite varieties of human life and interest, the power and wisdom of God in nature, the picturesque details of great events in history, 119

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Fundamental here is Jason Edwards, ‘“A Curious Feature”: Harry Bates’s Holy Trinity Altar Front (1890)’, Sculpture Journal 17/1 (2008): 36–51. See the corrective now provided by Claire Jones, ‘Reading Victorian Sculpture: Nathaniel Hitch and the Making of Church Sculpture’, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 22 (2016): https://19.bbk.ac.uk/article/id/1697.

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which the genius of a poet, who has first thought and then worked it out on the canvas, helps you almost for the first time to appreciate, and ever afterwards to retain, – all go to quicken the sensibilities, to open the pores of the entire spiritual being to new and stirring impressions, to set us thinking and feeling, to transport us, at least for a little while, from the narrow and shallow eddies of our own limited experience, to watch the billows as they roll in from the tempests of the universe to break on the world’s shore.121 121

Anthony Wilson Thorold, ‘The Preparation of a Sermon’, in Charles John Ellicott, Homiletical and Pastoral lectures. Delivered in St. Paul’s Cathedral before the Church Homiletic Society. With a Preface by the Right Rev. C. J. Ellicott, D.D., Lord Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol (New York, 1880), 3–26 (at 13–14).

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part iii

Materiality and Spectacle

6

Dionysia in Bavaria Greek Theatre, German Catholicism, and the Cultural Uses of the Oberammergau Passion Play, 1830–1910 robert d. priest

An unlikely feature of the nineteenth century is that the question of how European culture might reconcile its Christian and classical lineages seemed to some observers to be posed with unique acuity at a woodcarving village in the Bavarian Alps. In 1633, amidst the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War, the villagers of Oberammergau had vowed to perform the last days of Christ if God would spare them from the plague that was raging through the valleys. When they emerged relatively unscathed, the Oberammergauers duly performed the passion in 1634 and have done so every ten years since 1640 with only a handful of interruptions. The men grow long beards and rehearse for months beforehand in half-timbered houses whose walls are painted with biblical frescoes. On stage the action alternates between spectacular crowd scenes, involving hundreds of villagers dressed as first-century Jews, Romans and Christians, and tableaux vivants that recreate episodes from the Old Testament. For the penultimate act Jesus (the ‘Christus’) is erected high above the stunned audience in a vertiginously realistic crucifixion. Although the play had its origins in regional devotional traditions, by the closing decades of the nineteenth century many Germans saw Oberammergau as a festival that was as much British and American as Bavarian. Thousands of Anglophone tourists flocked there on package tours pioneered by Thomas Cook and others. Of the 223,548 visitors in 1910, perhaps a third were foreign tourists, and these included representatives of the royal houses of (among others) Britain, Prussia and Sweden.1 For a Protestant audience to engage with this Catholic play naturally provoked debate.2 The most common defence was to stress the script’s remarkable fidelity to the Bible, with one 1

2

Estimate based on extrapolation from 1922 figures. Otto Huber, Helmut W. Klinner and Dorothea Lang, ‘Die Passionsaufführungen in Oberammergau in 101 Anmerkungen’, in Hört, sehet, weint und liebt: Passionsspiele im alpenländischen Raum, ed. Michael Henker, Eberhard Dünninger and Evamaria Brockhoff (Munich: Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte, 1990), 163–79 (at 172). Helena Waddy explores some of these elements, in Oberammergau in the Nazi Era: The Fate of a Catholic Village in Hitler’s Germany (Oxford University Press, 2010), 17–25.

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churchman going so far as to assert that the play was ‘even in a certain sense unconsciously Protestant’.3 While not all critics agreed, the assertion that the play was fundamentally biblical certainly allowed Oberammergau to develop an unusual position within European religious geography as a site simultaneously charged with Catholic and ecumenical significance.4 That observers would judge a passion play by the firmness of its biblical foundations is unsurprising; that the same figures would draw attention to its Greek quality is less expected. Yet, as I will show in this chapter, not only was this a prominent feature of writing on Oberammergau but it also opens some significant lines of analysis that help us account for its appeal to diverse audiences, especially at the fin-de-siècle. I will trace discussion of the notionally Greek elements in the passion play – most notably the open-air performance, spoken Prologue and Chorus – across the substantial volume of commentary produced during the nineteenth century. Beginning with the earliest serious respondents to the play, I suggest that early nineteenth-century writers consistently represented the play’s Greek features as a testament to the influence of educated clerics. This fact was sometimes celebrated but more often elided, whether for confessional reasons or because it undermined efforts to present the play as a product of indigenous German Catholic rural culture. By contrast, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a diverse band of literary and dramatic experimenters incorporated into their treatments of Oberammergau the new and different philhellenist discourse – prevalent for the intellectual generation of Friedrich Nietzsche – which laid heavy emphasis on Greek theatre’s Dionysian quality. Figures as diverse as the Viennese Catholic revivalist Richard von Kralik, Bavarian anticlerical modernist Oskar Panizza and Thuringian ruralist Friedrich Lienhard all celebrated Oberammergau in remarkably congruent terms. In other words, what was ‘Greek’ about the play changed – it now referred to the demiurgic drama of the folk more than the specifics of the proscenium stage – and so did the value attached to it. Oberammergau’s Hellenic essence was no longer something to be sidestepped awkwardly but rather emerged as one of its most admirable and imitable qualities. Fusing the content of the Bible with the cultural forms of Greek antiquity might even form the basis for the moral regeneration of German or European society. 3

4

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, ‘The Ammergau Mystery; or, Sacred Drama of 1860’, in Stanley, Essays Chiefly on Questions of Church and State from 1850 to 1870 (London: John Murray, 1870), 532. Originally published in MacMillan’s Magazine in 1860. Étienne François, ‘Oberammergau’, in Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, ed. Étienne François and Hagen Schulze, 3 vols. (Munich: Beck, 2009), vol. III, 279–82.

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The historiography of late nineteenth-century German culture and ideas has long stressed the centrality of both philhellenism and theatre within elite projects of national revival. Historians generally recognise a series of phases in German philhellenism: roughly, the passage from the age of Winckelmann, whose heirs sought to create a German elite through an ideal of Bildung that developed ideas of Greek beauty and reason, to that of Nietzsche, whose followers turned their attention to the irrational and emotional drives that undergirded the Greeks’ festal culture.5 But Catholic Germany fits awkwardly into the historiography of German philhellenism, even though one of the most powerful proponents of the nineteenth-century neoclassical revival was King Ludwig I of Bavaria – whose prized architect Leo von Klenze remodelled not only Munich but also Athens, capital of the newly independent Greece (which was ruled by the Bavarian Wittelsbachs).6 Historians sometimes argue that philhellenism was bound up with the project of Kulturprotestantismus. As Celia Applegate and Suzanne Marchand have argued, the Greek ideal appealed to German Protestant elites in the early nineteenth century who ‘wanted . . . what they presumed the Greeks had had: a Kulturnation, unencumbered by clerical censors or superstitious peasants, and united in its support and love for art, Wissenschaft, and poetry’.7 By fusing the post-Reformation mind with the Greek ideal, elite projects aimed to draw the nation ever further out of the mire of backwardness and superstition that, particularly within the anticlerical imaginary of nineteenth-century Protestant elites, could be coded as Catholic. By contrast, the neo-romantic philhellenism of the fin-de-siècle, with its embrace of the irrational, mythic and superstitious, would seem more open to the Catholic world. While historians have not examined in any sustained way the possibility that German Catholicism might provide models for cultural regeneration beyond the Catholic milieu, the evidence of Oberammergau’s diverse admirers suggests that this connection warrants further attention. 5

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The literature on German philhellenism is immense. Particularly important works for this study include Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton University Press, 1996); William J. McGrath, German Freedom and the Greek Ideal, ed. Celia Applegate, Stephanie Frontz and Suzanne Marchand (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Erika Fischer-Lichte, Tragedy’s Endurance: Performances of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany since 1800 (Oxford University Press, 2017). For a wide-ranging review of recent historiography, see Helen Roche, ‘The Peculiarities of German Philhellenism’, Historical Journal 61 (2018): 541–60. Reinhold Baumstark (ed.), Das neue Hellas: Griechen und Bayern zur Zeit Ludwigs I. (Munich: Hirmer, 1999); Joshua Hagen, ‘Architecture, Urban Planning and Political Authority in Ludwig I’s Munich’, Journal of Urban History 35 (2009): 459–85. Celia Applegate and Suzanne Marchand, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, in McGrath, German Freedom, xxiii; similarly, Marchand, Down from Olympus, xxiii.

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A broader argument of this chapter is that Oberammergau played a role in the evolution of modern theatrical aesthetics. While biographical studies often recognise the importance of the passion play to their subjects, the history of Oberammergau’s cultural significance substantially remains to be written.8 The limited reception history of the Oberammergau passion play that exists tends to focus on how it appealed to the religious and touristic motivations of its nineteenth- and twentieth-century visitors.9 Yet, as even the small sample treated in this chapter shows, many serious cultural figures believed that Oberammergau had a message for the world about the future of the stage. This was especially significant because many nineteenth-century commentators believed that theatre was an art form of unique importance for the morality, cohesion and well-being of European societies. A tradition going back to Friedrich Schiller’s famous lecture on the theatre as a ‘moral institution’ in 1784 argued that drama had a special capacity to transform and educate its audience.10 In the middle of the century, particularly around the revolutions of 1848–9, demands for a socially engaged musical and dramatic culture flourished in Germany.11 Richard Wagner was the most famous figure to harness and develop this drive and his ambitious vision of the regenerative power of drama appealed to Europeans of all political persuasions because, as David Clay Large and William Weber noted, many on both Left and Right ‘shared deep reservations about aspects of their society and culture and were looking for a vital new alternative’.12 The 1890s and 1900s witnessed a pan-European 8

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This is particularly true for Richard von Kralik, treated in more detail below. Other examples include Joanne E. Gates, Elizabeth Robins, 1862–1952: Actress, Novelist, Feminist (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 36–8; Dick Russell, The Life and Ideas of James Hillman, vol. I: The Making of a Psychologist (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), chap. 6. For example, François, ‘Oberammergau’; Joshua Edelman, ‘Spiritual Voyeurism and Cultural Nostalgia: Anglophone Visitors to the Oberammergau Passion Play, 1870–1925 and 2010’, in The Oberammergau Passion Play: Essays on the 2010 Performance and the Centuries-Long Tradition, ed. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017), 66–87; John R. Elliott Jr., Playing God: Medieval Mysteries on the Modern Stage (University of Toronto Press, 1989), chap. 2; Leanne Groeneveld, ‘“I felt as never before, under any sermon that I ever heard preached”: Word, Image, and the Oberammergau Passion Play, 1840–1900’, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film 43 (2016): 131–59. A partial exception is Klaus Lazarowicz, ‘Das Oberammergauer Passionsspiel: Theater oder Gottesdienst?’, in Theatrum Europaeum: Festschrift für Elida Maria Szarota, ed. Richard Brinkmann et al. (Munich: W. Fink, 1982), 517–36, which argues for the significance of theatrical motivations. Friedrich Schiller, ‘The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution’, in Essays on German Theater, ed. Margaret Herzfeld-Sander (New York: Continuum, 1985), 24–33. James Garratt, Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner (Cambridge University Press, 2010). David C. Large and William Weber, ‘Introduction’, in Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, ed. Large and Weber (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 16.

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wave of experimental ventures that sought to broaden radically the scope of what could be achieved both on- and off-stage, whether through the democratisation of the audience, the incorporation of amateur performers, or the effort to transcend the constraints of traditional venues and institutions. Beyond the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, a selective list might include the Freie Volksbühne association in Berlin (founded 1892), which was soon imitated in other cities across Europe, Maurice Pottecher’s Théâtre du Peuple in Bussang (1895), which inspired Romain Rolland’s ambitious new theatrical aesthetics (1901–3), and Georg Fuchs’ opening ceremony for the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony (1901). What united all these ventures was a belief that the new age demanded a new sort of theatre which, done properly, could transform society.13 This chapter suggests that the Oberammergau passion play’s appeal to an otherwise opposed group of cultural figures in the late nineteenth century resulted from the fact that they saw it through this common lens. While a common motif concerning regenerative artistic movements in nineteenth-century Europe is that they sought to create a ‘religion’ of culture that might fill the void left by traditional faith, the success of Oberammergau suggested that Catholic culture might contain the resources to regenerate both Christianity itself and culture in general.

I. 1830-50: The First Critics By the early nineteenth century the Oberammergau passion play may have already endured for two centuries, but it could not in any meaningful sense be called a centre of national aesthetic or religious debate. It was, at best, a regional curiosity, and the few distinguished visitors who passed through wrote little or nothing of their experiences. In the 1830s and 1840s, however, educated commentators from Munich and elsewhere in Germany began to write admiring pieces on the passion play, which set in motion a cycle of visitors and travel-writing that would rapidly accelerate during the middle of the century. There was a straightforward historical precondition for this development: Oberammergau had survived. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a combination of forces spearheaded the suppression of passion plays in much of Catholic Europe, including Bavaria. On the one hand, Catholic reformers sought to erase 13

See for instance Jessica Wardhaugh, Popular Theatre and Political Utopia in France, 1870–1940 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

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profane practices; on the other, ‘enlightened absolutists’ like the Bavarian prime minister Maximilian von Montgelas saw the plays as unproductive superstitions. The Oberammergauers fought hard to maintain their play, supported by the erudite monks of the nearby Benedictine monastery of Ettal. The abbot Othmar Weis comprehensively rewrote the script in 1811 to excise its more profane and comic elements, and the village’s right to perform was permanently restored after 1815. By maintaining and re-establishing its performance following the revolutionary era, Oberammergau evolved from being one passion play among many into an almost lone example of religious drama in the German countryside.14 The early nineteenth-century attraction to Oberammergau also rested on two intellectual foundations. Firstly, much post-Enlightenment German thought accepted that theatre was an art form which had a unique capacity to affect its audience. The theatre could be conceived as a ‘moral institution’, in the words of Friedrich Schiller’s famous lecture at Mannheim in 1784, or as an elevating journey into a holistically conceived alternative world, as in the self-professed ‘romantic’ August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s 1808 ‘Lectures on Dramatic Art’ in Vienna.15 These views – especially Schiller’s – dovetailed with a broader current of philhellenism in early nineteenth-century Germany, especially among Protestant elites. The second intellectual foundation was the romantic fascination with the Middle Ages. This was sometimes hitched to a nostalgic Catholicism – as exemplified by the conversion of August Wilhelm’s brother Friedrich and his wife to Catholicism in Cologne in April 1808 – but not necessarily, and medievalism straddled a broad range of political and confessional positions within German nationalism in the decades after 1815.16 Even in the earliest commentaries of visitors to Oberammergau, the supposedly Greek elements of the play’s staging attracted commentary: most notably the open-air performance, spoken Prologue and Chorus. But we can clearly note that in this period the play’s Greek-ness always stood for elite influence on the play. This can be seen in Sulpiz Boisserée’s review of the Oberammergau passion, which is usually considered the earliest significant 14

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A solid general narrative of this process can be found in James Shapiro, Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play (New York: Vintage, 2001), chap. 2. Schiller, ‘The Stage’, in August Wilhelm Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen, vol. IV: Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (1809–1811), ed. Stefan Knödler. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2018. On the Schlegels’ conversion, see e.g. Asko Nivala, The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel’s Philosophy of History (New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2017), chap. 11. On the uses of medievalism, David E. Barclay identifies at least five in ‘Medievalism and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Germany’, Studies in Medievalism 5 (1993): 5–22 (at 7).

The Oberammergau Passion Play, 1830–1910

commentary. Alongside his brother Melchior, Sulpiz had pioneered the collection of German medieval painting during the Napoleonic occupation of Bavaria. Through their collections – which today form the basis of Munich’s Pinakothek galleries – and their criticism, the Boisserée brothers helped develop a theory of the evolution of German painting that made a significant contribution towards the definition and revival of the ‘gothic’ in Vormärz Germany.17 Boisserée is usually attributed with having converted Goethe towards a certain respect for the aesthetic qualities of the Middle Ages following their celebrated meeting in 1811. One of the enthusiast’s letters to the Sage of Weimar certainly made an important contribution to the intellectual vogue for visiting the Oberammergau passion, after it was published by Goethe’s daughter-in-law Ottilie Goethe in her magazine Chaos. Writing on 24 September 1830, Boisserée enthused about his recent visit to the Bavarian play.18 He stressed the piece’s aesthetic rather than religious qualities, celebrating the beautiful and emotive quality of the performance. This was well-calibrated: as Jane K. Brown has argued, what Goethe most resented in the vogue for medieval Catholicism that gripped many German romantics in the early nineteenth century was not so much its medievalism as its religiosity.19 Comparing the village stage to Goethe’s own famous theatre at Weimar, Boisserée wrote: ‘One notices very soon that this setup is borrowed from the old Greek stage, with a few modifications, and when one now sees the display with a prologue and choir, one cannot resist the thought that some connoisseur of antiquity must have assisted the good villagers with help and advice.’20 Boisserée assumed that the ostentatiously Greek character of the Oberammergau stage had a clear genealogy: it must be a contribution from the erudite monks of Ettal. To accept that the play was as much a product of the local Catholic clergy as a folk tradition, however, troubled other commentators. Ludwig Steub, the travel writer whose volumes on Bavaria and Tyrol drew romantic travellers to the South German highlands, downplayed the connection in order to accentuate the play’s medieval simplicity: the Oberammergau arrangement was ‘similar to the stage of Sophocles, but likewise essentially to the Shakespearian’.21 17

18 19

20 21

The classic account is W. D. Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany: A Chapter in the History of Taste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), esp. pt. IV (‘Goethe and Boisserée’). Sulpiz Boisserée, Briefwechsel mit Goethe, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1862), vol. II, 542–6. Jane K. Brown, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, in The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism, ed. Nicholas Saul (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 119–32 (esp. 125–9). Boisserée, Briefwechsel, vol. II, 544. Ludwig Steub, ‘Das Passionsspiel in Ammergau. 1840’, in Aus dem bayrischen Hochlande (1860), 61–2.

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There could be a confessional politics to this: the Protestant actor and dramatist Eduard Devrient – who sang the part of Christ in Felix Mendelssohn’s 1829 revival of Bach’s St Matthew Passion – insisted that the stage construction was fundamentally medieval and the overall effect ‘more biblical than the Jesuit comedies’.22 Other writers were comfortable with acknowledging the influence of elites on the play because it fulfilled their nostalgic fantasies of a harmonious relationship between clergy and laity. Guido Görres was the scion of a dynasty of Bavarian Catholic intellectuals who turned to ultramontanism out of a belief that only the Pope would defend the people’s liberties in an age of oppressive states.23 In 1840 Görres wrote a series of essays for the Historisch-politische Blätter für das katholische Deutschland – the magazine he co-edited with his father that was a leading publication of the Bavarian Catholic intellectual opposition.24 While Görres acknowledged that the arrangement of the theatre strikingly recalled ‘the old Greek stage’, and had some value as ‘an illustration of the classical theatre’, he did not linger on the subject.25 He was comfortable noting that the origins of Christian drama were pagan, and indeed that Greek and Roman plays were fundamentally religious, but his narrative portrayed Christianity supplanting the decadent classical stage with a higher, more idealistic form of dramatic expression. Görres made a historically rooted defence of the Oberammergau passion as a piece of Christian art. He had arrived fearing irreverent and mercenary peasants, but instead found a play delivered with high seriousness that brought urbane visitors to the same hot tears as the Tracht-clad Tyrolean farmers who sat alongside them.26 There were regrettable elements: Görres fantasised about a time when local villages processed to the play in ordered groups rather than streaming into the first seats available, and he also found the use of dialect occasionally jarring.27 But the passion play had nonetheless preserved the core of medieval Christian tradition, where the devout 22

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Eduard Devrient, Geschichte der deutschen Schauspielkunst (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1848), 404–5; see also his Das Passionsspiel in Oberammergau und seine Bedeutung für die neue Zeit (Leipzing: J. J. Weber, 1851) which was highly influential in German literary circles. On Görres’ father: Jon Vanden Heuvel, A German Life in the Age of Revolution: Joseph Görres, 1776–1848 (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001); more broadly, Paul Gottfried, Conservative Millenarians: The Romantic Experience in Bavaria (New York: Fordham University Press, 1979). Guido Görres, ‘Das Theater im Mittelalter und das Passionsspiel in Oberammergau’, ‘Die Fahrt nach Oberammergau’, and ‘Das Passionsspiel in Oberammergau’, Historisch-politische Blätter für das katholische Deutschland (1840): 1–37, 118–28, 167–92, 308–20, 349–84. Görres, ‘Das Theater’, 183. 26 Görres, ‘Das Theater’, 4–6. 27 Görres, ‘Das Theater’, 180.

The Oberammergau Passion Play, 1830–1910

seriousness of the amateur actors was complemented by the biblical fidelity of the abbot’s script.28 In summary, the first wave of nineteenth-century German commentary on Oberammergau made the analogy to the Greek stage only fleetingly and primarily as an example of the play’s intermingling of the learned and the folk. How comfortable commentators were with this syncretism depended largely on how far the idea of elite and clerical interventions aided or disturbed the idealisation of Oberammergau that they wanted to sell to their readers.

II. The 1860 Play: Daisenberger’s Hellenisation? Before dealing with late nineteenth-century discourse on Oberammergau, it is important to recognise how the play itself mutated in the middle of the century. The passion that Franz Liszt and King Ludwig II saw in 1870–1 was fundamentally different to the performance Boisserée or Görres had first eulogised in the 1830s and 1840s. The first change was textual. No single figure made so significant a contribution to the development of the passion play in the nineteenth century as Oberammergau’s new parish priest Joseph Alois Daisenberger. Daisenberger was a local boy, educated first at Ettal, and then at the University of Landshut under the Jesuit theologian Johann Michael Sailer, a leading figure of the Catholic Enlightenment whose belief in communicating inner faith to the laity in persuasive terms surely helped to mould Daisenberger’s own pastoral orientations.29 The village recruited Daisenberger from his post at the nearby town of Uffing in 1845 for a simple reason: he was an enthusiastic amateur dramatist whom they (rightly) believed could revive the play’s fortunes. Daisenberger had been writing and staging plays in Uffing since 1837 – most of them biblical plays based on the didactic children’s books of Christoph von Schmid, a fellow student of Sailer.30 On 8 July 1856, the Bavarian government commissioned Daisenberger to revise and shorten the passion play script alongside ‘knowledgeable (sachkundig) men’.31 The 28 29

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Görres, ‘Das Theater’, 314, 320. The most recent treatment in English is Richard Schaefer, ‘A Critique of Everyday Reason: Johann Michael Sailer and the Catholic Enlightenment in Germany’, Intellectual History Review 30 (2020): 653–71. Hans Pörnbacher, ‘“. . .weshalb ich Mittags ein Gögglein verzehrte”: Joseph Alois Daisenberger in Uffing’, in Joseph Alois Daisenberger: Das Urbild eines gütigen Priesters. ed. Helmut W. Klinner (Oberammergau, 1999), 33–7. Staatsarchiv München, RA51035, f. 95: Bayerisches Staatsministerium des Innern für Kircheund Schulangelegenheiten to Oberbayern Kammer des Innern, 8 July 1856.

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text that Daisenberger delivered to the Munich authorities at Christmas 1858 would be performed almost unchanged for the following century and a half and still forms the kernel of the play today. Otto Huber has argued that, in the process of reforming the text, Daisenberger introduced various palpably Greek elements into the play. Firstly, he redrew the story of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus more in the manner of Orestes, the figure from Greek drama who killed his mother to avenge the death of his father Agamemnon. Secondly, Daisenberger introduced moments of anagnorisis into the narrative – that is, the pivotal moment in a Greek tragedy where one character recognises the true identity or nature of himself or another (for example, Oedipus’ realisation he has killed his father and married his own mother). In Daisenberger’s revised text there were two notable moments: Mary recognising Jesus on his way to the cross and Judas having an intuition that he has betrayed the true Messiah.32 For a further reform in 1870 Daisenberger carried out a consciously Hellenising move by transposing the Prologue and other parts of the play text into the metres of Aeolic verse – the lyric form which originated with Sappho – although the village rejected this.33 However far we want to follow Huber in seeing Daisenberger as having Hellenised the passion play, it seems plausible that on some level the play’s later audiences were engaging with ‘Greeker’ raw material than their predecessors. The second important transformation at Oberammergau in the late nineteenth century was accessibility. Although the play was interrupted during its 1870 season as the players were called up to fight for the Bavarian Army in the Franco-Prussian War, it resumed in 1871 with great fanfare and a larger audience than ever.34 Thomas Cook organised its first scheduled tour to the passion play that year, and other British, French and American operators soon followed. For the 1880 performance visitors could catch a train from Munich to Murnau and then take a short coach ride (or five-hour hike) to Oberammergau itself. By the time the travel lecturer Burton Holmes returned to the play in 1900, you could take the railway right to the centre of the village: ‘The cracking whips of the Tyrolean drivers and the jingle of the bells upon the horses’ collars have

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Otto Huber, ‘Dichten “mit glänzendem Angesichte”: Daisenbergers Reform des Passionsspiels’, in Joseph Alois Daisenberger, ed. Klinner, 67–87. Huber, ‘Dichten’, 82–3. Saul S. Friedman, The Oberammergau Passion Play: A Lance Against Civilization (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 29.

The Oberammergau Passion Play, 1830–1910

given place to the rumble of steel wheels and the shrill, piping whistle of the new Continental locomotive.’35 Analogies to Greek theatre became a mainstay of the foreign travel accounts that proliferated after 1860, although they were often somewhat blithe. In her popular essays on being a British art student in Munich, Anna Mary Howitt lauded the ‘effects of sunshine and shadow, and of drapery fluttered by the wind . . . one could imagine how the Greeks must have availed themselves of such effects in their theatres open to the sky’.36 Sitting alongside Daisenberger in 1860, Hans Christian Andersen expressed himself in almost identical terms.37 But the comparison with Greek theatre could also provoke more complex theological reflections. Dean Stanley, the English Broad Churchman, offered a prolonged meditation on Oberammergau for Macmillan’s Magazine in 1860, which later had a central place in his collection of essays on ‘Church and State’. Stanley wrote that ‘an educated man’ happening on this open-air performance of the sacred would instantly compare it to an Athenian tragedy.38 And while elements from the proscenium to the chorus seemed at first to be explicitly borrowed from the Greek tradition, he speculated that they were indigenous in origin: ‘Precisely such a union of rustic simplicity and high-wrought feeling – of the religious with the dramatic element – of natural scenery with simple art – was exhibited in the Dionysian theatre, and, as far as we know, has been exhibited nowhere since.’39 Stanley had two important motives for portraying Oberammergau as an indigenous sacred festival that could be compared only to the theatre of Dionysus. His essay’s broader argument was a defence of Oberammergau’s salutary quality for Protestant audiences, written in the context of increasing Victorian travel to this notionally Catholic site. Since putting the Bible on stage was consistently forbidden by the Lord Chamberlain’s office in England, Stanley was one among many British clergymen who considered the question of whether Oberammergau was theologically sound and morally edifying.40 Comparing Oberammergau to an indigenous Dionysian rite might initially seem only to render the play less Protestant, but by turning the play into the creation of the community, Stanley defended the village from the charge that it was a product of clerical 35

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Elias Burton Holmes, The Burton Holmes Lectures, with Illustrations from Photographs by the Author, 10 vols (Battle Creek, MI: Little-Preston, 1902), vol. VII, 116–17. Mrs Howitt-Watts, ‘The Miracle-Play at Ober-Ammergau’, in An Art-Student in Munich, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (London: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1880), 60. Hans Christian Andersen, The Story of My Life (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1871), 454. Stanley, ‘Ammergau Mystery’, 511. 39 Stanley, ‘Ammergau Mystery’, 511-12. A comprehensive treatment is Richard Foulkes, Church and Stage in Victorian England (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and particularly chap. 2 on censorship.

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initiative, and thereby rendered it less Catholic. A second motive can be found in Stanley’s firm argument that the Oberammergau play was inimitable and immovable: ‘This, beyond all dispute, is an institution which cannot be transplanted without provoking sentiments the exact opposite of those which it excites in its own locality. Even an extension or imitation of it in the country of its birth would go far as to ruin its peculiar character.’41 The Bavarian passion play was, like English choral music, a local expression of the Christian faith. The salutary effect of the piece only worked in context and wrenched from it would necessarily be jarring and irreverent. By insisting on Oberammergau’s sacred indigeneity and insularity from outside influence, Stanley therefore vetoed contemporary projects to revive passion playing in England while simultaneously legitimising the Bavarian play as a site of ecumenical Christian heritage for Victorian visitors.

III. 1880-1910: Dionysia in Bavaria The examples above show that, from the first performance of Daisenberger’s reformed play in 1860, analogies to the Greek theatre formed an important part of Oberammergau’s appeal to its swelling English audience. Yet the purportedly Dionysian character of the passion play would become an especially powerful theme of aesthetic commentary in fin-de-siècle Germany and Austria, where it indulged the fascinations of a variety of movements that sought to create new varieties of festal or cultic drama in the service of ideologies of völkisch nationalism, religious revival, or in some cases both together. The remainder of this chapter shows how three writers from across German-speaking Central Europe incorporated the passion play into their advocacy for a new cultic theatre: Richard von Kralik (1852–1934), one of the leading conservative figures in Vienna’s Catholic literary revival, who visited Oberammergau in 1880; Oskar Panizza (1853–1921), a modernist playwright whose experimental erotic drama fell foul of the censors in Munich, who attended the play in 1890; and Friedrich Lienhard (1865–1929), a writer and dramatist who helped initiate the ‘Heimat’ movement through his activities in Berlin and who went in 1900. All three figures fused some variety of nostalgic medievalism with Dionysian theory into an argument for a festal theatre, or Festspiel, within which Oberammergau served as both a prototype and a source of frustration. 41

Stanley, ‘Ammergau Mystery’, 535.

The Oberammergau Passion Play, 1830–1910

III.i Richard von Kralik The Catholic Kralik offered the most prominent expression of the idea of taking Oberammergau as a model for Dionysian theatre. Born to a wealthy family in a small village in German-speaking Bohemia, Kralik had moved first to Linz and then to university at Vienna. As Judith Beniston has argued, the rise of Karl Lueger’s antisemitic Christian Social Party in the 1890s ‘was accompanied by the emergence of a more assertive form of cultural Catholicism’ and Kralik became what Richard Geehr has called ‘the poet laureate of Christian Socialism’.42 Kralik was a deeply idiosyncratic figure whose aggressive and increasingly antisemitic nationalism perhaps owed something to insecurity over his Bohemian origins and Czech name. An enthusiast of – in turn – socialism, Wagner, Nietzsche and ancient Greece, he wrote plays in calligraphic monk’s script, filled his house with an eccentric mix of medieval Christian artefacts and Greek statues, and later became famous for the Tuesday evening dinners to which he invited admiring young writers. Kralik was a constant source of improbably ambitious projects, such as when in 1882 he won an audience with the Austro-Hungarian Emperor to discuss creating a Walhalla in Nußberg outside Vienna.43 Kralik’s initial activities centred on the Leo-Gesellschaft, a devoutly Catholic intellectual society founded in 1891 to focus on restoring the unity between learning and faith in Austria. Kralik convinced the society that they were wrong to discount the theatre as a worldly and debauched medium incompatible with religious sincerity, and in 1893 persuaded them to stage his nativity play Das Mysterium von der Geburt des Heilandes at the Großer Musikvereinsaal in Vienna to widespread critical acclaim.44 Kralik subsequently emerged as the architect of a number of increasingly ambitious Catholic theatrical productions in the city, gradually branching away from the Leo-Gesellschaft, incorporating amateur actors from Vienna’s working-class districts, and taking his adaptations of Pedro Calderón de la Barca plays beyond the capital into its surrounding villages. In 1899 he founded the Christliche Wiener Volksbühne, hoping to take his production Erwartung des Weltgerichtes ‘out into the parks and squares of the city’, although this venture soon collapsed.45 42

43 44

Judith Beniston, Welttheater: Hofmannsthal, Richard von Kralik, and the Revival of Catholic Drama in Austria, 1890–1934 (London: M. S. Maney and Son, 1998), 90; Richard S. Geehr, The Aesthetics of Horror: The Life and Thought of Richard von Kralik (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2003), 1. Lueger was elected as Mayor of Vienna in 1897. All these details are from Geehr, Aesthetics of Horror. I depend here on Beniston’s account in Welttheater, 93–7. 45 Beniston, Welttheater, 126.

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Visiting Oberammergau was more central to Kralik’s intellectual development than to that of perhaps any other thinker. By his own account in 1909’s autobiographical essay Die katholische Literaturbewegung der Gegenwart, all of his later efforts at cultic theatre, which only accelerated during the interwar period, stemmed from his transformative experience at the passion play. As he wrote in 1923: ‘the relationship of this Christian mystery art to the ancient Greek stage was the foundation for my entire life’s work’.46 Kralik arrived in Oberammergau on 23 May 1880, having already read Nietzsche and Wagner with some enthusiasm; he particularly admired Parsifal. Importantly he arrived after spending spring in Greece, a region which had held no special interest to him before his visit but then provoked a series of reflections on ‘the heart of all learning [den Kern aller Bildung]’.47 In Kralik’s view the real lessons of Greece had been known by ‘all of Europe in the Middle Ages’ and today only by ‘the devout people’.48 Kralik’s description of Oberammergau illustrated clearly what he thought these lessons were: I found what I sought here among the peasants in this remote valley, where the destructive “Enlightenment” of the last three or four centuries had fortunately not yet fully penetrated. Imagine that this dramatic mystery [Mysterium] were not a rustic curiosity for English visitors, but instead formed the centre of a religious service [Gottesdienst] in a global metropolis, endowed with the highest magic of perfected artistry, and you will have the drama of Aeschylus, the drama of the holy theatre of Dionysus, the rapt enthusiasm of an entire people – in other words, what makes this life worth living. Fuse the principle of Oberammergau with that of Athens, the fullest Christianity and the most unconditional Catholicism with the highest artistic consciousness of Greek civilisation [Kultur], and you will have the right, the new, the modern, the contemporary and the future.49

In Kralik’s view Catholic Germany was in fact like Greece, possessing holiness, poetry, prophets and oracles. Its Delphi was Mariazell (in the Styrian Alps) and its Colonos was Maria Lanzendorf (near Vienna): two pilgrimage sites known for their miraculous images of the Virgin.50 The problem was that the supposedly educated world mocked and rejected these things. What Germany lacked was a high cultural affinity with the 46 47

48 50

Richard von Kralik, Die Weltliteratur der Gegenwart (Graz: Styria, 1923), 70. Richard von Kralik, Die katholische Literaturbewegung der Gegenwart: Ein Beitrag zu ihrer Geschichte (Regensburg: Habbel, 1909), 5. Kralik, Katholische Literaturbewegung, 5. 49 Kralik, Katholische Literaturbewegung, 5. Kralik, Katholische Literaturbewegung, 5-6.

The Oberammergau Passion Play, 1830–1910

holiness, legends and ideas that were ordinary people’s entire education.51 In other words, Kralik’s mission was to bring the ‘Greek’ low culture of Catholic Germany into its barren secular high culture. As he later recalled: ‘It appeared to me that the most important duty of all was to secure for our nation the same epic cultural foundation as the Greeks, and certainly the Indians and Persians, had and continue to have. To that end, I would have to bring into a unity the inherited sagas of gods and heroes, just as Homer, Hesiod or Ferdusi had.’52 While there is no reason to doubt the passion play’s effect on Kralik, the prominence he gave Oberammergau within his autobiography also served as an intervention in the so-called Katholischer Literaturstreit that had broken out in 1898 and lasted until the First World War. This dispute, which hinged on how Catholic writers should engage with modernist innovation, pitted Kralik and his followers against the circle around Karl Muth, who founded the important learned Catholic magazine Hochland in Munich in 1903. Whereas, for Muth, the changing religious and artistic conditions of the modern world demanded that Catholic artists create innovative new forms, Kralik believed that the fundamental importance of tradition to Catholicism entailed that any artistic renewal must draw on those of the past. In the case of drama this meant that while Kralik was keen to argue that a renewed Catholic drama should draw on medieval religious plays or Spanish Golden Age dramatists like Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Muth was sceptical. He thought people needed to be educated to watch theatre properly before they could understand the devotional implications of historic work; a revived cultic experience could not do the trick on its own. As for Oberammergau, Muth saw the play as a ‘one-off’ that should not be imitated and could not form the foundation of a revival of folk theatre.53 Kralik’s more optimistic view of Oberammergau as a Dionysian prototype nonetheless posed him uncomfortable questions. In 1890, ten years after his original visit, Kralik noted that the play had been ‘unfortunately very modernised’ by the building of a permanent purpose-built enclosed theatre as well as the obvious investment in props and scenery. He lamented that ‘the original simplicity, the magic of devout naivety had to 51 52

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Kralik, Katholische Literaturbewegung, 6. Richard von Kralik, Tage und Werke, Lebenserinnerungen (Vienna, 1922), 84, cited in William J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 100. Geehr, Aesthetics of Horror, chap. 2; Beniston, Welttheater, 128–36; on Muth’s view of Oberammergau in 1890, Anton Wilhelm Hüffer, Karl Muth als Literaturkritiker (Münster: Aschendorff, 1959), 24–7.

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yield to shiny, rich, theatrical decorations’, while the high-tech theatre and ‘modern costumes’ reminded him of Bayreuth and the voguish historicist theatre of the Meiningen Ensemble more than the German Middle Ages.54 The community had indeed spent 14,500 Marks that year on new costumes and machinery designed by Carl Lautenschläger from the Munich Hoftheater, although one should note they had also received substantial help from the same theatre a decade earlier.55 Nonetheless, Kralik’s account was that at the earlier performance he had been able to mentally isolate what he saw as the Dionysian core of the play from its commercial accoutrements and international audience. The great dilemma he faced in 1890 was that the play’s success had produced a reaction which threatened to eradicate the primal quality that made it so valuable. Beyond merely a critique of the evolution of a Bavarian heritage site, we must surely read this judgement as betraying an anxiety about the very project of cultic theatre: if Oberammergau’s deeply rooted, centuries-old fusion of the Dionysian and the Germanic could evaporate so quickly in the glare of its own success, how would Vienna’s new generation of Catholic modernists preserve the festal effect that was so central to Kralik’s project of regenerative drama?

III.ii Oskar Panizza As among Catholic conservatives in Vienna, one might expect Oberammergau to find admirers in its nearest city, Munich. But the passion play’s appeal to one of that city’s most bohemian and profoundly anticlerical modernist dramatists is not so obvious. The experimental playwright Oskar Panizza was not even Catholic and had been raised a Pietist, yet he became the play’s foremost advocate among the Bavarian avant-garde. Along with the veteran naturalist poet Michael Georg Conrad (1846–1927), Panizza had been the founder of the Gesellschaft für modernes Leben (Society for Modern Living) in 1890 – premier association of the early ‘Munich Moderns’ – and he had a close association with the pioneering dramatist Frank Wedekind. The author of many anticlerical and antisemitic satires in the early 1890s, Panizza became infamous for his play Das Liebeskonzil (The Council of Love) in 1894. This spectacularly scandalous text satirised the fifteenth-century papal court as a den of sexual depravity and venereal disease. It landed the author in a Bavarian prison on ninety-three counts of blasphemy from which neither his career nor his mental health ever 54 55

Kralik, Weltliteratur, 70; see Beniston, Welttheater, 86–8. Huber, Klinner, and Lang, ‘Die Passionsaufführungen’, 170–1.

The Oberammergau Passion Play, 1830–1910

truly recovered.56 Of all the fin-de-siècle intellectuals who eulogised Oberammergau, Panizza seems uniquely incongruous. In 1890, the same year that Kralik revisited the village and lamented its commercialisation, Panizza visited for the first time. He produced a series of generally sympathetic historical and critical articles on the history of Oberammergau itself, as well as passion plays and peasant theatre more generally, for the leading organ of the Munich Moderns, Die Gesellschaft. How could this most anticlerical and spectacularly blasphemous of dramatists, who worshipped Luther as a culture-hero, simultaneously celebrate Oberammergau as a relic of medieval, which is to say pre-Reformation, Christianity? Fundamentally, the performative dimension of the contemporary passion play, rather than its religious content, enthralled Panizza. He stressed that medieval drama had been a fusion of Greek festival traditions, heathen customs and Christian narrative. Throughout history, each culture produced a form of theatre that reflected its characteristic values: the open-air theatre represented Hellenistic strength and honesty; the canvas stage backdrop evoked Rome’s culture of luxury and refinement; Christian theatre, meanwhile, specialised in spawning long scenes out of slim material, much like biblical exegesis.57 Still performed in a roofless theatre, Oberammergau preserved the essence of the original late medieval mystery plays, which had first taken place on wagons outside the church. When we enclosed stages in artificially lit halls, we severed the line that connected us to the Greeks.58 While everything from Wagner’s opera to the avant-garde ‘free’ stages in German cities seemed to accept this for granted, Oberammergau stood alone as a testament to a different way of doing things, preserving the fusion of heathen festival and early Christianity that the affectations of modernity had eroded. It was ‘a flaming protest against our Italian proscenium stage and our auditoriums filled with mist and misery’.59 Panizza hoped that Oberammergau would inspire today’s dramatists ‘with its thrust stage, crowd scenes, the splendid architecture of its façade and the sheen of its Greek sky’.60 When Panizza and the other Munich Moderns formed an association to found a ‘Free Stage’ (Freie Bühne) in 1891 – inspired by the one Berlin artists had successfully 56

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The definitive work is Peter D. G. Brown, Oskar Panizza and The Love Council: A history of the Scandalous Play on Stage and in Court, with the Complete Text in English and a Biography of the Author (London: McFarland, 2010). Oskar Panizza, ‘Theater-Koups und Machinationes: Ein geschichtlicher Überblick über Szene und Konstruktion der Mysterien-Bühne, bei Gelegenheit der Oberammergauer Passionsaufführungen 1890’, Die Gesellschaft: Monatsschrift für Litteratur, Kunst und Sozialpolitik 7 (1891): 592–614, 806–29 (at 825–6). Panizza, ‘Theater-Koups’, 826. 59 Panizza, ‘Theater-Koups’, 829. Panizza, ‘Theater-Koups’, 829.

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opened two years earlier – he channelled this yearning. They petitioned for a theatre ‘whose stage construction is based on that of the Oberammergau set, and whose audience seating is based on the amphitheatrical arrangement of Wagner’s theatre in Bayreuth’.61 Panizza’s praise was not unconditional. In his quasi-Nietzschean worldview, society was a struggle of individuals and communities against the states and institutions that sought to control them, within which we are alive only in striving to be authentic. Not only did he celebrate what he saw as the intrinsically carnivalesque nature of peasant religiosity, he also wrote a book extolling the tradition of Bavarian charivaris that protested church and state attempts to infringe their traditional rights.62 He even celebrated the rise of the populist Bavarian Peasant League in the 1890s, whose slogan was ‘no nobles, no bureaucrats, no priests’.63 Yet Panizza’s celebration of carnivalesque anticlericalism meant he watched the nineteenth-century passion with a certain regret. He lamented how the village had excised controversial early modern elements of the play to please the Bavarian authorities: ‘The world has become more enlightened, but less imaginative [phantasieärmer].’64 While his own play featured Satan prominently as a syphilitic antihero, he noted that removing the devil from the Oberammergau passion had been one of the most prominent changes in Othmar Weis’ 1811 script. A year later in 1891 he visited a peasant production of the life of the Tyrolean folk hero Andreas Hofer in the village of Oberdorf. Here was real Bauerntheater! Panizza celebrated its rusticity, amateurish staging and impenetrable Swabian dialect – in other words, all the raw naivety Oberammergau had sacrificed for success.65

III.iii Friedrich Lienhard Where the celebration of indigeneity and particularism could be fused with a commitment to national renewal, Oberammergau found more unambiguous admiration, even among Protestants. Friedrich Lienhard, who 61

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‘Vorstandschaft der Gesellschaft für modernes Leben: An dem hochlöblichen Magistrat‘, 1, cited in Michael Bauer, Oskar Panizza: Ein literarisches Porträt (Munich, C. Hanser, 1984), 143. Oskar Panizza, Die Haberfeldtreiben im bairischen Gebirge: Eine sittengeschichtliche Studie (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1897). My account here is dependent on the superb analysis in Peter Jelavich, Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting, and Performance, 1890–1914 (London, 1985), 54–74. Oskar Panizza, ‘Der Teufel im Oberammergauer Passions-Spiel: Eine textgeschichtliche Studie mit Ausblicken auf andere Mysterien-Spiele’, Die Gesellschaft: Monatsschrift für Litteratur, Kunst und Sozialpolitik, 6 (1890), 1022. The village was in Bavarian Swabia. Oskar Panizza, ‘Andreas Hofer: Ein schwäbisches Bauernspiel aus dem Algäu (Frühjahr 1891)’, Die Gesellschaft: Monatsschrift für Litteratur, Kunst und Sozialpolitik 7 (1891), 885–93.

The Oberammergau Passion Play, 1830–1910

went by the folksy ‘Fritz’ to his friends, was an Alsatian who had been educated at Strasbourg but established himself as a leading writer in Berlin during the 1890s. Here he was one of the founders of the ‘Heimat’ movement at the turn-of-the-century, which blended an interest in local history, popular crafts and environmental conservation with often quite reactionary politics. He started the journal Heimat: Blätter für Literatur und Volkstum in 1900. His 1902 article ‘Los von Berlin?’, which attacked the decadence and faddishness of big-city intellectual life, became something of a manifesto in Heimat circles.66 In 1903 he decided to practise what he preached and moved ‘far from Berlin’, retiring to the Thuringian Forest. In Lienhard’s romantic and Herderian vision, given clearest expression in his 1901 essay collection Neue Ideale, art grew organically from discrete peoples, emerging alongside them from a common soil.67 The purpose of modern literature was to draw on and develop this healthy wholeness into new forms of art, and a new form of Germanness (‘Deutschtum’) that would fuse these parts into a transcendent whole. Departing from some of his materialist and antisemitic contemporaries, he insisted that this Germanness was compatible with Christianity. Returning to the pagan traditions of the Aryan past was futile; rather, German culture should draw on the surviving elements of the pagan spirit: light, land and blood.68 Lienhard visited the Oberammergau passion play in 1900, and his essay on it had a central place in Neue Ideale. Narrating his visit, Lienhard eulogised the ‘sacred harmony of nature and religion’ embodied by the village and expressed through the poetry of its play, an ‘entirely unique Gesamtkunstwerk’ that blended the technical accomplishment of a city theatre with the earnest religiosity of a devout people.69 The unique festal setting of the Bavarian highlands allowed Oberammergau to resolve and transcend these polarities: Under the light of God’s kingdom, it is no longer only the story of Jesus but the story of humanity; it is not only a drama, but a piece of opera; it is not only an artwork, but a piece of religious edification; and finally, they are not drilled actors, but Alpine peasants [Alpenbauern], a community of crucifix-carvers with artistic sense and time-honoured religiosity; while all the while the great Alpine landscape and the holiday mood of the Highlands lives and laughs and illuminates all around us and within us.70 66

67 68 69 70

Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman, Heimat: A German Dream: Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture 1890–1990 (Oxford University Press, 2000), 32–6. Friedrich Lienhard, Neue Ideale: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Berlin and Leipzig: G. H. Meyer, 1901). Lienhard, ‘Christentum und Deutschtum (1893)’, in Neue Ideale, 93. Lienhard, ‘Oberammergau (1900)’, in Neue Ideale, 140, 144. Lienhard, ‘Oberammergau’, 148.

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The implication of Oberammergau’s achievement for German culture was that the nation needed to create two types of theatre: the Shakespearian Gestaltungssspiel on the one hand and the Greek Festspiel on the other. So far Germany had developed the former, a theatre oriented around character narratives and the individual, whereas the latter sought to express elevated ideas and orient itself around the totality. It was now time to create ‘a Sommerfestspiel in the German countryside’ that would cast aside the cold city theatres.71 Lienhard’s model for the Sommerfestspiel was, predictably, Dionysian theatre. This came to him via his collaborator Adolf Bartels, who articulated a particularly antisemitic variant of völkisch ideology in the pages of Heimat and elsewhere. The two later parted ways as Bartels grew more reactionary, but at this moment they were close friends. Bartels was an admirer of Nietzsche and had developed a plan to create a new ‘German Dionysia’ at Weimar. The birthplace of modern German literature would become a ‘Bayreuth for the spoken word [Wortdrama]’ that staged elaborate cycles of the great German playwrights – starting with Lessing, Kleist, Goethe and Schiller, then working up to the present.72 But to Lienhard, Bartels had not pushed the Greek comparison far enough: if we are to have German Dionysias then they must truly be Dionysian, and that meant vibrant Festspiele rather than Shakespearian Gestaltungsspiele. The model was apparent: ‘For German Dionysias in the German summer, a theatrical style remains to be found, which must somehow draw on that of Oberammergau.’73 Yet while the Greek comparison pointed the way, it also raised some troubling questions. Lienhard ended his piece with an apostrophe: ‘O, you Germans, who have only just become a nation, do you have a coherent culture? Do you have, like the Greeks, a coherent belief? Do you have common heroes, who are keenly revered by all confessions, classes and peoples? Do you have the strength and urge to celebrate Festspiele?’74 While it was clear that these questions were supposed to throw down the gauntlet to his readers, they also betrayed a real insecurity at the heart of the Dionysian discourse. He ended the essay on an inconclusive note, winding ruminatively through the hills of Bavaria on his train home. 71 72

73 74

Lienhard, ‘Oberammergau’, 151–2. Adolf Bartels, ‘Deutsche Dionysien’, Deutsche Welt, 1 July 1900, and ‘Weimarer Stimmungen’, Heimat, June 1900. Lienhard, ‘Oberammergau’, 152. Emphasis in original. Lienhard, ‘Oberammergau’, 152. (In the euch form . . . common in these texts to address ‘my German brothers. . .’.)

The Oberammergau Passion Play, 1830–1910

Conclusion The essays in this volume make clear that the question of whether and how to reconcile the twin legacies of the Bible and classical antiquity held a powerful appeal to educated Europeans in the nineteenth century. An index of the interlocking significance of the biblical and classical pasts to nineteenth-century observers is that, even when they were handling a cultural phenomenon – the Oberammergau passion play – that seems to belong unambiguously to the Christian heritage, they often viewed it through a lens that was shaped by their investment in the cultural potential of Greek antiquity. In the early nineteenth century, the first elite visitors to the passion play acknowledged that its open-air staging recalled the Greek theatre, which they generally took as a reassuring indication that educated clerics had helped shape the village’s tradition. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, Oberammergau served as a central example of the Dionysian Festspiel ideal that crisscrossed and animated a confessionally and politically diverse range of cultural movements from Berlin to Vienna. This shift was partly a product of the pervasive influence of Nietzsche and Wagner among Central European artists and intellectuals, about which so much has been written, but it was also about wanting to move beyond what Wagner had achieved at Bayreuth. Rather than seeing elite interest in Oberammergau as a by-product of Wagnerism, it is more helpful to view the twin fascinations with Wagner and Oberammergau as tributaries from a common and broader cultural stream that Suzanne Marchand labels ‘neo-romantic’.75 Furthermore, uncovering the hidden similarities between figures of such different confessional and political positions in their appreciation of Oberammergau is a reminder of the fundamental ambivalence that scholars have detected in the variously ruralist, cultic, völkisch and ethno-cultural fascinations of fin-de-siècle thought and culture.76 Oberammergau was special to fin-de-siècle visitors because it brought together so many of the impulses behind the Festspiel movement – specificity to a location, repetition with festal regularity, the use of amateur performers, the fusion of myth, drama and music – and yet it also achieved 75

76

Suzanne L. Marchand, ‘From Liberalism to Neoromanticism: Albrecht Dietrich, Richard Reitzenstein, and the Religious Turn in “Fin-de-Siècle” German Classical Studies’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Supplement 79 (2003): 129–60. Boa and Palfreyman, Heimat, 2–22; Marchand, ‘From Liberalism to Neoromanticism’, 129–33, 159–60; Stefan Berger, ‘Germany: Ethnic Nationalism Par Excellence?’, in What Is a Nation? Europe 1789–1914, ed. Timothy Baycroft and Mark Hewitson (Oxford University Press, 2006), 42–62.

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things that artists like Wagner and themselves struggled to – it was not implemented from the top down, it brought together all social classes and confessions in the same audience, and it had endured across the centuries. As this fundamental tension indicates, ‘Dionysian’ eulogies to Oberammergau were testaments of frustration as much as of possibility. For the conservative Kralik, Oberammergau was a model of everything to which he thought the Austrian Catholic literary revival should aspire. And yet like so many of the play’s admirers he found the play to have fallen victim to the very success he had himself encouraged – on return in 1890 it reminded him, precisely, of the professionalised Bayreuth he wanted to surpass. For the anticlerical Panizza, the open-air passion play provided a tangible link to a pre-Enlightenment drama and therefore to both the Greeks and the carnivalesque energies of popular culture. Yet the very polish and refinement that had ensured Oberammergau’s survival through the era of Montgelas had ironed out the profanity and irreverence of the passion play tradition, which was now impossible to recapture. Finally, for Lienhard, Oberammergau fused all the strands of his Heimat enthusiasm – rurality, rootedness, Germanness, religiosity – and yet at the same time posed troubling questions about the very possibility of a unified German culture. How, in other words, were German cultural leaders to reconcile the Dionysian effervescences of myriad indigenous communities with the Apollonian unity of Greek culture that earlier German philhellenists had so envied? Reading commentary on Oberammergau through the lens of the evolution of German philhellenism in the nineteenth century has, then, a broader significance. For many early German philhellenes, the challenge of putting the Greek ideal into practice ultimately involved working through elite institutions, much in the way that writers like Schiller imagined a ‘trickle-down’ of Bildung from dramatists to the theatrical public: transform scholarship, architecture, theatre and school curricula, and cultural change would follow.77 Other than the morally or aesthetically elevating role of the arts, this all had little to do with what romantic commentators celebrated at Oberammergau, hence the marginalisation of the Greek theme in most early texts, and indeed little to do with Catholics at all. By contrast, the neo-romantic philhellenism of the fin-desiècle yearned for a cultic Dionysian culture that would emerge organically from a community in which creative artists immanently dwelled. Oberammergau, easily mocked as kitsch and superstitious, now emerged 77

Garratt, Music, Culture and Social Reform, 15–18.

The Oberammergau Passion Play, 1830–1910

as a living experiment in intellectuals’ most urgent yearnings. The powerful appeal of Oberammergau suggests that the question of German Catholicism’s compatibility with the Dionysian enthusiasms of fin-desiècle artists and writers warrants further attention. But as Kralik and other advocates of the Festspiel were to discover, it is fiendishly difficult to stimulate the creation of popular culture from above. ‘Fusing the principle of Athens with that of Oberammergau’ was an aspiration that revealed the tensions as much as the appeal of efforts to blend the classical and the biblical in the nineteenth century.

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‘Popes and Caesars’ St Paul, Protestant Bible Culture, and the Building of the American Episcopal Church in Rome g. a. bremner [T]o a people like the Italians – all eye and ear – the very stones, the spire and chimes, of a distinctive Church building, will teach more of the strength and reality of our Christianity, than any account of writings that might be distributed among them; and, will be, as well, a constant, visible witness to them that religious liberty, and the rights of the human conscience, have at last found a home in the city of the Popes and the Caesars.1

The above passage is from the official fundraising literature for the building of the new American Episcopal Church in Rome, published at the beginning of the process in 1871. It was authored by the church’s energetic and outspoken rector, the Revd. Robert Jenkins Nevin (1839–1906). At first glance, it is striking for the emphasis it places on architecture as a most conspicuous form (symbol even) of religious character and identity. But it is no less striking for the way it stages a contrast between the ancient and modern worlds, as well as its demarcation between religious ‘truth’ and liberty on the one hand, and religious tyranny and authoritarianism on the other. The way in which the ‘Popes and Caesars’ are conjoined here would have resonated unequivocally in the wider Protestant imagination. Although some Anglicans had come to view the Pope rather wistfully by the 1870s, as an amusing type of ecclesiastical relic, for Nevin – who was based in Rome, and who had witnessed the events of September 1870 first hand – it was no laughing matter. Nor would he have recognised any irony in apparent parallels between the Pope, Catholicism, and ideas of High Anglican primitivism. Liturgical practice and externals were one thing, but theology, doctrine, and basic ecclesiastical governance were another. As we shall see, Nevin’s antipathy towards the Papacy and what he called ‘Vaticanism’ was nothing if not serious.2 1

2

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See ‘To the Friends of the American Chapel, Rome’, circular letter, 1871, St. Paul’s Vestry Archive, Rome. For instance, see R. J. Nevin, ‘A Notable Secession from the Vatican’, Nineteenth Century 11/62 (April 1882): 606–25 (at 622).

The Building of the American Episcopal Church in Rome

His basic intention therefore was to ask if there was any real or substantial difference between ancient and modern Rome. In so doing he was eager to reiterate the long-established trope of the apparent distinction between a rational, Bible-reading culture and one that was (at least to the Protestant frame of mind) mired in the tactics and practices of the ancient past, including the maintenance of a monopoly on biblical interpretation and authority. In other words, there is a tension embedded in the passage between modern Bible usage and interpretation (i.e., reformed/Protestant theology) and the ancient past vis-à-vis the Pope and his church being rigidly hierarchical, doctrinal, and imperious. In short, the imputation is that the Pope was but little more than a modern emperor. It needs recalling in this context that the title ‘pope’ itself was heavily loaded. Although derived from the ancient Greek word for ‘father’ (πάππας), the position to which it refers – the Bishop of Rome – had long been associated with the ancient Roman term pontiff (Latin: pontifex). The imperial allusions were of course deliberate. In 1453 pontifex maximus, the title given to the chief ‘high priest’ of the College of Pontiffs in ancient Rome (conferred upon the emperor himself in imperial times) became a semi-official title of the Pope, appearing, among other places, in inscriptions on buildings.3 Indeed, some popes, the most famous perhaps being Julius II (1443–1513), specifically styled themselves as modern Caesars, in Julius’s case (the ‘second Caesar’) after his namesake Julius Caesar.4 Over time, this idea, and its connotations, cemented a politicised connection between the institutional Papacy and the city of Rome as the heart of Christian authority in the West. This ancient and authoritarian residue clung to the Papacy into the nineteenth century, propagating a negative image of the Church of Rome in the minds of some. Thus, ‘Rome’, both as an idea and in reality, remained a seat of arbitrary and authoritarian government for such onlookers, now pretending to be the centre of the Christian universe. This is not only how reformed Christians came to understand and criticise Papal authority, but also how the American Episcopalians in Rome wished it to be presented. And it was precisely 3

4

Iiro Kajanto, ‘“Pontifex maximus” as the Title of the Pope’, Arctos: Acta Philologica Fennica 15 (1981): 37–52; Roald Dijkstra, ‘Anchoring Pontifical Authority: A Reconsideration of the Papal Employment of the Title Pontifex Maximus’, Journal of Religious History 41/3 (2017): 312–25. Rosamond McKitterick, ‘The Popes as Rulers of Rome in the Aftermath of Empire, 476–769’, Studies in Church History 54 (2018): 71–95. Nicholas Temple, ‘Julius II as Second Caesar’, in Julius Caesar in Western Culture, ed. M. Wyke (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 110–27. See also Emily O’Brien, ‘Arms and Letters: Julius Caesar, the Commentaries of Pope Pius II, and the Politicization of Papal Imagery’, Renaissance Quarterly 62/4 (2009): 1057–97.

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this tension – between modern and ancient, Protestant rationalism and Papal perversion – that was specifically exploited in the commissioning and erection of the American Episcopal Church in Rome, St Paul’s Within-theWalls, following that city’s ‘conquest’ in 1870. The Risorgimento and political unification of the Italian peninsula, which promised a new liberal and modern state, is important to understanding the contrasts that were being staged here. Exacerbating the Episcopalians’ grievance in this regard was the Vatican’s stance on the new Italy. Invoking its temporal power as vested in the Papal States, the Vatican was widely perceived as deliberately obstructing the unification process – in a sense, dividing the country in two – and had therefore raised the ire of a great number of Italians, especially among the anticlerical elite.5 It also drew the opprobrium and censure of countries like Great Britain and the United States.6 The whole affair had become something of a flashpoint with respect to the balance of power in Europe, as France, Prussia, the AustroHungarians, and Britain all vied to influence the process. The Vatican may have been exercising what it believed to be its God-given right in protecting its interests and thus the integrity of its ‘universal’ church, but others considered it to be acting mischievously in threatening not just the stability of Italy but that of Europe, too.7 Moreover, the city of the Popes, Rome, was itself the focus of much heated and confused debate during this period. Being among the foremost sites of early Christian witness and martyrdom, Rome was prone to interpretation by Victorians through the lens of biblical history. ‘More than the seat of the Roman Republic, the throne of the Caesars and the destination of Mazzini and 5

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For a summary of the resistance to and subversive tactics of the Papacy in relation to Italian unification, see Martin Clark, Modern Italy 1871–1995, 2nd edn (London and New York: Longman, 1996), 81–8. For what the The Times of London was saying about this, see C. T. McIntire, England Against the Papacy: Tories, Liberals and the Overthrow of Papal Temporal Power during the Italian Risorgimento (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 44. See also Danilo Raponi, Religion and Politics in the Risorgimento: Britain and the New Italy, 1861–1875 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 5; David Dowling, ‘Reporting the Revolution: Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville, and the Italian Risorgimento’, American Journalism 31/1 (2014): 26–48. See letter between Odo Russell and Lord John Russell, 16 January 1861, concerning conversation between Odo and Pius IX on the matter of British government policy towarsd Italy, in Denis Mack Smith (ed.), The Making of Italy, 1796–1870 (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 397–401. General British government attitudes towards the Risorgimento, which were all but universally supportive, can be found in McIntire, England Against the Papacy. See also Jonathan Parry, Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party, 1867–1875 (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 16, 43. For the US, see H. R. Marraro, ‘The Religious Problem of the Italian Risorgimento as Seen by Americans’, Church History 25/1 (1956): 41–63 (at 58–9). D. I. Kertzer, ‘Religion and society, 1789–1892’, in Italy in the Nineteenth Century 1796–1900, ed J. A. Davis (Oxford University Press, 2000), 181–205; McIntire, England Against the Papacy, 4; Clark, Modern Italy, 84.

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Garibaldi’, Jane Garnett and Anne Bush have observed, ‘it [Rome] was the cradle of apostolic Christianity and the supposed resting place of St Peter and St Paul.’8 The contested heritage of Rome was therefore as much about religion as it was about the ancient past and present politics. The Bible and its historic settings were taken as having equal authority to the well-worn accounts of the great classical authors. As we shall see, for the Americans, the historical (even mythical) figure Paul became a conduit through which to channel this contested heritage, especially its grievances concerning the Vatican’s recalcitrance in its treatment of Protestant Christianity. The political and religious rhetoric that surrounded the building’s commissioning, construction, and consecration worked to draw connections between the Bible, certain historical figures featured in it, and antiquity. Much was at stake, for Rome was one of the principal sources of Western culture, and the heart of Latin Christendom. The process of the building of St Paul’s Within-the-Walls therefore provides an interesting case study of how, from a material culture point of view, architecture inflected this contested history and its contemporary political resonances in a way that not only rendered them physical, but also invested them with symbolic power through the monumental presence of built form.

I. The Church, Its Congregation, and the Local Context The church of St Paul’s Within-the-Walls (1872–6), Via Nazionale, was designed by George Edmund Street (1824–81), one of the Britain’s greatest and best-known architects of the nineteenth century (Figure 7.1). So impressive a work is it considered to be, that it was once described by the eminent architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock as a ‘major work of the Victorian Age’.9 Yet very little scholarly attention has been afforded this building. Indeed, for most casual onlookers, it appears an incongruous anomaly: a Gothic Revival structure in red brick peering out from among a wider urban fabric that is essentially classical. The general feeling has been that it somehow seems foreign and therefore out of place.10 8

9

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Jane Garnett and Anne Bush, ‘Rome’, in Cities of God: The Bible and Archaeology in NineteenthCentury Britain, ed. David Gange and Michael Ledger-Lomas (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 285–314 (at 286). See also Norman Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 204–8. Hitchcock writing to J. R. Millon, 1982, in J. R. Millon, St Paul’s Within-the-Walls, Rome (Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 2001), 32. This was certainly the view put forward by Carroll Meeks in 1953. It appears to have stuck, but is now in urgent need of revision. See C. L. V. Meeks, ‘Churches by Street on the Via Nazionale

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Figure 7.1. St Paul’s Within-the-Walls, Rome (1872–6), by G. E. Street. PRJ/1/21, Paul Joyce Archive, GB3010, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, UK.

As misconstrued as this impression may be, the building is nevertheless an important site and document in an episode of Italian national life that witnessed the steady if inexorable march of a new and liberal reform agenda. It stands as a monument to a skirmish in that episode that pitted the mighty and authoritarian belligerence of the Roman Catholic Church, in Rome, against what many saw as the modern and righteous principle of freedom of religion. More than this, it would emerge as a victorious symbol in a tussle over ‘truth’ and error, legitimacy and impropriety. The reason it acquired such symbolic potency is a rather long and somewhat troubling story. It begins with the organised presence of American Episcopalians in the Eternal City in the 1850s. According to letters and published accounts, the American community in Rome, which grew throughout the course of the nineteenth century owing to increased seasonal tourism, found it difficult (both financially and legally) to secure and the Via del Babuino’, Art Quarterly 16 (1953): 215–28 (at 215). Meeks repeated this observation in his book on modern Italian architecture of 1966. See C. L. V. Meeks, Italian Architecture 1750–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Pres, 1966), 281.

The Building of the American Episcopal Church in Rome

a convenient place of worship. Although officially illegal, other forms of Christian and non-Christian worship, such as Judaism, were tolerated in the city of Rome because the communities they attracted were financially beneficial to the Vatican. However, being unofficial, their status was never protected, and policy towards their presence was liable to shift from time to time. Therefore, in the case of the Americans, services would routinely move between rooms in private dwellings (clandestine) to facilities provided for in hotels. But these arrangements were always viewed as unsatisfactory, and therefore only temporary. When a space for proper church service was eventually acquired in 1864, it was given the name Grace Church, and, as with the English chapel in Rome, was forced to endure the indignity of being located outside the old city walls, ‘with the swine’, in rooms on the Via Flaminia, just beyond the Porta del Popolo.11 The early life of American Episcopalian worship was therefore rather peripatetic, having moved between, at first, the American Legation in the Palazzo Bernini from 1859, then to the Palazzo Simonetti, and then on to the Palazzo Lozzano, as the Legation moved premises. Services were suspended for part of the American Civil War, but resumed in 1863, at first in a bank, and then under the protection of the new foreign minister at the Hotel de Russie, before ending up in the houses of certain members of the congregation. In 1864 it found a new home in the Palazzo Doria, within the premises of the new American Legation.12 At this point, however, it was decided by the vestry of the church to sever ties with the Legation and go it alone. As might have been expected, the church, no longer protected by the American Legation, was sent outside the walls by Vatican decree. Although this ‘concession’ was granted to both the English and American communities in Rome, services were still to be conducted ‘incognito’.13 In reading the sources that relay the early history of the American community in Rome, it is easy to sense a degree of opprobrium. Indeed, Nevin, who was the incumbent of Grace Church at the time of the building of St Paul’s, never concealed his antipathy towards the Vatican. Nor did he temper his disgust at the way in which he believed American Episcopalians 11

12

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See ‘To the Friends of the American Chapel, Rome’, circular letter, 1871, St. Paul’s Vestry Archive, Rome. Here it was observed that ‘the respect due to our faith and national name requires that we should remove from ourselves the reproach of being held without the gates, as an unclean thing, “with the swine”, as the Papal Monsignori were delighted to describe it’. An account of these movements and the early history of Grace Church can be found in R. J. Nevin, St Paul’s Within the Walls (New York: D. Appleton, 1878), 9–34. E.g., Henry Watson Wasse, An Account of Building a Church for the Anglican Communion in Rome (Aylesbury, 1885).

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had been treated by the authorities in Rome prior to 1870. Such antipathy was in and of itself neither unique nor surprising. As William Vance has shown, Rome in the imagination of Victorian Americans was a place fraught with moral hazard. As the centre of a once supreme if now enervated authoritarian Papacy, it repulsed as much as it lured.14 There was of course a general, underlying prejudice among Americans towards the Catholic Church, and in particular the Vatican, owing to the Protestant foundations of American culture. Despite support in some quarters of American society for the Pope’s cause, this animus reached a peak in 1867, politically speaking, when Congress officially withdrew the American Legation to Rome in protest over the ejection of the Episcopal church beyond the walls.15 More fundamentally, believing as they did in the progressive modernity and ethical superiority of their own society, many Americans naturally found Rome a challenge to their assumptions about history and the future.16 It appeared to be a place that time had forgotten, and one where the march of progress and the ultimate liberation of mankind had ceased. It is important to note that, in a context such as late nineteenth-century Rome, even High Anglicans were keen to emphasise the distinct and thus ‘Protestant’ basis of their branch of the Church Catholic. This we find Nevin doing over and over, employing the term Protestant when and wherever he thought it would strike the right contrast, despite his High Church leanings. He also sought to use the term in its plain rather than nakedly sectarian sense, seeing both himself and his church – as part of the wider reform movement in Latin or Catholic Christianity – as maintaining a state of protest in the face of the Vatican. He obviously thought that anything that dissented from the grotesquely deformed and repressive ordinances of the Papacy was ‘Protestant’ in its very being. With the beguiling and ‘idolatrous’ imagery of the Counter-Reformation Church bearing down on all sides, Protestant sentiments in such a place were naturally piqued. In this respect, whatever their intrinsic differences may have been, reformed Christian congregations in Rome were able to rally around what they perceived as a common enemy in the Vatican. 14

15

W. L. Vance, ‘The Sidelong Glance: Victorian Americans and Baroque Rome’, New England Quarterly 58/4 (1985): 501–32. See also, W. L. Vance, America’s Rome, vol. II: Catholic Rome and Contemporary Rome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Dominic Janes, ‘Vile Bodies: Victorian Protestantism in the Roman catacombs’, in Rome, Pollution and Propriety: Dirt, Disease and Hygiene in the Eternal City from Antiquity to Modernity, ed. M. Bradley and K. Stow, British School in Rome Monograph Series (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 223–40. Marraro, ‘Religious Problem’, 58–9. 16 Vance, ‘Sidelong Glance’, 518.

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Despite this esprit de corps, however, the various reformed churches in Rome at the time did not always see eye-to-eye. Even those of the same denomination were sometimes at loggerheads. The idea of what a ‘Protestant’ church was or ought to be was still open to question.17 In a place such as Rome, this could be politically explosive. Take, for instance, the Church of England community in Rome. What we can say about this group and its organisation is that, although party loyalties were largely laid aside for the sake of good relations, tensions over style and liturgical practice were never far from view. Controversy occasionally raged over the appointment of this or that chaplain, or over the nature of worship being conducted at any one time. As party politics were rife in England over such matters, it was only natural that they had the potential to flare up in Rome too. In Rome it was considered especially dangerous, even insulting, to witness a service that seemed too ‘Popish’ in its surrender to externals, or in the clergy showing even the slightest sign of genuflection. Of course great suspicion surrounded those chaplains of Tractarian persuasion, who were perceived by some in the congregation as Vatican stooges, or, worse still, counter-missionaries of a sort.18 The rather febrile disposition of the English community would reach breaking point in the late 1860s, leading to division and the setting up of a rival (Evangelical) church, Holy Trinity, in 1870.19 17

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For a wider analysis of attempts at Protestant reform in Italy by British agents during the nineteenth century, and the problems associated with it, see Danilo Raponi, ‘Risorgimento e virtù civiche: Riflessioni dei protestanti britannici sull’identità nazionale italiana (1861– 1875)’, in Il Protestantesimo Italiano nel Risorgimento: Influenze, miti, identità, ed. S. Meaghenzani (Torino: Claudiana, 2013), 113–25. The effects of Nevin’s endeavours need to be seen in this light. The private correspondence between English residents, friends of the church, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) bear out these concerns. The SPG had taken over patronage of the English chaplaincy in Rome by 1866. At times alarm was raised on the part of some among the congregation at what was perceived in the clergy as ‘popish’ practices. For example, see unpublished letters from W. B. d’Almeida to SPG(?), 13 February 1866, and J. T. Payne to SPG, 28 May 1866, in USPG Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford: C/EUR/21a. The Bishop of Gibraltar was aware of the sensitivities around this matter, acknowledging the presence of a ‘strong Evangelical party’ in Rome, who ‘will certainly have a rival church’ if forced to have a ‘High Church or Ritualistic’ priest. See unpublished letter, Bp. of Gibraltar to T. W. Bullock (SPG), 20 May 1866, USPG Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford: D29c, 2235. See Muriel Talbot Wilson, The History of the English Church in Rome from 1816 to 1916 (Rome: La Speranza, 1916), 84–91. Rome was of course not the only English community affected by such schism. For that at Bordighera, and for the challenges of the Diocese of Gibraltar in general, see Marcella Pellegrino Sutcliffe, ‘Residenti anglicani inglesi: Una sfida per il vescovo di Gibilterra’, in Meaghenzani, Il Protestantesimo Italiano, ed. Meaghenzani, 265–75. For more on the English church in Rome, see G. A. Bremner, ‘Sermons in Stone: Architecture and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts within the Diocese of Gibraltar, c.1842–1882’, in

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Therefore, although it would appear that one could be more or less Protestant, it seems that being reformed, to whatever degree, was the key dividing line between the Roman Catholic Church and those other Christian denominations that had begun to congregate in the Holy City. This, at least, is how Nevin saw it. Despite practising quite a high brand of Anglican worship himself, which attracted little controversy among his own flock, Nevin believed that his church could (and would) in no way be confused with Roman Catholicism. As we shall see, what may have appeared to be a fine line in the minds of some, was a gaping chasm to him. This distinction, as far as Nevin was concerned, had as much to do with politics and culture as with doctrine. There is little question that Nevin perceived the Roman Catholic Church in its modern guise as a kind of putrefied corpse lying over Rome and thus stifling any move towards achieving a freer and truer religious environment.20 This sense of inherent if not piqued Protestant animus is important to understanding the subsequent actions taken by the American community in Rome following the demise of Papal sovereignty in September 1870.

II. Real and Unreal: Architecture, Moral Activism, and the Politics of Purity Before the dust had barely settled following the events of that fateful day of 20 September 1870, the American Episcopalian community began looking for a new site within the walls of the old city. As Nevin explained, the situation was still somewhat fluid, with only a provisional government in place. A free vote in Rome had resulted overwhelmingly in favour of annexation to the new Italian state, but the formal steps of admission were not yet complete. Nevertheless, ‘the whole people felt themselves to be already a part of Italy, and free to act under the Italian Constitution and laws’.21 The Italian constitution as it then existed was essentially that of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, which had steadily developed under the leadership of the great modernising statesman Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour (1810–61). Significantly, this constitution – in its original form, the

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British Protestant Missions and the Conversion of Europe, 1600–1900, ed. Simone Maghenzani and Stefano Villaini (London: Routledge, 2020), 235–61. Apart from what is written in St Paul’s, we get a good flavour of Nevin’s views in this regard in Nevin, ‘Notable Secession’. Nevin, St Paul’s, 35.

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Statuto fondamentale (1848) – prescribed equality before the law, including freedom of religion as a cornerstone of modern, liberal government; and so it remained a cornerstone of the wider, evolving Italian constitution after the declaration of the new Kingdom of Italy in 1861.22 Part of this reform, as it had initially taken shape in Sardinia, saw the repeal of disqualifications against Protestants (in that case the Waldensians) and other religious minorities, but would lead ultimately to a more general campaign to extend civil liberties and demolish the ‘confessional state’ (i.e., nominal Roman Catholic supremacy) throughout the whole of Italy.23 It was under the fiat of these principles, and the apparent civil liberties they guaranteed, that the American community in Rome felt free to acquire property and begin erecting a church worthy of the name, even within the see of another, pre-existing bishopric. For his part, and playing the ‘protest’ card again, Nevin was convinced of the righteousness of this action. Instead of urging a less interventionist approach by citing the interpretation of Paul’s epistle to the Romans that emphasised the ‘Roman Church’ as merely a branch rather than the root of the Church of Christ, he agitated for direct usurpation: I have not the least feeling of doubtfulness upon this question of intrusion . . . I hold that the Bishop of Rome has fallen into such fatal heresy, has been so manifestly false to the Apostolic trust committed to him, as to have wholly forfeited those ecclesiastical rights which would otherwise have attached to his See; and that it is the right of the Bishops of any neighboring Church to send truly Catholic teachers into that See, or even to reëstablish the Catholic Episcopate there in its purity and integrity.24

Although hinging on a point of natural law relating to ecclesiastical jurisdiction, this passage echoes in its own way the spectacle of the Italian State bashing down the walls of Rome and reclaiming the city as its rightful capital. To Nevin, those walls were clearly as much a spiritual obstacle as they were a political one. Here religious and secular motives played out different acts in the same historical drama, both seeking a new but associated kind of social order. Accordingly, the ‘free’ and ‘liberal’ qualifications of Nevin’s church were seen as fitting easily with those of the new Italian state. Indeed, as Terry Kirk has argued, the cult of the Risorgimento as a type of secular deism quickly pressed itself into the iconography of post-conquest 22

23

24

Arturo Carlo Jemolo, Church and State in Italy 1850–1950, trans. D. Moore (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960 (first published as Chiesa e Stato in Italia dal Risorgimento as oggi, 1955), 16–26. Derek Beales and Eugenio F. Biagini, The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 2002), 93–4. Nevin, St Paul’s, 33–4.

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Rome, with buildings, statuary, and other assertive forms of urbanism confronting, challenging, and even replacing the once all-powerful symbols of religious authority.25 In staging his takeover, Nevin presented himself as something of a Protestant champion in his eagerness to defy the Papacy. As degenerate and decayed as the Church of Rome was understood to be, it would still take a well-aimed and manly blow, from a spiritually virtuous intercessor, to lay it low once and for all. This posturing by Nevin, a war hero in his own right, reveals a man of action, and kind of clerical Garibaldi, who saw himself as both carrying and acting out the hopes of Protestants the world over (Figure 7.2). Despite the fact that things did not work out quite the way he might have imagined, Nevin’s ambition, along with his closeness to the action, nevertheless bolstered his credentials (in his own mind, at least). In this respect Nevin can be seen as not so much a ‘muscular’ Christian as a kind of high-minded, self-righteous miles Christi.26 Having been an independent battery commander in the Union Army during the American Civil War only a few years earlier, he was prone to think strategically and militarily. Given this inclination, he perhaps imagined St Paul’s as a type of newly entrenched defensive position, just as his battery had been during the fortification of Washington, DC, with its spiritual guns trained on the great dome of St Peter’s, only a mile or so away across the Tiber. In the event, the Americans did indeed rush through the breach to stake their claim within the confines of the Holy City. Less than two weeks after the conquest of Rome, the vestry of what was still then Grace Church met to deliberate over necessary action. It was following this meeting that the circular letter mentioned above was published in order to raise funds for the erection of a new building. The language in this document was unequivocal, and the strategy laid bare. The promotion of religious liberty was obviously one goal, but the potential moral effect of architecture was also high on the agenda. In a city replete with architectural remains – indeed, somewhat defined by those remains – it is hardly surprising that architecture would figure so highly in Nevin’s vision. In so much as these remains spoke not only to the Papal past, but also to that of Roman imperium, built form was a key register and index to 25

26

Terry Kirk, ‘The Political Topography of Modern Rome, 1870–1936: Via XX Settembre to Via dell’Impero’, in Rome: Continuing Encounters between Past and Present, ed. D. Caldwell and L. Caldwell (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 101–28. The trope of ‘manly Christian’ idealism in Victorian culture is now well understood. For example, see Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1985); James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Susan Walton, Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Era: Charlotte Yonge’s Models of Manliness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).

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Figure 7.2. Robert Jenkins Nevin (1839–1906), Rector of St Paul’s Within-the-Walls, American Episcopal Church, Rome. Clerical Biographies, MSS C569, Special Collections, Christoph Keller, Jr. Library, General Theological Seminary, New York.

the conflation between ancient and modern forms of tyranny. If this were doubted, Nevin might well have pointed to the recent history of Pius IX’s own archaeological initiatives that sought to anchor the Roman Church’s legitimacy in ancient ruins, in the process verifying its apparent authenticity and durability.27 In soliciting donations, the Grace Church committee noted how a new building would therefore be expedient to the extent that it would not only stand as a symbol of religious freedom in the new Italy but also bear witness to the continuing efforts to rid Christianity in Rome of ‘Papal corruptions’ through genuine reform. This appeal took the necessity for a new building beyond any kind of special pleading, for it may well have been just as expedient (financially) to acquire and refurbish an existing structure. Only a new building, with a new architecture, could hope to achieve the aims of reformed Christianity in Rome, it was claimed.28 This is an important idea, and it brings us back to the 27

28

Richard Wittman, ‘A Partly Vacated Historicism: Artifacts, Architecture, and Time in Nineteenth-Century Papal Rome’, Grey Room 84 (Summer 2021): 7–37. It was also observed in this regard that: ‘Moreover, for us to occupy a Roman Church would excite much ill-feeling against us among the superstitious people, and greatly impair our influence with the liberal Catholics.’ See ‘To the Friends of the American Chapel, Rome’, circular letter, 1871, St. Paul’s Vestry Archive, Rome.

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opening passage quoted. Indeed, the effect of such a structure, in this locale, was supposed to be all the more advantageous, for, in ancient times as now, ‘Rome must always be the controlling moral capital of Italy.’29 But there are two words in particular that stand out in that passage: ‘distinctive’ and ‘reality’. Both of these words, and the ideas they encompass, would be crucial in guiding the choice of architect and style of building, as well as how the building was intended to be perceived. Indeed, the term ‘reality’ – here taken to mean a certain essence relating to veracity and authenticity – was a key concern of Street’s own approach towards architectural design, thus corresponding precisely with wider notions of ‘truth’ and rationality in Protestant theology. Again, and as Brian Murray observes elsewhere in this volume, this idea maps neatly onto the general perception held by many Victorian tourists and sojourners that Rome was a fundamentally dirty and impure place, not merely physically, but morally and spiritually, too.30 Observers of the contemporary scene, such as William Gladstone, the young John Ruskin, and Charles Dickens, bemoaned the wretched conditions they found in Rome and its surrounding territories.31 As Dominic Janes notes, ‘the medieval system of Catholicism that seemed somehow to have persisted in undead animation after the therapeutic attentions of the Reformation brought together dirt, disease, hunger and horror in terrifying juxtaposition and confrontation’ in the minds of such visitors.32 Horrors of this kind were infinitely worse than those to be found in London, precisely because they were morally repugnant if not contagious. In its impurity, modern Rome was (by analogy) also unreal, lacking an essential and 29 30

31

32

Ibid. For instance, Rosemary Sweet has shown how by the second decade of the nineteenth century many English tourists had begun to associate modern Rome with filth and corruption. See Rosemary Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour: The British in Italy c.1690–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 129–47. For British travellers’ reactions to papal spectacle in Rome, see Britta Martens, ‘Vatican ceremonies and tourist culture in nineteenth-century British travelogues’, in Imagining Italy: Victorian Writers and Travellers, ed Michael Hollington, Catherine Waters, and John Jordan (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 14–34. For Gladstone, see Deryck M. Schreuder, ‘Gladstone and Italian Unification, 1848–70: The Making of a Liberal?’, English Historical Review 85/336 (1970): 475–501 (at 476); McIntire, England Against the Papacy, 32–3. Gladstone did not have quite the same reaction to St Peter’s as Ruskin, but did recognise the dire consequences of papal government, as he saw them, in both Rome and the surrounding lands of the Papal States. See The Gladstone Diaries, ed M. R. D. Foot and H. C. G. Matthew, 14 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968–94) vol. I, 460–2. For Ruskin, see Tim Hilton, John Ruskin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 58. For Dickens, see Dominic Janes, ‘Dickens and the Catholic Corpse’, in Dickens and Italy: Little Dorrit and Pictures from Italy, ed. Michael Hollington and Francesca Orestano (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 170–86. Janes, ‘Vile Bodies’, 233.

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abiding ‘truth’. There may have been, as the Wesleyan minister William Arthur pointed out in 1860, a certain sincerity of faith evident among the populous, but this was all but concealed beneath the debased accretions that had amassed since modern times.33 In the mind of Nevin there was a necessary connection between these things. There was a clear link, he insisted, between the getting up of a building in a ‘distinctively Gothic style’ and it being a ‘type and representative of our pure branch of the one holy and Apostolic Church’. A ‘true’ architecture was a pure and ‘real’ one. Only such a structure could act as an effective instrument in the sterilisation of Papal contamination, its hallowed spire inserted like some great cauterising needle into the infected flesh of the city, tapping the ‘essence’ of a purer and older Christianity that lay beneath.34 Moreover, in embodying these attributes, the Gothic style would also make for a building that stood out as a ‘memorial and exponent of that freedom of conscience and religious liberty, which is the priceless privilege guaranteed to us by our American institutions’.35 This last claim is noteworthy for its invocation of national and political, as opposed to merely religious, attributes. The argument essentially stated that not only should the liberties enjoyed by Americans in the United States be in some sense extended to Italy – what, in effect, amounted to a case for extraterritoriality – but also that the new church should be appreciated as an implement of ‘soft power’ in the Episcopalians’ endeavour to reform the Roman Church (perhaps even overthrow it) at the heart of its operations.36 Thus, location and proximity were key. As Nevin would later observe: 33

34

35 36

William Arthur, Italy in Transition: Public Scenes and Private Opinions in 1860 (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1860), esp. 303–86. This interpretation is based on Dominic Janes’s analysis of how Protestants came in time to view the catacombs beneath Rome as a source of earlier Christian ‘purity’, beneath the surface of physical pollution that was contemporary Catholic Rome. See Janes, ‘Vile Bodies’, 236’. Nevin, St Paul’s, 45. For instance, see Charles R. Conybeare, Church Reform Movement at Rome: The Italian Catholic Church (Winchester, 1883). Here Nevin is highlighted as one of the prime movers and supporters of the cause for Roman Catholic reform. There were wider attempts at Protestant proselytisation in Italy during the nineteenth century. Although numbers of conversions of Catholics to Protestantism during the period were small, the Catholic Church did take these attempts to intervene in Italian politics and society seriously, especially the phenomenon of British evangelical colporteurs distributing bibles in Italian throughout Italy. See Raponi, Religion and Politics, 73–111. As Stefano Villani has shown, there were also attempts throughout the first half of the nineteenth century to use Italian translations of the Book of Common Prayer as a means of encouraging reform within the Roman Catholic Church. See Stefano Villani, ‘Anglican Liturgy and a Model for the Italian Church? The Italian Translation of the Book of Common Prayer by George Frederick Nott in 1831 and its Re-edition in 1850’, Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, 22/1 (2017): https:// doi.org/10.4000/rfcb.1253.

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From the beginning we recognised, at Rome, its [the project’s] magnitude and its responsibility. The building we were to do involved much more than the convenience and honour of our particular congregation. It represented the Church at large, both to Roman Catholic and to Protestant Europe, as a body, on the one hand, reformed from the pagan corruptions of the Papacy; on the other, freed from all state establishment, and political control in things spiritual.37

In other words, St Paul’s would be the exact antithesis of the previous state of affairs in Rome, where Protestant places of worship were ‘prohibited from showing any external sign’ of their presence or character. From this perspective, the Gothic style, in striking a contrast with the fundamentally classical landscape of ancient (i.e., Pagan) and modern Rome, was understood as both a form and mechanism of resistance.38 But tensions between past, present, and future with respect to the American Episcopal Church do not end here. Mid-nineteenth-century architectural discourse was itself beset by such tensions. Most notably there was the long-running struggle between classical and Gothic (broadly medieval) approaches to architectural design or the so-called ‘Battle of the Styles’. This connected the endeavour of St Paul’s not only to A. W. N. Pugin, and thus the wider Gothic Revival movement, especially the idea that classicism was fundamentally dishonest and corrupt, but also to the Ruskinian notion that architecture had moral agency and ought to be a medium for action in the world. Central to this agenda was the notion, peddled by Pugin and taken up by Anglicans, that classical architecture was at root Pagan, and, by implication, not suitable for Christian use (Presbyterians and Nonconformists differed on this point).39 Street was himself a confessed advocate of Puginian principles, as translated through modern Anglican ecclesiological theory. But not all classical architecture was the same; nor was it treated equally by nineteenth-century onlookers. As Vance has shown, for Americans the Baroque excesses of Bernini and Borromini in Rome were considered the 37 38

39

Nevin, St Paul’s, 37. A similar point was made by the Bishop of Long Island in his sermon on the occasion of the consecration of St Paul’s on 25 March 1876, where he effectively noted that the building stood as an object in the urban landscape that spoke truth to power. See A. N. Littlejohn, ‘Fest of the Annunciation, A Sermon Preached at St. Paul’s Church, Rome . . . ’, reprinted in Nevin, St Paul’s, 106–7. The apparent irony concerning Pugin’s own Catholicism is not lost here. It is something that he himself came to realise while in Rome in 1847, where he noted that ‘the modern churches here are frightful’. See Clive Wainwright, ‘“Not a style but a principle”: Pugin and His Influence’, in Paul Atterbury and Clive Wainwright (eds.), Pugin: A Gothic Passion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 8.

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most ‘vile’ and debased manifestations of the classical tradition. In their licentiousness and apparent corruption of form, the works of these key Roman artists were understood to reflect the venality of the Papacy itself (this view would have applied equally for Episcopalians as for evangelicals). In this attitude we may observe an ideological continuum. For tourists and architects alike, it seems, there appeared to be a strong correlation between the perverted world of the Popes and Caesars, via the persistent use and symbolism of classicism (an affront to reformed and ‘true’ Christianity), and a natural sympathy for Gothic and/or medieval architecture. Indeed, for many, Baroque Rome of the Counter-Reformation was simply obliterated from the tourist’s mind and his/her itinerary, and if encountered was to be ritually repudiated.40 The general feeling that informed such sentiments is captured lucidly in Amours de Voyage (1849) by the English poet Arthur Hugh Clough: Rome disappoints me much; I hardly as yet understand, but Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it. All the foolish destructions, and all the sillier savings, All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages, Seem to be treasured up here to make fools of present and future. Would to heaven the old Goths had made a cleaner sweep of it! Would to heaven some new ones would come and destroy these churches! . . . No, the Christian faith, as I, at least, understood it, Is not here, O Rome, in any of these thy churches, Is not here, but in Freiburg, or Rheims, or Westminster Abbey . . . Here, with emasculate pupils and gimcrack churches of Gesu, Pseudo-learning and lies, confessional-boxes and postures, Here, with metallic beliefs and regimental devotions, Here, overcrusting with slime, perverting, defacing, debasing, Michael Angelo’s dome, that had hung the Pantheon in heaven, Raphael’s Joys and Graces, and thy clear stars, Galileo!41

40 41

Vance, ‘Sidelong Glance’, 501–32. Extracts from Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage, ed. Patrick Scott (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1974), 3–6 (Canto I, i–v). Although written in 1849, the poem was not published in Britain until 1862, posthumously, in Poems by Arthur Hugh Clough, With a Memoir (London: Macmillan, 1862). However, the poem had been serialised in the Boston-based Atlantic Monthly (Feb.–March) in 1858, so would have been known to an American audience. See ‘A Note to the Text’, in Amours de voyage, 19. See also Arthur Hugh Clough: Selected Poems, ed. Shirley Chew (New York: Routledge, 2003), 24ff. I wish to thank Simon Bradley for bringing this poem to my attention.

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In Clough’s poem we have the colliding worlds (and sentiments) of present and past, modernity and antiquity, word and image, Protestant and Roman Catholic, rational and absurd, and Gothic and classical. All the ‘incongruous things’ of ‘incompatible ages’ were clearly something of a shock. Articulated in Puginian terms, the Gothic remains the one, true ideal. The High Renaissance masters get off lightly, acceptable on grounds of clarity and decorum. But the slimy ‘gewgaws’ of the Baroque come in for a clobbering. Was Street’s intervention to be the beginning of the long hoped-for ‘clean sweep’? Were Street, Nevin, and the Risorgimento at large heaven-sent to topple the ‘gimcrack churches of Gesu’, in the fabled ‘country of Dante’? An additional factor in favour of medieval styles was that, apart from clear precedent in Rome itself, they were considered permissible by modern ecclesiologists because they were largely seen to predate the fraudulent decline of the Church Catholic in its Roman guise, thus signifying a certain purity and appeal to origins.42 Far from being solely Anglican, this idea had echoes in contemporary Nonconformist readings of the early Church, as a pure ‘MartyrChurch of the first ages’, subsumed and ultimately sullied by Constantine as early as the fourth century.43 Although going back to the fourth century might be seen as rather extreme for Episcopalians and Gothic Revivalists alike, the idea of an untainted ‘medieval’ Church had considerable ideological appeal. From this perspective the option for a conspicuous Gothic Revival church in the heart of Rome presented itself as a near irresistible ‘back to the future’ scenario in which a once limpid (if imagined) medieval integrity, having been recovered from the past, could be set up and brushed off as a lodestar to impending social and political change. In this sense ‘Gothic’ was seen as having all the right emblematic connotations, spiritual and moral.

III. St Paul and the Bible: History, Liberty, and the Fabrication of a Legacy Within this scenario there appeared to exist a tension not only between the namesake of the new church, St Paul, and the historical context (first-century Rome) from which he emerged, but also between the apparent nature of Paul’s principal legacy to Christian evangelism (i.e., epistolary) and the overtly spectacular and sensual nature of Tridentine art and liturgy. In other words, in Nevin’s ambition to put Paul back in his rightful place beside 42

43

As Dominic Janes has pointed out, the adjective ‘corrupt’ was perhaps the most frequently invoked in relation to Roman Catholicism. See Janes, ‘Vile Bodies’, 230. William Arthur quoted in Janes, ‘Vile Bodies’, 236.

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Peter as joint protector and founder of Christ’s Church, as Judith Rice Millon has observed,44 Protestant Bible culture – and Paul’s central place within it – was seen as an effective means of striking the desired contrast between past, present, and future. What is clear in the rhetoric surrounding those events relating to the church’s foundation and consecration is that Nevin, perhaps owing to his religious upbringing (his father was a leading figure in the German Reformed Church in Pennsylvania), maintained a stout animus towards the Papacy and its exclusive claims to the Petrine bishopric. This focus on Paul for the American Episcopal congregation at Rome, and for Nevin in particular, is significant, both as political gesture and theological crutch. To begin with, the remnants of the house of Pudens (now Santa Pudenziana) were only 200m from the site of the new St Paul’s. Owing to a reference in Paul’s epistle to Timothy (4:21) of a certain ‘Pudens’, it was widely believed in the nineteenth century that Paul was directly connected to the site of this ‘house’, which was also among the first and most significant places of Christian worship in first-century Rome. On this point Nevin observed: ‘The name of St Paul has been most happy. Near by [sic] is the house of Pudens, where the apostle undoubtedly preached.’45 In this respect genius loci was seen to carry some weight with respect to deliberations over the selection of a site for the new church. But this allusion to the activities of Paul in first-century Rome had greater import than first meets the eye. For as Jane Garnett and Anne Bush have shown, the mid to late nineteenth century was a moment of intense debate and controversy over the ‘real’ origins of Rome and its Christian heritage. With new and more precise archaeological and photographic techniques being brought to bear, Rome – now exposed in hitherto unimaginable ways – could be recovered ever more accurately as a biblical city (or so it was believed).46 One such controversy centred on the house of Pudens itself. As mentioned, popular authority had it – from various sources, including the Bible – that this house was among the first locations of Christian worship in ancient Rome. However, when the noted Oxford publisher and architectural enthusiast J. H. Parker suggested at a meeting of the Archaeological Institute in 1865 that the remnants of the house had been consecrated by Pius I as St Pudentiana in c.160 CE, he was immediately attacked by E. A. Freeman for relying too readily on myth and hearsay.47 Asking for 44 47

Millon, St Paul’s, 18. 45 Nevin, St Paul’s, 53. 46 Garnett and Bush, ‘Rome’, 293–304. J. H. Parker on Rome at Dorchester meeting of the Archaeological Institute, 1 August 1865, in Archaeological Journal 22 (1865): 349–51.

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proof, Freeman insisted that, despite Parker’s archaeological efforts, ‘it would not do to patch things up out of Baronius’.48 At an early stage in his archaeological investigations in Rome (he removed there in 1866 for long periods owing to his failing health, where he established the British Archaeological Society of Rome), Parker was prepared to accept, at least as a starting point, previous accounts of this building and its history by authors who lived many centuries after the event. There was a question as to whether Parker let the archaeology guide his conclusions, or allowed legend to cloud his archaeological judgement. No matter how incisive and revelatory the new techniques of archaeology and photography were in uncovering the ‘truth’ of ancient Rome, they inevitably required interpretation, and this could be (and often was) flawed. In the event, it seems that Parker was unwilling to relinquish his belief in the date of Santa Pudenziana’s consecration. He would later supplement his findings in the early 1870s with further archaeological evidence and literary reference, including the account of Anastasius.49 If Freeman had insisted that Parker approach the building ‘in the spirit of an archaeologist’, then this is precisely what he tried to do. Nevertheless, later scholars such as John Henry Middleton and Henry Francis Pelham would continue to cast doubt over Parker’s claims, as well as his ability as an archaeologist.50 Again, what this controversy points up is the contested historical terrain that Rome had become by the mid-nineteenth century, as new standards in science were pitted against faith and received wisdom. As Nevin was immersed in the world of modern archaeology and the trafficking of Roman antiquities at this time, he was probably aware of the controversies that surrounded the city and its history in this regard.51 In the absence of concrete evidence one way or the other, and for immediate self-serving purposes, it seems he was disposed to err on the side of legend in the cause of his new church, allowing the idea of the Pauline connection to sow romantic associations in the minds of those who would be inclined to part with their cash. Disputed facts concerning the exact whereabouts of Paul in the ancient city, or the truth behind the consecration of the house of 48

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51

Ibid., 351. Freeman was referring to the Annales Ecclesiastici (1588–1607) of Cesare Baronius, cited by Parker. I wish to thank Michael Ledger-Lomas for pointing out this altercation between Parker and Freeman. J. H. Parker, The House of Pudens in Rome (London: Archaeological Journal, 1871). Richard Riddell, ‘Parker, John Henry’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published online 23 September 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/21324. Nevin was a known dealer in Rome of antiquities and Italian masterworks. See Millon, St Paul’s, 32. He also must have been aware of the history behind the Vatican’s own politicised archaeological initiatives in this regard. See Wittman, ‘Partly Vacated Historicism’.

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Pudens as a Christian church, were calculated to enhance rather than diminish the mystique that surrounded the historical figure of Paul. It seemed that both the man and his legacy were worth fighting for at least in the Protestant imagination. For Nevin, it was the manipulation of legend (honest or cynical) that would ultimately achieve greater results. Indeed, the politics of this recalls controversy around the British Anglican legend, propagated by Samuel Lysons and others, that Pudens, his wife Claudia, and the origins of Christianity lay not in Rome but in first-century Gloucester.52 Although there is no evidence that Nevin knew of this legend – attributed to archaeological discoveries from earlier in the century, and despite still being current in the 1850s and 1860s – it nevertheless attests to the politicised nature of Christian origin myths in Anglican historiography at this time, especially in resisting the authority of Rome. But if the example of Pudens was not enough by itself, Nevin had other allusions up his sleeve. After referring to Santa Pudenziana, he quickly moved to invoke Paul’s execution. ‘His martyrdom at Rome no one ever has questioned’, he reminded those gathered. ‘He was the great Apostle to the Gentiles, whose children we are.’53 This is significant for the way it stages a convenient synergy between the persecution of Paul for his beliefs, in Rome, and that of the American Episcopalian community (in the very same city) by that most illiberal and tyrannical modern-day Nero, the Pope. This logically led to Nevin’s next set of observations, which concerned scripture. Here he noted specifically how it was ‘In his [Paul’s] writings, above all others of the sacred books, . . . [that] we find most clearly set forth the great principles of faith, and liberty, and a pure conscience, for which our Church is protestant at Rome’.54 This particular line of reasoning, and its revelation, was echoed by the Bishop of Derry during the official ceremony for the laying of the building’s foundation stone, held on 23 January 1873, the feast day of the conversion of St Paul.55 In his address, the bishop dwelt initially on Rome itself, in the days of Nero and the converted Pharisee. He noted how the city and its culture were ‘truly the home of History’, and that the historian, gazing ‘into the darkness of antiquity’, could no doubt bring before the mind’s eye the ancient city as it had once been. But so much history, as interesting as it may have been, was naught in comparison to the episodes of the great apostle and martyr in that 52

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See ‘Roman Stones: “Rome derives its Christianity from Britain, not Britain from Rome”’, in Simon Goldhill, The Buried Life of Things: How Objects Made History in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 34–45. Nevin, St Paul’s, 53. 54 Nevin, St Paul’s, 53–4. By this time the bishopric of Derry had become the bishopric of Derry and Raphoe (from 1834). The bishop Nevin refers to was the Rev. William Alexander (1824–1911), a cleric of some Tractarian sympathy, and later Archbishop of Armagh (from 1896).

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city, especially his last two years under house arrest from where he unflinchingly ‘expounded and testified the kingdom of God’. Here again antiquity was held out, in contrast, against the future and ultimate triumph of the great biblical apostle, as if it were dry as dust – a history that was dead, unlike the ‘living’ tradition of Paul. It was this idea, emphasised the bishop, that ‘must come home to us this morning upon this spot’. As with Nevin’s allusion to the house of Pudens, this evocation by the bishop of Paul’s devotion and near ghostly presence on that occasion echoed in an odd way the growing industry of biblical tourism and its associated literatures, which may indeed have been familiar to many of those gathered.56 W. J. Conybeare and J. S. Howson’s The Life and Epistles of St Paul (1856), for instance, was exemplary in its step by step account of Paul’s journeying, describing in vivid and scholarly detail the types of landscapes and encounters the great apostle would have experienced, as if placing the reader in his shoes.57 In like fashion, the bishop seemed to be asking his audience to feel what Paul had felt, to imagine his holiness increasing hour upon hour, as he took visitors and stoically awaited his fate, only a short distance from where they all currently stood.58 Here was a new generation of devotees who must have sensed themselves part of the latest moment in the ‘living’ tradition of Paul, in the very city of his martyrdom: walking on the same ground that he had, partaking of a kindred suffering, and witnessing the marking of his legacy.59 Without digressing, the bishop then moved to the fundamental distinctions between Protestant and Roman Catholic religious observance by pointing out that, although he believed many deficiencies might be levelled against Anglicanism as a branch of the Christian church, none could criticise ‘Anglo-Saxon Christianity’s’ reverence for scripture. With the English-speaking men and woman of the Anglican faith, he stressed, the Bible was popular. That the epistles of Paul took up so much of the Bible was considered evidence of his special relationship to the English-speaking, scripture-reading congregations of Rome.60 While the sculpture of Paul by 56

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For this kind of tourism in relation to St Paul, see Michael Ledger-Lomas, ‘In the Steps of Saint Paul’, in Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form, 1760–1900, ed. Brian H. Murray and Mary Henes (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 156–74. See also Garnett and Bush, ‘Rome’, 302–3. W. J. Conybeare and J. S. Howson, The Life and Epistles of St Paul, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1856). There were repeated and updated editions of this book throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the early part of the twentieth. Bishop of Derry’s speech quoted in Nevin, St Paul’s, 68–9. Another English text, from slightly later, that tapped into these efforts to bring the life and teaching of St Paul to ‘life’ was F. W. Farrar’s The Life and Work of St Paul, 2 vols. (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin, 1879). It was even believed by some that Paul had visited Britain, thus giving, as Michael Ledger-Lomas has noted, an apostolic rather than papal ancestry. See Ledger-Lomas, ‘In the Steps of St Paul’,

The Building of the American Episcopal Church in Rome

Canova in the crypt of St Peter’s might appear to venerate the great apostle’s memory, the bishop observed, only the reading and communication of his writings (i.e., the word) could truly respect his legacy. Therefore, although the raising of St Paul’s church would be in no bitter, offensive, or sectarian spirit, the bishop added, it would nonetheless be a ‘badge’ of liberty and symbol of toleration.61 But to what extent, if at all, Nevin and the bishop were aware that modern biblical scholarship had begun to question long-held certainties regarding the authority and inerrancy of the Bible, including who wrote it and when, is not clear. One would be forgiven for thinking that such concerns passed them blissfully by. Either that, or they were wont to shield this special occasion from insinuations that were themselves highly controversial in the Anglican world at the time. Clearly this was neither the time nor the place for the rehearsing of such debates. However, one must presume that they were aware of such scriptural controversies, as perhaps many of those in attendance were also. Attacks on the Old Testament (Genesis vs. geology) were well known and understood by this time, but even criticism of the New Testament had grown steadily in clerical circles and at the universities during the 1850s and 1860s.62 This criticism, the inspiration for which came from early nineteenth-century German theological studies, included debate over the authorship and historical setting of Paul’s epistles.63 Thus, the extent to which they took up so ‘large a share’ of the Bible, as the bishop had claimed, was itself in doubt.64

61 62

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159. He refers here to R. W. Morgan’s St Paul in Britain; Or, The Origin of British as Opposed to Papal Christianity (Oxford and London: James Parker, 1861). Bishop of Derry’s speech quoted in Nevin, St Paul’s, 69–72. E.g., Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church: Part II, 2nd edn (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1972), 40–111; Gerald Parsons, ‘Biblical Criticism in Victorian Britain: From Controversy to Acceptance?’, in Religion in Victorian Britain, vol. II: Controversies, ed. Gerald Parsons (Manchester University Press, 1988), 238–57. Here one can point to the influence of the writings of the German theologian, F. C. Baur (of the so-called Tübingen School), in particular, who had begun to affect English scholarship. For a good overview of this influence, see James Carleton Paget, ‘The Reception of Baur in Britain’, in Ferdinand Christian Baur and the History of Early Christianity, ed. Martin Bauspiess, Christof Landmesser, and David Lincicum (Oxford University Press, 2017), 307–54 (esp. 315– 41). For views and interpretations on Paul during the nineteenth century in Britain, see Michael Ledger-Lomas, ‘Paul’, in Making and Remaking Saints in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Gareth Atkins (Manchester University Press, 2016), 30–9. It is highly likely that Nevin knew of this scholarly tradition through his father, John Williamson Nevin, who was a leading Presbyterian and then German Reformed theologian in the United States, who had studied under Charles Hodge at Princeton. See D. G. Hart, John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2005); and Annette G. Aubert, The German Roots of Nineteenth-Century American Theology (Oxford University Press, 2013). For instance, by this time, apart from the critical literature in German that was available, there had already been published in English on the Pauline epistles Benjamin Jowett, The Epistles of St Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Romans: With Critical Notes and Dissertations, 2 vols.

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Although inclined to emphasise the idea of the Bible as a ‘Sacred Volume’, the bishop’s underlying message (and that of Nevin, it may be assumed) was a cultural rather than strictly theological one – not so much Bible-bashing as an attempt to highlight a fundamental distinction in mentality. Indeed, it may not be too fanciful to suggest that, indirectly embracing biblical controversy, their point was a means of underscoring, in the context of their proximity to the Roman Church, the liberal traditions of Protestant (and particularly Anglican) theology, as contested as it was. The fact that such theological disputation could occur at all was folded into a recasting of Paul as a quintessentially liberal-minded figure, and man of conscience (as Nevin observed), who, if he were alive today, would surely encourage if not welcome such honest discussion. These sentiments certainly keyed with Nevin’s proclamation that the laying of the foundation stone was to be ‘the first stroke in manifestation of the newly-recognised religious toleration in Rome’.65 If this were not enough to cement the church and its congregation’s liberal credentials, a brick from Independence Hall in Philadelphia was sent to Rome especially to be placed in the new building’s cornerstone.66 That the church thus expressed the material as well as spiritual claims of liberty was no exaggeration. The legend of Paul was gilded with a metanarrative of American exceptionalism. In a final retort, as if deliberately needling Vatican authorities, Nevin sought to draw a direct link between the perceived liberalism of Paul’s teaching and the apparent neglect of his commemoration within the walls of the old city. ‘By a singularly significant omission’, he exclaimed rather amusingly, ‘there is no Roman church dedicated to St Paul within the city walls. There is no use trying to conceal it, St Paul has not been for many, many centuries, in much favor at the Vatican . . . I think it was Père Hyacinthe who remarked on the strangeness of this, that St Paul should only after eighteen centuries have found his way back into Rome via America.’67 This was proof, above all, in Nevin’s mind, not only that the Vatican was institutionally illiberal, but also that Paul was an honorary American of sorts.

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(London: John Murray, 1855); and Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, The Epistles of Paul to the Corinthians, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1855). Later came J. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (London: MacMillan, 1865), and Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians (London: Macmillan, 1868). Lightfoot had also been lecturing and delivering sermons on the subject in the 1860s, the texts for which were later published in Biblical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1893). As Nevin had studied at the General Theological Seminary, New York City, between 1865 and 1867, it is likely that he knew of some of these publications. For Lightfoot’s contribution to Pauline scholarship, see Geoffrey R. Treloar, ‘J.B. Lightfoot and St Paul, 1854–65: A Study of Intentions and Method’, Lucas: An Evangelical History Review 7 (1989): 5–34. Nevin, St Paul’s, 65. 66 Vestry Meeting Minutes, 1873, St. Paul’s Vestry Archive, Rome. Nevin, St Paul’s, 53–4.

The Building of the American Episcopal Church in Rome

Later describing the church’s consecration, which took place on 25 March 1876, Nevin drew his readers’ attention to the chime of bells presented by Thomas Messenger, the largest of which was inscribed with the words ‘Verbum Dei non est alligatum’ (the word of God is not bound, 2 Timothy 2:9). He took delight in noting how these bells rang out on the day of the Pope’s jubilee (which was happening at the same time), ‘a much needed utterance . . . to the people of Rome . . . the long-stifled voice of Rome’s greatest martyr’. With the building now standing, he was finally able to say: No American, habituated from childhood to the thought of religious liberty as a right as free to man as God’s air and water, can possibly understand what this church on the Via Nazionale, dedicated to the great Apostle to the Gentiles, means to a Roman mind. Severely pure and beautiful in its architecture, it has come to stand before the Roman (indeed the Italian) people as the material representation of all those principles of truth and freedom which flow from St Paul’s teaching. And has come thus to be looked to as the very type and symbol of the struggle of Protestantism, in the best and widest sense of the word, against the Papacy . . . Even were it to be razed to its foundations to-morrow, a voice had gone out from it already whose echoes can never be laid – the same cry which, from the bonds and darkness of a Roman imperial prison, proclaimed from the mouth of Paul to all people and times the inevitable, irrepressible power of his Master Jesus – “the word of god is not bound”.68

Conclusion In erecting this new temple of ‘Protestant’ worship in Rome, Nevin and his associates were either unwilling or unable to separate the ancient past from an emergent modern and liberal present. The parallels and tensions concerning the arbitrary and abusive wielding of power with respect to the ‘Popes and Caesars’ was an active if well-worn motif in the presentation of their cause, especially in the context of the recent conquest of that city. These tensions, deliberately bridged across millennia, were then carried over into the fashioning of a narrative that invoked as one of its central planks the history and 68

Nevin, St Paul’s, 99, 104. It should also be said that the church is known for its magnificent mosaics by the English Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, featuring St Paul. See Richard Dorment, ‘Burne-Jones and the Decoration of St Paul’s American Church, Rome’, unpublished PhD thesis, Columbia University (1975); C. N. Ptaschinski, ‘Edward Burne-Jones, G. E. Street, and the American Church in Rome: Revivalism, Religion, and Identity’, unpublished MA thesis, Texas Christian University (2013). See also, Richard Dorment, ‘Burne-Jones’s Roman Mosaics’, Burlington Magazine 120/899 (1978): 72–82.

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theology of St Paul (and his legacy) as fundamentally important to Protestant culture through the trope of reverence for scripture (i.e., the Bible). This was then mapped onto the just and redemptive trajectory of the new Italian state, the principles of which were to reverberate in monumental form through the self-proclaimed liberal (and liberating) credentials of Nevin’s church. If we track through the commissioning, fundraising, construction, and ceremonial milestones of the church (and the statements and sermons associated with them), these ideas and tensions are never far from the surface. Through the calculated use of architectural style, the intention was for these to be writ large across both the exterior and interior of the building. The symbolic basis of Christian architecture was fundamental to contemporary ecclesiological theory, of which the architect Street was a celebrated exponent. Thus, the utterings of Nevin, combined with the appreciation of ‘reality’ in medieval architecture, invested the image and materiality of the building with a semiotic value that spoke directly to ideas of purity, honesty, and integrity. In this respect, the building maintained a strange dialogue with the archaeological fascination that surrounded the physical remnants of early Christian Rome, as though it were but the most recent accretion in the long ‘history’ of material evidences relating to Paul’s existence and legacy. What such a project demonstrates above all is the different ways in which wider debates in educated Victorian circles over history and the present, ‘truth’ and legend, oppression and liberty, and antiquity and the Bible could be articulated. It was not only in the intellectual space of the printed page, the lecture, or the sermon, in political discourse or indeed on the battlefield, that such ideas and controversies achieved expression, but also in the immediacy and tactility of material form. As a medium that was supposed to ‘speak’ with didactic purpose to the high Victorian mind through allusion, metaphor, and symbol, architecture (as a type of material culture) was here fully exercised for its communicative power. In this respect, St Paul’s Within-the-Walls stands as a physical reminder of those nineteenth-century ideas and debates concerning antiquity and the Bible.

part iv

Travelling the World

8

Protestant Travellers to Rome and the Legacies of the Apostolic Church dorothy m. figueira and brian h. murray

I. Religion in the Italian Travelogue Disputes between Catholics and Protestants in the nineteenth century frequently hung on the perceived authority of scripture over the claims of tradition and antiquity. If Protestants defended the inviolable authority of the Bible, Catholics could point to the well-documented apostolic succession connecting St Peter and the Church of antiquity to the authority of the modern papacy. Catholics had a special commitment to preserving and validating the early history of the Roman Church, but committed Protestants also had an active and critical interest in apostolic legacies. By demonstrating that the earliest Christians practised a simple and earnest form of worship – anathema to the pomp and ritual of medieval popery – Protestant commentators vindicated their own faith as a return to apostolic authenticity. This chapter explores how the material legacies of the apostle St Peter provoked religious, moral, and political debate among Protestant travellers and called attention to the intertwined legacies of early Christianity and ancient Rome. More specifically, we will focus on how one site (St Peter’s Basilica) – and one ritual object (a medieval statue of St Peter by Arnolfo di Cambio) – became a battleground for sectarian readings of the apostolic past. Critical accounts of British and North American travel writing in Italy have tended to focus on the traveller’s construction of their own reason, civility, and modernity in opposition to an imagined archaic Other. According to one recent study, for the Victorians, Italy was ‘what the Orient is to Europeans of the twentieth century, a mixture of attraction and repulsion’.1 Matthew Reynolds identifies a discourse of nineteenth-century ‘Italianism’, whereby British travellers characterised the peninsula ‘in opposition to their own identities’.2 Considering this 1

2

Alessandro Vescovi, Luisa Villa, and Paul Vita, ‘Introduction’, in The Victorians in Italy: Literature, Travel, Politics, and Art, ed. Vescovi, Villa, and Vita (Milan: Polimetrica, 2009), 9–15 (at 9). Matthew Reynolds, The Realms of Verse, 1830–1940: English Poetry in a Time of Nation Building (Oxford University Press, 2001), 83. See also Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour:

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pronounced emphasis on alterity, the lack of attention to religious difference in critical accounts of British and American travel writing is notable. The scant coverage of religion is even more striking when we consider how foregrounded these issues are in nineteenth-century travelogues.3 When Protestant reactions to Italian Catholicism have been analysed in depth, it is usually in the context of Anglophone engagement with Italian politics and the Risorgimento. As Marcella Pellegrino Sutcliffe has demonstrated, in Britain anti-Catholic sentiment often provided a useful common ground, helping to bring together diverse political groups in support of Italian reformers and revolutionaries.4 It is no coincidence that the heyday of British travel writing on Italy was the 1840s, the period coinciding with the early Risorgimento and the most dramatic contestation of Papal power in centuries: the fleeting triumph of the Roman Republic of 1849 and Pius IX’s temporary exile. Although, as Jane Stabler and others have pointed out, we should be careful not to elide the important difference between ‘anti-Papal and anti-Catholic sentiment’. Indeed, prior to Catholic Emancipation in Britain, many Romantic radicals sought to elevate the status of the Catholic subjects and citizens while simultaneously denouncing Papal authoritarianism.5

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5

Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (Manchester University Press, 1999); Hilary Fraser, The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Kathryn Walchester, ‘Our Own Fair Italy’: Nineteenth Century Women’s Travel Writing and Italy, 1800–1844 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007); Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (eds.), Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy (Manchester University Press, 2003); James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Anne O’Connor makes the same point in one of the few recent studies to take serious account of religion in Italian travelogues. ‘A Voyage into Catholicism: Irish Travel to Italy in the Nineteenth Century’, Studies in Travel Writing 20/2 (2016): 149–61. Some other notable exceptions include a chapter on inter-religious encounters in John Pemble’s classic study The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford University Press, 1988); and Dominic Janes, ‘Vile Bodies: Victorian Protestants in the Roman Catacombs’, Rome, Pollution and Propriety: Dirt, Disease and Hygiene in the Eternal City from Antiquity to Modernity, ed. M. Bradley and K. Stow, British School in Rome Monograph Series (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 223–40. Marcella Pellegrino Sutcliffe, Victorian Radicals and Italian Democrats (London: Boydell Press, 2014). See also Jane Stabler, ‘Devotion and Diversion: Early Nineteenth-Century British Women Travellers in Italy and the Catholic Church’, in Unfolding the South, ed. Chapman and Stabler, 15–34 (at 15); Eugenio Biagini, ‘Mazzini and Anticlericalism: The English Exile’, in Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalization of Democratic Nationalism 1830–1920, ed. Eugenio Biagini and C. A. Bayly, 145–66 (Oxford University Press, 2008); M. Borutta, ‘Anti-Catholicism and the Culture of War in Risorgimento Italy’, in The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy, ed. Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 191–213. Stabler, ‘Devotion and Diversion’, 15.

Protestant Travellers to Rome

Such liberal positions, however, were often difficult to maintain amidst the strong and pervasive animus against Catholics in Britain and North America. American Protestant travellers tended to view the practices and beliefs of the Italian Catholic Church with especial disfavour. These tourists and travellers believed that the Protestant faith had brought righteous individuals into a true and serious communion with the Divine and that it alone promoted morality and virtue. By contrast, the oppressive centralised authority of the Catholic hierarchy and institutions epitomised despotism and excess. Authoritarian excess was materialised in the accumulation of ornamentation in baroque Roman churches, religions processions, and festivals, especially when compared to the stern and measured simplicity of American Puritan minimalism. Author after author commented on the Catholic’s slavish submission to clerical dictates and Papal restrictions on the freedom of speech and of the press. The democratic values purported to have been fostered by American Protestantism were thought to have formed the basis for America’s prosperity and general happiness and stood in sharp contrast to what the American visitors viewed as the misery, decaying morality, and the general debased character of Italians under Catholicism. American travellers praised Italian art and were even sometimes awed by the Roman Church’s rituals. But, for the most part, they had contempt for the Catholic faith and its social effects and blamed Catholicism for Italy’s poverty and lack of progress. The depiction of Italian Catholicism in American travel writing reflected a pattern found in the nativist literature published at home. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the danger of foreign invasion was remote but there was still significant fear of internal subversion. In the popular press, this fear attracted wide public support. It produced stereotypes and conspiracy theories regarding the foreign Other in American society. This paranoia was particularly directed against Italians and Catholics who were seen, in the sensational fiction in the 1840s and 1850s, as plotting to destroy American democracy. In this literature, Italian-American priests, receiving instructions from Rome, relentlessly schemed to subject the nation to popish despotism.6 This nativist literature enacted a process of American Protestant self-affirmation; however, it also expressed elements of national selfdoubt. In The Papal Conspiracy Exposed, and Protestantism Defended in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother, Edward, claimed that American democracy and Catholicism could 6

David Brion Davis, ‘Some Theories of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47/2 (1960): 205–24.

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not co-exist and that one must destroy the other.7 According to another popular nativist author, supposedly a defrocked priest, and therefore an unimpeachable authority, the Roman Catholic Church yearned to restore its fallen greatness. To achieve this end, it had infiltrated American society by establishing nunneries and monastic institutions and engaged in criminal activity. The Church had also subverted American education by supporting popish colleges, manned by Jesuits who actively set out to destroy American youth by engaging in blatant immorality. Books such as Popery! As It Was and As It Is and Auricular Confession and Popish Nunneries emphasised the brutal sadism and sexual depravity allegedly found among Roman Catholic clerics.8 Yet despite their tendency towards xenophobic anxiety and Protestant triumphalism, British and American accounts of Catholic Rome also register something more complex than mere bigotry and sectarian chauvinism. As an increasing physical presence and political force in Britain and America (not to mention Ireland), Catholics were simultaneously ‘other’ and palpably familiar to British and American travellers and readers. In Rome, Protestant travellers (Anglicans and Episcopalians in particular) were continually confronted by echoes of their own religious practices. As John Pemble has suggested, nothing ‘was so enticing, nor yet so repulsive as the religion of Papal Rome’; its ceremonies were ‘too remote to be familiar, yet too familiar not to be disturbing. It was a face within a face; a travesty of features well known and deeply cherished’.9 The multiple resonances of St Peter’s Basilica were difficult to disentangle for pious Protestants. ‘How shall I describe the sadness with which I left the tombs of the Apostles!’, wrote the wavering Anglican John Henry Newman in 1832; ‘Rome, not a city, but as a scene of sacred history, has a part of my heart, and in going away I was tearing it as if in twain.’10 As we shall see, for many Protestant travel writers, understanding Rome as a ‘scene of sacred history’ meant reading the early history of Christianity in its ancient Roman context. From this perspective, the tombs of Peter and Paul ranked alongside the most celebrated ruins of imperial Rome, while the apostles themselves appeared, as it were, in classical costume. 7

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Edward Beecher, The Papal Conspiracy Exposed, and Protestantism Defended in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture (New York: M. W. Dodd, 1855), 29. William Hogan, Popery! As It Was and As It Is, 7–8, and Hogan, Auricular Confession and Popish Nunneries, 264–5, both in one volume (Hartford, CT: Silas Andrus and Son, 1855). Pemble, Mediterranean Passion, 212. J. H. Newman to Jemima Newman, Naples, 11 April 1833, in The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III: Jan 1832 to June 1833, ed. Ian Ker and Thomas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 282.

Protestant Travellers to Rome

II. Tourism, Theatre, and Ritual One of the key genres of nineteenth-century tourism was the ‘literary pilgrimage’ (the graves of Shelley and Keats in Rome’s Non-Catholic Cemetery were a notable attraction). Jonah Siegel has drawn attention to another variation on the aesthetic pilgrimage in what he labels the ‘Art Romance’, a fictional genre which borrows elements from the Italian travelogue and plays out similar ‘fantasies of access to the place of creative origin’.11 As several recent critics have pointed out, like their religious predecessor, these modern variations on pilgrimage relied upon heavily formalised itineraries and standardised responses to given sites.12 But what happened when the sacred pilgrimage and the antiquarian tourist excursion overlapped or even collided? How did Christian travellers venerate sacred relics when surrounded by classical ruins? St Peter’s Basilica was an important sacred site of modern Catholic pilgrimage, but it was also part of a heritage claimed by Anglican Protestants, many of whom vocally espoused the values of the ‘Primitive Church’. In a recent essay, Sharon Ouditt and Loredana Polezzi have called for renewed attention to Italy as a ‘practised space’. Critical emphasis on the identity politics of the travelogue form has, they argue, occluded the importance of ‘what people do when they travel . . . the encounters they have, the images they produce, gather and perpetuate’.13 A brief scan of the countless nineteenth-century travelogues and guidebooks devoted to Rome makes clear that British travellers did not see St Peter’s as a mere museum. Protestant tourists were intensely (and sometimes painfully) conscious of the Basilica as a charged space of ritual and performance. Countless English travelogues comment negatively on the perceived ‘theatricality’ of Roman ritual. ‘I could have fancied myself in a theatre’, quips the autobiographical heroine of Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée (1826): I saw no devotion, and I felt none. The whole appeared more like a triumphal pageant acted in honour of a heathen deity, than an act of worship and thanksgiving to the Great Father of all.14 11

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Jonah Siegel, Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art-Romance Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2005). Ian Ousby, The Englishman’s England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 7–8, 21–56; Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1–15. On the Protestant Cemetery, see Alison Chapman, ‘The Aura of Place: Poetic Form and the Protestant Cemetery at Rome’, in Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form, 1760–1900, ed. Brian H. Murray and Mary Henes (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Sharon Ouditt and Loredana Polezzi, ‘Introduction: Italy as Place and Space’, Studies in Travel Writing 16/2 (2012): 97–105. Anna Jameson, Diary of an Ennuyée (London: Henry Colburn, 1826), 320.

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On first arriving at St Peter’s, Charles Dickens found it draped and decorated like ‘one of the opening scenes in a very lavish pantomime’. On a subsequent visit, he noticed a ‘large space behind the altar . . . fitted up with boxes, shaped like those at the Italian Opera in England, but in their decoration much more gaudy’.15 As Britta Martens has suggested, English tourists’ ‘disproportionate focus on the highly formalized Vatican rituals [allowed] them to reaffirm their association of Catholicism with artificiality and conversely to claim spontaneity and sincere spirituality for Protestantism’.16 In a similar manner, most nineteenth-century American travellers to Rome, although drawn to its art and history, recoiled at the decadence, dilapidation, and depravity they were predisposed to find in its religious institutions. William Dean Howells described a procession of cardinals at the Sistine Chapel as a ‘grotesque company of old-womanish old men in gaudy gowns’.17 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia, thought the Catholic clergy resembled hogs.18 In fact, they were so fat and flabby that she felt faint. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow noted how priests coveted their neighbours’ wives.19 Margaret Fuller’s antagonism for the Church grew daily in the period leading up to the Republican uprising of 1849.20 One could easily fill several anthologies with extreme Protestant responses to Italian Catholicism – ranging from sly mockery to pious horror. But our immediate interest lies with some of the more ambivalent reactions to St Peter’s. If Protestant travellers were quick to point out the theatricality of the Mass, many were still eager to consume Catholic services as gorgeous spectacles. An edition of John Murray’s popular Handbook of Rome and Its Environs from the 1870s devotes seven pages to the services at St Peter’s alone, offering detailed accounts of 15 16

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Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (1846), ed. Kate Flint (London: Penguin, 1998), 117, 119. Britta Martens, ‘Vatican Ceremonies and Tourist Culture in Nineteenth-Century British Travelogues’, in Catherine Waters, Michael Hollington, and John Jordan, ed., Imagining Italy: Victorian Writers and Travellers (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 14–31 (29). William Dean Howells, Italian Journeys (New York: 1867), 177, cited in Paul R. Baker, The Fortunate Pilgrims: Americans in Italy 1800–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 170. See also Susan M. Griffin, ‘The Black Robe of Romance: Hawthorne’s Shadow and Howell’s Italian Priest’, in Roman Holidays: American Writers and Artists in Nineteenth-Century Italy, ed. Robert K. Martin and Leland S. Person (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), 191–205. Sophia Hawthorne, Notes on England and Italy (New York, 1870), 480, cited in Baker, Fortunate Pilgrims, 170. Longfellow to his brother, Rome, 28 June 1828. See Longfellow papers in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, cited in Baker, Fortunate Pilgrims, 171. Margaret Fuller, At Home and Abroad, ed. Arthur B. Fuller (Boston, 1856), 299, cited in Baker, Fortunate Pilgrims, 170–1.

Protestant Travellers to Rome

ceremonies and English translations of Latin liturgy. Despite the widespread dismissal of Catholic rites as hollow mummery, Murray’s Handbook also warned English tourists not to treat Catholic services as mere theatre. We cannot conclude this brief notice on the Church ceremonies without endeavouring to impress on our countrymen how much it becomes them upon such solemn occasions to conform to the usages of the people of the country where they are residing, and not to consider, as we are ashamed to confess is too often the case, the ceremonies of the Church almost as theatrical representations. Nothing can be less dignified than to see English and American ladies and gentlemen remain seated during the most solemn part of the mass – the Elevation of the Host. If, as Protestants, they cannot conscientiously conform outwardly to the usages of Roman Catholics on such occasions, they would do better to stay away, or, if present, to reflect that, instead of sitting in a theatre or concert-room, they are assisting at the most solemn ceremonials of the Christian Church in the most splendid edifice ever raised by man to religion and the worship of the Divinity.21

As the Handbook points out, the congregation at St Peter’s were expected to be performers, not merely passive observers. An anxiety about the behaviour of British and American tourists is near ubiquitous in English accounts of Rome in the first half of the century. The novelist Frances Trollope was a vocal critic of Catholic superstition and priest-craft but in her account of Mass at St Peter’s, she reserves her fiercest scorn for gawping English tourists: ‘The general character of English travellers certainly does not stand high on the Continent, but no where has it ever appeared to me so bad as at Rome.’22 On one occasion, Trollope reports that as the congregation bowed in ‘solemn silence’ before the elevation of the Host, ‘the rapt worshippers of a faith having the same holy origin as our own were startled by the popping of champagne corks in one of the [rear chapels] prepared for the English!’23

21

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John Murray (firm), A Handbook of Rome and Its Environs, 12th edn (London: John Murray, 1875), 136. Contributors to this edition of Murray include the Irish diplomat and traveller J. B. Pentland, the Anglo-Catholic publisher and archaeologist John Henry Parker, and Rodolofo Lanciani, Rome’s most revered classical archaeologist. This edition was edited by the English landscape painter Arthur John Strutt, another long-term British expat in Rome. See W. B. C. Lister, A Bibliography of Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers (Dereham: Dereham Books, 1993). Frances Trollope, A Visit to Italy, vol. II (London: Richard Bentley, 1842), 271. Trollope, Visit to Italy, 273–4.

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III. Protestant Pilgrimage Many Protestant visitors wished to venerate St Peter’s as sacred ground for all Christians, while simultaneously distancing themselves from the superstition and excessive formality of popery. Like many contemporary English visitors to Rome, Frances Trollope took the opportunity to wax ecumenical under the dome of St Peter’s: To describe the sort of rapture which the standing still to gaze within this building inspires, would be very difficult; to define it, impossible . . . It is made up, I suppose, of an elevating consciousness of vast sublimity, a luxurious sense of most harmonious beauty, and high-wrought feeling of religious holiness. I cannot easily believe that any Protestant Christian ever stood beneath its roof, without claiming it in his heart as a Christian temple, within which all petty doubts and difficulties of creed and doctrine might safely be laid aside, while a prayer is breathed to the “Father of all,” on the spot where man has done the most, and the best, to render the shrine worthy of the deity.24

Despite her general distaste for Catholic ritual, Trollope praises the church as a monument to the missionary triumphs of the apostolic age, when the might of a pagan empire was quelled by ‘the voices of a few humble fishermen’. Her description of St Peter’s as ‘Christian temple’ and ‘shrine’ built in honour of an (uncapitalised) ‘deity’ underlines the miraculous emergence of apostolic Christianity from the polytheistic diversity of classical Rome. It is glorious to see the church of St. Peter stand in the circus of Nero . . . it is glorious to trace the growing greatness of the universal Christian metropolis, and to see the blood-proud Romans, and all their deified brutalities, trampled in the dust . . . St. Peter’s stands unshaken, and, it may be, shall stand as long as the solid foundations of the earth endure . . . It is The Catholic Cathedral, built over the grave of him whom Christ commanded to preach his word, and not all the earth-born blunders of the Vatican can prevent Christians from feeling it is a Christian Temple.25

Trollope’s appreciation of St Peter’s as an ecumenical ‘Christian Temple’ depends on maintaining the site’s authentic connection with ancient apostolic Christianity (while simultaneously ignoring the Renaissance and Baroque origins of the edifice itself). 24

Trollope, Visit to Italy, 188.

25

Trollope, Visit to Italy, 254–5 (ellipses in original).

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Not all visitors were so generously credulous, and sceptical commentators often began by casting doubt on the authenticity of the relics and remains associated with St Peter. Some extremists even rejected the historicity of Peter’s mission to Rome entirely as an apocryphal invention of the Latin Church.26 However, most nineteenth-century Protestant travellers were torn between two competing visions of the apostle Peter. The ‘historical’ Peter was an austere preacher and evangelist, the author of two New Testament epistles. But for Roman Catholics, Peter was also an early martyr, and his apocryphal death in Rome connected the life of an Eastern Christ with the authority of the imperial capital. The Basilica founded on the tomb of the martyr-bishop became the central site of the Catholic Church and his throne the symbol of the Pope’s spiritual and temporal power. While many Protestant pilgrims chose to emphasise the ‘historical’ and scriptural credentials of their pilgrimage to sites associated with the apostles like Peter and Paul, they could not ignore the vibrant Catholic martyr-cults associated with these same figures.27 If they rejected popish devotion to the supposed relics of Peter and Paul, they nonetheless felt the powerful lure of the sites long associated with their death and burial. Frances Trollope, for example, is characteristically ambivalent in her verdict on the superb baroque canopies ‘reared over the bones of Paul and Peter’, which ‘even to the Protestant eye [conveyed] . . . something worthy at least of reverence, though not of worship, in the dust that lies thus splendidly enshrined’.28 Alongside these religious tensions, the Anglophone encounter with Rome also presented opportunities for political self-fashioning. Continental travel allowed nineteenth-century Americans, for example, to differentiate themselves from the European historical tradition and affirm their sense of national superiority. In terms of social status, the European Grand Tour also served as a ritual of cultural legitimacy for Americans. It was, therefore, a highly charged political act when Frederick Douglass, a black former slave, sought to emulate the experience of privileged white American tourists by visiting Rome.29 As an American Protestant who had to continually struggle 26

27

28 29

See, for example, the discussion of the controversy sparked by Lady Morgan’s gleefully flippant account of St Peter’s, in Brian H. Murray, ‘The Battle for St Peter’s Chair: Mediating the Materials of Catholic Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Word & Image 33/3 (2017): 313–23. On nineteenth-century Protestant pilgrims and St Paul, see Michael Ledger-Lomas, ‘In the Steps of St Paul’, in Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form, 1760–1900, ed. Brian H. Murray and Mary Henes (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 156–74 (at 164–5). Trollope, Visit to Italy, 190–1. He travelled to Europe in the company of his second wife, Helen Pitts, a white educated (Mount Holyoke) graduate whom he married two years after the death of his first wife of forty-four

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for freedom and recognition, Douglass had little time for triumphalist patriotic narratives of America as an exemplary Christian nation. His account of his 1887 visit to Italy is notable for its sustained attention to, and analysis of, feelings of attraction and repulsion prompted by Catholic and apostolic Rome. Douglass’s commentary recycled many of the themes common to other Grand Tour narratives. He immediately places his reactions in the context of other American cultivated travel writers by making standard Grand Tour cultural references, as when he evokes and cites Byron.30 But Douglass also distinguishes himself as a black traveller and author by drawing parallels between Roman historical sites and the experiences of his race. He equates the battles of the gladiators in the Coliseum with the treatment of black slaves in America. When visiting the Arch of Titus, he compares the suffering and persecution of the Jews with his own enslavement.31 In another instance, he compares Paganini’s violin (on display at Genoa) to the pen used by Lincoln in signing the Emancipation Proclamation.32 In all these instances, Douglass first shows his erudition and appreciation of Italian history and art, but then uses his antiquarian and aesthetic commentary as a springboard to discuss black suffering and endurance.33 It is as the black cosmopolitan writer par excellence that Douglass brings much more to this encounter with Rome than his white bourgeois analogues. It is the ‘gigantic’ presence of Catholicism in Rome, however, that elicits Douglass’s most sustained response. He is impressed by its excesses, noting the ‘all-pervading, complicated, accumulated and mysterious power of this great religious and political organization’.34 He finds that its rituals and practices clearly bring ‘a great comfort to these people’, even though it is mendacious, despotic, and aristocratic in character.35 In his comments, Douglass shows himself here to be more the cosmopolitan than the nativist, recognising the Church’s worldliness as an economic and imperial institution. He is favourably impressed with it as a capitalist enterprise, taking

30

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34

years. She was an advocate of temperance and female suffrage and had worked as a clerk in Douglass’s office since 1882. Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass Written by Himself (1893), in Douglass, Autobiographies (New York: Library of America, 1994), 453–1045 (at 999). Douglass, Life and Times, 1000. 32 Douglass, Life and Times, 997. On the politics and aesthetics of antiquarianism and the origins of the nineteenth-century cult of ruins, see Rosemary Hill, Time’s Witness: History in the Age of Romanticism (London: Penguin, 2021); Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2020); Sam Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). Douglass, Life and Times, 1001. 35 Douglass, Life and Times, 1004.

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money in the form of gifts from every nation, ‘our own republican country included’.36 He shares neither the contempt nor the virulence of American nativist literature or British evangelical commentators. Douglass’s positive reading of Italian Catholicism is even more striking, given the scathing critique of American Christianity in his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Despite this nuance, Douglass’s account of St Peter’s Basilica begins with a characteristically Protestant observation on the contrast between the decadence of contemporary Italian Catholicism and the humble Church of the Apostles. For Douglass, true Christianity wears the garb of Roman austerity not medieval splendour. I was much more interested in the Rome of the past than in the Rome of the present . . . in the preaching of Paul eighteen hundred years ago than in the preaching of the priests and popes of to-day. The fine silks and costly jewels and vestments of the priests of the present could hardly have been dreamed of by the first great preacher of Christianity at Rome, who lived in his own hired house, and whose hands ministered to his own necessities. It was something to feel ourselves standing where this brave man stood, looking on the place where he lived, and walking on the same Appian Way where he walked, when, having appealed to Caesar, he was bravely on the way to this same Rome to meet his fate, whether that should be life or death. This was more to me than being shown, as we were, under the dome of St. Peter’s, the head of St. Luke in a casket, a piece of the true cross, a lock of the Virgin Mary’s hair, and the leg-bone of Lazarus; or any of the wonderful things in that line palmed off on a credulous and superstitious people.37

Douglass’s Paul – a contemporary of ‘Caesar’ – is more classical hero than saint. His modern devotees should privilege scriptural topography – the sites associated with Paul’s missionary travels – over dubious relics. As befits a Protestant traveller for whom the city of Rome represents the materialisation of biblical history, there is no clear distinction between historical interest, personal feeling, and religious devotion (‘It was something to feel ourselves standing where this brave man stood’). Douglass explicitly rejects the dubious traditions attached to Roman relics while tacitly endorsing the New Testament as an authentic historical account of apostolic missionary endeavour and an episode in the religious history of imperial Rome.

36

Douglass, Life and Times, 1003.

37

Douglass, Life and Times, 1003–4.

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IV. Narratives of Temptation and Conversion Douglass, Trollope, and Dickens were underwhelmed – if not entirely offended – by the supposed relics of the apostolic age, but most travel accounts still acknowledged the seductive power of the art, architecture, ritual, and music of the Roman Church. Protestant alarm at the seductive power of Catholicism reached fever pitch in the aftermath of the high-profile conversions of John Henry Newman and several of his Oxford acolytes in 1845. Newman had himself felt the lure of the ‘cruel Church’ as an Anglican tourist to Rome in 1833.38 In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860) – a novel which follows the interconnected lives of a group of American and European artists and travellers – the troubled Hilda, an earnest daughter of New England Puritans, enters St Peter’s in a state of ‘unutterable anguish’.39 Had the Jesuits known the situation of this troubled heart, her inheritance of New England Puritanism would hardly have protected the poor girl from the pious strategy of those good fathers. Knowing, as they do, how to work each proper engine, it would have been ultimately impossible for Hilda to resist the attractions of a faith, which so marvelously adapts itself to every human need.40

Hilda’s visit to St Peters is presented here as part of a ‘dangerous errand . . . to observe how closely and comfortingly the Popish faith applied itself to all human occasions’.41 The Jesuits’ famous (or infamous) rhetorical skill of ‘accommodation’, a technique for meeting potential converts on their own level, is presented as a strategy of seduction. In administering the sacrament of confession, the priest lures Hilda into a threateningly foreign and potentially corrupting space. After revealing her darkest secrets in a confessional marked ‘Pro Anglica Lingua’, Hilda experiences some catharsis but she also resists the lure of conversion and stays true to her Puritan inheritance. Hawthorne here presents the activity of the priest in the confessional as a ‘cat and mouse’ game, not unlike the depictions of priestly 38

39

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41

Newman wrote to his sister Jemima from Naples on 11 April 1833: ‘Oh that Rome were not Rome; but I seem to see as clear as day that a union with her is impossible. She is the cruel Church – asking of us impossibilities, excommunicating us for disobedience, and now watching and exulting over our approaching overthrow’ (Letters, 282–4). Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (1860), in Hawthorne, Novels (New York: Library of America, 1983), 849–1242 (at 1151). Hawthorne, Marble Faun, 1138. For an extended discussion of this scene, see Steven Mailloux, ‘Narrative as Embodied Intensities: The Eloquence of Travel in Nineteenth-Century Rome’, Narrative 21/2 (May 2013): 126–39. Hawthorne, Marble Faun, 1139.

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behaviour found in American Protestant anti-Catholic conspiracy literature. Indeed, the emphasis on the play between competing national and confessional identities is compounded when Hilda realises that the priest is himself a native of New England. In St Peter’s, Hilda finds the lure of Catholic splendour well-nigh irresistible. Hawthorne again describes the Roman architecture and ritual as a technology of seduction and conversion. The roof! the dome! Rich, gorgeous, filled with sunshine, cheerfully sublime, and fadeless after centuries, those lofty depths seemed to translate the heavens to mortal comprehension, and help the spirit upward to a yet higher and wider sphere. Must not the faith, that built this matchless edifice, and warmed, illuminated, and overflowed from it, include whatever can satisfy human aspirations at the loftiest, or minister to human necessity at the sorest? If Religion had a material home, was it not here? As the scene which we but faintly suggest shone calmly before the New England maiden at her entrance, she moved, as if by very instinct, to one of the vases of holy water, upborne against a column by two mighty cherubs. Hilda dipped her fingers, and had almost signed the cross upon her breast, but forbore, and trembled, while shaking the water from her finger-tips. She felt as if her mother’s spirit, somewhere within the dome, were looking down upon her child, the daughter of Puritan forefathers, and weeping to behold her ensnared by these gaudy superstitions. So she strayed sadly onward, up the nave, and towards the hundred golden lights that swarm before the high altar. Seeing a woman; a priest, and a soldier kneel to kiss the toe of the brazen St. Peter, who protrudes it beyond his pedestal for the purpose, polished bright with former salutations, while a child stood on tiptoe to do the same, the glory of the church was darkened before Hilda’s eyes.42

Seduction and conversion are narrowly but decisively avoided. As a Protestant innocent, Hilda escapes by ‘her finger-tips’, saved by a sudden revulsion of feeling prompted by the intervention of her mother’s disapproving Puritan Ghost. The maternal nature of Hilda’s American Protestant inheritance is contrasted with the phallic metonym of Catholic conversion: St Peter offering his protruding toe to the lips of pilgrims. The ritual act of homage depicted here by Hawthorne was a key feature of most nineteenth-century accounts of a visit to the Basilica. The toe in question belonged to a fourteenth-century statue of St Peter by Arnolfo di Cambio (Figure 8.1). It remains an object of veneration for Catholic pilgrims and tourists today. The fact that the statue served as such an obvious manifestation of the performative and tactile nature of Catholic 42

Hawthorne, Marble Faun, 1143–4.

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Figure 8.1. St Peter Enthroned, St Peter’s Basilica, Rome, bronze. Attributed to Arnolfo di Cambio (c.1240–1300). Photo: Antoine Taveneaux (2014). Creative Commons Licence (Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-sa/3.0/legalcode.

devotion made it an obvious source of Protestant unease. Frances Trollope recoiled from the ‘the hideous statue of the old bronze St. Peter, whose toe is so incessantly kissed by the devout’.43 Dickens scoffed at the ‘black statue of St. Peter . . . which is larger than life and which is constantly having its great toe kissed by good Catholics’.44 But conflicting accounts of its age and origin also demonstrate how anti-Catholic critique was often grounded in intense antiquarian scrutiny of ritual objects. In one of the earliest popular guidebooks for British travellers in Italy, Mariana Starke explained that the statue ‘is said to have been cast during the Pontificate of Gregory the Great, from the fragments of a demolished statue of Jupiter Capitolinus’.45 43 45

Trollope, Visit to Italy, 191. 44 Dickens, Pictures from Italy, 119. Mariana Starke, Travels in Europe: For the Use of Travellers on the Continent, 9th edn (Paris: Galignani, 1839), 181.

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This now disproven theory served as quarry for endless apostrophes on the perpetuation of pagan idolatry by the Romish Church. As the Irish traveller, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) observed in 1821: A statue of Jupiter Capitolinus now figures as the Prince of Apostles, and has performed as many miracles since his christening as he did before. Round this statue may be seen, at all hours, groups of peasants rubbing their foreheads to its feet, which have become bright and polished by the perpetual friction.46

Morgan’s phrasing here seems to invite the misreading of ‘friction’ as ‘fiction’ – a gesture perhaps to the structures of Papal authority that erroneously conferred power on arbitrary material objects. If Douglass and others sought to elevate the apostles as classical heroes, the conspiracy theories of Starke and Ownenson suggest a darker legacy: the prospect that objects of Catholic devotion have been literally recast from the profane idols of ancient Rome.

V. Ambivalent Encounters While some British travellers resorted to Whiggish complacency in the face of Roman ‘backwardness’, many Anglicans were forced to acknowledge the marginal status of their own faith. As John Pemble notes, in Rome ‘the fact of schism became something much more than an intellectual position. It became an accusation that made the heart sick.’47 In William Thackeray’s The Newcomes (1855), the would-be artist Clive Newcome narrates his comically condensed pilgrim’s progress from doubt to conversion to apostasy at St Peter’s. There must be moments, in Rome especially, when every man of friendly heart, who writes himself English and Protestant, must feel a pang at thinking that he and his countrymen are insulated from European Christendom . . . Lo! yonder inscription, which blazes round the dome of the temple . . . it proclaims to all the world, that this is Peter, and on this rock the Church shall be built, against which Hell shall not prevail . . . Come, friend, let us acknowledge this, and go and kiss the toe of St. Peter. Alas! There’s the Channel always between us; and we no more believe in the miracles of St. Thomas of Canterbury, than that the bones of His 46

47

Lady Morgan, Italy, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1821), vol. II, 203. For a detailed account of the religious attitudes of Irish travellers in Italy, see O’Connor, ‘Voyage into Catholicism’. Pemble, Mediterranean Passion, 227.

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Grace, John Bird, who sits in St. Thomas’s chair presently, will work wondrous cures in the year 2000.48

As Thackeray suggests, a visit to St Peter’s often inspired elaborate theological contortions and forced Protestant tourists to view the relationship between Catholicism and Anglicanism from an unfamiliar angle. Beneath Michelangelo’s dome, St Peter’s claim to be the centre of Western Christendom and the one true church seemed incontestable. Yet even those who, like Clive Newcome, were impressed by Catholicism’s antiquarian credentials baulked at the prospect of extending the reverence bestowed on early saints and martyrs to the all-too-human prelates of the modern Church. When Frederick Douglass arrived at St Peter’s he was also struck by the grandeur of the Basilica and its dome: ‘St. Peter’s, by its vastness, wealth, splendor, and architectural perfections, acts upon us like some great and overpowering natural wonder. It awes us into silent, speechless admiration.’ There is, significantly, a bodily identification with a particular saint and apostle whom he deems more important than all the Catholic relics he views in St Peters.49 The saint in question is St. Peter and Douglass relates to him by ‘indexing his own racial embodiment’.50 I had some curiosity in seeing people going up to the black statue of St Peter – I was glad to find him black, – I have no prejudice against his color – and kissing the Old fellow’s big toe, one side of which has been nearly worn away by the devout and tender salutes. In seeing these, one may well ask himself, What will not men believe? Crowds of men and women going up a stairway on their knees; monks making ornaments of dead men’s bones . . . give a degrading idea of man’s relation to the Infinite Author of the universe. But there is no reasoning with faith. It is doubtless a great comfort to these people, after all, to have kissed the great toe of the black image of the Apostle Peter . . . I felt, in looking upon these religious shows in Rome, as the late Benjamin Wade said he felt at a negro campmeeting, where there were much howling, shouting, and jumping: ‘This is nothing to me, but it surely must be something to them.’51

Douglass here narrates the subtle transformation of his own sympathies, as he moves from conventional Protestant repulsion to a relativistic understanding 48

49 50

51

W.M. Thackeray, The Newcomes, vol. I (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1854), 349–50. John Bird Sumner was Archbishop of Canterbury between 1848 and 1862. Douglass, Life and Times, 1004. Mailloux, ‘Narrative as Embodied Intensities’, 129. See also Steven Mailloux, ‘Remarking Slave Bodies: Rhetoric as Production and Reception’, Philosophy and Rhetoric 35/2 (2002): 96–119. Douglass, Life and Times, 1004.

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of Catholic ritual and devotion. Significantly, both of Douglass’s test cases for the limits of inter-confessional sympathy – Italians kissing the toe of a black St Peter and a white American senator’s account of an African-American religious gathering – conflate religious with ethnic difference. By comparing his own bemusement at the realities of embodied Catholic devotion with Senator Wade’s ambivalent account of the ‘negro camp-meeting’, Douglass offers a critical self-reflection on his own inherited prejudice. In an earlier account of his visit to St Peters, found in his diary, Douglass made no mention of the apostle being black. His published account does not explain that the statue’s colouring is the result of tarnished bronze and thus provocatively and playfully leaves the question of Peter’s ethnic identity to the reader. Douglass’s emphasis on Roman blackness will appear as a recurring theme throughout his tour. In the Autobiography, Douglass maintains that Romans, like himself, are a mixed-blood people and he continually deploys the language of physiognomy and ethnography to compare Italians with African Americans. Like Africans, Italian women have picturesque headwear, they dress in gay colours, wear startling jewellery, and carry bundles on their heads. Douglass thus draws a distinct parallel between the ‘blackish’ inhabitants of Rome, the cradle of Western Europe, and the blacks of America. Moreover, as he moves from Rome to Naples and across the Mediterranean to Egypt, he observes an increase in black hair and eyes, African features, and darker complexions. Douglass presents his trip to Italy as a challenge to white supremacist ideology. Asserting his cosmopolitan credentials, he dramatises a journey from discrimination to acculturation, in an era when such acceptance was as uncommon for blacks as it was for them to travel abroad. In this respect, Douglass exemplifies James Clifford’s vison of identity as not just about location, but also about displacement and relocation.52 Douglass found in Rome what he most needed – an identity as a cosmopolitan and elite traveller, unfettered by segregation. Once in Rome he realised that African Americans had legitimate claims to ‘the moral support of Greatness’ offered by pagan and Christian antiquity. It was equally his past too. ‘After my life of hardships in slavery and of conflict with race and

52

See James Clifford, ‘Mixed Feelings’, in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 362– 70 ( at 369). On Douglass, race and cosmopolitanism, see also Angela G. Ray, ‘Frederick Douglass on the Lyceum Circuit: Social Assimilation, Social Transformation?’ Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5/4 (2002): 625–48; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 103, 110.

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color prejudice and proscription at home, there was left to me a space in life when I could and did walk the world unquestioned, a man among men.’53 The Anglo-American Italian travel narrative offered a space in which Anglophone Protestants could negotiate their relationship with antiquity, while also distancing themselves from the Roman Catholic Other. Importantly, it was their supposed familiarity with the Bible as a unique authoritative record of apostolic antiquity which allowed Protestant tourists access to a deeper reading of the relics and ruins of Rome (a scriptural narrative illegible to modern Romans and their ‘ignorant’ priests). In his account of St Peter’s, Douglass at once lays claim to this tradition – making a radical case for African Americans as co-inheritors of Hebraic and Hellenistic ‘Civilisation’ – while simultaneously questioning the chauvinistic, sectarian, and racist assumptions that underpin British and American denunciations of Roman Catholic religion.

VI Catholics Write Back We have so far privileged the voices of Protestant travellers and writers. But the Roman inter-religious encounter was not all one-way traffic. Condemnatory Protestant accounts of Italian Catholicism were far from uncontested.54 One expat English Catholic proved a continual thorn in the sides of Protestant travel writers. As head of the English College at Rome, Nicholas Wiseman (a future Cardinal and Archbishop of Westminster) took it upon himself to respond directly to the gibes of British travellers. In an article for the Dublin Review in 1843, he berated Dickens and Frances Trollope as ‘superficial’ travellers ‘who skim over the surface of the land, who see it out of carriage windows, and visit its sights by guide-book . . . who give us, indeed, often their notions of things, but not the things themselves’.55 Pricked by Wiseman’s denunciation of his American Notes, Dickens began Pictures from Italy with a disclaimer addressed to his Catholic readers: When I treat of the ceremonies of the Holy Week, I merely treat of their effect, and do not challenge the good and learned Dr. Wiseman’s interpretation of their meaning. When I hint a dislike of nunneries for young girls who abjure the world before they have ever proved or known it; or 53 54

55

Douglass, Life and Times, 1017. On Irish Catholic travellers and pilgrims to Rome in the same period, see O’Connor, ‘Voyage into Catholicism’, 156–9. [Nicholas Wiseman], ‘Superficial Travelling’, Dublin Review 14 (1843): 255–68.

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doubt the ex officio sanctity of all Priests and Friars; I do no more than many conscientious Catholics both abroad and at home.56

Dickens may have counted on the support of some liberal Catholics, but his work clearly offended others. The artist Clarkson Stanfield, who had previously provided illustrations for Dickens’s Christmas books, was originally selected as the illustrator for Pictures from Italy, but he later demurred citing his unease with Dickens’s mockery of priests and monks.57 In fact, English travellers did not have to wait for the reviews to have their opinions and prejudices contested. When Frances Trollope visited the Venerable English College at Rome, she and her fellow travellers were subjected to an aggressive sermon by Wiseman’s successor, the Irish-born rector, Charles Michael Baggs. This sermon was [Trollope recalls] for the most part so truly Catholic, that in describing it I might very safely leave out the word Roman, save for the latter part of it. But in this latter part Monsigniore B––– described with considerable force and eloquence the enduring nature of the Roman Catholic Church . . . There were many distinguished English Protestants present, and there was nothing in the discourse that could reasonably shock them . . . and yet it was impossible not to feel that in some degree he did address us as heretics when he quoted a passage from the Edinburgh Review, eloquently but strangely alluding to the comparative immutability of the Romish Faith above all others. I have not the article before me . . . but the purport of the passage I have not forgotten . . . That St. Peter’s would still stand uninjured, intact, and entire, as we now behold it, when the travelling antiquarian shall be seen, standing upon a broken fragment of London Bridge, in order to take a sketch of the ruins of St. Paul’s.58

The article in question was the English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay’s famous review of Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Popes (1834–6). Macaulay had himself visited the English College three years earlier and had been shown around the tombs and cloisters by Wiseman.59 His 56 57

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Dickens, Pictures from Italy, 6. Jane Cohen, Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators (Colombus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 182. Trollope, Visit to Italy, 301. On the day before his visit to the English College (26 November 1838), Macaulay had been shown some recently excavated Roman ruins. The sight led him to imagine a future period when London had ‘dwindled to the dimensions of the parish of St. Martin’s, and [was] supported in its decay by the expenditure of wealthy Patagonians and New Zealanders’. On his arrival in the city he had hastened directly to St Peter’s: ‘I was so much excited by the expectation of what I was to see that I could notice nothing else . . . I never in my life saw, and never, I suppose, shall again see, anything so astonishingly beautiful. I really could have cried with

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anonymous review of Ranke famously climaxes with a paean to the Church of Rome’s extraordinary longevity and supernatural resilience, a passage which traces not just Christianity’s but also Catholicism’s origins to ancient Rome. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.60

As we have seen, many Protestant travellers were humbled by the sight of St Peter’s and forced to confront the relative youth of their own faith in comparison with the awesome antiquity of the Roman Church. Macaulay emphasises this impression with a series of striking comparisons. First, he points out that Rome was already a centre of Christian civilisation and culture when Britain was an abandoned Roman province in decline (‘before the Saxon had set foot on Britain’). His final juxtaposition, of St Paul’s with St Peter’s, plays off the two great baroque temples of Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism (significantly named for two greatest missionary apostles to Rome) against each other. Macaulay’s New Zealander makes the standard European journey from imperial metropolis to colonial margin in reverse.61 As Trollope states, the ‘New Zealander’ is a ‘travelling antiquarian’, and at the English College, Charles Baggs invokes the ruin-gazing New Zealander as an uncanny mirror image of the English tourist. As the son of a Protestant father (a colonial judge who died in British Guyana in 1820) and an Irish Catholic mother, Baggs was the product of both religious intermarriage and the career networks of empire. In his childhood, he had attended both Protestant and Catholic schools in England, before joining the English College at Rome in 1824, aged twenty-two. He returned to Britain as Vicar Apostolic of the Western District of England in 1844.62 In Rome,

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pleasure’. George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1876), vol. II, 29–30. Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Von Ranke’, Edinburgh Review 72 (October 1840), 227–58. For a lengthy discussion of Macaulay’s New Zealander as exemplary ‘ruin gazer’, see Julia Hell, ‘Imperial Ruin Gazers, or Why did Scipio Weep?’, in Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 169–92; and Julia Hell, The Conquest of Ruins: The Third Reich and the Fall of Rome (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Vicar Apostolic was a title used before the reinstatement of the Catholic hierarchy of bishops in England and Wales in 1850 (the so-called ‘Papal Aggression’). On the ‘Papal Aggression’ Crisis, see Walter Ralls, ‘The Papal Aggression of 1850: A Study in Victorian Anti-Catholicism’, in Religion in Victorian Britain, vol. IV: Interpretations, ed. Gerald Parsons (Manchester University Press, 1988), 115–34; Saho Matsumato-Best, Britain and the Papacy in the Age of

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Baggs served as ‘cameriere d’onore’, an official member of the Papal household. He was responsible for presenting Catholic and Protestant English visitors admitted to private audiences with Pope Gregory XVI.63 He took his role as representative of English Catholicism seriously, and wrote several publications aimed at English tourists with an interest in the architecture, liturgy, and ritual of Rome. A guide to The Ceremonies of Holy-Week at Rome and The Papal Chapel described and illustrated from History and Antiquities both appeared in 1839. This was followed by a more detailed account of the pontifical masses sung at St Peter’s at Easter, Christmas, and the festival of Saints Peter and Paul. The guides were published by Monaldini, a bookseller and lending library at the foot of the Spanish Steps that specialised in English-language publications (Monaldini also stocked the Murray’s Handbooks). In his guide books, Baggs promoted the idea that English Christianity of all stripes owed its origins to Rome. Was it not from ‘Rome our Saxon forefathers received Christianity; and from the same source we have derived several Latin words denoting christian [sic] rites’?64 For Baggs, the Latin liturgy and its attendant ceremonies constituted ‘a precious legacy from the time when Peter and Paul preached in Rome’.65 If Protestant travellers were keen to cast the pomp and circumstance of Romanism as an absurd corruption of the religion of the Bible, Baggs was determined to demonstrate that the Mass constituted a living tradition which bound modern Catholics to the religion of Christ’s earliest disciples. (‘Like her divine founder she is the same yesterday and to-day . . . she is unchanged and unaffected by the wayward caprices of fashion.’)66 Baggs did not aim to convert his Protestant readers, but he did want them look beyond stereotypes and clichés about Catholic superstition, and to value the Mass as a verifiable fragment of both primitive Christianity and Roman antiquity. An antiquarian will readily tell you the age of a building from the materials of which it is constructed, and the manner in which they are united together: and even so may we judge of the antiquity of a church from the elements of which her ritual is composed . . .67

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Revolution (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003); Michael Wheeler, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Michael E. Williams, ‘Baggs, Charles Michael’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published online 23 September 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/1033. Charles Baggs, The Ceremonies of Holy-Week at Rome, 3rd edn (1839; Rome: Monaldini, 1846), 5. Baggs, Ceremonies of Holy-Week, 17–18. 66 Baggs, Ceremonies of Holy-Week, 17–18. Charles Baggs, The Pontifical Mass sung at S. Peter’s on Easter-Sunday, the Festival of SS. Peter and Paul, and Christmas-Day, described and illustrated, with a Dissertation on ecclesiastical vestments (Rome: Monaldini, 1840), 43.

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It is tempting, and sometimes helpful, to read accounts of travel and pilgrimage in terms of sectarian alterity: the Protestant traveller fixing the Catholic Other with their privileged ethnographic gaze. But in the context of Anglophone Rome, we should not forget the networks of print, politics, and sociability shared by British, Irish, and North American Christians of all persuasions. If British and American travellers wanted to put Catholicism in its place, many Anglophone Catholics sought to win over Protestant sceptics by appealing to a shared antiquarian epistemology, a line of reasoning which combined the affective appeal of Catholic ritual with an historicising emphasis on the tangible legacies to apostolic antiquity. In the final section, we explore an example of how these issues played out on the domestic front. We have so far concentrated on the narratives of pilgrims and travellers to Rome. But in an age of mass movement, visual spectacle, and mechanical reproduction, it is misleading to represent individuals as always mobile and devotional objects as rigidly fixed in space.

Epilogue: St Peter on the Road Wary of the repulsion to relics so characteristic of British and American accounts of Rome, Charles Baggs had provided visitors with detailed antiquarian accounts of the provenance of objects connected with the life of St Peter, while also playing down their theological centrality. In another attempt to win over Protestant readers, he recast the Catholic devotion to relics as a recognisable and respectable form of ‘hero worship’: ‘We all honour the memorials of the great, of the wise and the brave; who has not venerated the oak of a Tasso or the house of a Shakespeare . . . others respect the chair and table of Wickliffe at Lutterworth, or the room of Luther at Eisenach.’68 Protestant sceptics had attacked Catholic devotion to apostolic relics with enlightened appeals to archaeological evidence and reason. But how important were certificates of antiquarian authenticity to the ordinary pilgrim who pressed her lips against the smooth bronze of the apostle’s foot? Were ordinary Catholics really duped by the Church’s storehouse of relics? Or was it rather the repeated acts of devotion paid by their fellow pilgrims that endowed such sites with spiritual value? We usually think about the lure of pilgrimage in terms of the singular aura attached to a specific sacred or secular site. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, 68

Baggs, Ceremonies of Holy-Week, 89.

Protestant Travellers to Rome

Figure 8.2. St Peter Enthroned, English Martyrs Catholic Church, Walworth, London. Brass and wood replica by Froc Robert of Paris (1904). Photo: Brian Murray (2022).

reproducible objects of Catholic devotion arose in the service of saintly cults which had always been transportable despite their origins in specific sacred sites. We can thus trace a market of sacred objects which overlaps and intersects with the networks of devotional and antiquarian print described above. Figure 8.2 shows a late nineteenth-century copy of the Vatican statue of St Peter. This replica stands in a Catholic church in Walworth, South London. The statue is made of wood painted to resemble the colour and texture of ageing bronze. However, the apostle’s articulated and detachable right foot is brass – now worn smooth and bright – indicating that Catholic Londoners have mimicked the actions of Roman pilgrims by repeatedly kissing and rubbing it. The Walworth Peter was produced in 1904 by the Parisian ecclesiastical outfitter Froc Robert.69 In the nineteenth century, 69

Denis Evinson, Catholic Churches of London (Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 220.

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these wooden and brass replicas were purchased for churches around the world. Other prominent examples can be seen at Saint-Sulpice in Paris and the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC. One of the earliest replicas was erected by the Franciscans in front of the Church of St Peter in Tiberias on the shores of Lake Galilee (near the apostle’s old fishing grounds). These examples all exhibit the same marks of wear visible on the foot of the original in St Peter’s. Does this mean that credulous pilgrims are still being duped into thinking these mass-produced objects are genuine relics of antique or medieval Christendom? Unlikely. Rather it seems that modern Catholics are perfectly at ease directing their spiritual energies at manufactured and even mass-produced devotional objects. While the centre of the cult of St Peter has remained rooted in the Vatican Basilica, ever since the nineteenth century congregations across the globe have been tapping into these local nodes of intercessional power. At the Edwardian Church of the English Martyrs in Walworth (Figure 8.2) St Peter gazes down a redbrick nave decorated with polychrome plaster representations of martyred English and Irish Catholics (including Margaret Clitherow, Oliver Plunkett, and Thomas More). It was supposedly the modern historical self-awareness of Protestant travellers which allowed them access to an archaeologically authentic image of the apostolic past. Conversely, the hopelessly backward and medieval nature of popish superstition obscured the faithful image of Christian antiquity for Catholics. Yet, if many Protestant travellers were determined to reject Catholic architecture, ritual and liturgy as dangerously foreign and hopelessly archaic – an untimely survival of a fallen pagan empire – a rejuvenated Catholic Church in late nineteenth-century Britain and North America was ready to rethink the relationship between the ‘primitive Church’ of Rome and the devotional needs of the faithful. By the end of the nineteenth century, it seems, Catholics across Europe were embracing new performative notions of sanctity in an age of mechanical reproduction.

9

HMS Bacchante Religion, Time Travel, and the Victorian Monarchy michael ledger-lomas

On 3 April 1882, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Raphael Meyer Panigil, invited two teenaged English sailors to a Passover supper. Their journal recorded that they were ‘much impressed by the complete domesticity of the feast’ and by their exotically clad hosts. Sampling charoset and chewing on their bitter herbs, they carefully recorded the Passover ritual, punctuating their account with quotations from the Authorised Version whenever they were reminded of the details of Christ’s Last Supper. As they left Panigil’s house in the Jewish quarter, they heard other families celebrating Passover, but their thoughts now ran on the passion of Christ. Passing the hill which they knew that some Protestant scholars had claimed was Calvary and seeing ‘the full Paschal moon’ shining through ‘heavy black clouds’, they reflected that Christ must have been chilly on Gethsemane that night. The next morning, they rose in freezing conditions for a day of sight-seeing: The heaven looks angry as it looked then; ever and again there is a gleam of sun, but the agony of the cold cutting wind to His naked body must have been great: “More pangs than heart and tongue can frame / Were suffer’d there without relief.”

These experiences, mingling Orientalising ethnography with careful scriptural topography and the devotional quotation of John Keble’s Christian Year, were characteristic of Victorian tourism in the Holy Land. What was unusual was that the two sailors were the sons of the Prince of Wales: Prince Albert Victor and his younger brother George, who would succeed his father as George V in 1910. Their Passover Feast had ended with the Chief Rabbi chanting a prayer, ‘invoking blessings on the Queen of England, the Prince and Princess of Wales, and every member of their family’. As they rode around the walls of Jerusalem the next morning, they did so to the accompaniment of the national anthem, sung by ‘native boys’ from the rooftops of the Protestant schools of Mount Zion.1 1

John Neale Dalton, The Cruise of Her Majesty’s Ship ‘Bacchante’, 1879–1882, Compiled from the Private Journals, Letters, and Note-books of Prince Albert Victor and Prince George of Wales 2, vols. (London: Macmillan, 1885), vol. II, 588–91.

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Like many Holy Land travellers before them, the princes roved over classical as well as biblical lands in the Near East. They visited Athens as diligently as they had Jerusalem, going over the Parthenon and the Areopagus, inspecting Schliemann’s finds and listening for the nightingale song once described by Sophocles.2 Yet their trip also formed part of a new activity for royal and elite men: the world tour. While the Holy Land was always conjoined with classical lands and literatures in the Victorian mind, these tours also embedded it in very different global and historical contexts. Both princes were nearing the end of the third leg of a global cruise when they reached Palestine, during which they had explored the West Indies, the Cape, Australia, Fiji, Japan, China, Sri Lanka and Egypt. Keeping them warm in their tents in Palestine were ‘our rugs of Australian kangaroo skins’, procured half a world away.3 The princes’ uncle, Prince Alfred, had linked Holy Land tourism with royal globetrotting when in 1859 he visited Jerusalem en route to Cape Town and the West Indies as a midshipman on board the fifty-gun frigate HMS Euryalus. His pilgrimage was a manifestation of sovereign piety which also flexed Britain’s claims against its geostrategic rivals. No wonder that a Romanov Grand Duke followed in his footsteps, acquiring the Codex Sinaiticus and laying out plans for grand Orthodox churches in Jerusalem.4 In years to come, Alfred logged spectacular distances as a career sailor, travelling 31,000 nautical miles by 1870.5 In 1868, his escape from assassination at Sydney would occasion global acts of thanksgiving, which sanctified the British Empire.6 Victoria sent Alfred’s brother the Prince of Wales travelling as well. By the time he went to Palestine and Egypt via Greece and Constantinople in 1862, he had already undertaken a tour of Upper and Lower Canada. He returned to Egypt with his wife in 1868, staying for the inauguration of the Suez Canal. If these visits trained him as a ‘ruler of a vast empire’, then his ‘Odyssey’ also had immediate strategic objectives: to cultivate the Canal’s architect, the Khedive of Egypt.7 In 1875, he dropped in on him again, decorating his 2 4

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Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 742–6. 3 Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 657. Simon Dixon, ‘Pilgrimage and Politics: Two “Sailor Princes” in Jerusalem, 1859’, in Magic, Texts and Travel: Homage to a Scholar, Will Ryan, ed. Janet M. Hartley and Denis J. B. Shaw (London: SGECR, 2021), 329–46. Charles Reed, Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects and the Making of a British World, 1860–1911 (Manchester University Press, 2018), 15. See Gordan Pentland, ‘The Indignant Nation: Australian Responses to the Attempted Assassination of the Duke of Edinburgh in 1868’, English Historical Review 130 (2015): 57–88; and Joseph Hardwick, ‘Special Days of Worship and National Religion in the Australian Colonies, 1790–c.1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45 (2017): 365–90. W. H. Russell, A Diary in the East during the Tour of the Prince and Princess of Wales (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1869), 4, 407.

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son Tewfik with the Star of India in recognition of their dedication to the ‘safety and convenience of our communications between England and India’. He did so while travelling to India via that very canal, on a tour designed to provide the subcontinent with an ‘outward and visible sign of the personal existence of the Power which had control of her destinies’.8 Historians are right to argue that these heavily reported tours were on one level simply charismatic displays of power. They associated Victoria’s men-folk with the domination of nature, not least because of their addiction to hunting big game, and demonstrated to colonial settlers and subjects the commitment of distant rulers to their material progress.9 Thanks to railways, steam ships and increasing British influence over Egypt, British princes travelled effortlessly ‘from Pall Mall to the Punjab’, while their appearances celebrated not just pomp but improvements in infrastructure.10 On 17 September 1860, cannons boomed and the Dean of Cape Town Cathedral intoned a prayer as Alfred tipped rubble into Table Bay, inaugurating the construction of Cape Town’s harbour breakwater, an act which delighted boosters of the Cape Colony.11 In December 1875, the Prince of Wales likewise laid a foundation stone for the new harbour in Madras, celebrating a ‘successful struggle with Nature’. Wherever they went, telegraphs demonstrated the interconnectedness of the British world. Boarding HMS Serapis at Suez to begin the sea leg of his journey to India, the Prince had picked up a telegram with the results of a Cambridgeshire horse race.12 Yet royal tours did more than tighten emotional cords between the crown and its subjects or advertise the state’s prowess. This essay argues that they pioneered a new technology of rule, establishing the crown’s cosmopolitanism by extending its religious sympathies beyond Christianity and what this book identifies as its ‘originary pasts’ in Greece and Palestine to encompass the diverse creeds of the world. Over the course of her reign, the expansion of 8

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W. H. Russell, The Prince of Wales’s Tour: A Diary in India: With Some Account of the Visits of His Royal Highness to the Courts of Greece, Egypt, Spain, and Portugal (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1877), 62, ix; Milinda Banerjee, ‘Ocular Sovereignty, Acclamatory Rulership, and Political Communication: Visits of Princes of Wales to Bengal’, in Royal Heirs and Soft Power in Nineteenth-century Europe, ed. Frank Lorenz Müller and Heidi Mehrkens (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 81–100. Reed, Royal Tourists, 9–10, chap. 3; Chandrika Kaul, ‘Monarchical Display and the Politics of Empire: Princes of Wales and India 1870–1920s’, Twentieth Century British History 17 (2006): 464–88 (at 467–8). J. Drew Gay, The Prince of Wales in India: Or, From Pall Mall to the Punjab (New York: Worthington, 1877). On Egypt, see Jonathan Parry, Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2022), chaps. 5 and 11. Saul Solomon, Progress of HRH Prince Alfred through the Cape Colony, British Kaffraria, Orange Free State, Port Natal (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, 1860), 112–16. Russell, India, 38, 70.

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Queen Victoria’s Empire, particularly in the Indian subcontinent, broadened her spiritual persona. The Jubilees of 1887 and 1897 fostered representations of her as not just the governor of the Church of England or a Protestant Queen, but as a tolerant Empress: a friend not just to Protestant Dissenters, but to Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Zoroastrians.13 Like other European empires, hers demonstrated its strength through its cosmic scope: the ability to categorise racial or religious differences and subordinate them to one tolerant ruler.14 With the ageing Victoria unable to budge beyond Europe, it fell to her family to demonstrate their interest in the global faiths found in her Empire. The reconciliation of Catholic and Protestant, Francophone and Anglophone populations had been the burden of Albert Edward’s Canadian tour. At Bombay a decade later, he spoke of his satisfaction that ‘under British rule men of varied creeds and nations live in harmony’, developing ‘energies which they inherit from widely separate families of mankind’.15 The exploration of religious diversity was a journey not just through space but time. The industrialisation of communications in the nineteenth century annihilated neither time nor space, but rather encouraged a new and dynamic relationship between them.16 As travellers confronted faiths and mental worlds different to their own, they reflected on how they came to be. To the western scholars who mapped the religions of the globe, one understood a faith by travelling backwards to its authoritative point or points of origin.17 At the same time, it was modern technologies of communication and reproduction – steam ships, railways, photographs and telegraphs – which generated the ‘articulation’ of philology as a universalising science, which advanced from the study of classical and biblical literatures to develop a ‘global apparatus’ for the comprehension of any past human culture.18 This essay shows that the monarchy and its advisers patronised such scholarship on their travels in an attempt to 13

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For this argument, see Michael Ledger-Lomas, Queen Victoria: This Thorny Crown (Oxford University Press, 2021), Introduction, chaps. 7 and 8. See Martin Rady, The Habsburgs: To Rule the World (New York: Basic Books, 2020). Ian Radforth, Royal Spectacle: The 1860 Visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada and the United States (University of Toronto Press, 2004); Russell, India, 119. See Nile Green, ‘Spacetime and the Muslim Journey West: Industrial Communications in the Making of the “Muslim World”’, American Historical Review 118 (2013): 401–29, for this dynamic in the lives of travellers very different to those discussed here. See Simon Goldhill, ‘Ad Fontes’, in Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History, ed. Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi (University of Chicago Press, 2020), 67–85; and Chapter 2 above. See Paul Michael Kurtz, ‘The Philological Apparatus: Science, Text, and Nation in the Nineteenth Century’, Critical Inquiry 47 (2021): 747–76 (at 755, 758, 769, 776).

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represent themselves as not just Christian but cosmopolitan rulers. In the eyes of its later nineteenth-century boosters, the Empire’s extent and technological integration had allowed it to escape the cyclical decline to which classical polities were condemned.19 The crown headed an ‘empire of religion’, one in which science and power fused as colonial officials gathered data for the comparative study of religions and scholars argued that knowledge of subaltern faiths would underpin imperial stability.20 The easy familiarity of princes with such studies was an important legitimation of their universal sway. Victoria’s sons admittedly made unlikely philologists. Albert Edward preferred to view foreign parts down the barrel of a gun: he shot crocodiles, ‘pigeons, hawks, and teeny owls’ on the Nile; elephants and tigers in Ceylon and India, or lizards and woodpeckers when grander targets were not forthcoming.21 Yet his entourage made him spend as much time tracking ancient monuments as big game. He had first seen the East with the Anglican historian Arthur Penrhyn Stanley and the photographer Francis Bedford, who captured scriptural sites such as the ‘Street called Straight’ in Damascus (Acts 9:11), as well as images of Judaism, Islam and Christianity as oriental lived religions.22 Sailing along the Nile in 1867, the Prince inspected the temples of Luxor, ‘dived’ into tombs in the Valley of the Kings and commissioned a dig around the obelisk which the Khedive had promised to Victoria. In 1875, he shot his first elephant in Ceylon, but also, like Alfred before him, made sure to view the relic of Buddha’s tooth in the temple at Kandy. He listened politely as a monk read him Buddhist scriptures, in hopes of effecting his ‘miraculous conversion’.23 In India, tiger hunts alternated with policed visits to Hindu temples, mosques and Parsi cemeteries.24 The Prince played the role not just of a student, but of a devotee. At the Meenakshi temple in Madurai, the Prince and his chaplain donned shawls and were showered with gold dust; at Varanasi, he fed the temple monkeys.25 19

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Duncan Bell, ‘From Ancient to Modern in Victorian Imperial Thought’, Historical Journal 49 (2006): 735–59. David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2013), 16–18, 46. Russell, East, 208; Russell, India, 275, 283. Francis Bedford, ‘The Street called Straight, Damascus, 30 April 1862’, Royal Collections Inventory Number 2700964; Sophie Gordon, Cairo to Constantinople: Francis Bedford’s Photographs of the Middle East (London: Royal Collections Trust, 2013). Russell, East, 233–5, 237, 271. Joseph Fayrer, Notes of the Visits to India of HRHs the Prince of Wales and Duke of Edinburgh, 1870, 1875–76 (London: Kerby and Endean, 1879), 40. Russell, India, 307–8.

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These experiences formed the template for the education of his sons. Throughout their cruise, they crossed the wake of their relatives: planting a tree in the botanical gardens at Perth next to one planted by Alfred or inspecting their father’s graffito on the Great Pyramid at Gizah. When it came to antiquity, they likewise showed that they were amateur Orientalists who devoted as much if not more energy to the ancient faiths of the Far East as to the Greco-Roman and biblical remains of the Near East. The architect of this global apprenticeship was the princes’ tutor, the Reverend John Neale Dalton. An academic highflyer, Dalton’s preaching had brought him to Queen Victoria’s notice when serving as a curate at Whippingham Church on the Isle of Wight and he had ended up as a royal tutor. He had encouraged Albert Victor’s parents to send him to join George as a naval cadet to cure his intellectual lethargy, which he may have exaggerated to safeguard his own influence. With Albert Victor struggling to progress on board the training ship HMS Britannia, Dalton grasped at the notion of a world cruise. Having persuaded their father to back it against Victoria’s qualms and the Cabinet’s resistance, he joined them on board HMS Bacchante as the ship’s chaplain. On his return to Britain, he ‘compiled’ their journal for publication, with the addition of background notes.26 The result was The Cruise of Her Majesty’s Ship ‘Bacchante’, 1879– 82, Compiled from the Private Journals of Prince Albert Victor and Prince George of Wales with Additions by John Neale Dalton (1885), which Dalton’s modern biographer has dismissed as ‘an ill-judged affair, by turns showy, pedantic, and self-glorifying’.27 As Dalton admitted, he had not only added his own notes in square brackets, but treated the journal of the princes as a mere ‘groundwork’, silently improving them with sententiae, quotations and factual nuggets. The result was what George’s biographers have condemned as a ‘gigantic but well-meaning deception’. Dalton’s suspiciously erudite diarists actually ended their tour little better educated than they had begun it. Albert Victor flopped when sent to Cambridge because he was unable to finish a book; George remained suspicious of foreign languages and shaky in spelling his own.28 Their fitful curiosity about other cultures did not run in academic channels. In Japan, one of their guides was disappointed when during a theatre performance 26

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See Jane Ridley, Bertie: A Life of Edward VII (London: Chatto & Windus, 2012), 268, for his manoeuvres. Richard Davenport Hines, ‘John Neale Dalton’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published online 23 September 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/58767. Kenneth Rose, George V (London: Knopf, 1984), 9–15, 21; Jane Ridley, George V: Never a Dull Moment (London: Chatto & Windus, 2021), 25–7.

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‘Prince George made me come & sit by him while he had a tiger tattooed & I lost it all.’ Meeting him years later in London, he discovered that George ‘did not like Japs’.29 Deeply flawed as a source for what the princes genuinely thought or felt, his book nevertheless offers a vision of what Dalton considered a future monarch should think and feel. This essay reads The Cruise as an elephantine Mirror for Princes, which outlined the disciplined curiosity a sovereign needed to display about the world’s pasts and the scholarly networks they could activate in satisfying it. Easily dismissed as a ‘creepy canon’, Dalton was one of a band of clerics instrumental in shaping the intellectual pursuits of the royal family – such as they were – and their representation to the public.30 In gamely depicting the princes as sharing his interest in world religions and their pasts, his book articulated the idea that British sovereigns sympathised with religions other than their own, a fancy which has endured to the present.31 In sermons to the princes and their fellow naval cadets in the years before their cruise, Dalton preached a homosocial muscular Christianity, which turned Christ into a model cadet and flattened the gospel into a simple creed of imperial service, with the British Empire slotting into the position that Rome occupied for St Paul.32 The contours of the religious maps he sketched reflected this bluff faith, revealing a more respectful interest in some pasts than others. While Dalton was swayed by the imperial philologists he met into acknowledging that some beliefs and practices deserved as much respectful investigation as Christianity, the aggressive rationalism of contemporary anthropology authorised him to dismiss others as savage survivals. His book therefore bore witness both to a lasting change in the spiritual profile of the monarchy and to the nature of Victorian interest in the Holy Land. While never ceasing to be an ‘originary past’ for Christians, it was now also an outwork of the East, which could be investigated with the same kind of philological and archaeological methods scholars deployed on its alien antiquities. * 29

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A Diplomat in Japan, Part Two: The Diaries of Ernest Satow, 1870–1883, ed. Ian Ruxton (Morrisville, NC: Lulu Press, 2006), 476, 3. Ridley, George V, 53. See Danny Loss, ‘Missionaries, the Monarchy, and the Emergence of Anglican Pluralism in the 1960s and 1970s’, Journal of British Studies 57 (2018): 543–63, for this theme in the twentieth century. John Neale Dalton, ‘Christ’s Boyhood’ and ‘Fearlessness’, in Sermons to Naval Cadets (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1879).

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Dalton’s first volume, which took the princes to ‘the West and the South’, with long stops in the West Indies, at the Cape of Good Hope and in Australia, had more to say about the future than the past. His explicit additions in this volume were dominated by chauvinistic ruminations on imperial futures, in a style reminiscent of the liberal writers who had travelled to discover a ‘Greater Britain’.33 Like Charles Dilke or Edward Freeman, he articulated not just the potential of Britain’s settler colonies, but the threats which faced them, from within and without. That was understandable: while the princes were at the Cape, rebel Boers in the Transvaal routed a British army at Majuba Hill. Like many fledgling champions of the ‘idea of Greater Britain’, Dalton urged the grant of liberty and self-determination to bind turbulent settlers to the motherland. Unless the ‘blending of the two races’ – Dutch and English – took place, all of South Africa might be lost to Germany. Similarly, at Melbourne, he urged that the Australian colonies ought to form one ‘federation’, which could then take its part in a federated empire, which would offer home rule all round.34 Underpinning his visions was the technological romanticism of the time, which saw telegraphs as having annihilated space and welded the British world together culturally and thus politically.35 The princes dramatised that conquest by the ease with which transoceanic telegraphs kept them in touch with the ruling house at home. They dispatched birthday telegrams to Balmoral and Sandringham from Fremantle and Japan. Wandering around the temple of Bubastis on the Nile, immersed in ancient Egypt, they suddenly received ‘a telegram from England telling us of the Queen’s escape from an attempt made to murder her’.36 Dalton’s anxious survey of Greater Britain discounted the faiths of its colonised peoples, which did not in his eyes have ancient pasts worthy of remark. His chauvinism often conflated religion with state power, turning it into an unappetising amalgam of the Bible and Britishness. In a sermon preached to naval cadets on the anniversary of the Spanish Armada and just before the departure of HMS Bacchante, Dalton chose patriotism as his subject and Psalm 62 as his proof text. He explained that ‘in reading the Old Testament, more especially the poems of the Psalmists and the Prophets, you will find it a very healthful practice often to substitute the name of your 33

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See Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton University Press, 2007). Dalton, Cruise, vol. I, 323, 538–49. See Duncan Bell, ‘Dissolving Distance: Technology, Space, and Empire in British Political Thought, 1770–1900’, Journal of Modern History 77 (2005): 523–62, for this theme. Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 107, 367.

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own country and your own country’s heroes for those of Israel or Judah, or the great men of the Hebrew race.’37 To chauvinism, Dalton added colour racism. Musing on the West Indies, he invoked Charles Kingsley and echoed Thomas Carlyle to complain of the inherent laziness of its population. Africans ‘can do so much by the exertion of mere brute force, and [their] wants are so few, that the mind is seldom stimulated to exercise’. Similarly, Dalton scoffed at missionary work among the peoples of South Africa, because to the dim stirrings of their imperfectly developed intellects Europeans are and must always remain in a great measure strangers. England and Englishmen can rule native races, can turn them into good customers, into orderly subjects, and into indifferent Christians – no better and no worse, perhaps, than the majority of white men; but neither they nor their religion can ever hope to gain their entire sympathies or affections.38

Dalton could appeal to imperial philology in support of his contemptuous assertions. He and the princes had received a briefing on ‘Kaffirs’ (or ‘Bantus’), ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Bushmen’ from Dr Theophilus Hahn, a Saxon protégé of Friedrich Max Mūller who had taken up a new chair of comparative philology and the custodianship of Cape Town’s Grey Library. In Max Müller’s pregnant phrase he was a ‘Government philologist’ whose researches were intended to advance British interests just as the pioneers of Indology had assisted the East India Company.39 Dalton wrote up Hahn’s thinking in a lengthy note, which represented native religion as ‘fetichism’: confused, magical thinking which led the Bushmen to revere ‘a caterpillar’ for ‘success in the chase’.40 The publication of Hahn’s researches had provoked debate in Britain on whether primitive religion was a powerful form of mythopoesis or just a survival from ‘savage’ times. Dalton sided with the latter, invoking the developmental terminology of evolutionary anthropologists such as E. B. Tylor to describe African religiosity as rudimentary thinking, which need not concern the princes overmuch.41 The princes needed little encouragement to despise Africans. Like their father before them, they passed time aboard ship listening to blacked-up sailors sing minstrel songs.42 On meeting the deposed Zulu King Cetawayo, 37 39

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Dalton, Sermons, 173. 38 Dalton, Cruise, vol. I, 196, 381. See Friedrich Max Müller, ‘Mythology among the Hottentots’, Nineteenth Century 11 (1882), 110–11 for his support for Hahn. Dalton, Cruise, vol. I, 331. See e.g. Max Müller, ‘Mythology’ and Andrew Lang, ‘Hottentot Mythology’, Academy, 21 (1882), 10–11. Dalton, Cruise, vol. I, 284; Reed, Royal Tourists, 17.

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they dismissed him as a ‘blood thirsty old chap’ whom they were disappointed to find in European dress rather than his native costume, ‘which is almost nothing at all’. Dalton had the princes argue that ‘the most strange fact, though the most certain in nature, is the unequal development of the human race’; the ‘duty of the Englishman’ towards inferior races was no more than ‘fair play and protection’. In his own voice, he urged that Christian sentimentality for African victims of Dutch aggression must not be allowed to frustrate the vital reconciliation of Boer and Briton.43 In Australia, Dalton had eyes only for its English settlers – ‘bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh’, who had changed ‘the sky under which they live and breathe’ but not ‘their race, their manners, their religion’.44 He did not record the princes meeting any Aboriginals, as Alfred had done.45 Even a demonstration at Sydney of Boomerang throwing, a practice ‘so distinctive of the Australioid race’, was carried out by one Mr Moseley. Going down mines and looking over hospitals and schools, the princes ran on European time. The ‘most ancient-looking site’ they inspected in Sydney was St James’s Church, which had been completed in 1805. When they traversed the Downs near Sydney, the Princes stepped into a place where they felt that human time had never even begun. Almost scarily empty, it reminded them of the command given ‘to the forefathers of the human race when they stepped forth into a solitary world’: Go forth and multiply (Genesis 9:7).46 * If human time was shallow in the ‘West and South’ and its spaces either empty or filled with peoples stuck in savagery, then in the second volume on ‘The East’, Dalton reported on rewarding encounters with ancient civilisations. Though it took the princes to colonies such as Hong Kong and Ceylon, the main emphasis was no longer on the extension of British trade or military force, but on encounters between the princes and civilisations and faiths older than their own, in Japan, China, Egypt and Palestine. The Empire was never altogether absent. In Egypt, the Princes travelled over Tel el Kebir, where by the time Dalton published his book, British troops had smashed Urabi’s nationalist revolt against the European bondholders and incidentally given a spur to British Egyptology.47 But in Japan 43 45

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Dalton, Cruise, vol. I, 342, 339–40. 44 Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 548. John Milner, The Cruise of HMS Galatea, Captain HRH the Duke of Edinburgh, KG, in 1867–68 (London: W. H. Allen, 1869), 178–80. Alfred’s interlocutors were Anglicised Christians who protested that they were not ‘wild blacks’ but prayed ‘to the same God’ as he did. Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 571, 583. David Gange, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922 (Oxford University Press, 2013), 165–72.

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they had confronted a society on an independent path to modernisation. The keynote of this second volume was thus the exposure of the princes to overlapping Orients and their attempt to understand why they were ineradicably different to Britain. In doing so, they relied on networks of scholars, which overlapped with but were never identical with British power. In Japan, Egypt and finally Palestine, philologists and archaeologists – the figures who this book shows wrote the tangled geneaology of Christianity – guided them around ancient monuments and sites. Dalton not only reproduced their lectures, but made lengthy additions from his reading, before turning over his drafts to them for their edits, turning a travel journal into a handbook of the education heads of state ought to receive. In Japan, the scholarly diplomat Ernest Satow took charge of the royal party, befriending Dalton in the process.48 A secretary at the British Consulate since the sixties, Satow had immersed himself in Japan, taking a common-law Japanese wife and becoming an authority on its ‘antiquity’. He was a productive member of the Asiatic Society of Japan, whose president he became when he returned to Japan as Consul General in 1895. Like philologists in other fields, Satow considered the reconstruction of ancient texts to be the best means of establishing the original, and thus purest, form of a religion.49 Satow followed other European scholars in his fascination with Shintoism, which the 1868 Meiji Restoration had revived. Did its rituals, which seemed ‘hollow, empty and jejeune’ to Protestant eyes, add up to a genuine religion?50 Satow had answered that question by unearthing the ‘real Shiñ-tau’ behind its bastardised later forms, which he defined as the ‘belief actually held and the rites practiced by the Japanese people before the introduction of Buddhism and the Chinese philosophy’.51 The ‘philological labours’ of Japanese predecessors, who had established a canon of early Shinto texts, were the sources for this enterprise. Yet like a good German biblical critic, Satow rejected the ‘alleged infallibility of the ancient records’, subjecting them to the ‘usual 48

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Satow’s diary is reticent about the princes but records excursions with Dalton to Kyoto bookshops (Satow, Diplomat in Japan, 474–9). Hans Martin Krämer, ‘Orientalism and the Study of Lived Religions: The Japanese Contribution to European Models of Scholarship in Japan around 1900’, in Scholarly Personae in the History of Orientalism, 1870–1930, ed. Herman Paul and Christiaan Engberts (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 143–71. Ernest Satow, ‘The Shintô Temples of Isé’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 2 (1873– 4), 138. Ernest Satow, ‘Ancient Japanese Rituals’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 7 (1879): 95–126 (at 95).

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canons of historical criticism’ and relegating many of their facts and dates to the status of myth.52 His research had been not just critical but comparative. The worldliness of diplomatic circles and the culture shock of Japan had caused Satow to reject not just his nonconformist upbringing, but theism altogether. An agnostic of Herbert Spencer’s school, he had found in Tylor’s theory of animism a convincing explanation of the origins of religion, which in the process explained away its truth claims.53 When he urged that the early religion of the ‘primitive Japanese’ was just another ‘ancient religion’, he implied it was a primitive nature cult.54 Satow felt that the ‘practical side of Shiñ-tau’, which he had advanced through painstaking publications on rites, temples and grave mounds, further advanced this view of his subject.55 Given what he knew of Shinto’s origins, Satow felt that the Emperor’s attempt to revive it as a governing creed for the nineteenth century was misguided and could only end in a ‘system of mental slavery’.56 Despite his own religious doubts, he also regarded the failure of the Japanese to accept Christianity in the seventeenth century with ‘profound regret’ because he regarded their Jesuit proselytisers as the agents not of popery but of modernity, symbolised by their introduction of printing with moveable type.57 The study of Japan’s past had then convinced Satow that its autochthonous religion had no future. Writing in October 1881 to a fellow Japanologist in England, he agreed on the ‘overwhelming superiority of European literature’ and confessed that when he returned himself he would ‘shut up all Asiatic books’.58 Although he championed a strategic alliance between Britain and Japan, he never swerved from his conviction that the British were on a ‘far higher plane of moral civilization’.59 The accident of acquaintance was, then, important in constructing Albert Victor’s and George’s knowledge of Japan. Other scholar officials, 52

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Satow, ‘Ancient Japanese Rituals’, 96; Satow, ‘The Revival of Pure Shiñ-tau’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 3 (1874, repr. 1885), 87. See letter to Mrs Dickins, 8 November 1889, in Sir Ernest Satow’s Private Letters to W.G. Aston and F. V. Dickins: The Correspondence of a Pioneer Japanologist from 1870 to 1918, ed. Ian Ruxton (Morrisville, NC: Lulu Press, 2005), 167–74. By the time of writing he had become a liberal Anglican. Satow, ‘Revival’, 87. Krämer, ‘Orientalism’, 153; Satow, ‘Ancient Japanese Rituals’, 97. For such studies, see e.g. Satow, ‘Shintô Temples’; Satow, ‘Ancient Sepulchral Mounds in Kaudzuke’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 8 (1880): 313–32. Satow, ‘Shintô Temples’, 135; Satow, ‘Revival’, 32. Satow, ‘The Church at Yamaguchi’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 7 (1879), 131; Ernest Satow, The Jesuit Mission Press in Japan, 1591–1610 (London: privately printed, 1888), v–vi. Satow to F. V. Dickins, 10 October 1881, Private Letters, 139. Nigel Brailey, ‘Sir Ernest Satow, Japan and Asia: The Trials of a Diplomat in the Age of High Imperialism’, Historical Journal 35 (1992): 115–50; Satow to Dickins, 27 August 1906, Private Letters, 246.

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such as Satow’s friend, colleague and successor William George Aston, who was a liberal Irish Unitarian, were forming much more positive views of Shintoism as a piety of love and gratitude.60 Satow though had authorised Dalton to dismiss it as a relic. In his summary of his shipboard lectures to the princes, Dalton argued that it had been a primitive nature cult, which had become ‘exceedingly barren and empty (especially in its restored form)’, involving little more than a ‘vague reverence for deceased ancestors, especially for those of the Mikado’. Dalton briskly played down the impact of Satow’s researches, which had ended in the ‘unearthing of the few liturgies known, which are little more than long repetitions of formulae or incantations pronounced over various offerings of the fruits of the soil’.61 Dalton’s disdain for Shinto did not, though, exhaust his interest in Japanese religion. He was much more appreciative of Buddhism, not least because he and the princes absorbed their interpretation of it from a leading Japanese scholar. Touring the Buddhist temples of Kyoto in the company of the ‘Reverend Mr Akamatsu’ – Akamatsu Renjō – the princes wrote that it was a ‘sensation to be able to talk perfectly freely in English to an Oxford man who was also a Buddhist priest’. They were just as impressed to hear that the ‘Rev Mr Buniyu Nanjo’ from a neighbouring monastery was currently at Oxford. Nanjō Bun’yū was studying with Max Müller to improve the Chinese translations of Sanskrit scriptures upon which Japanese Buddhists had relied. Max Müller couched his enterprise in Protestant terms when he wrote that he hoped to create ‘a “Revised Version”’. While the Princes toured Japan, Nanjō was printing a catalogue of the Chinese works which formed the Japanese Buddhist canon at the expense of the India Office: cooperating with, while profiting from the imperial state. It was not just the publications but the personae of Japanese Orienta lists which impressed Westerners. Max Müller felt that Japan could be ‘proud’ of Nanjō and his colleague Kenju Kasawara’s austere devotion to the collation of manuscripts and their aversion to the ‘immorality’ of undergraduate Oxford.62 While Nanjō was devoted to the philological regeneration of Buddhism, Akamatsu Renjō, who later starred at the 1893 Columbia World’s Parliament of Religions, used his Oxford training to finesse its presentation to western sympathisers.63 He had contributed a sketch of his Shinshū sect to 60 61 62

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See William George Aston, Shinto: The Way of the Gods (London: Longmans, 1905). Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 71–2. Friedrich Max Müller, ‘Bunjiu Nanjo, 1849, and Kenjiu Kasawara, 1851-1883’, in his Biographical Essays (London: Longmans, 1884), 188, 212. Judith Snodgrass, Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Columbian Exposition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 151–5.

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Edward George Reed’s history of Japan, which presented it as a Protestant theology of salvation through faith in the ‘boundless mercy’ of Amita Buddha. In Reed’s summary, he and his colleagues were the ‘Protestants of Japan’, who had swept away the clutter of ‘ancient’ Buddism – ‘celibacy, penances, fastings, seclusions, pilgrimages, etc’ – and were exercising ‘vast influence in the religious development of the people’.64 ‘One point’ which Renjō ‘kept insisting on’, noted the princes, ‘was that Buddhism was not a religion but a philosophy. At first sight we could not see what he meant, but after a little bit he made it clear.’ If his worldview seemed reminiscent of scientific naturalism, its metaphysical ‘materialism’ could be ‘supplemented’ with a religious determination to avoid speaking, acting, or thinking evil. As Dalton approvingly summarised his lecture to the princes, Buddhist metaphysics was ‘the most efficacious teaching to promote virtue and discourage vice’. Renjō pursued this interpretation of Buddhism as a lucid but morally fervent worldview as they strolled around his temple. The first sight that greeted them was a statue of the Shinshū’s thirteenth-century founder. The Japanese kneeling before it as they repeated the Namida Butsu prayer, ‘equivalent to our Kyrie eleeson’, resembled Catholics ‘kneeling in church at devotion before the images and pictures of the saints’, but Renjō banished such troubling comparisons. Their reverence was not directed at the teacher, he told them, but was ‘only a thanksgiving for the good deeds done and for the truth taught by them’, which resembled the Christian ‘act of meditation and self recollection’. With such cues, Japanese religiosity looked comfortingly familiar. Passing into the garden behind his temple, a carp pond ‘crossed three times by wooden bridges’ struck them as ‘something like the one at the back of Queen’s College [sic], Cambridge’. Thereafter, the parallelism between Buddhism and Anglicanism became insistent. Rising after a night in the monastery of ‘Omuro-go-sho’ (Ninna-ji), to the ‘cawing of rooks and the sound of bells’, they felt as if they were in the ‘precincts of some old English cathedral’. As a result, Dalton began to regret the apparent westernisation of modern Japan. Contemplating a dilapidated monastery, which the state had starved of funds, he reflected that ‘guns, and uniforms, railways, steam, revolution, and haste to be rich, are the order of the day here as elsewhere. Every one for himself, and the devil take the hindmost; the last man down from aloft will be flogged on the quarter-deck: and in the universal scramble something must be smashed.’65 64

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Edward James Reed, Japan: Its History, Traditions, and Religions, with the Narrative of a Visit in 1879, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1880), vol. I, 84–6. Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 94–6, 98–9, 119.

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Orientalism in Japan, then, produced doubts about the value of westernisation, doubts which proliferated as the princes steamed to Hong Kong and Shanghai. Here, they ventriloquised ‘the Chinaman’, who ‘rightly’ felt that ‘his empire had attained a high civilisation 2000 years before the forefathers of the British race were painted savages, herding with the beasts in their native woods and dells’. Dalton’s survey of Chinese faiths put them on a moral scale, even as he recognised that many Chinese did not regard ‘the religion of the old Chinese Empire’, Confucianism, Taoism or Buddhism as distinct or exclusive faiths. The ‘old state religion’ which had come to China along with the migration of Akkadian people was like the Shintoism which probably derived from ‘elemental nature worship’. Approving of Confucianism as the pursuit of domestic virtue, he was severe in his judgment on Taoism, which had lapsed from its metaphysical pretensions to become ‘the vulgarest and most material of religions’, whose practitioners traded off the ‘dread of spirits’ for profit. Buddhism in China as in Japan struck Dalton as a spiritual, progressive faith. Even in its baroque popular forms, Dalton discerned the craving for redemption characteristic of the revivalist hymns which he had heard godly sailors sing on board HMS Bacchante. Metaphysical Buddhism satisfied more curious intellects, just as some English evangelicals succumbed to ‘subtleties of dogma’, but when the crunch came Buddhists and evangelicals alike conceded that simple faith was the path to salvation.66 Dalton continued his emphasis on the malleability and creativity of Buddhist superstition in his account of the princes’ visit to Ceylon. Buddha’s tooth in the Temple at Kandy might have struck the royal party as a fake, but it was a numinous one and they noted that Asiatic sovereigns had bolstered their authority through association with it. Western converts to Buddhism had urged their grandmother Queen Victoria to do the same.67 * In the Far East, Dalton had depicted the princes learning about an ancient but also a distant faith. On their arrival in Egypt, both classical and Egyptian antiquities suddenly acquired a scriptural context and anchor. No sooner had HMS Bacchante entered the Suez Canal, than Dalton noted it was sailing past Tel-el-Maskhutah, where Edouard Naville ‘has lately discovered Pi-thom’, the sacred city of Ramses II, which the Israelites had built using bricks without straw (Exodus 1:5–18). ‘More curious confirmation of a minor historical detail’ in the Scriptures ‘it would be difficult to 66 67

Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 183, 240, 242, 250, 253–4. Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 325; Ledger-Lomas, Queen Victoria, 253.

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cite’. Dalton’s footnote to this excursus eagerly solicited donations for the recently founded Egyptian Exploration Society, whose members were courting the Protestant public by promising to dig up concrete proofs of Old Testament narratives.68 Thereafter, his account of Egypt constantly mingled topographical and archaeological with scriptural referents. At Heliopolis, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s writings directed them to stand on the ruined walls to view the pyramids of Gizah. The princes mused that Moses must have gazed ‘from this very spot’, in a landscape then free of minarets. The narrative of the visit to the Great Pyramid confirms Dalton’s interest in the religious value of Egyptology, moving beyond antiquarianism to represent Egyptian monuments as timeless symbols of the craving for eternal life, which Christianity ultimately satisfied. The ancient Granite Temple and the adjoining Sphinx were reminders of the scriptural warning ‘that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day’ (2 Peter 3:8). And at that very moment, what should they spot but a scarab beetle! Its entombed offspring, which had once inspired ancient Egyptian necrology, remained ‘a symbol of the Resurrection’.69 Valuable as were Egypt’s monuments for the verification of the Scriptures and thus for Christian piety, Dalton’s racial crotchets meant that he was tempted to situate ‘old Egyptian religion’ in savage Africa rather than the venerable East. Having toured Cairo, the princes undertook a tour up the Nile with Heinrich Brugsch, a Prussian Egyptologist hired by the Khedive to develop a School of Egyptology.70 Brugsch had developed a sideline as a scholarly guide (wissenschaftliche Reisemarschall) for globe-trotting royal visitors, ranging from Emperor Pedro of Brazil to Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria.71 His lectures on Egyptian religion reminded Dalton of Hahn’s discourses at Cape Town on the ‘Kaffirs and Hottentots’. Race surfaced with a vengeance: the Bantu of South Africa may have been as nearly related to the ‘aboriginal inhabitants of the Nile valley’ as the English were to the Aryan ancestors of the Hindus. The ‘rudimentary and animistic beliefs’ of the early Egyptians were accordingly African. If an ‘incoming Asiatic race’ had added monotheistic 68

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Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 366. For Pithom and scriptural verification in Egyptology more generally, see David Gange, ‘Pithom’, in Cities of God: The Bible and Archaeology in Nineteenth-century Britain, ed. David Gange and Michael Ledger-Lomas (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 136– 63; Gange, Dialogues with the Dead, chap. 3. Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 402, 393. Donald Reid, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War One (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 93, 116–18. Heinrich Brugsch, Mein Leben und mein Wandern (Berlin: Allgemeiner Verein für Deutsche Litteratur, 1894), 309–15, 355.

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elements to Egyptian religion, then it never quite shed ‘fetishism’ and the ‘grossest animism’. Yet if Egyptian religion was tainted by its racial origins, Dalton allowed that beneath its grotesque gods was ‘one leading thought . . . Life in its eternal, unchangeable foundation . . . persistency in the midst of change’. It was Brugsch who had developed this emphasis on the underlying monotheism of ancient Egypt as a way to reconcile his Muslim students to its study. But Dalton detected similarities between the sophisticated forms of Egyptian religiosity evident at Thebes and Karnak and Christianity. He shared in the growing admiration for the Book of the Dead, whose eschatology reminded him of Dante or Bunyan.72 It turned out that Egyptian priests could be quite as important in the preparation for the gospel as ancient Greek tragedians.73 The royal tour culminated in Palestine and Syria. This was not quite its end, for the princes went on to visit Athens, Palermo and Corfu, but it was its intellectual and emotional highpoint. Here they would be exposed to a final, heavily Christian form of Orientalism, which involved not the cultivation of strangeness and difference but familiarity and certainty.74 They came to the Holy Land as obedient churchmen, who had observed the major Christian festivals when afloat and dutifully visited colonial churches. In the Holy Land, their cruise became a pilgrimage, which would eventually end with a rite of passage. Several days after their return to British waters, the Princes were confirmed at Dalton’s Whippingham Church on the Isle of Wight, in the presence of Queen Victoria. In his confirmation address, the aged Archbishop of Canterbury mused that while ‘wander[ing] over the world with the privilege of seeing what others read about, and learn[ing] much as to men and places that can scarcely be known without being seen’ was a fine thing, it was more important to learn one’s duty. ‘A Christian is a soldier of Christ. His life is a warfare.’75 They had strengthened this faith in the Holy Land, the decision to spend nearly six weeks riding nearly six hundred miles from Joppa to Beirut being a mark of their earnestness. Appropriately, the first church they had visited at Jaffa was the Crusader church of St George, which although ‘recently restored by Russian money’, brought to mind St George’s, Windsor. On Palm Sunday in Jerusalem, the princes worshipped at the English Church, 72

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Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 456, 459–60, 494. Edouard Naville’s translation of The Book of the Dead did not appear until 1886, but for earlier interest in the ‘idea’ of the book see David Gange, ‘Across the Divide’, in Time Travelers, ed. Buckland and Qureshi, 176–95 (at 182–7). See Chapter 2 above for Aeschylus and the praeparatio evangelica idea. See Eitan Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture, 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 800.

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where the service was a microcosm of Greater Britain, conducted as it was by the Bishops of Nelson, New Zealand and Ballarat, Victoria, ‘whom we had met in Australia’.76 Dalton presented the princes as Protestant pilgrims, keen to see biblical places but aware that to do so without self-deception required immense caution. No sooner had the princes landed at Jaffa – where the pious tour guide Thomas Cook’s boats took them ashore – than they headed to the house of Simon the Tanner, to stand on the flat roof where God’s invitation to St Peter to kill and eat both pure and impure animals (Acts 9:9–16) had prefigured Christianity’s spread to the Gentiles. But troubling their reverence here and elsewhere was the niggling scepticism which Goldhill identifies as the sting in philology’s tail. How could the house be the one where Peter had stayed when it was evidently only eighty years old? At least the view from the roof had not changed: the ‘glistening white sheet of the Mediterranean’ which had greeted Peter when he awoke from ‘siesta’ and explained why he thought God had let down a large sheet from heaven for his feast. As they travelled around Jerusalem then its hinterland, the princes inspected the landscape with pained precision, collating it with the text of the Scriptures to correct the traditional location of biblical events. This required an erudition improbable in teenage midshipmen. Visiting the Tomb of Esau near Hebron, the princes wrote that the Muslim shrine may have started life as just ‘an ordinary Christian church’, ‘the village Si’air being confused with the land of Seir’, or Isa (Jesus) being corrupted into Esau. They thus dismissed its authenticity, after first discussing the tradition established by the Babylonian Talmud and the ‘Arab historian, Jelâl ed Din, in the fifteenth century’. In Jerusalem, they convinced themselves of the errors of the Crusaders in identifying biblical sites – people ‘ready to believe as realities the pious creations of their own fancy and those of the monks’. Just as troubling to a pilgrim’s sensibility was the jousting between Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches at the Holy Sepulchre or the Basilica of the Nativity at Bethlehem, where the armed Turkish peacekeepers in the grotto ‘rather confused’ their feelings. Their aversion to pious frauds led them into Protestant fantasy. Having stood unmoved at the Holy Sepulchre, they sided with scholars who had suggested that the real site of Golgotha and the adjacent tomb of Christ was a skull-shaped hill to the north of the Damascus Gate, an identification which that strange soldier exegete, Charles Gordon, would sensationally adopt in a book published just after the tour’s completion.77 76 77

Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 561, 578, 581. Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 586–7, 623. See Simon Goldhill, ‘Jerusalem’, in Cities of God, ed. Gange and Ledger-Lomas, 71–110 (at 76, 98–100).

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Dalton’s prosy topography reproduced the conversation and writings of their guides, Charles Wilson and Claude Reignier Conder of the Palestine Exploration Fund. Visiting Jezreel and tracing King Ahaziah’s flight to Megiddo after his rout by Jehu – a ‘veritable Majuba Hill’ – the princes explained how ‘Captain Conder’ had corrected earlier identifications of the places involved. Having read Wilson’s paper on the site of ancient Capernaum, they were convinced that it was to be found at Tell Hûm. They could then relax with fish dinners at its lakeside, convinced that they were eating the ‘lineal descendants of those the Apostles caught’. Conder guided the princes throughout their whole tour and was always at hand to suggest a correction or a revelation as they inspected monuments.78 He wrote it up for the Fund’s journal, dwelling on its ‘points of antiquarian interest’, and later dedicated a survey of Syrian archaeology to Albert Victor, ‘in memory of the interest which HRH expressed in the ancient history of Palestine’.79 Conder exemplified the ways in which British Orientalism relied upon state power without ever being quite reducible to it. Having served in the Royal Engineers, Conder led the Palestine Exploration Fund’s survey of Western (1872–5) and then Eastern Palestine (1882–3). His inch-to-the-mile maps catered to the Protestant determination of the Fund to fix scriptural locations as precisely as they could.80 As he later wrote in introducing his Western survey, it had confirmed the ‘historic and authentic character of the Sacred Volume’ by demonstrating that the ‘Land and the Book . . . tally in every respect.’81 His popularising Tent Work in Palestine: A Record of Discovery and Adventure (1878) thus claimed in its preface that he had brought Palestine ‘home to England’.82 Yet Conder felt that philology and archaeology might revolutionise the understanding of Scripture as well as simply verifying it. Like Dalton, he understood the ancient Near East as a dense palimpsest of races as well as faiths.83 In anonymous works published before and after he met 78 79

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Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 668, 689, 693, 572. Claude Reignier Conder, ‘Tour of their Royal Highnesses Princes Albert Victor and George of Wales in Palestine’, in Conder, Syrian Stone-Lore: or, the Monumental History of Palestine (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1888), v. John James Moscrop, Measuring Jerusalem: The Palestine Exploration Fund and British Interests in the Holy Land (Leicester University Press, 2000); Daniel Foliard, Dislocating the Orient: British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854–1921 (University of Chicago Press, 2017), 110–12. Claude Reignier Conder, Tent Work in Palestine: A Record of Discovery and Adventure (1878; London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1887), xiv. Conder, Tent Work, xii. See Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600– 2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 169–70.

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the princes, Conder applied comparative mythology to Christianity’s origins, representing Jesus as an ‘Oriental’ and even suggesting that he had borrowed his teachings from Buddha.84 A volatile compound of biblical literalist and covert heresiarch, Conder also remained a Christian soldier. After acting as cicerone to the princes, he joined Garnet Wolseley’s Egyptian expedition, fighting at Tel El-Kebir alongside their uncle Arthur and winning a medal. An ardent imperialist, he fretted about threats to British supremacy and became a Zionist in the belief that a Jewish state would look out for British interests in the Near East.85 Conder’s career is a reminder that knowledge fused with power in the understanding of religion in the Holy Land, just as it had elsewhere in the world. Albert Victor and George used Saxe-Coburg soft power to get around Syria and Palestine, with the Ottoman Sultan granting them unfettered access at the request of their grandmother’s ministers. At Hebron, they put their royal glamour at the disposal of their scholarly guides. In 1862, Stanley had got into the Haram at Hebron on the coat-tails of the Prince of Wales. Twenty years later, the local Pasha granted Wilson and Conder access along with the princes, allowing them to correct Stanley’s sketch in a published report of their findings.86 Wherever the princes travelled they found rival sovereigns competing with the British to discover and rebuild the biblical and Christian past. They were never far from a Russian building site, as the Romanovs expanded the Orthodox footprint throughout Palestine.87 Dalton mused in a long note that jealousy between the French and the Russians, as rival protectors of the Latin and Eastern churches, threatened to frustrate the extension of an international protectorate for Christians from the Lebanon to all Syria and Palestine. Instead he looked to the ‘Teutonic race’, most probably the German colonists who 84

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See [Claude Reignier Conder], Rabbi Jeshua: An Eastern Story (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1881); Conder, Bible Folk-Lore: A Study in Comparative Mythology (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1884); Conder, Paul of Tarsus, by the Author of ‘Rabbi Jeshua’ (London: George Redway, 1889). For discussion see Michael Ledger-Lomas, ‘An Eastern Story: Claude Reignier Conder and the Oriental Jesus’, in The Other Jesus: Alternative Histories of Jesus and the Religious World of the Past from the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, ed. Annelies Lannoy and Christiana Facchini (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). See e.g. [Claude Reignier Conder], ‘Fanaticism in the Soudan’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 135 (1884): 673–9; Conder, ‘The Zionists’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 163 (1898): 609; Donald Lewis, The Origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury and Evangelical Support for a Jewish Homeland (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 320–1. Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 595, 598; Dalton, ‘The Princes’ Journey through the Holy Land’, 193–5, and Claude Reignier Conder, ‘Report on the Visit of Their Royal Highnesses Princes Albert Victor and George of Wales to the Hebron Haram, on 5th April 1882’, 197–213, both in Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund 14 (1882). Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 758–9.

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were flooding into Syria, to promote Christian interests. Commenting on Athens, Dalton dismissed the Greeks as too nostalgic for Byzantium to stand up to the Ottoman Empire. He instead looked to Austria and Germany, for whom ‘empty’ Asia Minor might be an ‘Australia’ for its ‘overplus’ population. In heading east ‘with the migratory instinct which marks all Teutonic peoples’, Germans would ‘extinguish the barbarism of one half that continent’. The British would benefit from giving Germany an antique Lebensraum by trading with its migrants. An Austrian ‘Sclav Federation’ and a Germanised Asia Minor and Syria would create ‘one continuous and peace-loving Power’ from ‘Berlin to Antioch’, joining with Britain to form ‘one allied Teutonic race’ from the Orkneys to New Zealand ‘and back again across the Pacific to America, and thus girdle the world’.88 Dalton’s fantasy subsumed what the princes had learned about the past to a fantastic future, in which Teutons joined hands over the Orient and won the world for the West. In this Kingsleyan dreamworld, both classical and biblical lands were downgraded to a mere field for the expression of modern racial solidarities. Its Teutomania was rather ill-timed, given that both the Queen and the Prince of Wales had set their face against imperial Germany’s geostrategic ambitions. * The cruise of HMS Bacchante ended shortly afterwards, when after further stops in the Mediterranean the ship passed Gibraltar and entered the English Channel. As they sighted the Devon coastline, the princes recalled verses that Tennyson had written a decade earlier on their father’s recovery from typhoid fever, when the ‘thunderless lightnings’ of the telegraph had transmitted to London ‘the prayer of many a race, and creed, and clime’.89 Dalton’s book was meant to demonstrate that the princes returned to Britain in a position to attract their own homages in future. Its bulk and the delay in publishing it meant that it did not earn him widespread or enthusiastic reviews. Yet its vision of royal tourists as travellers in time and space became ever more significant in subsequent decades. The listless Albert Victor embarked on another eastern tour in 1889–90, this time of India and Nepal. Its chroniclers dwelled not just on the ease with which he travelled and his appetite for killing animals, but on his assiduity in inspecting temples and monuments.90 Talk of a further world tour followed, to the bemusement of Queen Victoria, who considered that he would be better advised to 88 90

Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 737, 754, 759–60. 89 Dalton, Cruise, vol. II, 798. See, e.g., J. D. Rees, HRH the Duke of Clarence and Avondale in Southern India (London: Trübner, 1891), 68–70, 147–8, 184–5.

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improve his dire French and German at the courts of Europe.91 If all Albert Victor’s apprenticeship went for nothing when he died of influenza in January 1892, then a blizzard of mourning telegraphs from around the globe was a tribute to the persona that Dalton and others had manufactured for him. The Chief Rabbi’s funerary eulogy even interpreted his youthful Passover in Jerusalem as a mark of the monarchy’s favour for Jews.92 Prince George inherited not just his brother’s fiancée Mary of Teck and his position in the line of succession, but also the expectation that he would further develop a sympathetic awareness of the faiths that thrived in his future empire. In March 1901, Dalton, now a canon of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, boarded the royal yacht HMS Ophir as chaplain to his former pupil and lifelong friend, who was now the heir to the throne. The Duke and Duchess of York were embarking on a trip to inaugurate Australia’s new federal Parliament, which also served as a leisurely homage to the recently deceased Victoria. They took seven and a half months to travel 50,000 miles by sea and rail around the British Empire, including a return train trip across Canada. As he celebrated Good Friday with hot cross buns in the Red Sea or buried a sailor who had perished from a surfeit of tropical fruit, Dalton must have felt considerable déjà vu. They called once more at Kandy to view Buddha’s tooth – this time photographing it – and viewed trees the princes had planted in Ballarat, Victoria.93 The tour’s chronicler not only represented George as able to rub along with Australians or ‘speak Canadian’, but revelled in his ability to draw polyglot, multifaith crowds of ‘black, brown, yellow and chocolate-coloured subjects’ in Ceylon and Singapore. Following precedents set by tours and durbars in India, George took part in ceremonial encounters with native elites, ranging from Zulu chieftains to New Zealand Māori. These occasions were often assimilationist in intent. Having shaken hands with Siksika Nation leaders in Western Canada, George said he was glad they had given up hunting the vanishing plains buffalo for farming and requested ‘civilisation’ from the British. But in a speech written for him by the local officials who were self-appointed experts on indigenous life, he also made a stilted effort to echo their idioms, hoping that ‘with the help of the Great Spirit, peace, prosperity, contentment and happiness may be your lot and rest in your days’.94 91 92

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Ridley, Bertie, 354–5. ‘The Funeral of the Duke of Clarence’, The Times, 21 January 1892, 3, 8; Ledger-Lomas, Queen Victoria, 215–16. Joseph Watson, The Queen’s Wish: How it was Fulfilled by the Imperial Tour of HRH the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York (London: Hutchinson, 1902), vi, 7, 14, 32, 49–54, 69, 96, 162, 164. Watson, Queen’s Wish, 49, 381. See Wade Henry, ‘Imagining the Great White Mother and the Great King’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 11 (2000): 87–108 (at 98–101).

HMS Bacchante

Modern Canadians feel that Victoria and her successors presided over the genocidal erasure of indigenous cultures. In consequence, such a ‘pow wow’ – during which a clergyman used ‘a hunting whip’ to conduct indigenous schoolchildren in singing the national anthem – can seem a sinister example of royal ‘Ornamentalism’.95 Ornamentalism camouflaged violence behind confected rituals and justified the archaic existence of British princes by sending them to fraternise with the no less archaic rulers of subjugated peoples.96 And yet, for monarchists such as Dalton, such encounters were part of a modern search for a ‘technology of rule’ which had been undertaken with the assistance of an array of contemporary experts.97 The voyage of HMS Bacchante was an early advertisement for an imperial monarchy whose power was an expression of its tolerance, however violently partial and shallow that tolerance now appears to have been. That had not only involved a pilgrimage to the biblical origins of Victorian Christianity, but a journey of discovery which related them to other and hitherto alien pasts. 95 96

97

Watson, Queen’s Wish, 382. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford University Press, 2002). See Reed, Royal Tourists, chap. 2, for the phrase and a fine-grained, sceptical account of the strategy.

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Manuscripts, Morality, and Metaphysics

10

‘Whoso Humbleth Himself Shall Be Exalted, Whoso Exalteth Himself Shall Be Abased’ F. D. Maurice and the History of Philosophy jocelyn paul betts

‘About my scribblings in the Encyclopædia, no one can feel more than I do how utterly unworthy they are of the subject.’1 In September of 1839 Frederick Denison Maurice thus unburdened himself to Julius Hare, his former lecturer at Cambridge, over his article on ‘Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy’ for the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. Yet for all the doubts that Maurice initially felt about his efforts in the history of philosophy, they were to be regarded by friends and foes alike as an important contribution to Victorian letters. A few years later George Henry Lewes introduced his own secularizing, positivist, and remarkably successful Biographical History of Philosophy with an account of the deficiencies of previous authors including Johann Jakob Brucker and Heinrich Ritter and lamented the lack of engaging and informed works for British readers wanting an up to date overview of European philosophical traditions. Despite a vast gulf between their philosophical and religious outlooks, Lewes was nevertheless compelled to acknowledge Maurice’s article with unqualified praise as ‘masterly . . . eloquent, ingenious, and profound’ – if unfortunately inaccessible to a wide audience.2 Some decades later, after Maurice had gradually expanded his essay across four sprawling volumes, not only were its readership and reputation established but for Maurice’s followers it was perhaps the surest testament to his intellectual status. John Malcolm Ludlow backed up his claim that Maurice had been ‘the greatest religious thinker since the Reformation’ by musing that ‘If half a dozen works of contemporary literature survive to the thirtieth century, I believe that Maurice’s Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy will be one of them.’3 As such lavish estimates help to indicate, Maurice was doing far more than providing a dutiful 1

2

3

Frederick Denison Maurice, The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice Chiefly Told in His Own Letters, ed. Frederick Maurice, 3rd edn, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1884), vol. I, 275. George Henry Lewes, A Biographical History of Philosophy, 3 vols. (London: C. Knight, 1845–6), vol. I, 6. J. M. Ludlow, ‘Some of the Christian Socialists of 1848 and the Following Years, Part One’, Economic Review 3 (October 1893): 486–500 (at 491).

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compendium of past thinkers. His work on the history of philosophy is more important to his oeuvre than commentators have recognized, articulating Maurice’s distinctive understanding of philosophy, morality, and politics and the close connections he perceived between them, while providing a striking account connecting the biblical and classical pasts, an account which was also flexible enough to be subtly rewritten across different editions to meet new circumstances. For Maurice, Lewes, and others, the ultimate stakes were high. To write the history of philosophy in this period was to engage in a conversation about the role of ideas in social order that was made particularly pressing by the fluid meaning of the American and French Revolutions and their legacy in questions about church and state, the status of intellectuals, and the workings of government in a democratizing age – concerns that could hardly be ignored when dealing with the writings of Cousin and Comte or Hegel and Schelling. How should philosophy be defined, how did it relate to changes in the public mind, and what would the future hold for the maps of human knowledge turned into territories through texts, movements, and teaching practices? Maurice’s intervention in this terrain provides valuable insights into ideas that animated his career as a hugely influential theologian and moral commentator, a spiritual guide to the English Christian Socialists, and an important representative of philosophical idealism who was to return to Cambridge in 1866 as the Knightbridge Professor of Moral Theology, Casuistical Divinity, and Moral Philosophy. Maurice’s work bore more particularly on a long and pervasive discussion about how to make sense of modern European culture in relation to its Judeo-Christian and classical heritages. This was a discussion threaded with unstable narratives about hybridity and purity and riddled with religious and racial anxieties, as explored by Simon Goldhill in this volume (Chapter 2). As Frank Turner showed in his seminal study of the Victorian engagement with ancient Greece, ‘Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Hellenism and Hebraism, Jerusalem and Athens, Socrates and Christ’ formed a schematic polarity bearing on a range of vital questions in politics, culture, and morality, and not least on Maurice’s central concern – the relationship between philosophy and religion.4 Maurice was seeking to show the subordination of philosophy to theology in a way that might buttress the place of Anglicanism in public life, and his pursuit of this object was intimately related to his presentation of ancient history. Rather 4

Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), quote at xi; see esp. chaps. 6–8.

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than beginning his narrative in a more conventional fashion with the preSocratics and the ideas of Thales of Miletus on moisture as the world’s basic substance, Maurice’s account began with the Old Testament, addressing the question of how philosophy came into being as an outgrowth of divine revelation. From here he sought to join the history of the ancient Hebrews into a seamless whole with the development of Greek thought and its subsequent fate, in a way that gave distinctive meaning to both the biblical records and the annals of antiquity. For Maurice such a history was not merely a useful supplementary tool to contemporary philosophical understanding. Rather it provided a necessary overview of the working of providence within which philosophy was bounded and made comprehensible. It was in historical development itself that one saw the genesis and limitations of philosophy – its purpose and relevance in a divine plan. The connections between philosophy and religion could not be fully grasped through an abstract understanding of the nature of reason and faith, but only through the story of God’s action in the world as it gave rise to different forms of human life and thought. Maurice thus not only gave his history of philosophy distinctive content, but also put the genre to a particular purpose in helping to show the mutual constitution of Christianity and the intelligibility of history. This intelligibility complemented his general theology, centred as it was on the intervention of a knowable God in human time via the Incarnation, and a closeness of the divine to the human that made communal moral progress (and not only individual redemption) feel distinctly possible – an increasingly vital element of Victorian religiosity.5 Maurice’s providential reading of the history of philosophy was also inextricably connected to an exploration of the history and meaning of politics. In bringing together the Old Testament and the works of the Greek philosophers, Maurice was not simply uniting revelation and philosophy, but was also grounding the history of thought in a history of collective human relations. Above all the Old Testament provided a history of the Hebrew polity, and it was as a result of a specific development of human society and authority after the pattern of a divine order that philosophy first came into being, while Greek thought owed its excellence to divine cultivation through political experience. Philosophical speculation needed to be regarded not only as one part of the history of humanity’s relation to God, but as an exercise undertaken in society rather than by isolated reasoning 5

See Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? (Oxford University Press, 2006), 633–4; Jeremy Morris, F. D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority (Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. 173; Bernard M. G. Reardon, Religious Thought in the Victorian Age, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 123–8.

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minds, gaining its deepest, most practical value as a contribution to maintaining a moral community. In consequence, Maurice’s history of philosophy was also an exploration of the nature of righteous polities and provides a useful window onto his political thought and its place in his work as a whole. It illuminates a range of topics that have been important in Maurice’s increasing acceptance as a significant Victorian political thinker, including his attitudes towards church and state, commerce and property, manliness and the family, and the general relationship of morality and political leadership.6 In drawing together these concerns with the question of how philosophy and religion were connected, and presenting the whole in a narrative that linked Jewish and Greek history to the Christian era, Maurice’s history of philosophy provides an important complement to the ideas in his 1838 Kingdom of Christ, generally taken as the most systematic outline of both his political and theological views. Adding to the interest of Maurice’s history of philosophy is the fact that it moved. While much of the longer version of the work that emerged during the 1850s and early 1860s was an elaboration of themes he had already laid down, the process of rewriting also saw a change in Maurice’s mode of dealing both with the ancient world and with the relationship between philosophy and religion. Maurice’s original account had focused rigorously on the Old Testament and Greek thought and the relationship of these to political developments. In the mid-1840s, however, Maurice began reading on a range of other religious and philosophical traditions, attempting to understand them as expressions of a common human longing after divine knowledge that was most fully answered by Christianity. Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy reflected this new interest with the addition of chapters on Indian, Chinese, and Persian thought. As part of the same process Maurice also recast his conception of philosophy, crafting a narrative about a human search for wisdom that was guided by the word of God speaking in all times and places if people were prepared to listen. As Maurice’s vision of antiquity widened outwards from the Eastern Mediterranean, the Old Testament was thus correspondingly decentred as a tool for understanding philosophy’s relationship with religious life. In addition, a text that had been oriented to a large extent towards the 6

See Henry Stuart Jones, ‘The Idea of the National in Victorian Political Thought’, European Journal of Political Theory 5 (Jan. 2006): 12–21; Henry Stuart Jones, Victorian Political Thought (London and New York: Red Globe Press, 2000), 48–52; Morris, F. D. Maurice, chaps. 4–5; Edward Norman, The Victorian Christian Socialists (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 14–34; Jonathan Parry, ‘Christian Socialism, Class Collaboration, and Public Life after 1848’, in The 1848 Revolutions and European Political Thought, ed Douglas Moggach and Gareth Stedman Jones (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 162–84.

F. D. Maurice and the History of Philosophy

question of righteous government and its meaning for the British state now gained a new element of comparative religion that supported a sense of Britain’s divine global mission. Beneath these shifts of emphasis lay an essential continuity, as Maurice struggled with what it might mean to find a unity in the history of ideas by focusing on the personal relationship between God and humanity, avoiding the intellectual pride of philosophical system. A focus on the common human strivings of conscience as the highest mental experience led to seeing philosophy as a practical element of maintaining a godly polity, but also onward to the idea that divine wisdom was at some level universally accessible throughout time and space. The most important interlocutor in this movement was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose idealism was an important fountainhead for a wing of Anglicanism that looked for a reconciliation between the worlds of philosophy and theology without resort to Tractarian emphasis on priestly authority or evangelical trust in the self-justifying simplicity of the gospel. When Maurice confessed his feelings of inadequacy to Hare in 1839, he was writing to a mentor who had helped to cement his appreciation for Coleridge’s philosophical, religious, and political outlook.7 By writing for the Metropolitana, Maurice was also contributing to a reference work that had been originally planned out by Coleridge himself as a pedagogical antidote to the philosophically unstructured mass of information being made available to early nineteenth-century autodidacts, and as a bulwark against the materialism and notions of rational human perfectibility purveyed by the French Encyclopédistes and their successors.8 Maurice’s history was in turn pursuing at least two central lines of Coleridgean thought in tandem. The first was a centring of philosophy on the idea of the conscience. Coleridge had sought to circumscribe Enlightenment ideas of reason by employing a distinction between reason and understanding drawn from Kant and Jacobi. The understanding that had been explored by Locke and Hume was a mere handmaiden to the true reason that encompassed moral intuitions and helped to vouchsafe the existence of God. For Coleridge the conscience was the prior condition of human self-consciousness rather than its result, and this way of viewing personhood formed the basis for a rejection of those who sought after Locke to investigate the mind as gradually emerging from sense data and the association of ideas. It told too as part of an argument about the nature of morality, and its independence from the expediency and utilitarian 7 8

Morris, F. D. Maurice, 37. Richard Yeo, ‘Reading Encyclopedias: Science and the Organization of Knowledge in British Dictionaries of Arts and Sciences, 1730–1850’, Isis 82 (March 1991): 24–49 (at 34–9).

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calculation with which it had been linked by Paley. That the foundation of Coleridge’s faith lay in his conception of reason and conscience also made it possible for him to engage openly with the Higher Criticism and to treat the Bible in a non-literalist way.9 Secondly, as well as following Coleridge in this elevation of the conscience, Maurice was also developing aspects of Coleridge’s politics. In his Statesman’s Manual Coleridge had stressed the importance of the Bible as a source of political science. Following quite intentionally in the footsteps of Milton and England’s seventeenth-century Puritans, Coleridge had laid down that the ancient Jewish theocracy provided the ultimate political exemplar.10 There was nothing in the nature of modern states, whether in their constitutions or socioeconomic foundations, that immunized them against the historical truth that immorality and irreligion led to decline and disorder, as made visible in the French Revolution. Such arguments worked not only against secular radical reformers, but also against constitutionalists who valued political machinery (which might have emerged from the unintended consequences of a long historical development) over ideas of general virtue. In a diatribe against Hume, Coleridge had thus emphasized that working constitutions were only born and maintained through political action fuelled by enthusiasm.11 Maurice’s elaborations of these themes add detail to the point that while the Victorians found pressing reasons to reinterpret Greek and Roman political antecedents in their own increasingly democratic and self-consciously imperial polity, less attention has been paid to the continuing discussion of ancient Israel and its uses in Victorian understandings of the meaning of moral politics.12 Maurice was to make these themes his own, and the way that he brought together philosophy, religion, and politics is clarified by getting to grips with the title of his work. While physical philosophy was a questioning of the order of the external world, both moral and metaphysical philosophy related to the nature of humanity. Moral philosophy was a probing of how to live in accordance with the requirements of the relationships in which one found oneself, while metaphysical philosophy dealt with the division of 9

10

11

12

Thomas McFarland, ‘Prolegomena’ to The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. XV: Opus Maximum, ed. Thomas McFarland and Nicholas Halmi (Princeton University Press, 2002), xli–ccxl (esp.) xli–lxxv. On seventeenth-century ideas of the ancient Jewish polity, see Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Statesman’s Manual’, in Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, vol. VI of Coleridge’s Collected Works, 3–52. This Coleridgean focus on the Old Testament in Maurice’s political thought has been raised in Jones, Victorian Political Thought, 9; Jones, ‘Idea of the National’, 16.

F. D. Maurice and the History of Philosophy

the human mind from nature, asking whether both were subject to the same laws, whether they possessed different powers, and why and how such powers might exist. Moral and metaphysical inquiries were often inextricably linked, justifying the need to account for them as aspects of a single history. Yet the moral philosopher took as a starting point the distinction of man from the natural world and the need to secure a practical knowledge of rules of behaviour, while the metaphysician sought to establish what moral philosophy took as given, gradually moving from study of human faculties to an awareness of the need to comprehend society and the conscience.13 As Maurice wrote elsewhere, the exploration of human faculties without reference to the moral practicalities that make up a truly human existence was like ‘a man fitting up shelves and dividing them by compartments, when he has nothing to put into them’.14 Moral philosophy was conceptually central while metaphysics led towards and supported it, paving the way for a history that emphasized philosophy as fundamentally concerned with, and rooted in, social relations. For Maurice more than for Coleridge, a focus on the conscience thus allowed for a route out of the dangers of prideful system-building and metaphysical wrangling that might obscure divine truth, and towards a practical concern with collective human coexistence. Coleridge had been happy to see history as a series of eras ruled by metaphysical systems that were given life when men were awakened from mere practicality in its guise as dead routine and unimaginative exposition of sensory facts.15 Yet in Maurice’s eyes Coleridge’s true value lay in his constant active concern with the practicalities of law and government, providing a salutary contrast to the mistakenly vaunted sham-practicality of Dugald Stewart and other Scottish thinkers concerned with empirical observation of the processes of thought.16 The point was pressed home towards the end of Maurice’s essay, as he explained that Schleiermacher might have more effectively combated Hegel if during his work on Plato he had paid more attention to The Republic, for ‘the only antidote to a circular system founded on a philosophical notion is a polity founded upon an actual revelation’.17 It was singularly fortunate that Coleridge, despite his own aspirations, had failed to complete a systematic exposition of his thought, for it was as important for philosophers as for theologians to 13

14

15 17

[Frederick Denison Maurice], ‘Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy’ (hereafter ‘MMP’), in Encyclopædia Metropolitana, eds. Edward Smedley, Hugh James Rose, and Henry John Rose, 26 vols. (London: B. Fellowes, 1817–45), vol. II, 545–674 (at 545). F. D. Maurice, ‘Introduction’ to William Law, Remarks on the Fable of the Bees (Cambridge: D. & A. Macmillan, 1844), vii–lxxix (at xxxvi). See Coleridge, ‘Statesman’s Manual’, 14–15. 16 Maurice, ‘MMP’, 672–3. Maurice, ‘MMP’, 671.

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recall the words of Jesus with which Maurice ended his article: ‘WHOSO HUMBLETH HIMSELF SHALL BE EXALTED, WHOSO EXALTETH HIMSELF SHALL BE ABASED.’18 To be humble was to be moral and hence political; to exalt oneself was to be absorbed in the nicer points of metaphysical theories and systematic connections, seduced by an illusory profundity that exiled thought from the common concerns of one’s contemporaries. In mobilizing biblical history as a starting point for this contrast of politics and intellectual system, Maurice was also brought to give some explanation of the relationship between philosophy and revelation. Maurice conceded that revelation, as communicated truth, was not equivalent to the philosophical search for wisdom, but rather its opposite. Yet it was possible to understand divine communication as stimulating this search so that a full history of revelation would deal with both communicated knowledge and its awakening of feelings and faculties that would lead to a continuing grasping after moral certainty. In such a way Maurice subverted the idea of a simple divide between human reason and the direct transmission of divine truth in favour of an idea of the human intellect realizing the need to exercise its rational powers through an intermittent tutelage under God.19 Where the primacy of moral philosophy linked philosophy as a whole to social realities, this blurring of the lines between human powers of thought and divine action placed philosophical speculation within the recorded historical relationship between God and man. Taken together these provided the foundations to a story of philosophy as emerging from divine communications about the nature of social life. The opening of this story concerned the origins of political life in general in a way that reveals the foundational importance of Maurice’s ideas about man and nature. The history of humankind down to their punishment in the deluge was a history of Seth’s offspring preserving familial relations, while Cain’s progeny moved prematurely into political society, cultivating the mechanical arts and neglecting the family. God’s covenant with humanity following the flood was an attempt to reconcile these strands of human life through the creation of nations, which would also have to uphold patriarchal order or risk destruction, as indicated by the curse visited on Ham’s son Canaan after Ham had seen his father Noah drunk and naked. Righteous paternal government by both an unseen being and human fathers raised men above their animal natures, and the effects of losing this patriarchal authority were shown in Maurice’s bold interpretation of 18

Maurice, ‘MMP’, 673–4.

19

Maurice, ‘MMP’, 546.

F. D. Maurice and the History of Philosophy

the story of Babel. As some of Noah’s descendants lost sight of fatherly government they sank into fear of natural phenomena and worship of mere power, leading to the building of walls to protect against nature’s ravages, and resulting in the loss of true society symbolized in the disintegration of common language, as well as the creation of a political tyranny supported by nature-worship. In this way Maurice separated Babylon and all states that rejected God’s covenant with Noah from his concern: their running together of the human and natural worlds explained both their amoral politics and why they gave rise to no philosophy worthy of the name.20 This view of the earliest states had a clear bearing on Maurice’s view of contemporary questions. His sense of language and its history as containing a spiritual vitality that maintained community had informed a lecture of the late 1830s ‘On Words’ in which he vigorously attacked the linguistic theory of the radical Horne Tooke for turning words into mere arbitrary signs, which exercise Maurice took as itself an expression of a declining morality and politics.21 More generally, Maurice’s equation of the apparently advanced states of Mesopotamia with animal instinct put in the starkest terms that it was spiritual virtue rather than material wealth or military prowess that formed the basis of a civilized politics. This was a warning against both privileging visible progress over moral order and the assimilation of the study of politics and social relations to the empirical methods of study of the natural world. The history of the Hebrews from Abraham onwards showed divine guidance recreating a political order in which power was tempered by morality despite the constant threat of reversion to the worship of nature under the influence of the surrounding peoples. This development had three distinct parts. The first involved the imparting of patriarchal authority to Abraham, the second the revelation of the law via Moses, and the third the development of public worship in the state of Israel. The schema here was significant, as Maurice sought to show how the unveiling of different aspects of the divine personality resulted in a harmonious combination of the three institutions of family, nation, and organized religion. The moral education of Abraham began with the revelation of God as a righteous and just being who had both sympathy with mankind and the authority to punish for misdeeds, as at Sodom. Abraham was guided through a series of reflections on the nature of the family that placed him in a position of patriarchal power reflecting God’s own, including a need 20 21

Maurice, ‘MMP’, 546–7. Frederick Denison Maurice, The Friendship of Books, and Other Lectures, ed. T. Hughes (London: Macmillan, 1880), 32–59.

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for sacrifice of the will that prefigured the Incarnation. His development of a manly character through the gradual acquisition of a sense of power, self-sacrifice, and distant posterity, the last fostered by the direct bestowing of land from God, culminated in the institution of circumcision and the creation of a new covenant specific to Abraham’s descendants, with this divine education in the meaning of patrilineal order being continued through Isaac and Jacob.22 By the time of Moses the Hebrews had degenerated into a mere horde through their contact with the Egyptians, meaning that order needed to be restored once again through a new revelation. The voice of God and the vision of the burning bush delivered Moses from the world of nature-worship, and the revelation of the law elaborated a new aspect of the idea of righteous power. The subsequent foundation of Israel connected family and national life through the organization of the tribes as well as through festivals, the selection of elders as magistrates, and the creation of a priesthood in the Levites. The national law allowed the sense of family connection to be joined by a more distinct personhood as individuals comprehended their place in a wider just community that was itself potentially subject to divine judgement. Lastly, this negative element of the law was joined by a positive element that emphasized communion with the divine being, through organized worship, sacrifice, and poetry – a worship that could only exist in political communities and that cemented a truly social feeling at the level of the nation rather than the family.23 The contrast between the Jewish polity and other ancient nations lay in the way that divine communication helped to thread together moral personhood, a regime of national justice, and the possibility of communion with God, preventing power from becoming mere coercion. It has been noted that family, state, and church formed the essential building blocks of Maurice’s politics – and in his Kingdom of Christ, concerned as it was primarily with ecclesiology and the nature of the Christian community, Maurice laid down that the nation and family were subsidiary institutions.24 Yet his history of philosophy complements this picture by showing that the political order that emerged from the earliest revelations involved a growth out of the family, through the nation, and towards an institutionalized religion that helped to connect the state to a universal humanity. The degradation of this revelation and the rise of arbitrary power, culminating in the influence of Rome, provided the background to a new dispensation flowing from the life and death of Jesus. The history of the modern, Christian world was one that began 22

Maurice, ‘MMP’, 547–9.

23

Maurice, ‘MMP’, 552–6.

24

Morris, F. D. Maurice, 70.

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with the church, witnessed the re-emergence of nations, and ultimately led towards new forms of appreciation for the significance of the family in both Protestantism and the rise of the bourgeois household. Maurice’s history was thus not primarily one of the cyclical rise and fall of states, nor of any linear advance, but was rather based around a symmetrical butterfly-like pattern with the sanctification of family at the chronological limits and the universal Church and the life of Jesus at the centre. It was through this pattern that Maurice could connect the wisdom of the Old Testament with the importance of the Christian church to modern social life, and the underlying constant here was the need for divine guidance to raise humanity out of its natural animal existence and into a realm where conscience was interwoven with politics. Philosophy was above all a tool to help polities realize this possibility, and thus although ancient Greek thought took up the bulk of Maurice’s narrative, it remained auxiliary to a far broader story. As well as setting up this historical pattern for comprehending the ancient and modern, Maurice’s description of the Jewish polity allowed him to draw out specific points of importance for early Victorian politics, particularly via the Coleridgean themes of keeping commerce subordinate to wider political ends, and the moral function of aristocratic leadership. The subdivision of land between tribes both demonstrated the sanctity of property, and limited the danger that its accumulation might create a pattern of social division leading to conflict. Equally wise was the devotion of the Levite priesthood to God in substitution for the firstborn of each tribe, preserving in practice the primogeniture that supported the patrilineal family but making clear that it existed in order to further a grander moral end exemplified in the priesthood, to which it could thus be legitimately sacrificed. This was an object lesson in the adaptation of institutions and relative morality to uphold the more absolute aim of moral government, and Maurice linked it to the continuing need for ‘feudal’ ideas to be kept alive without being considered as ends in themselves – with obvious lessons for the British aristocracy who needed to recall the wider moral purpose of their offices. Likewise, Maurice’s description of Jewish public worship was also a reflection on the intertwined nature of church and state, reproducing the double sense in his thought of the church as universal but finding expression in the nation, as the Jewish communion with the one God reminded them that the separation of Abraham from other men was meant to serve a wider purpose touching all nations. Above all, the central code of the ten commandments contained within itself a means of understanding the perennial causes of the decline of states. The loss of reverence

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for God, for parents (a failing that Maurice linked to emigration), for life, marriage, property, and character, and above all the spread of greed and the over-dominance of commerce – these lay at the heart of the failure of commonwealths.25 An example of such decline occurred in Maurice’s discussion of Egypt. During the Jewish captivity Joseph had taught Pharoah that there was a divine order in the universe, thence publicized by the priesthood as instructors of the people, while through the setting up of granaries Joseph helped to replace independent proprietorship with a system more akin to feudalism, having at its root a connection to ideas of family life through fatherly government. Egypt’s paternal oversight of distribution under Jewish influence was further evidence for Maurice of the way that familial sensibilities acted as a counterweight to commerce, and the subsequent corruption of Egyptian virtues amidst material plenty was couched in terms that had evident significance for contemporary Britain. Territorial divisions were allowed to harden into a caste system, and increasing sensualization led to the resurgence of nature-worship. While the Pharoah did not entirely lose his paternal role, the people lost the capacity for cultivation, the priesthood became the servant of government, and politics itself became a series of mechanical contrivances. Materialism, social division, and an amoral administration focused solely on keeping institutions functional were the timeless marks of a society in decay.26 This focus on political organization was far from being a distraction from Maurice’s purpose. Rather it led directly into his understanding of the genesis of philosophy, which could be traced through the Psalms of David to Solomon’s writings in Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. The final element in the development of ancient Israel’s politics occurred against the backdrop of renewed danger of idolatry and worship of nature. Samuel was given a new form of revelation in his internal reception of the voice of God, giving rise to the prophetic tradition. At the same time through crowning Saul he was the vehicle for the creation of a hereditary monarchy, the desire for which God had implanted in the people, and which provided a useful personal permanence to the administration of the law. Henceforth the king would unite civic and ecclesiastical roles as both a political and moral leader, while the prophets would provide a means of rebuking the monarch. That the first philosophers were the kings of Israel showed the new requirement for temporal rulers as representatives of divine order to reflect on the source of morality. The Psalms were a meditation on the relationship between earthly and higher powers, while Solomon’s books were a search for 25

Maurice, ‘MMP’, 552–6.

26

Maurice, ‘MMP’, 549–52.

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a wisdom that might undergird both personal and political life. The Proverbs bore the mark of true philosophy through their concern with the moral nature of everyday experience, and also proceeded according to a method in the connection of various facts to a single principle, and the exploration of this principle through contradictions. Ecclesiastes, in its effort to find a mysterious order underpinning the apparent emptiness and confusion of the world, exemplified a central theme of later philosophical inquiry.27 Maurice’s purpose here was not simply to show that the Bible recorded the origins of philosophy, but also to point to its meaning as a tool for maintaining moral and political order in the absence of ongoing direct communication from God to rulers. Maurice was interested in the way that the influence of the Jewish state had affected its neighbours, not only through the sense of familial government given to Egypt by Joseph, but also through the idea of human lordship found in the Phoenician gods Baal and Astarte, and the softening of Chaldean monarchy.28 Yet he saw little need to posit the idea of a direct Hebrew influence on the Greeks out of sheer veneration for scripture. The divine cultivation of Greek thought was testament to the way that society itself could be an instrument of education – human relationships, laws, and political events served to make humans search after knowledge of themselves and their maker when the right political possibilities were in play.29 In short, the Greeks developed the second great line of philosophical inquiry after the Jews thanks to their political circumstances, and exemplified Maurice’s general dictum that philosophy hit its loftiest heights when political feeling ran highest.30 Maurice based his discussion of the development of Greek myth on its threefold concern with the vital questions of patriarchal authority, the nature of national life, and the mysteries associated with the cult of Dionysus, mirroring the general problem of bringing family, state, and priesthood into a single order.31 In turning to Miletus and to the setting that gave rise to Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, Maurice stressed the municipal self-government and tribal loyalty of the Greeks in Asia Minor in the face of surrounding despotism, and that the emergence of philosophy was preceded by political sages concerned with practical moral problems.32 The novel method of Socrates was to be developed against a background of growing conflict between Athens and Sparta and the question of how to moralize a democratic society, while the relative hollowness and sterility of philosophy after Aristotle was connected to the 27 30

Maurice, ‘MMP’, 560–4. Maurice, ‘MMP’, 673.

Maurice, ‘MMP’, 559–60, 565. 29 Maurice, ‘MMP’, 567. Maurice, ‘MMP’, 567–9. 32 Maurice, ‘MMP’, 570.

28 31

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political effects of Alexander’s conquests.33 The respective pinnacles of the thought of Plato and Aristotle lay in The Republic and the Politics, and the epicureanism and stoicism adopted by Rome appeared in this account as pale shadows of Greek moral struggles.34 Throughout this story, however, new areas of thought were opened up, for while the Greeks were divinely cultivated by the action of historical forces, their philosophy was to lack the revelatory centre that had focused the Jews on the problems of preserving a moral polity. Greek thought therefore necessarily took the form of searching after assurances of the distinctively human through metaphysical investigation.35 Maurice’s analysis was thus a sustained effort to demonstrate that the ideas of the philosophers had reflection on man at their centre, even when they seemed most concerned with unraveling the structure of nature. Thus Thales’ principle of water was an attempt to grasp something that existed in the body that went beyond mere matter, providing an analogy for the soul; Anaximander’s reflections on the origins of the world in the infinite were an expression of human awe; Anaximenes’ principle of air was part of an attempt to describe the outward world as symbolic of inward life; while Heraclitus sought to explore the connection of human individuality with the universal via a common rationality stemming from divine reason. Through such exposition Maurice was attempting to show the Ionians’ meditations on nature as components of a search for the connections between self-understanding and the understanding of the external world. By contrast the Pythagoreans explored the mystery of the infinite through numbers and music, while their desire for unity was expressed in the foundation of communities rather than through attempts to find a unifying principle in nature. The Eleatics were heirs to both the Ionian speculations and the Pythagorean idea of a ground of unity outside the natural world, and thus explored the idea of a reality that was not present to the senses. Xenophanes began this avenue of inquiry, Parmenides took it up to explore divine unity as a condition of the mind and as having a more real substance than nature, and Zeno continued this argument by attacking conventional notions of space and motion, beginning to see words as the objects of philosophy, and as existing outside the realm of the natural. This insight of Zeno’s was to lead in turn to logic, as an investigation of the laws regulating the mind’s affirmations independently of sensory experience. Yet the overarching message of Maurice’s description of the pre-Socratics 33 35

Maurice, ‘MMP’, 579, 621–2. Maurice, ‘MMP’, 567.

34

Maurice, ‘MMP’, 592, 617, 622–5.

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was that their desire to understand the soul and its connections to a grander unity led both to concerns with community and to a differentiation of thought from sensation reminiscent of modern idealism.36 Maurice’s efforts in this vein continued, and it would be impossible and no doubt undesirable to give a continuing detailed account of them here. But it is worth following this line of thought through Maurice’s treatment of Socrates, both because it was pivotal in his treatment of ancient Greece, and because it has been misinterpreted. The concern with exploding the evidence of the senses that had been brought to a pitch by Zeno was to find a more corrosive expression in the arguments of the sophists, who combined their learned speculations too readily with the pursuit of power, to the neglect of morality. It was Socrates’ desire to lead the Athenian youth away from the lure of using words as an end to power, by showing that the sophists were slaves of their terminology rather than its masters, and that there was a reality beyond the conscious formation of concepts. Rather than teaching that men created the basis of virtue and faith, Socrates’ questioning led his interlocutors to the idea that there was a real and inescapable ground to their existence that might provide a basis of certainty worth searching for. Socrates’ famous demon was for Maurice a cipher for the conscience, and in trying to cultivate others’ sense of this inner being Socrates was satisfying human cravings for spirituality, although in the process of pointing to something that lay beyond language and its manipulation he was bound to be accused of both scepticism and vagueness.37 Maurice’s presentation of Socrates and the sophists echoed the views of Coleridge, who had seen the sophists as judging questions of reason by the criteria of the understanding, and was itself an early contribution to a long pattern of interpretation by liberal Anglican thinkers who sought to show Socrates as mediating between the claims of individual rationality and established religious culture.38 Yet Maurice’s Socrates was profoundly not an advocate of contemplation and quiescence over the vita activa of the sophists, and did not reflect an unmediated distaste for the innate corruption of Athenian democracy.39 Maurice’s political diagnosis was more complex than this. The progress of conflict between Athens and Sparta up to the Peloponnesian wars 36 38 39

Maurice, ‘MMP’, 570–5. 37 Maurice, ‘MMP’, 579–85. Turner, Greek Heritage, 264–97. Nadia Urbinati, Mill on Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 144. Urbinati backs this up with a quote from Maurice on Socrates and the sophists: ‘Political life was with them everything; with him it was nothing.’ Yet the quote refers to Anaxagoras. Frederick Denison Maurice, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy, 3rd edn (London and Glasgow: R. Griffin, 1854), 123.

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heightened awareness of each state’s respective excellence in individualism and order and stimulated political and philosophical debate. In the process young men, particularly Athenians, came to support the mere abstract principles of democracy or aristocracy and lost the true patriotism that had led to Greek victory over the Persians at Marathon and Plataea. The Athenian democracy was particularly prone to the dangers of mob sycophancy and litigiousness satirized by Aristophanes, and in this atmosphere the rhetoric of the sophists was apt to be divorced from morality. Yet democratic Athens also had its characteristic virtues in developing citizens’ individual energies and capacity for practical thought, and if the sophists were indeed worldly, which marked them out from the medieval scholastics to whom they had been unduly compared, the solution was not any contrasting monastic unworldliness. Socrates did not point to ‘an escape from common life, from daily business’, but ‘was, like the sophists, a man of business and action’, attempting to find a practical answer to the excesses of his state.40 For Maurice the question of the worth of democratic government was subordinated to the broader question of moral politics that was about far more than who should exercise rule, and it was this question that Socrates’ project had also been oriented to. Maurice’s subsequent accounts of Plato and Aristotle were involved, attempting both to give a sense of their relation to Socrates and to each other, and outlining the connections within their respective corpuses. Plato was lauded for keeping alive Socrates’ dialectical probing and desire to educate and induce thought, and was combatively presented as the opposite of systematic in continuing the search for a sense of reality behind human conceptions through his doctrine of the forms.41 Aristotle’s movement towards logic and the validity of verbal arguments was part of a project of much sophistication, but ultimately a well-intentioned deviation from the pressing questions that had inspired Socrates’ mode of philosophizing.42 There was a value in the continuing traditions of classical thought as they helped to keep alive certain habits of mind that would contribute to the reception of Christianity, and both Cicero’s conception of duty and Philo’s combination of Judaism and Platonism were significant gestures towards a synthesis of morals and metaphysics. Yet after Aristotle a truly constructive history would begin again only with the expansion of the church at the close of the Western Roman empire, and the unfolding of a new world of national and familial life from the Christian ideal of absolute 40

41

Maurice, ‘MMP’, 579–81 (the first quote is from 581); Maurice, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy, 114–23 (the second quote is from 123). Maurice, ‘MMP’, 588. 42 Maurice, ‘MMP’, 601–6.

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morality. With Gregory the Great began an age of missions marking a new era of universal community, and from Charlemagne onwards this was to be in negotiation with the creation of new national states, indicating the need for an integration of absolute and positive law.43 In turn the period from the Reformation onwards involved the strengthening of familial relations both within Christian thought and in civil society. The effects of Catholic teaching on celibacy; of chivalry on mores; and of a feudal system that beneficially kept alive primogeniture but which obscured the family by uniting it too closely with the state and with military dependents, all began to wane. (It was a historical irony for Maurice that the family principle of which the aristocracy was the truest representative had required reinvigorating by the middle classes.)44 The endpoint of this development was represented by the French Revolution, which Maurice saw as a culmination of thought on the social contract that misrepresented the polity as a mere collection of individual atoms. The failure of the experiment was a final mark of the significance of the family to modern politics, the conceptual mirror of God’s earliest lesson for humanity.45 Philosophy since the French Revolution might have taken unproductive turns in the works of figures like Stewart or Hegel, not to mention the destructive ideas of Bentham. Yet the Kantian answer to Humean scepticism had led Coleridge to explore the practical reason and to restore morality to its central position, in a way that connected philosophy with the life of the whole community rather than with the educated few alone. The nineteenth century also displayed a useful tendency towards historicism and the reconciliation of previous opinions under a Christian aegis in authors such as Coleridge, Guizot, and Schelling. This tendency might come to work with the political lessons that had been made manifest during the revolutionary epoch, and against the continuing dangers of systematic philosophy that privileged a shallow novelty over genuine originality of thought.46 Many of the fundamentals of this story that Maurice had worked out in his Metropolitana article were to remain central to his history when he began to rewrite it for publication as a series of separate volumes in the late 1840s. Maurice retained his commitment to propagating a theology that put conscience, humility, and a personal relationship with God in opposition to an unnecessary intellectualism that drew religion away from

43 46

Maurice, ‘MMP’, 641. Maurice, ‘MMP’, 670–4.

44

Maurice, ‘MMP’, 649.

45

Maurice, ‘MMP’, 669.

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common experience. Yet the process of rewriting his history of philosophy was to lead him towards an admission about his earlier work: I failed, as it now seems to me, in a clear apprehension of the word Philosophy, – in seeing what part different nations had taken in the inquiries which it denotes, – in tracing the workings of the Wisdom which had guided these inquiries, – in noticing how one grew out of another. I found also I had indulged far too much in disquisition, and too little in biography.47

The two concerns expressed here were related to two types of revision that on the surface could not have been more different. Maurice’s interest with ‘different nations’ and their part in furthering human thought was to lead to the addition of overviews of a range of religious traditions that could only add to the schematic feel of his account, while the requirement for more biographical detail pulled away from the abstract exposition of ideas and towards a more sympathetic treatment of individuals. In truth, however, both were related to a continuing concern to prevent systematic ideas from interfering with an exploration of practical thought as stemming from personal intercourse with the divine. The most obvious element of this change stemmed from Maurice’s increasing interest in the variety of global religious traditions. The clearest expression of this interest lay in the Boyle lectures that he gave in 1846, published as his Religions of the World and Their Relations to Christianity, a work that remains an important reference point for explorations of Victorian comparative religion.48 The central message of the Boyle lectures was that in Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism one could detect conceptions of divinity that indicated common human longings. The truest means of satisfying these was to be found in Christianity, and the most effective means of converting those who adhered to these traditions would be found in showing how Christian theology intersected with and consummated the spiritual impulses that each of them exemplified. At the same time these religions offered the chance for Christians to regain a sense of the importance of aspects of their inherited faith, and particularly to avoid its degradation into a dry dogma free of mystery. Even in contemporary irreligion there was a lesson to be learnt in the idea that purely human systems of thought must perish and that one should focus on that which unites and outlasts them.49 These thoughts were 47 48

49

Maurice, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy, viii. As in Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 75–7. Frederick Denison Maurice, The Religions of the World and Their Relations to Christianity (London: Macmillan, 1847).

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a continuation of the idea that had run through Maurice’s Kingdom of Christ that Christian sects as well as apparently secular contemporary impulses might find reconciliation in the higher union of a universal community under the personal government of God. Yet there was a sense in which this synthesizing impulse did not sit easily with the way that Maurice’s article on moral and metaphysical philosophy had sought to follow a single line through Jewish morality and Greek metaphysics towards their successful reconciliation in Christianity.50 It also called into question the idea that the excellence of philosophy was related to the twin political traditions of ancient Israel and the Greek city-states. Alongside this question Maurice also came to reappraise the mode that Coleridge had led him into when writing about the ancient world in general and scripture in particular. In 1849 he wrote to Edward Strachey (with whom he had read Tennemann and Cousin on the history of philosophy while working towards his original article): What I object to in Coleridge generally as a critic is his tendency to abstraction; his acquired incapacity for looking straight at a man, and his passion for conceiving him under some forms and conditions which, if they belong, as I readily admit they do, to a higher logic than the ordinary one, are for that very reason apt to deceive more and to put themselves forth as adequate substitutes for life and humanity.51

Revising his history of philosophy had forced Maurice to see that under Coleridge’s influence he had lost ‘simplicity in the study of great living books like the Scriptures, from being addicted to formulas’.52 Maurice had always considered his aim to be a sympathetic, biographical treatment of the history of thought. He had told Hare in 1839 that he had tried ‘to give pictures of men thinking rather than the mere results of their thinking’, and it was this quality of ‘intellectual dramatism’ and the ability to comprehend the meaning of positions wildly at variance with Maurice’s own that made Ludlow regard the Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy as a unique work.53 In writing its second iteration Maurice began to see sticking too rigidly to Coleridgean abstraction as an impediment to this purpose. The result was that Maurice’s 1850 account of philosophy before the life of Jesus began with a subtly different definition of its subject matter that stuck more closely to its etymology – in keeping with Maurice’s sense of the living significance of the history of language. The key idea was now one of 50 52 53

See Maurice, ‘MMP’, 567. 51 Maurice, Life, vol. I, 199, 510–11. Maurice, Life, vol. I, 199, 511. Maurice, Life, vol. I, 275; Ludlow, ‘Christian Socialists’, 491.

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philosophy as a desire for wisdom and the search that this resulted in. The definitions of moral philosophy and metaphysics remained essentially the same, as did the emphasis throughout on conduct and morality. Yet there was a shift of emphasis that we can start to unravel through Maurice’s discussion of Solomon and the origins of philosophy. Maurice pointed to Solomon’s personification of sense as a ‘strange woman’, while wisdom, as an opposite pole exerting an attraction that could hardly be less, was also given a female persona. For Maurice there was a value in Solomon having conceived of the contest between lower and higher human knowledge in such terms, for it spoke directly of individual experience, and avoided abstraction. Yet the personification of wisdom was of more importance than this. Maurice dwelt on the eighth chapter of Proverbs, in which wisdom describes the way that she was brought into being at the beginning of creation, and oversaw it alongside God, as well as afterwards giving counsel to men. For Maurice this was evidence of ‘one who is the sharer of God’s mind, of one who was before the universe, in whom the whole order of creation originated, but of one who regards man as above all this creation, who has been from the first his guide and teacher . . . by whom he is delivered from subjection to the world around him’.54 Though Maurice was not here explicit, his mind was clearly running towards an equation of the personification of wisdom with Jesus, and towards the parallel between this passage and the first lines of John’s gospel on the word’s original presence with God. At the close of his rewritten ancient philosophy he described Jesus as having been the ‘only perfect manifestation’ of the hidden and divine wisdom after which philosophy sought.55 And in 1871 Maurice wrote a new introduction to a two-volume edition of his history that was yet more overt. In discussing how to read the ancient Greeks as a Christian Maurice wrote of the divine wisdom that had illuminated humanity and quoted the opening of the gospel of John on the word as the light of mankind. Maurice’s history was thus a ‘study of the divided forms under which the light has broken in upon the human heart and intellect – of the efforts of the senses to draw it down into themselves – of the corruptions which have darkened it’.56 The shift towards thinking in terms of wisdom was thus a means for Maurice to make even more central the personal relationship between God and humanity, and to posit continuities between ancient and post-Christian thought via an action of the 54 55 56

Maurice, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy, 22. Maurice, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy, 260. Frederick Denison Maurice, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1882), vol. I, xxxi.

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son of God that was not bound to the Incarnation alone, even as the Incarnation retained its significance in his account of the transition from ancient to modern societies. At the same time the focus on politics in the ancient world was in key respects weakened, though not eclipsed, as Maurice reoriented away from God’s education of man through events in the life of society towards a focus on wisdom as a personal influence on each individual. The schema of family, nation, and public religion was still present at points, but a large part of the discussion of the nature of the Jewish polity had been removed. In discussing the origin of Greek philosophy Maurice also significantly altered his message. The early sages, previously described as political, were now described as pursuing wisdom in a variety of forms of which politics was only a part, and the idea of family, nation, and public worship as structuring Greek myth was abandoned. In its place were the ideas that the Greek gods displayed a form of collective counsel that was lacking from their Eastern neighbours, and that the Delphic oracle provided similar counsel to all Greeks, both of these indicating a common idea of religious wisdom and its relationship to practical affairs that distinguished Greek culture.57 Maurice most definitely did not write politics out of his history of Greek philosophy, but there was now a stronger sense that this aspect of his story stemmed from a particular Greek relationship with the broader category of wisdom, rather than from the essential entwining of philosophy with a template for ideal politics. More striking, however, were the changes accompanying Maurice’s geographical widening beyond Greece and the Levant, and particularly his treatment of ancient India. In the Metropolitana he had written that Indian thought evidently played no part in the linear story that he was attempting to tell about the progress of philosophy; that though Indian cosmology involved metaphysical and moral elements, these were in the first case not successful in showing the relations between humanity and nature, and in the second case were not oriented towards social relations; and finally that there was no direct evidence that the Greeks owed anything to Indian ideas.58 All this was to be revisited as Maurice now delved into Hinduism as a distinct tradition of thinking about wisdom, grounded in an identification of God with intellect and thought. This tradition did not contain the Hebrew assurance of the personal rule of God over human affairs, but rather started with individual perplexity, answered by the felt 57 58

Maurice, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy, 82–8. Maurice, ‘MMP’, 567–9.

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sense of a mysterious teacher ruling nature. It subsequently ran together the roles of priest and philosopher, fostered a morality that began and ended with the self in an idea of purification of the soul, and was in danger of losing sight of divinity as anything other than a projection of the human mind. Yet in describing these pitfalls Maurice was also presenting the Sanskrit writings as originating metaphysics, beginning the soul’s questioning of its own qualities and place in the world in a way that should inform a reading of the Ionians and their heirs.59 Moreover there was the importation of a new schema here, for the division this indicated was no longer one simply between Greek and Jew, but was derived from philology as between the ‘Indo-Germanic’ and the ‘Semitic’ – reflecting the way that Maurice had found relief from ‘dark and dull reports’ on ancient India in the work of Friedrich Schlegel.60 A new mode of thinking in terms of linguistic inheritance was making itself felt in Maurice’s story, one that he contained with an existing framework of the distinction between metaphysical and moral philosophy that Christianity would reconcile, here finely retuned as between individual grapplings with mystery and the arrangement of an existing community under assured divine government. This not only showed the way in which Maurice’s conception of wisdom pulled away from his previous focus on politics, but also reflected scholarly tendencies that were serving to make the Old Testament less obvious as a focal point for thinking about ancient societies. Maurice went on to give a description of Buddhism as a failed attempt to separate philosophy from religion; of Chinese concern for political order and tradition; and of Zoroastrian dualism, providing a reconfigured explanation of the Persian affinity for despotism as the good became equated with the will of a distant power enforced through a single human representative. The place of such interpretations in the wider Victorian effort to understand the global history of ideas no doubt deserves more attention, but we can note that each was kept within Maurice’s established mode of stressing the partial recognition of truths that Christianity brought to more complete fruition. There was of course an irony to these additions, as Maurice’s attempts at intellectual humility created an ever more totalizing vision of the history of human thought. Yet in this development we see one response to the challenge not only of defending Christianity’s compatibility with philosophy but of adapting debates over the Bible and classical antiquity in an era of expanding scholarly and political horizons. 59 60

Maurice, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy, 37–52. First two quotes from Maurice, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy, 52; third quote from Maurice, Religions of the World, xvi.

F. D. Maurice and the History of Philosophy

Part of the interest of this story lies in the way that Maurice’s quest for synthesis and universality led him to graft together two potentially quite different conceptions of philosophy – one related to the moral core of the political inheritance of Western Europe from Israel and ancient Greece, and another portraying the voice of wisdom as providing succour to the human soul throughout the entirety of recorded human speculations. These different conceptions can plausibly be related to two distinct contexts, in the discussions of the nature of the British state during a period of deep uncertainty over its stability that reached a significant peak during the 1830s, and in questions about how to conceive of British missionary activity as the difficulty of mass conversion in Eurasia became increasingly apparent. Yet just as much interest lies in recognizing that the history of philosophy provided a platform for such a versatile discussion, and that Maurice could use the genre to thread together so many aspects of his thought. The cynosure of Maurice’s approach was a belief that if one kept sight of the irreducibility of moral personhood and its support from the personhood of God, the divisions between intellectual systems would cease to hold significance. From this central point he sought to give meaning to history, ground contemporary politics, address questions about the unity of religions, place philosophy under theology’s authority, and remind the Victorian intelligentsia of the dangers of losing touch with the general populace. In the under-explored field of how nineteenth-century figures wrote about the ideas and beliefs they had inherited, the history of philosophy remains a virtually untouched area. Yet Victorian thinkers put sincere faith in the causal power of ideas, and such exercises speak volumes about the way that they perceived the diverse problems surrounding intellectual authority, consensus, and conflict, both within British society and regarding Britain’s relation to the wider world.

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‘The Borderland of the Bible’ M. R. James, the Apocrypha, and Christian Antiquity in the Late Nineteenth Century* alison knight and scott mandelbrote

Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) is a figure who attracts, and was attracted by, stories. R. W. Pfaff, in his entry on MRJ in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, described him as ‘scholar and author’, and interest in his life and work indeed tends to fall along these two channels. Historians, librarians, and biblical scholars have been impressed by a body of scholarship of astonishing breadth (notably in the form of catalogues of medieval manuscripts, of which an initial five were published in 1895), much of which has never been revisited on the same scale and therefore retains its utility to this day. Literary scholars and more general readers, by contrast, are most taken by the ghost stories, which began to reach a public audience in 1895 and of which a collected edition first appeared in 1931. These are not, of course, sharply distinguished worlds, whether for James or for his critics. The scholarly milieu of his ghost stories has been widely appreciated from MRJ’s time onward – as his friend and colleague A. Hamilton Thompson suggested, ‘the crowning point of their art is their setting in the frame of his favourite tastes and pursuits, the invention of circumstances suggested by some line of learned research and worked out with minute accuracy of detail’.1 The stories that MRJ wove entertained their listeners in part because they were conspirators in their creation, who could imagine the author as protagonist or indeed remember him as such from travels that they had shared. The boys whom MRJ later enthralled were similarly under the spell of a ‘super-uncle’, whose trappings provided the setting for kindnesses not normally received, a glimpse of irony in the otherwise brutal literal-mindedness of the English public school. Telling tales made MRJ’s apparently dry-as-dust scholarship more human and recalled his own sociability, vulnerability, and humour.2 At the same time, their content sustained the reputation for scholarly

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* This chapter began life as a talk at the Fitzwilliam Museum. The authors are grateful to Suzanne Reynolds and Nicholas Robinson for their assistance. 1 A. Hamilton Thompson, ‘Introduction’, in Montague Rhodes James, ‘Catalogue of the Library of Leicester Abbey (Part 1)’, Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological Society 19 (1936–7): 111–61 (at 116). 2 See particularly the oral testimony collected by Michael Cox, M. R. James: An Informal Portrait (Oxford University Press, 1983), 206–9; and the account given by the editor (and widow of a close friend) in Montague Rhodes James, Letters to a Friend, ed. Gwendolen McBryde (London:

M. R. James, the Apocrypha, and Christian Antiquity

omniscience and idiosyncrasy that his friends were happy to believe the author possessed. In stories like ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’, ‘The Mezzotint’, and ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ (all printed in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, 1904) or ‘The Tractate Middoth’ (More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, 1911), it is impossible to ignore the plots driven by suspicious old manuscripts, unsuspecting museum directors and librarians, the treasures of out-of-the-way churches, or arch inventions such as the ‘Ashleian’ Museum, ‘Canterbury’ College, ‘Shelburnian’ Library, or ‘Sadduccean Professor of Ophiology’.3 What receives less attention is that the reverse is also true: MRJ’s scholarship was itself saturated in an appreciation for stories. Over the course of his career, which saw him Assistant Director (1886) and then Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum (1893), Provost of King’s College (1905) and ViceChancellor of the University of Cambridge (1913), and, finally, Provost of Eton (1918), MRJ made a pathbreaking impact in many fields: manuscript studies and codicology; ecclesiastical art and architecture; archaeology; hagiology; medieval history; and the study of the apocrypha. In his scholarly writing, MRJ’s use of personal history and anecdote might be thought to provide a setting, just as scholarship set the scene for his ghost stories: ‘During the month of September 1895 I visited Ratisbon . . . The West Front has an interesting portal of the fifteenth century, with a large number of statues in and about it.’ Yet, in both learned article and ghost story, MRJ’s use of first-person narration and description did more. It explained how something generated the author’s curiosity, and by making the author a familiar human being, it suggested why something (often deeply obscure) might also sustain the curiosity of the reader: ‘Those who are familiar with these cycles will be aware that the Rejection of Joachim’s offering is almost always the starting-point in them. There is, in fact, nothing which could precede it in the sources which artists ordinarily employed. Yet at Ratisbon it occupies only the second place . . . ’.4 The intrusion of the personal in part reflected the intermingling of travel record and notes on academic research in MRJ’s journals, in part it pricked the pomposity of scholarship (particularly German classical philology – which, as Constanze Güthenke has compellingly outlined of late, ‘articulated its relationship with the classical, and

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Edward Arnold, 1956). For a less positive perspective on ‘the eleusinian mysteries’, see Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (London: George Routledge, 1938), 277. For these, see M. R. James, Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, ed. Michael Cox (Oxford University Press, 1987), esp. 14, 19, 25: all jokes at the expense of Oxford (or rather ‘Bridgeford’). M. R. James, ‘Legends of St Anne and St Anastasia’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 9 (1897): 194–204 (at 196–7).

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especially the classical Greek past, as a quasi-personal relationship’).5 Yet threading throughout MRJ’s prodigious body of work is an appreciation for what he described, with charming simplicity, as ‘old stories’.6 Nowhere is this more apparent than in his writing on biblical apocrypha, a subject for which he had a lifelong fascination and which particularly drove his early career. An often controversial by-way of biblical studies which saw a particular rise in scholarly interest in the later decades of the nineteenth century, the apocrypha represent, as MRJ described in his Old Testament Legends (1913), a group of ‘stories [that] grew up about the great men of the Bible’.7 They are, he said, ‘not true, but they are very old; some of them, I think, are very beautiful, and all of them seem to me interesting’.8 MRJ’s interest in these extra-biblical stories was something which he (and those close to him) attempted to account for again and again – not only for how large they loomed across his published works and for the significant contributions he made to the field but because his concentration on the apocrypha seemed to tell its own important story about the development of biblical studies in the later nineteenth century. In his memoir Eton and King’s (1926), MRJ gave a particularly compelling description of this interest, which served as something of a précis of the priorities and preconceptions of biblical studies in late nineteenth-century England (and, therefore, of the concerns of this essay). He explained, ‘I had cherished for years, I still cherish, a quite peculiar interest in any document that has claimed to be a Book of the Bible, and is not.’9 That his interest was peculiar both is and is not true. MRJ’s fascination with the apocrypha certainly struck his early tutors as strange and unfruitful. Even the indulgent H. E. Luxmoore mocked his former pupil’s peculiar medievalism: ‘I have no new saints: but I saw S. Carlo Borromeo his own very self. the mummied head grins beneath jewelled mitre.’10 Yet, as MRJ’s studies developed at King’s College, Cambridge, what might have seemed a precocious obsession provided an interest that integrated well into an 5

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For example, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, James MSS 4.1 (containing notes made in 1887). See Constanze Güthenke, Feeling and Classical Philology: Knowing Antiquity in German Scholarship, 1770–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 2. Fitzwilliam Museum, James MSS 10.1. M. R. James, Old Testament Legends: Being Stories out of Some of the Less-Known Apocryphal Books of the Old Testament (London: Longmans, Green, 1913), xii. James, Old Testament Legends, xx. M. R. James, Eton and King’s: Recollections, Mostly Trivial, 1875–1925 (London: Williams & Norgate, 1926), 195. Letters of H. E. Luxmoore, ed. M. R. James and A. B. Ramsay (Cambridge University Press, 1929), 9.

M. R. James, the Apocrypha, and Christian Antiquity

environment where an appreciation was developing for the usefulness of apocryphal studies in biblical scholarship. As a body of witnesses that have been ‘at some time or another read in church and treated as Scripture’, but which were not regarded as part of the formal canon, the apocrypha prompted a growing scholarly appreciation for the contribution that texts which had ‘claimed to be part of the Bible’ could make to the understanding of the biblical canon and patristic writings.11 This was true of both the Old Testament apocrypha, that small corpus of texts which formed (and still forms) part of the Roman Catholic canon and which is often printed in Protestant Bibles (as MRJ describes them, ‘that appendix to the Old Testament which we have in our Bibles’), as well as the vast and nebulous class of literature known as the Old Testament pseudepigrapha and the New Testament apocrypha, texts which (with the possible exception of the Book of Revelation, of whose apocryphal status and its consequent associations MRJ was well aware) were never generally considered to be part of the formal canon but which still held at some point in their histories a degree of authority or saw an element of popular use in earlier Christian communities.12 It was in these that MRJ’s interest chiefly lay, and even at Cambridge, his interests were in some ways compellingly peculiar. MRJ was concerned with pseudepigrapha and apocrypha not only for what they said about the canon but in many ways because they were not canonical. He was interested in them because ‘all of them, I think, may fairly be called either fabulous or spurious, or both’ – precisely because they were not biblical truth, but compelling popular stories which had fired earlier Christian popular imaginations as if they were.13 The result was a distinctive body of work, focused peculiarly on a narrow but coherent range of often fragmentary texts, and directed at conclusions surprisingly at odds with those which had often underpinned previous attempts at the study of the same materials. Apocryphal texts are, MRJ wrote, ‘on the borderland of the Bible’.14 MRJ’s work on this ‘borderland’ speaks to a sense in the later nineteenth century that, in order to make new scholarly discoveries, new terrain had to be explored. This might take the form (familiar in accounts of nineteenth-century scholarship) of exploration in search of the Bible in the Middle East, leading to new manuscript discoveries such as those of Curzon (whose travels to monasteries in the Levant first inspired MRJ’s love of manuscripts), Tischendorf, Agnes Smith, and Margaret Gibson, or the use 11 12 13

James, Old Testament Legends, ix. See M. R. James, The Apocalypse in Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 26–8. James, Old Testament Legends, x. 14 James, Old Testament Legends, ix.

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of new technologies such as photography to make previously inaccessible manuscripts readable, or the learning of languages to open up new bodies of manuscript material.15 Other new terrain, however, opened up across the borders that biblical scholars had erected themselves – the borders of what constituted an acceptable source, of canonicity, and of genres. As MRJ’s colleague and collaborator J. Armitage Robinson (1858–1933) reflected in his lecture on the second-century apocryphal gospel of Peter (itself discovered at Akhmim in Egypt in 1886–7), ‘we live in an age of surprises – of surprising recoveries, no less than surprising inventions’.16 MRJ’s interest in the apocrypha took him across many ‘borderlands’ which his contemporaries considered peculiar, and whose recovery he pioneered – the medieval, the visual, and most of all, old stories, the popular literature of early Christianity. His skill in ravelling and unravelling tales, moreover, meant that he could divine connections before discoveries were made or deciphered: ‘The Apocalypse of Peter may go back almost to the end of the first century of our era: Mr M. R. James, of King’s, had told some of us what it would contain, if it were ever found: now we have a large fragment of it, and we know that he was right.’17 In performing this feat of conjecture, which the ‘fragments . . . called out of Egypt’ and first seen by MRJ in Cambridge in November 1892 confirmed, he relied on his broad knowledge (which began to be formed when a boy at Eton) of early Christian writings, especially of the ante-Nicene fathers, and ability, as both codicologist and iconographer, to piece together the elements of a text or a tradition.18 His grasp of medieval Latin texts, including fresh discoveries made in Cambridge libraries, had already demonstrated to him that it was possible to reconstruct the Apocalypse of Paul more completely than the version which Tischendorf had published in Greek in 1866. This was, in turn, a work which could be shown from patristic fragments to share material with the (at that time) lost Apocalypse of Peter, which MRJ believed to be ‘an early book and a popular one’, a witness to the apocalyptic ideas of the first Christians and a source for medieval imagery, including that of Dante.19 15 16

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James, Eton and King’s, 8. J. Armitage Robinson and M. R. James (eds.),The Gospel According to Peter, and the Revelation of Peter (London: Cambridge University Press, 1892), 13. Robinson and James (eds.), Gospel According to Peter, 13–14. The Apocalypse of Peter had been the subject of MRJ’s fellowship dissertation at King’s, begun in summer 1885 and nearly finished by October 1886: Cox, M. R. James, 78–9. Robinson and James (eds.), Gospel According to Peter, 39–40; Richard William Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James (London: Scolar Press, 1980), 74–5, 103. M. R. James, The Testament of Abraham, Texts and Studies II.2 (Cambridge University Press, 1892), 23–4; Montague Rhodes James, Apocrypha anecdota, Texts and Studies II.3 (Cambridge University Press, 1893), 1–42; James, Eton and King’s, 196–8.

M. R. James, the Apocrypha, and Christian Antiquity

MRJ’s fascination with the apocrypha began with a childhood love of their thrilling tales. While at his preparatory school, Temple Grove in Sheen, West London, he ‘collected martyrdoms of Saints – the more atrocious the better – and Biblical legends . . . Nothing could be more inspiriting than to discover that St. Livinus had his tongue cut out and was beheaded, or that David’s mother was called Nitzeneth.’20 As he explained in a letter home, he had already at this point collected about 200 apocryphal works from the Old and New Testament.21 While at Eton, fascination became obsession – ‘anything like a fresh apocryphal book’, he reflected in Eton and King’s, ‘was like meat and drink to me’. It was an obsession that certainly drained his purse. MRJ once spent sixteen shillings (well over half of his term’s pocket money) on ‘the four classical volumes of John Albert Fabricius on the Apocrypha of both Testaments’.22 In a letter home from Eton, he confessed to having purchased ‘five new apocryphal books, Psalms of Solomon, IV and V Esdras, Revelation of Baruch, Ascension of Moses, for 3/-, which I consider an acquisition . . . and I am sorry to say I wasted money on a Petronius which I can’t possibly read’.23 For MRJ’s father and tutors, however, the more concerning cost of his ‘peculiar interest’ in apocryphal literature was that it was detracting from both his time spent on, and his acquisition of a pure style in, classical Greek and Latin Literature. A report from Edmund Warre, then an assistant master at Eton, warned MRJ’s father that ‘he should stick to good models and not go wandering into strange pastures and poor herbage’, and MRJ’s tutor Luxmoore similarly admonished that his ‘technical scholarship and composition will be over-weighted by his miscellaneous reading and research’, and that ‘he dredges the deeps of literature for refuse’.24 In Eton and King’s, MRJ described the trouble his schoolboy ‘apocryphal proclivities’ caused in 1879, when he translated the Rest of the Words of Baruch and attempted to send the result to Queen Victoria, requesting permission to dedicate it to her. Luxmoore wrote again to MRJ’s father to notify him that ‘the Head Master is excessively annoyed at the conceit and bad taste of the proceedings’.25 20 22

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James, Eton and King’s, 13–14. 21 Cox, M. R. James, 15. James, Eton and King’s, 196; Johann Albert Fabricius, Codex pseudepigraphicus Veteris Testamenti, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Schiller, 1722–3); Johann Albert Fabricius, Codex apocryphus Novi Testamenti, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Schiller, 1719); see also Erik Petersen, Johann Albert Fabricius: En humanist i Europa, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1998), vol. I, 348–9. Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James, 28. Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James, 42; Cox, M. R. James, 38–40; James, Eton and King’s, 34–6. James, Eton and King’s, 41–2; Cox, M. R. James, 31–4; Fitzwilliam Museum, James MSS 9.1, 9.2, 9.3.

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The concern demonstrated by Herbert James and by MRJ’s schoolmasters reflected their belief that he was neglecting the two proper routes to scholarly advancement. As MRJ’s biographer Richard Pfaff aptly explains, ‘his fascination with the by-ways of classical and Christian literature made it unlikely that he would settle down to a career as either a classical or theological don, editing Greek historians or producing biblical commentaries’.26 The tradition of apocryphal studies in England did give some basis for their belief that expertise in that area would not be received as a valuable contribution. For most nineteenth-century audiences (if they thought of them at all), the apocrypha were considered to be (in the words of Edmund Gosse, then lecturer in English Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, on the occasion of MRJ’s appointment as Director of the Fitzwilliam in 1893) the product of ‘those poor old doggrell-mongers of the third century on whom you expend (notice! I don’t say waste) what was meant for mankind’.27 MRJ was well aware of such attitudes, even towards the more familiar Old Testament apocrypha which were to be found in most copies of the Bible. In one of a series of brief articles that he contributed to The Guardian in the late 1890s, he noted that: The old Puritan’s prejudice against the Apocrypha has not yet died out, and the very miscellaneous collection of books which goes by that name is viewed with grave suspicion, as if it had attempted to intrude itself into the Bible and had, fortunately, been detected in the act. We tolerate the Lessons from Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, and Baruch, which are read in October and November; but your Tobits and your Judiths, your Bel and the Dragon, and Susanna, are so many unmasked imposters, and we are not quite sure, some of us, that they were not invented by the Pope.28

MRJ’s comments draw attention to the fact that the reformations of the sixteenth century had profoundly altered Christian attitudes to the sources of belief and to the way those sources should be represented to the ordinary believer. The very idea of the canon of scripture underwent substantial change during that period and became an object of contestation both between rival Christian confessions (Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed) and between orthodoxy and heterodoxy within those confessions.29 Luther himself cast doubt on the apostolic authorship of some of the New 26 28 29

Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James, 68. 27 Cox, M. R. James, 111. M. R. James, ‘The Story of Achiacharus’, Guardian, 2 February 1898, 163–4. Irena Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378– 1615) (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Ariel Hessayon, ‘The Apocrypha in Early Modern England’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530–1700, ed. Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Willie (Oxford University Press, 2015), 131–48.

M. R. James, the Apocrypha, and Christian Antiquity

Testament epistles and the Book of Revelation; influential later Lutheran theologians sometimes expanded the list of works that they regarded as uncanonical or even apocryphal.30 The Council of Trent affirmed the integrity of the Vulgate Latin Bible, at the same time as Protestant theologians opened up a widening gulf between the history of the Jewish Church until the departure of the spirit of prophecy and the Church of the New Testament, based in part on an increasingly rigid demarcation between texts which survived in Hebrew and those which were known only in Greek. Later Reformed scholarship teased apart the world of Temple Judaism from that of so-called Hellenistic Jews.31 Confessional polemic between Protestants and Catholics made problematic the history of the early Church, in turn opening a chasm between a doctrinally pure past and a moment of doctrinal restoration in the present: the Middle Ages, whose theology nobody entirely wished to claim and whose popular belief almost everyone came to regard as superstition.32 That polemic helped to keep the question of what was apocryphal and what it might mean to be apocryphal current, in particular through more and more detailed consideration of the authenticity, authority, and significance of biblical citations in the work of patristic authors. This was an area of theological debate in which Lutheran scholars, scholars from the Church of England, and, eventually, scholars who moved between Lutheranism and Anglicanism or between Anglican orthodoxy and the non-juring schism in the early eighteenth century, came to play an especially strong suit.33 The shifting sands of confessionalism contributed to making discussion of the apocrypha, particularly the New Testament apocrypha, an area in which historical scholarship might easily become bogged down in disputes about what constituted doctrinal orthodoxy. In England in the mid-seventeenth century and, especially, in the early eighteenth century, questions of the historical status accorded to 30

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See Euan Cameron, ‘The Luther Bible’ in Euan Cameron (ed.), The New Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. III: From 1450 to 1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 217–38 (at 227–8); Kenneth G. Hagen, ‘“De Exegetica Methodo”: Niels Hemmingsen’s De Methodis (1555)’, in The Bible in the Sixteenth Century, ed. David C. Steinmetz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 181–96 (at 188). For an introduction to a vast literature on this topic, see Scott Mandelbrote, ‘The Old Testament and Its Ancient Versions in Manuscript and Print in the West, from c. 1480 to c. 1780’, in New Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. III, ed. Cameron, 82–109. See, for example, Anthony Milton, ‘The Church of England, Rome, and the True Church’, in Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 187–210. See Backus, Historical Method, 253–325; Jean-Louis Quantin, ‘Apocryphorum nimis studiosi? Dodwell, Mill, Grabe et le problème du canon néo-testamentaire au tournant du XVIIe et du XVIIIe siècle’, in Apocryphité: Histoire d’un concept transversal aux religions du livre, ed. Simon C. Mimouni (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 285–306.

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apocryphal texts helped to drive accusations of heterodoxy or to define sectarian attitudes. Nowhere was this more apparent than in eighteenth-century Cambridge, where William Whiston’s championing of the Constitutions of the Apostles and his redefinition of the nature of primitive Christianity led to the deprivation of his university offices in 1710.34 Yet when MRJ progressed from Eton to King’s in 1882, he entered a scholarly environment that was particularly suited to his apocryphal pursuits, where a wider academic movement was fostering an appreciation for the usefulness of apocryphal literature in biblical studies. A ‘broad church’ marriage between the interests of those who looked back fondly on an imagined Catholic past in the Church of England and those who were concerned that Anglican theology should embrace the intellectual discoveries of higher criticism was largely responsible for this. For the former, a warrant for considering the apocrypha was provided by John Cosin’s Scholastical History of the Canon of Holy Scripture (1657) and by the painstaking research into patristic practice and the canon of Humphrey Hody’s De bibliorum textibus originalibus (1705). For the latter, the reception, in outline at least, of the findings of the Tübingen school of New Testament criticism proved the necessity of the careful consideration of the effects of the context of Christian origins on the writing of the Gospels and Epistles.35 The impact of more traditional, ‘lower’ forms of criticism remained strong through knowledge of the manuscript discoveries of Constantin von Tischendorf (1815–74), some of which MRJ revisited in Paris in 1890, or the editorial work on early Christian canons of Samuel Prideaux Tregelles (1813–75).36 In local terms, the editorial work on Codex Bezae that had commenced with the type-facsimile edition prepared by Thomas Kipling in 1793 and that flowered in the edition of F. H. Scrivener (1864) underpinned ongoing academic concern at Cambridge with the physical evidences for early Christianity, including both canonical and apocryphal texts relating to the Greek New 34

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Justin A. I. Champion, ‘Apocrypha Canon and Criticism from Samuel Fisher to John Toland, 1650–1718’, in Judaeo-Christian Intellectual Culture in the Seventeenth Century, Allison P. Coudert et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 91–117; Eamon Duffy, ‘“Whiston’s Affair”: The Trials of a Primitive Christian, 1709-1714’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 27 (1976): 129–50. MRJ considered Whiston’s ideas ‘so eccentric as to deserve mention’: Herbert Edward Ryle and M. R. James (eds.), Psalms of the Pharisees, Commonly Called the Psalms of Solomon (Cambridge University Press, 1891), xv. See James Carleton Paget, ‘The Reception of Baur in Britain’, in Ferdinand Christian Baur and the History of Early Christianity, ed. Martin Bauspiess, Christof Landmesser, and David Lincicum (Oxford University Press, 2017), 307–54. James, Testament of Abraham, 1, 23. In the Introduction to Psalms of Solomon, Ryle and MRJ go further in their exploration of the findings of ‘higher criticism’, including the ‘exceedingly felicitious’ (xvii) conjectures of Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918).

M. R. James, the Apocrypha, and Christian Antiquity

Testament. More generally, the influence of John Ruskin, on Luxmoore and more widely in MRJ’s circle, promoted a more positive view of the Christian antiquity and practices of the Middle Ages. When MRJ set out on his career with medieval manuscripts, he could draw on the codicological principles (and a few of the descriptions) established in Cambridge by Henry Bradshaw (1831–86, and a Fellow of King’s).37 At the forefront of the scholarly reappraisal of apocryphal literature was the noted ‘Cambridge Trio’ (‘we three’) of biblical scholars, B. F. Westcott (1825–1901), F. J. A. Hort (1828–92), and J. B. Lightfoot (1828–89), who, however, left Cambridge some time before MRJ’s matriculation, when he became Bishop of Durham in 1879.38 The Cambridge Trio had introduced pivotal re-evaluations of the earliest New Testament documents, and they particularly promoted the idea that the history and milieu of a text were of utmost importance. As Westcott argued in the first significant publication of the Trio in this regard, A General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament (originally published in 1855, but significantly expanded and revised in subsequent editions, up to the seventh edition of 1896), ‘the books which are the divine record of Apostolic doctrine cannot be fitly considered apart from the societies in which the doctrine was embodied’.39 Across several influential works, including Hort’s textual introduction to Westcott and his momentous edition of the Greek New Testament (1881), and Lightfoot’s work on the epistles of Ignatius (which culminated in his edition of 1885), the Trio argued for the gradual and piecemeal development of the formal canon, the borders of which ‘were not marked out sharply, but that rather the outline was at times dim and wavering’, finally emerging as ‘the result of a common life, and not of any formal action’.40 The claim was that early Christian texts should be treated ‘on purely historical grounds’, which involved extensive consideration of the contributions of apocryphal texts to the development of public worship and a painstaking methodology of sifting through the evidence provided by a wide range of apocryphal and patristic texts.41 37

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Richard Beadle, Henry Bradshaw and the Foundations of Codicology (Cambridge: Richard Beadle, 2017), 85. Arthur Westcott, The Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1903), vol. I, 390 (29 May 1870). Brooke Foss Westcott, A General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament, 7th edn (London: Macmillan, 1896), 2. Brooke Foss Westcott, The Bible in the Church, new edn (London: Macmillan, 1879), xi, 293. Westcott, A General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1855), p. vii. The various prefaces added by Westcott to subsequent editions (in particular from the expanded fourth edition) show the development of these arguments.

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MRJ’s approaches and interests integrated well in this environment. Hort was particularly impressed with MRJ’s dissertation on the apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter. He recommended MRJ for a fellowship on the strength of it, even if Westcott considered ‘the Gospel and Apocalypse of St Peter’ to be ‘later than . . . the narrative . . . of the Canonical Gospels, and far below it in simplicity and spiritual force’.42 The appreciation was mutual; in Eton and King’s, MRJ described Hort as ‘eminent in University life, and full of kindness to me’.43 MRJ and Robinson dedicated their edition of The Gospel According to Peter, and the Revelation of Peter to Hort shortly after his death, explaining that To his voice we had looked forward as the one voice which should tell us, as no other could, where we were right or wrong. Now we must learn it in a harder school. But it will remain a sacred duty to carry out these investigations with the patience and deliberateness which his example enjoins and his removal has made more than ever necessary.44

MRJ had earlier dedicated his first substantial publication, Psalms of the Pharisees, Commonly Called the Psalms of Solomon (1891) to Westcott and was on familiar terms with him through the friendship of older Kingsmen.45 The occasion for the edition underlines the place that apocryphal literature then held in Cambridge theology: it was intended to act as a set-text in the Tripos. In editing it, MRJ worked with and under Herbert Ryle (1856–1925). Ryle’s election as Hulsean Professor of Divinity had encouraged King’s to appoint MRJ to the post of divinity lecturer. Later Bishop of Winchester, Ryle was MRJ’s forebear at both Eton and King’s, and a close member of his family circle as a godson of Herbert James. Here and elsewhere, MRJ’s early scholarship also owed much to Hort (who had written on apocryphal topics in works of reference like Smith and Wace’s Dictionary of Christian Biography that he had read at Eton), and he often consulted him – when MRJ discovered in 1885 two Latin versions and then in 1886 a complete Greek text of ‘the romance of Joseph and his wife Asenath’ (in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and the Bodleian, respectively), he took the finds first to Hort.46 42

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King’s College, Cambridge, Archive Centre, James Papers, GBR/0272/MRJ/D/Prothero (G. W. Prothero to F. J. A. Hort, 28 January 1887); Westcott, General Survey, 7th edn, iv. James, Eton and King’s, 252. 44 Robinson and James (eds.), Gospel According to Peter, 8. James, Eton and King’s, 128–31. For MRJ’s early work on the text, see Fitzwilliam Museum, James MSS 21.2. James, Eton and King’s, 198; Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James, 72–3, 78; Henry Wace and William Smith, A Dictionary of Christian Biography, new edn with an Introduction by Michael Ledger-Lomas (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018).

M. R. James, the Apocrypha, and Christian Antiquity

MRJ was therefore conscious of the traditions in which he stood. Even as a schoolboy, he had realised the importance of the early eighteenth-century editions of Fabricius, ‘whose services to Apocryphal literature can hardly be over-estimated’.47 He later suggested that the real false step in studies of the apocrypha in England had only occurred with the publication of William Hone’s Apocryphal New Testament in 1820: ‘a misleading and unoriginal book’, which had distorted the work of earlier editors.48 MRJ’s earliest forays into the editing of apocryphal texts in the 1890s show awareness of contemporary German and French scholarship (and the willingness to judge it).49 They display interest in the ongoing broadening of knowledge about the setting of early Christianity that was being driven by the discovery of previously unknown translations of texts (even if MRJ himself never properly returned to the field he had abortively tilled when he taught himself Ethiopic at Eton in order to translate The Rest of the Words of Baruch).50 Although his grasp of the Western manuscript tradition was growing rapidly (fed in part by his enthusiasm for modern forms of travel by railway, the Cheylesmore double tricycle, and, from 1895, the safety bicycle), MRJ remained dependent on others for information from libraries that he had not yet visited.51 Reports on Viennese holdings were one of the services performed for him by Robinson, with whom and other scholars MRJ had conceived the series ‘Texts and Studies’, in which most of his early work appeared, over breakfast in Christ’s College in August 1890.52 Yet, in some respects, MRJ remained sui generis. His long-term regard for the text that he later published as The Biblical Antiquities of Philo, and which he identified as a pseudonymous product of Hellenistic Judaism from the first century, began neither with editions of sixteenth-century Lutheran or 47

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Ryle and James (eds.), Psalms of Solomon, xiv; see also Anette Yoshiko Reed, ‘The Modern Invention of “Old Testament Pseudepigrapha”’, Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 60 (2009): 403–36; cf. James,Testament of Abraham, 8–9. Fabricius was ‘still unsurpassed’ to MRJ, The Lost Apocrypha of the Old Testament (London: SPCK, 1920), ix. M.R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1924), xiv–xv. Ryle and James (eds.), Psalms of Solomon, xv–xxi; James, Testament of Abraham, 7–12; Robinson and James (eds.), Gospel According to Peter, 46–7; Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James, 71–8. Notably in the appendix on the Arabic version provided by W. E. Barnes for James, Testament of Abraham, and the commission from Robert Bensly’s widow to complete his edition of The Fourth Book of Ezra, Texts and Studies III.2 (Cambridge University Press, 1895). On the history of the study of this text, see Alastair Hamilton, The Apocryphal Apocalypse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). On travel, see James, Eton and King’s, 151–4; The Letters and Memorials of William Johnson Stone (Eton: Spottiswoode, 1904), 54, 106–9; Fitzwilliam Museum, James MSS 14.1. James, Testament of Abraham, 3 (cf. 3–4, MRJ’s account of the manuscripts he had himself collated in Paris in 1890); Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James, 102; Cox, M. R. James, 102–3.

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Catholic editors, nor even with the long manuscript tradition that he was later able to trace across Europe. Instead, it arose from ‘four detached fragments’ that ‘In 1893 I came upon . . . in . . . Cheltenham, in the Phillipps collection’. These MRJ printed in Apocrypha anecdota (1893): ‘No one who reviewed the book in England or abroad recognised that they were taken from a text already in print.’53 MRJ’s enthusiasm for this form of serendipity might be contrasted with the view, already expressed in print in 1893, of James Rendel Harris (1852–1941) concerning Greek uncial fragments of a genuine work of Philo of Alexandria: ‘the book had passed into Sir Thomas Phillips’ [sic] library . . . and was now to be found in the possession of his son-in-law, Mr Fenwick of Cheltenham . . . a charge of one pound per diem is made to all persons who collate in this library, and this renders prolonged or careful study impossible.’54 The methods that characterised Cambridge theological scholarship – a careful combing of historical evidence for the use and transmission of a text, collation against patristic quotation, and awareness of subsequent translations and adaptations – can be seen across MRJs apocryphal publications. Beyond shared elements of method, MRJ inherited from the Trio an ideology of the usefulness of apocryphal literature for understanding early Christian priorities. He went further, however, in his judgement of the value of these books, regardless of their importance as sources of historical context for theological orthodoxy. As he argued in Apocrypha anecdota (1893): To me there is real pathos in the crude attempts of these ignorant or perverted souls to tell their friends or their disciples what – to be feared or hoped for – lies in the unseen future, or on the other side of the grave. But if the pathos is obscured to many readers by the crude fancy or the barbarous language, not many will deny these books possess considerable historical value. The high-road will serve us well enough if we want to visit our cathedral cities: but in order to get an idea of the popular architecture of a district we must often digress into obscure and devious by paths. The apocryphal books stand in the relation of by-paths – not always clean or pleasant – to the broad and well-trodden high-roads of orthodox patristic 53

54

M. R. James, The Biblical Antiquities of Philo (London: SPCK, 1917), 1–27 (at 9); James, Apocrypha anecdota, 164–85. MRJ nevertheless owed his initial knowledge of the manuscript containing the fragments to Heinrich Schenkel, Bibliotheca patrum latinorum britannica, 3 vols. in 10 (Vienna: Carl Gerold’s Sohn, 1891–1908). J. Rendel Harris (ed.), Fragments of Philo Judæus (Cambridge University Press, 1886), ix; on the difficulties of scholarly access to the collections of the late Sir Thomas Phillipps, the greatest collector of manuscripts of all time, see A. N. L. Munby, Phillipps Studies, 5 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1951–60), vol. V, 65–7.

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literature. If a future historian wants to realise vividly what were the beliefs of many large classes of ordinary Christians in our time, he will derive great help, I doubt not, from the ‘Sunday Stories’ of the last thirty years: and not less information can be gathered from the apocryphal books as to the popular beliefs of average Christians in far earlier times.55

If the ‘high-road’ remained the study of canonical texts, then apocryphal literature allowed scholars to place the biblical canon within a clearer contemporary landscape, which, for MRJ, embraced the afterlife of early Christianity as well as its first flowerings. Although MRJ’s priorities accorded well with the general developments in Cambridge in the 1880s and 1890s, some crucial distinctions must be drawn between his ‘peculiar interest’ in the apocrypha and those of his Cambridge contemporaries. First and foremost, despite his frequent insistence on the importance of the apocrypha for understanding the ‘high-road’ of New Testament studies, he rarely applied the results of his apocryphal research to canonical texts. Where scholars like Westcott, Hort, Lightfoot, and Robinson wrote extensively on New Testament and patristic texts, and Ryle, Robert Bensly (1831–93), or the Professor of Arabic and University Librarian, William Robertson Smith (1846–194), tackled both Old Testament and Hellenistic Jewish materials (in a multitude of languages), MRJ did not.56 In 1893, Robinson wrote that the German New Testament and apocrypha scholar Theodor Zahn (1838–1933), to whom MRJ had referred (sometimes favourably) in his own writings, ‘can’t make you out at all. He seems to think you must be very limited in your range to write only about Apocrypha and would like to draw you out’.57 When these scholars wrote about the usefulness of the apocrypha, they always had in view the reinforcement of the authority of the canon – for them the appropriate destination was always a high-road or a cathedral city. In A General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament (as well as The Bible in the Church, which was addressed to a popular rather than a scholarly audience), Westcott stridently argued that historical accuracy must come before (but not instead of) theology. He emphasised that: 55 56

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James, Apocrypha anecdota, vii–viii. For Bensly, see footnote 50 above; MRJ depended initially on Robertson Smith for the translation of Arabic materials used in James, Testament of Abraham (see 7). He also revised the translation of the manuscript eventually sent over from the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, which Barnes prepared (see 133). Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James, 104; cf. James, Testament of Abraham, 7–8, but also the more critical judgements in Robinson and James (eds.), Gospel According to Peter, 41–2.

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the Bible may be treated historically or theologically. Neither treatment is complete in itself; but the treatments are separable; and, here, as elsewhere, the historical foundation rightly precedes and underlies the theological interpretation. The Bible has suffered, and is in danger of suffering more, from the inversion of this order.58

Good theology could only come from a historically accurate sense of what the text of the Bible properly is and its usage in its contemporary context. Westcott expressed a similar attitude to the establishment of his and Hort’s edition of the Greek New Testament; in a letter to Hort of July 1870, he wrote ‘[we] have only to determine what is written and how it can be rendered. Theologians may deal with the text and version afterwards.’59 Yet despite such arguments that theology must follow from historical accuracy, it is clear that Westcott believed it did follow. He continued from his suggestion that ‘the historical foundation rightly precedes and underlies the theological interpretation’ with the claim that: The truest and most faithful historical criticism alone can bring out into full light that doctrine of a divine Providence separating (as it were) and preserving special books for the perpetual instruction of the church, which is the true correlative and complement of every sound and reverent theory of Inspiration.60

For Westcott, attention to the apocrypha eventually proved the authority of the canon and demonstrated the Holy Spirit in action among early Christians. Awareness of the history of the composition of the apocrypha did not reveal a canon that came about by accident; instead, he argued, the early Christian Church always had a clear sense of the special authority and integrity of the canonical texts, which was also reflected in their literary, historical, and spiritual quality. Even if individual Christians had made use of apocryphal texts, ‘the whole body was instinct with a sense of the truth and ready to maintain it’.61 Hort was more willing to concede that apocryphal writings ‘had a large popular currency’, and in their circulation ‘we seem to be in the presence of a vigorous and popular ecclesiastical life’, but he too was eager to assure readers that even if early Christians had enjoyed the use of apocryphal literature, they still had had a clear sense that they were not canonical.62 58 60 62

Westcott, Bible in the Church, viii. 59 Arthur Westcott, Life and Letters, vol. I, 392–3. Westcott, Bible in the Church, viii. 61 Westcott, History of the Canon (1855 edn), 372. B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort (eds.), The New Testament in the Original Greek: Introduction and Appendix (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1882), 126. Although the edition was the combined work of both Westcott and Hort, Hort was substantially responsible for the detailed Introduction.

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MRJ, too, was firm in his belief that the apocrypha did not convey doctrinal truth – they remained ‘obscure and devious by-paths . . . not always clean or pleasant.’63 Nor did he have any truck with the idea that apocryphal texts might belong in the canon; to anyone who would say ‘it was only by accident or caprice that they were not put into the New Testament’, MRJ responded that ‘the best answer to such loose talk has always been, and is now, to produce the writings, and let them tell their own story. It will very quickly be seen that there is no question of anyone’s having excluded them from the New Testament: they have done that to themselves.’64 MRJ wholly agreed with his contemporaries that the apocrypha were neither biblical not doctrinally true – but he disagreed with the idea that this had always been plain to early Christians. He repeatedly argued that early Christians (and indeed Christians throughout the medieval period) did think the apocrypha were authoritative and spiritually valuable – and this was precisely why they were interesting. The point was that early Christianity was not suffused with intrinsic knowledge of the canon; as scholars like Westcott readily admitted, the outline of the canon ‘was at times dim and wavering’.65 To regard the early Christian as always having known that apocryphal literature was not spiritually true was what gave rise to the belief that apocryphal literature amounted to ‘so many unmasked imposters’, as if the apocrypha ‘had attempted to intrude itself into the Bible and had, fortunately, been detected in the act’.66 For MRJ, what made the apocrypha important was that they sat on the borderland of biblical truth, and that their stories had been in some way spiritually compelling to early Christians. It did not matter if the Church had established that they did not convey doctrinal truth, for their ‘great and enduring interest’, he explained, was that: If they are not good sources of history in one sense, they are in another. They record the imaginations, hopes, and fears of the men who wrote them; they show what was acceptable to the unlearned Christians of the first ages, what interested them, what they admired, what ideals of conduct they cherished for this life, what they thought they would find in the next.67

To MRJ, the apocrypha mattered because they revealed what early Christians found moving, what compelled them spiritually. This emphasis 63 65 67

James, Apocrypha anecdota, viii. 64 James, Apocryphal New Testament, xi–xii. Westcott, Bible in the Church, xi. 66 James, ‘Story of Achiacharus.’ James, Apocryphal New Testament, xiii.

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on the response that the apocrypha sparked among early Christians – that his own ‘peculiar interest’ was sparked by their concerns – emerged again and again across MRJ’s work on the apocrypha. In his work on fragments of evidence for the text of the Apocalypse of Peter, for example, he explained that ‘for myself, they had always possessed a curious interest, as being the remains of a book once highly prized in several important Christian communities’.68 What would have been the point of tracing the religious thought of the age through apocryphal texts, if apocryphal texts had been fundamentally distinct from the religious thought of the age? This emphasis on the essential historical interest of apocryphal studies (rather than their interest as clues to something else) was perhaps where MRJ’s concerns were most distinct from those of other contemporary scholars of the apocrypha. Despite the fears of his father and tutors, MRJ’s ‘apocryphal proclivities’ provided the entrance to a distinguished scholarly career, focused above all on the ever-expanding study of the manuscript sources in which he could indulge them. Yet, although he stridently believed in the importance and usefulness of studying the apocrypha, MRJ would have continued to study them even if this were not the case. Lynda Dennison suggests that any shortcomings MRJ had as a scholar stemmed from ‘a disinclination to work on aspects of books which did not especially absorb him’.69 Although she does not pursue the suggestion further, it certainly seems to be the case that the driving factor in MRJ’s work was personal interest. Güthenke’s exploration of the crucial role of ‘a language and rhetoric of feeling and desire . . . in the way classical scholars conceived (and conceive) of what they were doing and what they were looking for’ aligns with this view of what drove MRJ’s apocryphal studies (and his studies generally).70 As he concedes in Eton and King’s, ‘What appeared to me to be important was the finding out of things that interested me; and since these things included my proper and prescribed work, all was well.’71 In essence, it was convenient that his ‘peculiar interest’ in the apocrypha integrated well into the priorities of 1880s and 1890s Cambridge, because MRJ would have studied them regardless. He found in them not only a means to integrate the study of the Bible and antiquity (including a way to bridge the gap between the ancient world and that of the Middle Ages) but also a spiritual electricity to spark the interest of any Christian. It was no accident that, even within the realm of apocryphal 68 69

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Robinson and James (eds.), Gospel According to Peter, 40. Lynda Dennison, ‘Introduction’, in The Legacy of M. R. James, ed. Lynda Dennison (Donnington: Shaun Tyas, 2001), 1–10 (at 1). Güthenke, Feeling and Classical Philology, 2. 71 James, Eton and King’s, 141.

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studies, what often concerned MRJ should be apocryphal apocalypses.72 That scholarly and theological concern was enhanced, but not created by, MRJ’s awareness of their importance for English medieval art, which had initially been set out by Paul Meyer (1840–1917), the leading French professional student of manuscript iconography.73 MRJ seemed eager to alert his fellow scholars to the role an individual’s interest might play in driving a choice of subject, and to argue for the critical importance of such thoughts or feelings: it seems that no one cares very much to investigate apocryphal books: though, if professed theologians are pressed on the point, they allow unanimously that it is extremely important that investigations should be made in this field. I can forgive them in a measure for not undertaking the task themselves, for I am very well content to do things which not everyone else is doing at the same time: but I cannot altogether sympathise with the contempt that is rather freely showered upon the literature as a whole. It is plain to be seen that most of the books are very badly written, some of them very savage and horrible, all of them most obviously unhistorical. But ought we not to be alive to the interest which they possess as being the products of human minds?74

Such arguments did not serve only to underline the scholarly delight of studying something for the mere joy of it. Rather, MRJ suggested that it was crucial for good scholarship, for ‘those who are interested in all branches of early Christian literature’, to ‘appreciate the importance of understanding what books were popular and what mental pabulum attracted the ordinary reader in the early centuries of the Church’.75 If biblical scholars were really interested in early Christianity, they should be alive to what had interested early Christians. If scholars believed religion existed only as creeds or correct doctrine – if they were only interested in how orthodoxy was defined and transmitted – then they would ignore what had been spiritually popular – what animated and propelled popular belief – and neglect a series of texts that conveyed the lived experience of Christians.

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For another focus, see Aideen O’Leary, ‘By the Bishop of Babylon? The Alleged Origins of the Collected Latin Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles’, in Legacy of M. R. James, ed. Dennison, 128–38. For MRJ’s links to Meyer, see Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James, 191, 314; see also Léopold Delisle and Paul Meyer, L’Apocalypse en français au XIIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Didot, 1900–1). Meyer’s work on Cambridge manuscripts to some extent anticipated that of MRJ: ‘Les manuscrits français de Cambridge’, Romania 8 (1879): 305–42; 15 (1886): 236–357; 32 (1903): 18–120; 36 (1907): 481–542. James, Apocrypha anecdota, vii–viii. 75 James, Apocrypha anecdota, 54.

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For MRJ, the essential importance of apocryphal literature was that early Christians read, transmitted, and saved them because they liked them, not because they were suffused with a pure sense of doctrine. And they liked them because they were entertaining stories – not doctrinally correct, not even well-written, but compelling. It was, he suggested, necessary to understand and appreciate what was moving about them, what attracted ordinary people to religion, the crucial role of old stories as popular entertainment and of entertainment, narrative, and imaginative appeal in the popularisation of religion. Here, as imitated in the ghost stories that he wrote, people confronted the supernatural, their hopes and fears for a life to come. MRJ established across his works on the apocrypha that their popularity meant they had a longer and more penetrating appeal than most biblical scholars gave them credit for: ‘They have, indeed, exercised an influence (wholly disproportionate to their intrinsic merits) so great and so widespread, that no one who cares about the history of Christian thought and Christian art can possibly afford to neglect them.’76 Because others clearly had neglected them, it meant that MRJ was seeing their reach in places others didn’t. The longevity of these texts, their translation into Latin, their use in art, meant that the reach of apocryphal stories extended well into the medieval period, where he was best placed to make discoveries. MRJ’s interest in, and belief in the value of, the medieval was not confined to manuscripts and textual discoveries. His concern with the long popular reach of the apocrypha extended into medieval art, architecture, illuminations, and other adaptations. Writing of the Apocalypse of Peter, he stated: How many of our popular notions of heaven and hell are ultimately derived from the Apocalypse of Peter, I should be sorry to have to determine. But I think it is more than possible that a good many of them are; and that when we sing in church of a land where ‘everlasting spring abides. / And never-withering flowers’ [from the hymn ‘There is a land of pure delight’], we are very likely using language which could be traced back with few gaps, if any, to an Apocalypse of the second century.77

Similarly, ‘we could trace the influence of the Apocalypse of Paul upon almost all the medieval visions, even in the Divina Commedia of Dante.’78 76 77 78

James, Apocryphal New Testament, xiii. Robinson and James (eds.), Gospel According to Peter, 81. Robinson and James (eds.), Gospel According to Peter, 40.

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Just as early Christian texts could not be appreciated properly without also understanding the stories that fired popular imaginations, it was necessary to appreciate the ways in which such stories were made available to contemporary scholars through medieval and early modern intermediary sources. Material arts such as sculpture or stained glass could not be understood without reference to contemporary literature and legends, and often the iconography involved in visual art could help identify and date those legends. In his application for the post of Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge in 1891, MRJ wrote the Vice-Chancellor a letter explaining the extent of his research into Christian art and iconography, covering material ranging from sculpture and painted glass to illuminated manuscripts and architecture. His object in this, he explained, has been to trace, so far as I could, the historical development of sacred art from the point of view of selection and treatment of subjects, and to bring it into connexion with the literature and legends to which the artists have had access . . . Should I be elected, I should propose to make the development of Christian art, and its connexion with Christian literature and legend, the subject of my published lectures.79

MRJ was not successful in his bid for the Professorship, but his letter highlights his alertness to the range of media that popular Christian stories penetrated. A particularly demonstrative example can be found in a lecture delivered at the chapter house at Ely Cathedral before a session of the Royal Archaeological Institute on 16 August 1892. It was printed in the Archaeological Journal for that year (49:345–62) and subsequently the Bishop of Ely, Lord Alwyne Compton, financed a separate edition, with fifty-five collotype plates, in which the text was somewhat revised and expanded. In this lecture and subsequent publications, MRJ’s emphasis on tracing legendary and apocryphal material through various media and through the mediation of ensuing periods was clearly apparent. The primary purpose of the lecture was to identify literary sources for the decoration of the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral, specifically for the sculptures in relief carved into the niches that form an arcade running along the chapel 79

Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James, 115–16. MRJ’s role in the archaeological work of the Cyprus Exploration Fund expedition, in which he had participated in 1888, shortly after his first appointment at the Fitzwilliam, involved an exploratory dig at the graves in Leontari. It was, however, largely confined to the interpretation of Greek inscriptions and the composition of a historical account of classical and later references to Paphos. For this, MRJ was significantly indebted to Joannes Meursius, Creta, Cyprus, Rhodus, ed. J. G. Graevius (Amsterdam, 1675): D. G. Hogarth et al., ‘Excavations in Cyprus’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 9 (1888): 147–271.

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walls. Each niche has two spandrels, and each spandrel depicts a group of figures, which remain in defaced form. As Pfaff suggests, ‘MRJ’s studies . . . had equipped him to notice that [the visible remains of the relief sculptures] which could be at all easily identified fit into a pattern, not biblical but apocryphal, of the life and miracles of the Virgin.’80 MRJ was able to identify the Lady Chapel sculptures because of his interconnected treatment of textual sources and fine arts, and the afterlife of the apocrypha in the late antique and early medieval period. He explained that: The necessary key to the interpretation of about half the sculptures was applied to me by a detail on the seventh stall from the west on the south side – a flight of fifteen steps with a child going up them, a robed figure at the top and two more looking on. This is undoubtedly the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple which occurs in every Life series of the Virgin’s Life, but not very commonly as a separate subject. The presumption is that in a Lady Chapel there will be a series of the Life of the Virgin. and so it proves in this case.81

Interestingly, in a short preface to the separate publication of the lecture in 1895, Compton elided the apocryphal derivation of the sculptures: ‘The Paper read by Dr. James at the Cambridge Meeting of the Archaeological Institute . . . identified the subjects of many of the Sculptures, of almost all those referring to the history, Scriptural and Legendary, of the Virgin Mary.’82 For MRJ, the sources were distinctly apocryphal, and they passed through a fascinating filter of medieval literature and art. In the preface to the 1895 publication, MRJ outlined the descent of the ‘legends’ that underlay the figures depicted, emphasising that ‘No survey of early Christian literature that aims at completeness can omit some notice of what are called the Apocryphal Gospels and their congeners, be the latter Acts, Apocalypses, or Epistles.’83 Again, MRJ explained apocryphal literature as a response to popular demand; as he described in Old Testament Legends: It is likely enough that after reading some history in the Bible you may have wondered whether there was anything more to be known about the people of whom it told you. You would have liked to find out what happened to Adam, or Joseph, or David, besides the things which are written in the Bible. It was just so in ancient times.84 80 82

83

Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James, 117. 81 Fitzwilliam Museum, James MS 10.1 (fol. 3). Montague Rhodes James, The Sculptures in the Lady Chapel at Ely (London: D. Nutt, 1895), Preface. James, Sculptures, 2. 84 James, Old Testament Legends, xi–xii.

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Similarly, MRJ claimed that the biblical silence concerning the birth, life, and death of the Virgin Mary ‘was filled up by the novelists of the Christian Church’, positioning such apocryphal texts as creative engagements with biblical material and, moreover, likely to inspire further creative engagements.85 He identified the second-century Greek Book of James and Gospel of Thomas as early apocryphal sources for expanded accounts of the early lives of the Virgin and Christ, which at some point between the sixth and tenth centuries were combined into a single Latin work, known as the Liber de infantia B.V. Mariae et Saluatoris (also termed the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew by Tischendorf). MRJ argued that it was this text, a medieval reworking of earlier apocrypha, that underpinned the figures and scenes depicted in the Ely sculptures. Although he did not identify a single literary source for the order of the episodes of the apocryphal virgin’s life, MRJ catalogued multiple medieval representations of the same apocryphal material, in literary and in visual forms, which bore considerable resemblance to the Ely sculptures. In particular, he noted two fourteenth-century illuminated manuscripts whose imagery derived from the apocrypha (the Smithfield Decretals and the Carew-Poyntz Hours, which MRJ had purchased for the Fitzwilliam in 1889) which ‘show a marked resemblance to our series here – so strong, indeed, that I am almost certain that their designers had the same unidentified collection of miracles before them’.86 Discussing the thirteenth niche from the west on the north side at Ely (figure 2), MRJ suggested that the sculpture depicted ‘the story of the Pope (Cæsarius or Leo) who was tempted by Satan in the guise of a woman when he was saying Mass; by way of penance he cut off his hand (or hands), and it was restored to him by the Virgin’. MRJ explained that this story was ‘copiously illustrated in both the Carew-Poyntz Horae and the Smithfield Decretals’.87 MRJ justified the connections he drew between textual representations of the apocrypha in the medieval Liber de infantia and the iconography of these illuminated manuscripts by explaining that: The more closely we study the remains of early sacred art, the more frequently do we detect that the smallest details have a meaning, and a meaning which can only be explained by reference to the literary source which guided the artist.’88 The ‘literary source’ that guided MRJ was the evolution of ‘old stories’, the 85 86

87

James, Sculptures, 2. James, Sculptures, 8; cf. Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 48; M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge University Press, 1895), 100–20. The ‘Smithfield Decretals’ are British Library, London, Royal MS 10 E IV. James, Sculptures, 55. 88 James, Sculptures, 62.

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legends that represented popular creative engagement with biblical themes. What emerges from his work on the Lady Chapel – otherwise a by-way that engaged comparatively little of his time and attention – is a picture of a scholar who worked across multiple disciplines and media, but who maintained for some time a clearly defined unifying focus that crossed ‘the borderlands of the Bible’ to recover both apocryphal stories and the medieval media that recorded and preserved them. To suggest that MRJ maintained a firm sense of the importance of old stories is to argue that his impressive scholarship was indebted in part to his literary imagination, just as his stories are saturated in his scholarly milieu. Yet this is not all that his alertness to the value and appeal of compelling narrative achieved. His most significant contribution to the nineteenth-century study of the apocrypha was to make the case that the popular literary imagination mattered in biblical studies, that it had a longer reach and a more vibrant legacy and life than scholars and general audiences gave it credit for. This was not a direction taken by most technical biblical scholars, whether in England or elsewhere, and although English theologians remained preoccupied with patristic studies, these were increasingly seen by others as a by-way in ecclesiastical history rather than a high-road to the discovery either of texts or popular beliefs. While his approaches had coincided with the emphases of Cambridge theology in the late nineteenth century, MRJ increasingly took a different path – more firmly that of a student of medieval manuscripts and iconography, but at the same time more decidedly as someone writing for a popular audience. Apocryphal research (in which he continued to be productive) took a back seat to the cataloguing of manuscripts and the composition of ghost stories, and MRJ increasingly emphasised providing accessible English translations of biblical materials as well as his narrative version for younger audiences, Old Testament Legends. It was not just the case, however, that his preoccupation with ‘these apocryphal curiosities . . . seems to have been unconsciously proleptic . . . because what really interested MRJ was not so much what chiefly interests biblical scholars as what interests medievalists’.89 MRJ’s career as a scholar of biblical antiquity was in many ways a nineteenth-century one, conducted when early modern editions remained authoritative, under the shadow of a dominant German academic culture, and within the last vestiges of an enclosed and confessional intellectual community, shaped by friendship, shared experience, and patronage. Even in the field of his greatest specialisation (which had 89

Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James, 103–4.

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little in common with the legal and political interests of some of the most significant contemporary Cambridge medievalists), MRJ was conscious of how things had changed: The fact is that since I began to busy myself with these things, the department of learning called palaeography has been more and more justifying its claim to be called an exact science. The multiplication of photographic facsimiles enables a student to have under his eye all the extant examples of writing of a given date. The methods of abbreviation and contraction of words that were in use in different scriptoria and different countries have been studied and classified. The scripts of Corbie, Laon, Reichenau, Lyons, and several other great centres are known entities. As time goes on, we shall be able to differentiate yet more minutely. What applies to writing is true of illumination as well. The younger workers in the field can look forward to discriminating the ateliers at which miniaturists worked in France or England in a way which was not dreamt of thirty years ago. I follow their advance with interest and pleasure, but cannot emulate them.90

MRJ’s most compelling talent was to bring otherwise dry-as-dust material to life, a talent that stemmed (in his apocryphal studies) from his recognition that earlier Christians had rich imaginative lives, and that this mattered both for scholarship and for its own sake. In a manuscript held at King’s, MRJ wrote in June 1883 about stained glass coming to life: ‘A Night in King’s College Chapel’. In this story, the narrator (who seems, again, an imagined version of MRJ himself) finds himself locked in the chapel at night after falling asleep studying the windows. The figures depicted in the windows then come to life and begin to bicker and chat; Reuben smokes a pipe and complains to Moses about the misbehaviour of the children of Israel; Eve takes offence at comments by Job’s wife; Tobias’s mother tells off Jonah, whose whale has splashed her; Jonah responds that ‘he had yet to learn that a prophet, even though he might have only five chapters, wasn’t a cut above an old woman out of the Apocrypha with half-a-dozen verses to bless herself with’.91 Even writing to entertain himself and his friends, MRJ recognised that the impulse to bring the biblical to life – arising from his own desire to imagine ‘whether there was anything more to be known about the people of whom it told you’, and from his throughgoing sense that early Christians shared such imagination – was what made the apocrypha interesting.92 90 91

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James, Eton and King’s, 199–200. King’s College, Cambridge, Archive Centre, James Papers, GBR/0272/MRJ/A/14/a; Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James, 55. James, Old Testament Legends, xii.

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Intellectual Superstars The Limits of Religion

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Words Thrown Out Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah* laura mccormick kilbride Ante omnia, frater, hoc in nomine Domini admonemus et praecipimus, ut quando auditis exponi sacramentum scripturae quae gesta sunt, prius illud quod lectum est credatis sic gestum quomodo lectum est; ne substrato fundamento rei gestae quasi in aere quaeratis aedificare St Augustine, Sermones 2.6 [But first and above all, brothers, I must in the name of the Lord to the best of my ability both urge upon you and insist upon one thing: when you hear the hidden meaning explained of a story in Scripture that tells of things that happened, you must first believe that what has been read to you actually happened as read, or else the foundation of an actual event will be removed, and you will be trying to build castles in the air.]

Introduction But is literary criticism a secular pursuit? The standard histories of our discipline say yes. We know how this story goes: in the wake of the First World War, literary studies, a poor man’s classics, was established to fill the void left by an increasingly optional religious practice.1 The literary canon * I wish to thank Simon Goldhill and Stefan Collini for their generous conversation and reading suggestions at the outset; Clive Simmonds at the University library for his wide-ranging knowledge of late nineteenth-century educational publications and editions; the PhD students at Edinburgh University’s Nineteenth Century Seminar for their pertinent questions; the first-year students at Peterhouse for staying with me and with Arnold while reading in unprecedented times; Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft, the best of interlocutors and the most patient. 1 Raymond Williams was among the first to take this long view in his study Culture and Society 1780–1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), suspecting in Arnold ‘a transference of emotion from the old concept to the new’ (126). Lionel Trilling, in Matthew Arnold (London: Unwin University Books, 1963; first published 1939) had previously noted how Arnold’s writings pushed ‘faith to that ultimate point beyond which nothing remains but to break definitively with the past and its texts and dogmas’ (321). Terry Eagleton was the first to give Arnold the official credit for this transition in Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), arguing that ‘If one were asked to provide a single explanation for the growth of English studies in the later nineteenth century, one could do worse than reply ‘the failure of religion’ (20), adding: ‘the key figure here is Matthew Arnold’ (22). For a succinct overview, see David Jaspers’ chapter ‘Biblical

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was its holy writ and reading was its practical formation. This story matters because the belief that reading will somehow make you a better person still underwrites many of the arguments made in defence of the humanities in the UK today.2 Yet a more recent change in direction called, variously, the theological turn, or the turn to or return of religion, as well as the increasing use of the term ‘post-secular’ by professional critics of literature, raises the question: just how secular is literary theory?.3 Eager to think about religion as more than an historical phenomenon, scholars have pushed back against the assumption that literary art replaced religion in the long nineteenth century as a source of moral values. However, few literary scholars have begun by reflecting on the beliefs already implicit within this question, or its horizon. For if secularism is defined, following Charles Taylor’s definition, as a situation in which belief in God has become one option among others, the fact that there are options means that belief can no longer be experienced naïvely or as an absence, but must be experienced as a construal.4 No one knew this more intimately than Matthew Arnold, poet, critic and inspector of schools, whose remark in an 1867 letter to Henry Dunn presents a peculiar grammar of assent: That Christ is alive is language far truer to my own feeling and observation of what is passing in the world than that Christ is dead.5

Writing against the excessive rationalism which had betrayed his earlier hopes for revolutionary France, Arnold falls between the stools of naïve and non-belief and catches himself. Christ’s resurrection and the redemption of the world, that central dogma of Christianity, is true to ‘feeling and observation’, yet it is also ‘language’. This is no straight credo, but

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Hermeneutics and Literary Theory’, in The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English, ed. Rebecca Lemon et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 22–37. See, for example, Stefan Collini on the development of liberal education in Britain in What Are Universities For? (London and New York: Penguin, 2012) 58, chap. 3 passim. A more thorough definition is beyond the scope of the current essay. However, to offer a few coordinates: literary theorists prefer to talk about a ‘theological turn’, or, if historically minded, a ‘turn to’ or ‘return to religion’. Occasionally, the phrase the ‘return of religion’ is used to emphasise religion as an alternative epistemology which might be better adapted to the needs of literature. The term ‘post-secularity’ seems grounded in the social sciences. For a wide-ranging and provocative summary, see Michael W. Kaufmann. ‘The Religious, the Secular and Literary Studies: Rethinking the Secularization Narrative in Histories of the Profession’, New Literary History 38/4 (Autumn 2007): 607–27. ‘So there is a condition of lived experience, where what we might call a construal of the moral/ spiritual is lived not as such, but as immediate reality, like stones rivers and mountains. The alternatives they faced in life were: living a fuller devotion, or going and living for lesser goods . . . not taking off after a different construal of what fulness might mean.’ Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 12. Letter to Henry Dunn, dated 12 November 1867, in The Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996–2001), vol. III, 189–90.

Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah

something examined at a distance. Charles Taylor’s choice of verb, to ‘construe’, has the sense ‘to interpret’, but has roots in construere – to build or piece together – and it is the integrated sense of the way in which we use words to piece together our sense of reality which is ascendant here. For Arnold, the phrase ‘He is risen’ (Matthew 28:6, Mark 16:16, Luke 24:6) was uttered at a certain moment in the past, yet it has a certain appeal to his feelings and observations at the present moment. Instead of wrestling with faith, Arnold parses this central Christian truth as a student construes her sentence. Looking at language in a certain historical half-light gives the reader a foothold between faith and doubt, a position beyond a straight yes or no from which one can ‘feel and observe’ the world. This is a position originating, not in some irreducible fact about our experience of language, nor in any one theory, but in practice. A practice of reading which found formulation in Arnold’s biblical hermeneutics throughout the 1870s and which, once considered against the whole history of reading practices, appears both distinct and new. It was this position that gave Arnold his ‘vocation’ for the following two decades: to change the way in which people read the Bible, in the hope of reconverting his reader. Recognising the rise of literalism on the one hand, and an increasing loss of belief on the other, Arnold attempts a middle way, consolidating and preaching the compromise between Evangelical literalism and high critical historicism begun by the architects of the Broad Church movement, the latter of which included the efforts of his father Thomas Arnold. However, this is not the Arnold which literary criticism remembers. Instead, the so-called ‘Arnoldian replacement theory’ has made Arnold stand in for two connected ideas: first, that literature can and should replace religion as a source of moral values; and secondly, that only a certain class of readers, those with a literary education, can access this moral wisdom.6 While the first assumption can at least be traced to the reception of Arnold’s biblical writing, the latter is unfounded.7 As Raymond Williams wrote over sixty years ago: ‘those who accuse him of a policy of “cultivated inaction” forget not only his arguments but his 6

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Kaufmann summarises: ‘the belief, whose origins are often attributed to Matthew Arnold, that poetry/literature replaces a religion that had become too dogmatic, and thereby takes on the cultural function of transmitting moral and spiritual values to at least a select segment of society’ (‘The Religious’, 616). Joshua King has recently written against this characterisation of Arnold, noting that ‘Representations of Arnold as a replacement theorist have made it difficult to appreciate the religious definitions and theological claims on which his program of “culture” depends. Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015), 125.

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life’.8 Instead, Arnold is made to bear the anxieties of an institution in crisis, uncertain about what happens when we read, or who is or should be reading. And yet, as one memorable placard from the marches against the cuts to higher education in 2011 put it: ‘THIS CONCERNS EVERYONE’. Because even if you retain zero interest whatsoever in literary criticism’s supposedly secular origins at a moment of crisis a hundred sleeping years ago, the fact that the United Kingdom’s Compulsory Education Act of 1944 remains in place means that who is managing to read, what, where, and how much anyone is paying for it remains a critical question. While Arnold’s attempt to read the Bible like any other book was more of the same for the established English church, the literary-critical establishment, despite its claims to have been founded on Arnold’s theory of literature as religion, has almost entirely forgotten Arnold’s attempt to read every other book like the Bible. Critics have tended to view his religious writing as a blip. Against this we can place two facts. First, Literature and Dogma (1873), in which he set out a new theory of how to read the Bible, was his bestselling book on either side of the Atlantic, reaching 100,000 copies by the early twentieth century.9 Secondly, as is hardly ever noted, he spent eleven years labouring over an edition of the Book of Isaiah.10 If Literature and Dogma was Arnold’s theory of reading, then his version of Isaiah presents the practice. And Arnold was a practical man. Spurred by the 1870 Elementary Education Act and running in direct competition with the new translation of the Old Testament then underway at Canterbury, Arnold sought to create a ‘version’ of Isaiah for schoolchildren aged between five and twelve, first published in an edition of 2,000 copies with Macmillan in 1872.11 It went on to be published in a larger and finer edition in 1875, with more chapters included, and was issued again in a further run in 1883. In addition to the text, Arnold also wrote copious notes and two introductions, first in 1872, the second in 8 10

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9 Williams, Culture and Society, 119. Williams, Culture and Society, 119. Even so forensic a scholar as Trilling, for example, does not list the Isaiah in his chronology of Arnold’s religious writings (Matthew Arnold, 340n.). The four scholars who do acknowledge Arnold’s Isaiah, whose work I engage with below, include David DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), 98–101, 122, 125–6; Ruth apRoberts, Arnold and God (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 245–50; James C. Livingston, Matthew Arnold and Christianity (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986), 112–13; and King, Imagined Spiritual Communities, 110–12, 115. Matthew Arnold, The Great Prophecy of Israel’s Restoration: Isaiah, Chapters 40–66 Arranged and Edited for Young Learners (London: Macmillan, 1872). A critical edition is included in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Abor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–74), vol. X, 259–447. All other references, unless otherwise indicated, will be to the page numbers of this edition (hereafter CPW) and will be given in the text.

Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah

1883, the latter being based on two articles on Isaiah which he had published earlier that year in the journal The Nineteenth Century. That first article also reached the United States through its publication in Littell’s Living Age.12 Arnold’s stated aim in publishing his Bible Reading for Schools was to give these children biblical poetry for moral formation, in a style perhaps already familiar from attending church on Sunday – but this was not quite candid.13 Instead, Arnold’s attempt to read Isaiah as a construal, rather than as a prophetic book, presents a pact of Faustian proportions: in attending to the experience of the prophet as expressed in the language of his situation, Arnold frees the reader from the burden of having to verify supernatural events or predictions, phenomena which, because they cannot be verified, challenge faith. However, in so doing, Arnold also effectively cancels miracles, prophecy, the incarnation, the resurrection, atonement and any possibility of a personal relationship with God. The result is a very undogmatic Christianity, yet its method is strangely familiar. If literary theory wishes to confront its origins – and I think it must – then it must be prepared to test theoretical speculation about reading against what we do when we read. A return to Matthew Arnold’s biblical criticism is essential, not just because it begs us to reconsider our current foundation myths, but because it asks us to attend to Arnold’s practice as a reader. Of the many recent efforts to rethink the Arnoldian replacement theory, none has begun by considering what Arnold said about reading against how he actually read.14 In this endeavour we might draw inspiration from working definitions of the secular in other disciplines, for example, cultural anthropologist Talal Asad’s refusal to treat the binary terms ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ as stable descriptors of experience, 12 13

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Littell’s Living Age, CLVII: 308–18. For the context in which Arnold was working, see John Lawson and Harold Silver, A Social History of Education in England (London: Methuen, 1973). Arnold’s stated aims are set out in two introductions. The first, written in 1872 for his Bible Reading for Schools, was published with slight alterations in address for a wider audience in 1875 and appears in Complete Prose Works, vol. VII, 51–72; the second introduction to a longer version of Isaiah, incorporating further chapters, is adapted from two articles published in the April and May editions of The Nineteenth Century in 1883, and appears in Complete Prose Works, vol. X, 100–30. All subsequent references, unless otherwise indicated, are to the page numbers of Super’s edition and will be given in the text. Kaufmann, in ‘The Religious’, proposes that we (1) consider each literary-critical movement’s take on secularisation narrative, (2) examine how assumptions about religion/secularity affect our academic subject positions, while calling for (3) honesty about the fact that critique is not a neutral activity. However, his vision of how we might go forwards has much less to say about reading in practice both within and beyond the academy.

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preferring to begin instead with the relationship between concept and practice: I take the secular to be a concept that brings together certain behaviours, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life. To appreciate this it is not enough to show that what appears to be necessary is really contingent – that in certain respects “the secular” obviously overlaps with “the religious”. It is a matter of showing how the contingencies relate to changes in the grammar of concepts – that is, how the changes in concepts articulate changes in practices . . . In my view the secular is neither singular in origin, nor stable in its historical identity, although it works through a series of particular oppositions.15

Inspired by Asad’s commitment to the secular as a phenomenon witnessed in our behaviour, knowledge, and sensibility, this essay speculates that the secular experience of belief finds one influential theoretical elaboration in Matthew Arnold’s co-ordinates for reading the Bible. However, Arnold’s theoretical articulation of this secular approach, set out most forcefully in Literature and Dogma, was worked out in his Bible Reading for Schools, a text in which the reader is led away from the established typological practice of reading the Bible, towards something more like our own secular literary-critical practice. These two practices of reading – typological and literary-critical – look structurally very similar, yet could not be further apart in what they assume about the human situation. Reengaging the dialectic between Arnold’s theory and his practice allows us to observe how certain assumptions about how we read, made manifest in the act of reading, can be formative. Reading, far from being a passive activity, reflects and constitutes how a reader conceives of their place in history, individual agency and, ultimately, God’s work in or absence from the universe.16 However, this secular position becomes less salient as this mode of reading moves away from scripture, towards the more avowedly secular ‘text’.

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Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2003), 25 (italics mine). I have in mind here Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice, a work which begins by asserting that: ‘The practical privilege in which all scientific activity arises never more subtly governs that activity (insofar as science presupposes not only an epistemological break but also a social separation) than when, unrecognised as privilege, it leads to an implicit theory of practice which is the corollary of neglect of the social conditions in which science is possible.’ See Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge University Press, 1977), 1.

Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah

Theory I: Words Thrown Out How did Arnold arrive at the theory which he hoped could save the Bible and, by extension, a Christianity, for his readers? And what compromises did this mission involve? We might begin by noticing that the Latin verb behind Taylor’s characterisation of secular belief as a ‘construal’ also lies at the root of Arnold’s use of the word ‘construction’ as a synonym for reading. For Arnold, criticism is as inevitable as reading: ‘it is only by applying to the Bible criticism, such as it is, that such a man makes out that criticism does not apply to the Bible’.17 However, all criticisms are not equal. We need to find the right ‘construction’ if we are to recover the Bible: We get a much firmer, nay impregnable ground for the Bible, and for recommending it to the world, if we put the construction on it which we propose. The only question is: Is this the right construction to put on it . . . And here, again, our appeal is to the same test which we have employed throughout . . . – the test of reason and experience. (CPW, VI:376)

Far from being the inspired word of God, Arnold admits the possibility of there being multiple ‘constructions’ on scripture. It is a case – as Taylor suggests – of there ‘being options’. In addition, belief is now subject to a further ‘test’: ‘reason and experience’. In a sense, then, the position reached in Literature and Dogma is already a secular one in the Taylorian sense. Yet although Arnold is a relativist, his epistemology is not relativistic in a straightforward sense.18 It is not that there can be no verifiable truths because there are multiple ‘constructions’ on scripture. Rather, in the case of the Bible, we are witnessing an inappropriate method being applied to an object that requires a very different approach. Arnold recognises that, for the people, ‘the old traditional schema of the Bible is gone; while neither they nor the so-called educated classes have yet anything to put in its place’ (CPW, VI:153).19 In arguing for his ‘construction’ on the Bible over others, 17

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Arnold, Complete Prose Works, vol. VI, 249. All future references, unless otherwise specified, are to the page numbers of Super’s edition (hereafter CPW) and will be given in the text. Williams writes that Arnold’s ‘way of thinking about institutions was in fact relativist, as indeed a reliance on “the best that has been thought and written in the world” must always be’ (Culture and Society, 128); for Trilling ‘experience is the key-word to Arnold’s religious discussion’, meriting comparison with William James’ all too pragmatic claim that ‘God is real since he produces real effects’ (Matthew Arnold, 319). We get some sense of who Arnold meant by this in a letter to John Llewellyn Davies, his colleague in the Education Department at Whitehall, in which he clarifies that: ‘By people I do not understand the plebs, but the nation, minus the fringe (for by its numbers it is no more) that

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Arnold identifies two kinds of construal: dogmatic truth, which makes statements about the world which can be proved true or false, and literary truths which have a different kind of hold on us. The Bible has begun to be treated as if it contains dogmatic truths, but this is the wrong way to read it, since the greater portion of the Bible contains statements which cannot be verified as true or false. And scripture does not lend itself to the apparatus of logic and system, as was proved when, at the University of Paris – ‘the leading medieval university’, Arnold adds – ‘it was seriously discussed whether Jesus at the ascension had his clothes on or not’ (CPW, VI:348). If readers continue to apply this false construction to the Bible, he reasons, they will lose faith once they realise that there is no way of proving the supernatural events on which that faith depends actually happened. Perhaps this slippage between literary and dogmatic ‘constructions’ is inevitable, he argues. Humans easily move from a true and verifiable observation of how the world works into poetry and back, for the simple reason that language is approximate, and because human desire is a powerful force. Arnold has a word for this kind of belief: Aberglaube – over- or extra-belief – and, as the spatial metaphor implies, this can overlay the true state of things. This phrase comes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s maxim ‘der Aberglaube ist die Poesie des Lebens’ (Aberglaube is the poetry of life) from his Maximen und Reflexionen, which, Super notes, Arnold jotted in his pocket diary for 16 July (CPW, VI:476), the same year in which he was beginning serious work on his version of Isaiah. The question over Jesus’ nakedness is a case in point: Monstrous! Everyone will say . . . [but this is] the very same criticism, which originally treated terms as scientific which were not scientific; which instead of applying literary and historical criticism to the data of popular Aberglaube, took these data just as they stood and merely dressed them scientifically. (CPW, VI:348).

This extra-belief is not in itself harmful. The difficulty arises when we apply the wrong ‘construction’ to scripture, and treat Aberglaube as having the same truth-status as moral truths. Just as the scholastics found cause to dress Christ up at the ascension, people have tended to overlay those truths which they can actually observe and verify. For Arnold, this is perfectly human: That the spirit of man should entertain hopes and anticipations, beyond what it actually knows and can verify, is quite natural . . . But this latter is educated in schools above the Volksschule, or school for the people at large. See Letters of Matthew Arnold, vol. IV, 125.

Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah

belief has not the same character as the belief which it is thus set to confirm. It is a kind of fairytale, which a man tells himself, which no one, we grant, can prove impossible to turn out true, but which no one also can prove certain to turn out true . . . Extra-belief, that which we hope, augur, imagine is the poetry of life, and has the rights of poetry. But it is not science; and yet it tends always to imagine itself science, to make itself the ground of the very science out of which it has grown. The Messianic ideas, which were the poetry of life to Israel in the age when Jesus Christ came, did this; and it is the more important to mark that they did it, because similar ideas have so signally done the same thing with popular Christianity. (CPW, VI:212–13)

Aberglaube thus emerges here as a crucial term in Arnold’s hermeneutics, allowing him to identify extra-beliefs and allowing for the profundity or meaning of those truths, but without depending on those events being verifiable. However, it is impossible to understand Arnold’s use of this term and its relevance to his theory of how we should read the Bible, without first having a grasp of his own historical account of the Jewish and JudaeoChristian peoples. The Israelites – as Arnold refers to them – were among the first to have the insight that living a moral life tends to bring one happiness (CPW, VI:195–6). For Arnold, this insight has the status of a fact, since it can actually be observed and verified (CPW, VI:212). This was expressed, in the Tanakh, in their conception of an eternal moral law, referred to as ‘The Eternal’. However, human language being approximative, and this insight being so vast and at times overwhelming, belief in the Eternal came to accrete further ‘extra beliefs’. For Arnold, these include the personification of the Eternal law as a personal God (CPW, VI:184), the idea of Israel as God’s chosen kingdom (CPW, VI:230) and the belief in a messiah who will come to redeem his chosen people. So: ‘Israel, therefore, who originally followed righteousness because he felt that it tended to life, might and did naturally come at last to follow it because it would enable him to stand before the Son of Man at his coming, and to share in the triumph of the Saints of the most high’ (CPW, VI:212). Arnold’s history is a decadent one, a sliding away from the original insight towards a confusion of beliefs. These extra-beliefs were still dominant at the time of Jesus’ mission, and so the Gospel writers wove them into their attempts to record his life – hence the continuities in language and image between the Old and New Testaments. However, all is not lost: in each generation there remains a ‘remnant’, a word Arnold takes directly from Isaiah (10:20–2, 11:11–16) describing a small group who escape the

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invasion of the Assyrian army led by Tiglath-Pileser III, and whom Yahweh will one day lead back to the promised land. For Arnold, that promised land is not a physical one, but a moral one. The remnant are those who are able to tell the difference between Aberglaube and true belief, who stay true to the original insight that moral behaviour – in Arnold’s repeated phrase – ‘tendeth towards life’. In Arnold’s treatment of the Old Testament, this remnant is above all associated with the prophet Isaiah; in the New, it is the role assumed by Jesus, whose epieikeia, or ‘sweet reasonableness of speech’, presented a new invitation to those who would follow the original Jewish insight. Crucially, this is also a role which any reader who applies the ‘right’ construction to the Bible can play. Stephen Prickett notes that there is a long tradition in biblical scholarship that the Gospel writers were ‘unsophisticated’, running through Gesenius, Lessing, and Eichhorn; however, in his bid to strip the Aberglaube from popular religion, Arnold takes this to new extremes.20 Discrediting the Gospel writers and their ‘turbid Jewish fantasies’ is crucial to his argument, since the more ‘fallible’ they appear, the less need we have ‘to make Jesus co-partner in their eschatology’ (CPW, VI:260). The picture of Jesus’ ministry that emerges in the later chapters of Literature and Dogma is of a gifted master of scripture ‘talking over the heads’ of his disciples: ‘A very small experience of Jewish exegesis will convince us that, in the disciples, their catching at the letter of the Scriptures, and mistaking this play with words for serious argument, was nothing extraordinary . . . His reporters . . . are the servants of the Scripture-letter, Jesus is its master’ (CPW, VI:263). In suggesting that Jesus’ disciples took Jesus’ words literally, Arnold is developing an idea popularised by his father, Thomas Arnold, called ‘the language of accommodation’. In his essay ‘On the Right Interpretation and Understanding of the Scriptures’ Dr Arnold compares the gradual revelation of God’s purpose in human history to that of a parent speaking to a child: an infinite being tries to accommodate his language to that of a finite being and to ‘speak sometimes according to the views of the latter’. Christ is a case in point for the elder Arnold, as ‘He must have often spoken as a man who possessed no greater knowledge than the men of that time and country . . . ’.21 Thus phrases such as ‘right hand’, ‘sitting on high in heaven’, are ‘acknowledged to be accommodations’ to the understanding of the listener. However, as we shall see, Thomas Arnold never ran the risk – as Arnold continually 20

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Stephen Prickett, Words and the Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 19. Thomas Arnold, Sermons, with an Essay on the Right Interpretation of Scripture: First Series (London: Reeves & Turner, 1874), xxix.

Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah

does in Literature and Dogma – of reducing all of Christianity to a single observable verifiable truth about the moral life and happiness. It will be clear to anyone who has read Arnold’s non-religious writings that the idea of the remnant bears an obvious relation to the ‘remnant’ which he connects with the task of the cultural critic. For Collini, the remnant are charged with the ‘disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world’.22 Raymond Williams also recognised the ‘remnant’ as a classless group, ‘those persons who are mainly led, not by their class spirit, but by a general humane spirit, by the love of human perfection’.23 Both recognise that the critical task has something of the Christian mission about it. However, neither connects the ‘remnant’ glimpsed here with the prophecies of Isaiah, presumably because his prolonged engagement with the Book of Isaiah is so little known. Yet in recognising that the task of the critic and the task of the ‘central remnant’ are one and the same, we can begin to see the connections between Arnold’s biblical and cultural hermeneutics for the unified vision that they really are. By the time he came to write his 1883 preface to his Isaiah, Arnold’s understanding of the role of this remnant has been completely stripped of its extra-belief, so that the prophet Isaiah’s phrase ‘the remnant shall return’ means: a ‘Return not in the physical sense, but in the moral, – be converted, come to God’ (CPW, X:110). Collini, focusing on the task Arnold sets for the critic of culture, has asked: Can a remnant be ‘central’?24 Considering Arnold’s literary criticism and his biblical hermeneutics together allows us to go some way towards an answer: yes, but ‘central’ understood, not in the sense of being ‘influential’, but as a ‘central’ force in human history, active so long as reading continues to play a role in everyday life. Arnold’s ‘correct construction’ on the Bible asks that the reader strip away the layers of Aberglaube, in order to get to the moral truth at the heart of scripture. This criticism is a success, in the sense that it fulfils his original aim ‘to find, for the Bible, for Christianity, for our religion, a basis in something which can be verified instead of something which has to be assumed’. Therefore, ‘when we come to put the right construction on the Bible we give to the Bible a real experimental basis and reap on this basis throughout’ (CPW, VI:150–1). However, this approach takes the Broad Church idea of ‘a language of accommodation’ to its logical extreme. Thomas Arnold was still confidently able to speak of ‘the life beyond the 22 23

Stefan Collini, Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 59. Williams, Culture and Society, 121. 24 Collini, Matthew Arnold, 59.

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grave’, not as a figure of speech, which has ‘the rights of poetry’, but as a fact.25 In contrast, whatever Matthew Arnold gains in terms of ‘recommending’ the Bible to the general reader comes at a price, stripping away most of what makes the Christian religion distinct, even allowing for denominational differences. This includes: belief in the incarnation (CPW, VI:146); the identification of Jesus Christ as the messiah (CPW, VI:214–15); the prophetic prediction of Christ’s ministry and death in the Old Testament (CPW, VI:235–6, 316); miracles (CPW, VI:243, 321, 328, 379); atonement (CPW, VI:356); the afterlife (CPW, VI:146, 229–30, 261– 2); the resurrection (CPW, VI:211); the holy spirit (CPW, VI:290); and any kind of personal relationship with the deity (CPW, VI:184, 189). Perhaps most famously, Arnold argues that the word God itself, far from addressing a supernatural being, ‘is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, at a not fully grasped object of the speaker’s consciousness, a literary term, in short, and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs’ (CPW, VI:171). Lionel Trilling put it well when he diagnosed in Arnold’s religious writings ‘a Spinozic or stoic naturalism which was not cheerful’, connecting Arnold’s position with the diagnosis ‘All that religion had left of it when Spinoza finished with it was the truth that morality is the will of God.’26 We might say something similar of what was left of the Bible by the time Arnold had finished Literature and Dogma. Perhaps the acid test of this is the admission of poet A. C. Swinburne, the most notorious anti-theist of his generation, that Literature and Dogma was ‘a book from which I cannot say that I learnt anything, since it left me much as it found me’.27 We have dealt with the whys and the wherefores of Arnold’s construction; however, we have not yet connected this theory of reading with how Arnold thought we should read the Bible. The strength of human desire and the approximative nature of language mean that identifying Aberglaube is no easy task. For this, one requires what Arnold calls ‘critical tact’. And it is here that we can again see the difficulty of separating Arnold’s ongoing argument about the role of culture in society from his biblical hermeneutics. Critical tact, simply put, is: ‘getting the power, through reading, to estimate the proportion and relation in what we read (CPW, VI:151).’ In contrast to this well-read, educated reader, the homo unius libri – the onebook man – has ‘no range in his reading . . . [and] must inevitably 25 27

Thomas Arnold, ‘On Isaiah XI.6’, in Sermons, 49–58. 26 Trilling, Matthew Arnold, 326. The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959– 62), vol. III, 13–15.

Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah

misunderstand the Bible, cannot treat it largely enough, must be inclined to treat it all alike, and to press every word’ (CPW, VI:152). To explain this, Arnold sometimes has recourse to the metaphor of ‘translation’, used figuratively to mean altering the source text to reveal its real meaning, where the criterion for doing so is verifiable experience. Rather than translating how the prophets and Gospel writers talked about their experiences ‘towards science’, Arnold suggests that: A better way than this, surely, is to take their fact of experience, to keep it steadily for our basis in using their language, and to see whether from using their language, with the ground of this real and firm sense to it, as they themselves did, somewhat of their feeling, too, may not grow upon us. (CPW, VI:200)

However, it is only through already having many encounters with many styles of expression of a shared reality that we will be able to keep in mind the wide divergence of idioms, metaphors and figures of speech that people have used to communicate their experiences. The example that he gives to illustrate this is one that he had already given much thought to in his version of Isaiah: The very substitution of the word Eternal for the word Lord is something gained in this direction. The word Eternal has less of particularity and palpability for the imagination but what it does affirm is something real and verifiable . . . Their words . . . taken in this sense have quite a new force for us . . . It is worthwhile accustoming ourselves to use them thus, in order to bring out this force . . . (CPW, VI:203)

Building upon his wide reading in religious texts, and on his own prior experience of preparing a ‘version’ of the Book of Isaiah, Arnold is able to engage with the religious metaphor of the God as a ‘Lord’, translating it away from the ‘scientific’ construction of a personal God who rules human fate, to arrive at what he took to be its real meaning: the existence of a moral law which deserved respect and acquiescence. However, this translation would not be possible, without Arnold’s own wide reading: Now it is simply from experience of the human spirit and its productions, and from observing as widely as we can the manner in which men have thought, their way of using words and what they mean by them, and from reasoning upon this observation and experience, that we conclude the constructions theologians put upon the Bible to be false, and ours to be the truer one. (CPW, VI:376)

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There are two implicit, interrelated assumptions bound up with Arnold’s notion of tact or of the role of culture here, which can easily be missed if we continue to separate his religious writings from his critical: first, Arnold never once suggests in Literature and Dogma that culture is a replacement for religion; secondly, there is an implicit understanding of history in Arnold’s thinking about both religion and culture, often overlooked, which we need to understand if we are to grasp the radical nature of Arnold’s practice as a reader.

Theory II: The Liberal Anglican Idea of History It is tempting to assume, given the chronology of his work, that Arnold first develops his idea of culture as a saving force in Culture and Anarchy and then extends this idea to religion in Literature and Dogma, sacralising the task of culture while drawing an equivalence between the two institutions. Trilling certainly suggests this when he describes Arnold’s formulation of culture as ‘religion with the critical intellect superadded’.28 Critics eager to justify the centrality of the humanities have been quick to quote Arnold in support of culture annexing religion. The most well-known lines are probably those sentences in his late essay, ‘The Study of Poetry’, in which Arnold opens by asserting that ‘The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry . . . our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay . . . The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry . . . ’.29 Yet if we take Arnold’s writings as a whole, we see that Arnold is frequently much stricter in his categories than later critics have acknowledged. His aim in Literature and Dogma –to find the correct construction for the Bible – ‘can’t be sought without coming in sight of another aim – culture’ (CPW, VI:151). His phrasing is precise here: the two aims are related, yet separate. When asking how the reader is to avoid becoming a one-book man, Arnold offers his ‘old remedy’: culture (CPW, VI:153). Again and again, he presents his two aims – that culture can bring a wider understanding of the history of the human spirit; and the present aim of winning for the reader a newly relevant, resonant Bible – as related, yet distinct. Rather than reworking his earlier concept of culture to address the problem of biblical hermeneutics, Arnold’s understanding of how culture works is instead founded on his lifelong practice of reading the Bible. This is 28 29

Trilling, Matthew Arnold, 266. Matthew Arnold, ‘Introduction’ to Arnold, The English Poets, ed. Thomas Humphry Ward, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1880) vol. I, xvii, later republished as ‘The Study of Poetry’.

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a connection which only becomes apparent in his critical writings once his religious writings are considered in depth. The view of history implicit in Arnold’s ‘construction on’ the Bible supports this. It is hard to convey just how crucial the historical sense is to Arnold’s thinking: it lies behind almost every concept, and at the heart of what it means to be human. He speculates that: The very words mind, memory, remain come, probably all from the same root, from the notion of staying, attending. Possibly even the word man comes from the same; so entirely does the idea of humanity, of intelligence, of looking before and after, of raising oneself out of the flux of things, rest upon the idea of steadying oneself, concentrating oneself, making order in the chaos of one’s impressions, by attending to one impression rather than the other. (CPW, VI:179)

From this ability comes morality, since the ability to act in a way which looks beyond the present depends on our ability to conceive of a better, future self. However, it is also a crucial aspect of his understanding of what happens when we read. In order to grasp this, we must first understand his upbringing and schooling by his father Thomas Arnold. Arnold’s very specific understanding of history is a history of nations, not individuals, cyclical not linear, developmental rather than progressive, and heavily influenced, as Prickett notes, by Giambattista Vico and Barthold Georg Niebuhr, although, as Trilling points out, Arnold’s concepts of the Hebraic and the Hellenic also owe much to John Henry Newman’s developmental idea of religion.30 Historian Duncan Forbes has described this ‘liberal Anglican idea of history’ as: a fully-fledged philosophy of civilisation, according to which all nations go through cycles of progress according to the law of their nature, passing inevitably from childhood to manhood and old age, from bondage intellectual, moral and social, to independence, from credulity to incredulity, from feeling to reflection, from imaginative states, dimly mental, in the bosom of Nature, through stages of intellectual clarity and vigour, to the final scepticism and barren theorising, the second barbarism of late periods.31

As Forbes implies, this understanding of history also entails two further assumptions. First, there is an implicit relativism in this approach which means that all phenomena must be studied in their own particular national 30 31

Prickett, Words and the Word, 53; Trilling, Matthew Arnold, 256, 332–3. Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge University Press, 1952), 38.

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situation. Secondly, though this particular situation remains the focus, the fact of there being underlying cycles means that there are obvious parallels to be drawn between nations at a similar point in the course of a cycle. This new philosophy of history, colliding with advances in biblical scholarship, brought about a ‘theological revolution in England’ – a revolution which Forbes associates with the work and pedagogy of Thomas Arnold.32 Far from being eternal, immutable, unquestionable, for the Broad Church, religions ‘in fact, are the product of the time and place, and must be studied in their context; only thus will religion, which is true eternally, emerge’.33 This approach was a huge change from the older, prophetic understanding of history, in which the Old Testament is understood as predicting, and being fulfilled in, the New. By making everything relative, Christian history was no longer the dominant thread running through time but became part of a universal historical process. Therefore ‘Prophecy, too, [Thomas] Arnold was able to explain as not so much anticipated history, as the enunciation of those eternal principles by which history is determined.’ Yet this revolution was not without its own problems and contradictions. As Forbes noted seventy years ago, the shift in understanding that recognises Christian history as part of universal history makes God’s action in the universe ‘a difficult and thorny conception’, because there is now no external cause to be considered outside the historical process.34 One could conceive of the two processes as coextensive and identifiable, as the anonymous reviewer of Arnold’s Isaiah in The Times did, when they wrote that this book witnesses the Jewish people ‘carried into the great open stream of the world’s history’.35 However, the idea of world-history threatens the sovereignty of Christian history as the sole timeframe within which human life and effort make sense. This sense of there being a second option comes very close to the new secular imaginary which Charles Taylor explores in A Secular Age. In the liberal Anglican idea of history we witness a changing set of concepts to answer to the practical facts of human experience. It is within this new, precariously secular historical paradigm that we have to understand the high value Matthew Arnold placed on both culture, as the record of universal human history, and the Judaeo-Christian religion, as the high point in that history. It therefore follows that ‘the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the 32 33 34 35

Forbes, Liberal Anglican Idea of History, 110. Forbes, Liberal Anglican Idea of History, 110. Forbes, Liberal Anglican Idea of History, 115. Anon., ‘A Bible Reading for Schools’, The Times, 19 September 1872, 4.

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world, and thus with the history of the human spirit’ (CPW, VI:151) must include a knowledge of Christianity and Christian scripture. It is not that culture comes to replace religion for Arnold, but that they are both part of the same historical process. Within Arnold’s understanding of history as it was taught to him by his father at Rugby School – who, criticism forgets, was elected to his fellowship at Oriel as a historian, and not as a theologian – nations can develop to full adulthood, or descend into decadence. In Literature and Dogma, the epoch in which the prophecies of Isaiah were written bears witness to the first great revelation of the connection between morality and happiness to humans, and is therefore a significant stage in the development of the human race: ‘this Power is revealed in Israel and the Bible, and not by other teachers and books’ (CPW, VI:370). The life of Jesus, who tried to stage a return to this insight, is the second. It is on this basis that the Bible retains its cultural centrality for Arnold: one might ‘as well imagine . . . a man with a sense for poetry not cultivating it by the help of Homer and Shakespeare, as a man with a sense for conduct not cultivating it by the help of the Bible’ (CPW, VI:199). And yet, it remains hard to see how exposure to ideal selves – wherever they are found – or a dubious culture-virtue ethics, will necessarily put theory into practice, or convert the reader into a best-selving member of the new classless nation state.

Theory III: Reading as Moral Formation This leap in Arnold’s thinking – from reading to the good life – has been puzzling critics ever since the article which was to become the first chapter of Culture and Anarchy appeared, prompting Frederic Harrison, in a mocking review, to take up the mask of Arnold’s own character Arminius, protesting: ‘Come . . . in the name of human woe, what Gospel does this offer to poor stricken men?’36 Contemporary commentators, even when sympathetic to Arnold’s aims, have not got much further in explaining how reading might convert people to the cause of morality, Christian or otherwise. Arnold’s biographer, Ian Hamilton, sees a shift towards a hope for a ‘revived and reconstructed Christianity’ after the 1860s, ‘which would have poetry, or some real sense of the poetic, at its centre’, but finds that ‘Arnold found it difficult to describe just what he meant by this.’37 Likewise, 36

37

Frederic Harrison, ‘Culture: A Dialogue,’ Fortnightly Review 8 (November 1867): 608; Ian Hamilton, Matthew Arnold: A Gift Imprisoned (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 205–6. Hamilton, Matthew Arnold, 205–6.

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Dinah Birch, reflecting in Our Victorian Education, detects the influence of a ‘Wordsworthian notion that the cultivated memory, returning to moments of insight, must be the foundation of education’.38 More recently Joshua King has noted Arnold’s conviction that poetic language can inspire readers, but there’s no sense of how the process of moral formation happens, beyond that of Christ acting as an exemplar of moral behaviour.39 Quite how these insights, gained from reading, are supposed to take hold of the individual is not explained. The closest anyone has come to explaining how Arnold supposes reading to be morally formative is Lionel Trilling’s 1939 monograph. Written at a moment at which Arnold’s whole liberal commitment to education as a way of promoting a peaceful society was on trial, the book still presents the most searching exploration of Arnold’s thinking on many counts. However, on the question of how reading is morally formative, he did not perhaps realise how right he was. Having suggested that Arnold saw an analogy between religion and culture, because each conceives of perfection as an individual, inward journey, Trilling argues that Arnold is necessarily concerned with ‘a fundamental problem of human knowledge . . . the difference between knowing something, and really perceiving and feeling it’: The difference may seem unimportant in the light of the difficulties he is undertaking to solve, or a merely pious emphasis; actually it is considerably more, as anyone who has ever recognised the justice of a proverb or a truism and then, after some experience to which it is relevant, looked at it again to find it vibrating with truth and meaning, or anyone who has “appreciated” and “understood” a poem, a picture, or a piece of music and then suddenly had the revelation of its “real” meaning, will, upon comparing his former with his latter condition, bear witness to. Understanding is an ambivalent, even a contradictory, thing: we may understand and not understand at the same time; it exists at such varying ideas of intensity that there is actually a difference in kind.40

This is an extraordinary passage. In suggesting that reading takes effect by our moving – or would a believer feel moved? – from one kind of understanding to another, which we might call a deeper, more experienced, or more personal understanding, he has hit upon the switch in readerly experience, from theory to practice, from ‘to whom it may concern’ to ‘who – me?’, which forms the cornerstone to Arnold’s whole theory of culture. Yet we would be wrong to assume that all Arnold’s theory of 38 39

Dinah Birch, Our Victorian Education (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 26. King, Imagined Spiritual Communities, 102. 40 Trilling, Matthew Arnold, 226–7.

Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah

reading as moral formation boils down to is personal appeal or the happenstance of individual experience. In fact, the question of what this means to me is intimately bound up with the historical awareness which underlies all Arnold’s thinking. Trilling’s ‘vibrating truth’ has a historical dimension, and for Arnold it also had a pedagogical dimension. Forbes notes that for Thomas Arnold, ‘the theory of analogous periods also governs the principles of translation. In the choice of his words and the style of his sentences the boy should be taught to follow the analogy required by the age and character of the writer whom he is translating.’41 This extension of the idea of analogy from biblical interpretation to translation suggests that Thomas Arnold’s theory of history, on which Matthew Arnold consistently drew in Literature and Dogma, also extended to the practices of reading in which Arnold, as his father’s pupil, was schooled. According to Forbes, this practice of seeking a parallel between your own time and a precise point in the past also had an imaginative dimension. Thomas Arnold’s ‘favourite question in school’ is said to have been: ‘What does this remind you of?’42 These ‘vibrating truths’ are not necessarily religious nor historical for Trilling, who would prefer to talk about proverbs or truisms than sacred texts or historical resonance. And yet it is precisely because Arnold’s whole theory of reading and history is built upon such a sacred and resonant text, the Bible, and because it underwent further development in relation to the prophecies of Isaiah, that Arnold’s theory of reading as morally formative makes no sense when considered in isolation from his practice as a reader. Forbes’ description of the liberal Anglican idea of history gives us a clue as to how Arnold might have been taught to read at Rugby. Trilling’s sense of ‘vibrating truths’ has given us another key. However, to understand how Arnold thought reading led to moral formation, we must first understand how Arnold thought reading should work in practice. Thankfully, he left his working in his version of Isaiah. Though Arnold’s Bible Reading for Schools remains relatively unknown, the publication history is well documented by Super (CPW, VII:412–13, X:484–5) and Buckler.43 However, these accounts of Arnold’s eleven-year engagement with the text of Isaiah underemphasise two aspects of its genesis, both important to Arnold’s reading practice. First, I want to stress that Arnold was well aware of the continuities between his Isaiah and Literature and Dogma. As King also notes, Arnold quotes his own changes 41 42 43

Forbes, Liberal Anglican Idea of History, 114. Forbes, Liberal Anglican Idea of History, 111. William E. Buckler, Matthew Arnold’s Books: Towards a Publishing Diary (Geneva: E. Droz, 1958), 119–25.

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to the text of the Authorised Version when referencing Isaiah in the popular, abridged version of Literature and Dogma, even to the extent of swapping out the word ‘Lord’ for the ‘Eternal’ in Isaiah 60:20.44 However, Arnold also makes the link explicit. On 7 February 1873 he sent a copy of the newly published Literature and Dogma to his nephew Thomas Humphrey Ward, husband of the author of Robert Elsmere, since he had so much enjoyed ‘the little Isaiah book’: ‘Pray accept it’, he wrote, ‘and read it to the end with the same kind of attention you bestowed on the first part.’45 Secondly, although Arnold’s stated concern was ‘to help popular education in an untried, but . . . important sort of way’ as he put it in a letter to William Steward, ‘a working man at Bedford’, there is also a continual sense of vocation connected to his work on this text which bears witness to his long, personal relationship with the text of Isaiah.46 In a grief-stricken letter to his mother, Mary Penrose Arnold, written the day before his forty-sixth birthday, he reflects on being within one year of his father’s age when he died – ‘how much he packed in! what ripeness of character!’ Since Arnold’s father and grandfather had both died of heart failure, the threat of angina pectoris was never far away for him. The last year had been a terrible one, as he had lost two sons. Yet Arnold is seeking some kind of a direction in his grief: ‘Everything has seemed to come together to make this year the beginning of a new time to me’ he writes: Tommy’s death in particular was associated with several awakening and epoch-making things; the chapter for the day of his death was that great chapter, the 1st of Isaiah – the first Sunday after his death was advent Sunday, with its glorious collect, and in its Epistle the passage which converted St. Augustine. All these things point to a new beginning – yet it may very well be that I am near my end, as Papa was at my age, but without Papa’s ripeness, and that there will be little time to carry far the new beginning. But that is all the more reason for carrying it as far as one can, while one lives.47

As Super notes, ‘it is not clear when Arnold first approached Macmillan about his projected textbook’ (CPW, VII:412). However, it is hard not to at least speculate on a connection between Arnold’s sense of calling in his letter to his mother, his account of hearing Isaiah at the service, and Augustine’s conversion. King reads this letter as a kind of mission statement, writing that: ‘Through the Prayer Book’s structuring of his emotions and his personal 44 46 47

King, Imagined Spiritual Communities, 114–15. 45 Letters of Matthew Arnold, vol. IV, 143. Letters of Matthew Arnold, vol. IV, 124. Letters of Matthew Arnold, vol. III, 305; Lang notes that the Epistle was Romans 13:13–14.

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application of scriptural and liturgical texts, Arnold comes to see himself as a latter-day Isaiah who must put on the armour of cultural light in his fight to rescue religion from its popular misunderstanding.’48 However, it is perhaps enough to note that this year of reflection, 1868, is also the year in which Arnold first begins to draw on his knowledge of European pedagogy to identify a serious lack of literary training in elementary schools, as noted in his report on the Wesleyan Training College at Winchester: The Bible . . . is for the child in an elementary school almost his only contact with poetry and philosophy . . . Even in the lowest classes the children in a German protestant school begin by learning verses of the Psalms by heart . . . how much do our elementary schools lose by not having such a course as part of their school programme. (CPW, VII:412).

Though Arnold’s work on the text of Isaiah was public-facing, it also had a personal edge. In 1872 he writes to Benjamin Jowett, then at work on a similar project, revising The School and Children’s Bible and helped by an unlikely duo – his ex-tutee from Balliol A. C. Swinburne, and his lifelong correspondent Florence Nightingale. ‘[T]he little book I sent you is the sort of thing I have always imagined my Father would have felt himself impelled to try’, Arnold wrote, ‘if he had been brought much in contact with schools for the people.’49 Later, reflecting on the 1883 edition, he wrote that ‘I have never done a piece of work that pleases me more.’50 Yet however satisfying the end result, Arnold’s feelings on the eve of publication remained complex.

Practice I: Arnold’s ‘Version’ of Isaiah On 27 April 1872, Arnold wrote of his hopes and fears regarding his Bible Reading for Schools to his publisher Alexander Macmillan: ‘That earlier or later it will come into general use I have little doubt. It is possible, however, that it may meet with opposition at first.’51 From Arnold’s letter it is hard to gauge on what grounds Arnold anticipated either reaction. The text of Arnold’s version of Isaiah is, on first encounters, not much of a version.52 48 49

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King, Imagined Spiritual Communities, 107–8. Letters of Matthew Arnold, vol. IV, 122; I am indebted to Charles Simmonds for drawing my attention to Jowett’s part in the School and Children’s Bible revision (1873). Buckler, Matthew Arnold’s Books, 116, 123–4. Buckler, Matthew Arnold’s Books, 120; Letters of Matthew Arnold, vol. IV, 116–17. Due to the somewhat complex publication history of the text and introductions, which Arnold cut and adapted, I have decided to follow Super in referring to the 1872 version as A Bible-

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His deviation from the Authorised King James Bible is very minimal. It is perhaps for this reason that Arnold’s editor, R. H. Super, includes Arnold’s version of Isaiah as an appendix, without the extremely detailed critical and explanatory notes which usually accompany Arnold’s prose. Arnold’s changes to the text of Isaiah, which he writes about with candour in the 1872 introduction and in his two articles for The Nineteenth Century, can be summarised as follows. First, he seeks to balance the need for clarity in the text against the familiarity of cadence, diction and idiom of a text which has played such a central role in the daily lives of English-speaking people. The result, he hopes, is a text which will allow his younger readers to read Isaiah without faltering (CPW, VII:60–1). However, to do so involves him in much circling, trying to correct the more obscure elements of the text, but then changing them back in deference to a text ‘consecrated’, not by any belief in it being the inspired word of God, but by its familiarity and long use. The exception to this concerns the use of the future tense in the Authorised Version, which Arnold alters from 1872 onwards to voice the doubts he has concerning the ‘supernatural prediction’ of the prophets, and which he would later write about at length in Literature and Dogma. Then again, he notes ‘it is unnecessary and pedantic to change always, in order to mark that a prophet is not, above every thing, a man who makes supernatural predictions, their future tenses into presents’ (CPW, X:105). In 1883, he decides to change tense only in cases where the sense of the passage is confusing.53 However, all in all, the actual changes to the text of the Authorised version are minimal, as Super’s textual notes also witness (CPW, X:582–4). Secondly, as the number of chapters grows, Arnold changes the order of the chapters according to his own conviction – based on contemporary scholarship – of there being two separate authorships to Isaiah, and his own sense of a narrative arc which does not involve prophetic prediction (CPW, X:115–21). In keeping with this, he also adds divisions and subheadings, in order to make the story more navigable (CPW, X:126–7). Finally, he also removes intrusive numbering and capitalisation – the latter decision also being motivated by his desire to minimise the weight given to supernatural prediction (CPW, VI:233). Overall, he hoped to make the experience of reading more like reading a prose narrative, a format that,

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Reading for Schools; the 1875 edition – an edition for general readers, finer in type and print – as Isaiah XL-LXVI; and the 1883 edition as Isaiah of Jerusalem. Ruth apRoberts also notes that Arnold shows a greater tendency to change the tense of the tenseless Hebrew away from the future back towards the present tense, explaining that old translators worked on the idea that prophecy was predictive. See apRoberts, Arnold and God, 250, 256.

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he says in a footnote, he discovered in a bible given to him by his godfather, John Keble. Taken together, these changes to the text of Isaiah do not mark Arnold out as differing radically from many arrangers of biblical texts for public use. In fact, the biblical scholar Francis Crawford Birkitt, writing in 1901, was surprised to discover that ‘Most literary people do not know how well equipped he was for the work.’54 Certainly, taken together, Arnold’s introductions and notes to Isaiah show a familiarity with the scholarship of Ibn Ezra (1089–1167), Justus Gesenius (1601–73), Campegius Vitringa (1693– 1723), Robert Lowth (1710–87), Heinrich Ewald (1803–75), Franz Delitzsch (1813–90), and T. K. Cheyne (1841–1915). Ruth apRoberts, one of the few scholars to have spent a good amount of time with Arnold’s Isaiah, suggests that ‘his rearrangements of the sections of the text seems to be unexceptionable given the tremendous textual problems of Isaiah, and since this is something the Revised Version or other regular translations can hardly do, it makes the Arnold version a highly satisfactory one for reading.’55 ApRoberts’ favourable opinion of A Bible Reading for Schools was evidently also felt at the time. The 2,000 copies of the first edition – priced, as King notes, at the ‘suitably low price of one shilling’ – were exhausted by mid-September, leading Macmillan to print a further 1,000 copies, promoting these as a ‘second’ and ‘third’ edition.56 If, for the time, a run of 1,000 copies in the first edition suggests that the publishers expected to break even, then the fact the first edition was twice that number suggests that Macmillan were confident in their investment.57 The book was also well received from the earliest reviews. The Schoolmaster praises it as a ‘valuable contribution to sacred literature’ despite remaining critical, if not haughty, about whether Arnold’s concern for Public Elementary Schools will be appreciated.58 The by then openly radical Westminster Review argues that ‘the writer’s remarks on the prophecies as having two sides or two applications, a side towards the nation at the time, and a side towards the future of all mankind . . . [are] inexact and misleading’, but is nevertheless positive.’59 The Hebrew scholar Thomas 54

55 56

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F. Crawford Burkitt, Two Lectures on the Gospels (London: Macmillan, 1901), 54–6, quoted in Arnold, Complete Prose Works, vol. VII, 440–1; apRoberts, Arnold and God, 243. ApRoberts, Arnold and God, 256. King, Imagined Spiritual Communities, 110–11; Arnold, Complete Prose Works, vol. VII, 413; Buckler, Matthew Arnold’s Books, 119–21. I must acknowledge my sincere thanks to Clive Simmonds for his advice on this point. Anon., ‘A Bible Reading for Schools’, The Schoolmaster, 21 September 1872, 116. Anon., ‘The Great Prophecy of Israel’s Restoration’, Westminster Review, January 1873, 250–1. It seems impossible that Arnold would not have had this review in mind when he later came to

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Kelly Cheyne, author of Notes and Criticisms of the Hebrew text of Isaiah (1868) and The Book of Isaiah Chronologically Arranged with Historical and Critical Introductions and Explanatory Notes (1870), both of which were also published by Macmillan, wrote the expert review, applauding Arnold’s aims: ‘Both the translation and the notes are models of pure English, and full of suggestiveness to “young learners”’, he writes. Yet he remains puzzled by the fact that Arnold’s ‘Introduction is full of criticisms involving points of Hebrew scholarship; yet his knowledge of Hebrew is as “a smoking flax”’.60 Cheyne would later go back on that view, admitting Arnold had some Hebrew and some knowledge of biblical scholarship, when reviewing the 1883 Isaiah of Jerusalem. There he argues that different versions of the text may be necessary for different audiences: ‘it is in the interests of churchgoers, school children and poor people that one may reasonably argue against a thorough revision’; for students, however, ‘a really faithful translation is indispensable’ and Arnold’s version will not cut it. However, that does not stop him from regretting that Arnold’s first little book, for schoolchildren, is ‘no longer to be had’.61 Most influential of all, perhaps, was the reader in The Times, who was ‘thankful for any help for making the great Hebrew Prophet understood by children in schools’ though doubtful that it will be taken up in government schools unless interdenominational strife ends.62 Taken together, the reviews tally with apRoberts’ sense that the little Isaiah was a ‘modest success’.63 Why then was Arnold so nervous, in his April letter to Macmillan, about his Bible Reading for Schools? Arnold’s anxiety may not have had anything to do with the actual text of his version of Isaiah, but his notes, to which criticism has paid little attention. This seems odd, given that, of the 188 pages which make up the text of Arnold’s version in Super’s appendix, 72 pages are notes, 38 per cent of the total text. Perhaps, as mentioned before now, more

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clarify his position – which is pretty much identical with this reviewer’s sense of how biblical language is a language of accommodation, rather than supernatural prediction – in his chapter on ‘The Proof from Prophecy’ in Literature and Dogma. Thomas Kelly Cheyne, ‘The Great Prophecy of Israel’s Restoration’, The Academy, 19 February 1876, 163. Thomas Kelly Cheyne, ‘Isaiah of Jerusalem’, The Academy, 22 December 1883, 410–11. Cheyne’s own version, The Prophecies of Isaiah: A New Translation, 2 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, 1880–1) had come out just two years previous. Anon., ‘A Bible Reading for Schools’, The Times, 19 September 1872, 4. This last comment on ‘interdenominational strife’ is intriguing, given that Arnold holds that ‘There ought to be nothing in the book which should hinder the adherent of any school of Biblical interpretation or of religious belief from using it.’ See Complete Prose Works, vol. VII, 66. ApRoberts, Arnold and God, 245.

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would have been made of them if Super had not decided to include Arnold’s Isaiah of Jerusalem as an appendix. Yet neither the review in The Times, nor the Westminster review mention the notes. Though Cheyne in The Academy and the reviewer in The Schoolmaster acknowledge the notes, the latter referring to them as ‘copious’, neither seems to have found anything remarkable in them. ApRoberts observes that ‘in his notes, Arnold gives only such historical and literary information as makes the text intelligible; he fastidiously, of course, eschews dogma . . . But he burdens the student-reader with no learned apparatus, German or other.’64 Though James C. Livingston reads Arnold as being ahead of his time, anticipating Rudolf Bultmann’s effort to demythologise the New Testament by seventy years, Isaiah takes up very little of the argument compared to Literature and Dogma and again the notes are not mentioned. More recently, Joshua King has recognised that Arnold’s Isaiah is connected to the argument of Literature and Dogma. His argument that this work is ‘a more concentrated and arguably more concrete illustration of the ways in which he hoped the “poetic” style of a specifically English Bible would bind together various classes of British readers’ is crucial for our thinking about how scholars conceptualise the Broad Church movement. And yet, for all his interest in A Bible Reading for Schools, as evidence of communal reading practices, King does not attend to the reading practices which Arnold hoped would inspire his readers.65 Yet on this, Arnold is quite explicit. Writing in the 1872 introduction, he expresses his hope: that teachers who use the book will above all things, attend to making their pupils seize the connection of sense; and to this end they will require the . . . chapters read to be always prepared beforehand, the notes studied, and the connexion in some sort grasped by the pupil. The notes contain some words which the pupil will probably not understand, and which will have to be explained to him, – words like nomad, for instance, or elliptical . . . the strict preparation of the class lesson beforehand, so universally insisted upon in our secondary schools, is an excellent discipline which our elementary schools . . . are too much without. (CPW, VII:512.)66

Clearly Arnold expects his reader will be constantly flipping backwards and forwards between the text and the relevant notes while preparing for class. 64 66

ApRoberts, Arnold and God, 254. 65 King, Imagined Spiritual Communities, 110. This section was cut from the 1875 version, presumably because it was no longer as relevant to the general reader.

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He also makes several comments about his rationale in providing notes, remarking that: ‘A variety of interpretations is hardly ever given; one interpretation is adopted, and the rest are left without notice. This is not because I consider the interpretation to be in all cases certain, but because the notes are written for those who want not to occupy themselves with weighing rival interpretations, but to get a clear view of the whole’ (CPW, VII:71). Later, in his 1883 edition, he would note that the notes were crucial for ‘understand[ing] the situation with which the book deals, the facts to which it makes reference, the expressions which it employs . . . without losing oneself in the details’ (CPW, X:107). The right way to do this is ‘to raise not as much discussion as possible over his meaning, but as little as possible’ (CPW, X:130). However, though Arnold’s introductions assert that the notes are important, they give no inkling whatsoever of what they might contain. In this case the devil really is in the detail.

Practice II: Arnold’s Notes to Isaiah To do as Arnold proposes, and to flip between his version of Isaiah and his notes, is to relive the comprehensive dismantling of a way of reading which had been practised without break for one and a half millennia. Typological reading – or, as it’s sometimes called, after Eric Auerbach’s seminal essay ‘Figura’ (1938), ‘figural reading’ – gives a general name to a practice that has been developing since the fourth century, which has always turned on the question of the relationship between the Old Testament and the New. In typological practice, the reader looks back to the symbols, words, and content of the Tanakh, connecting them to the symbols, words and content fulfilled in the Gospels. To give one example: the suffering servant, encountered in the fifty-third of Isaiah, is understood as the type or premonition of Christ, the suffering servant who atones for the sins of humanity. By the nineteenth century figural reading was clearly recognisable as ‘a Christian form of scriptural interpretation that claims to discover divinely intended anticipations of Christ and his dispensation in the laws, events and people of the Old Testament’.67 For Auerbach, the centrality of figural reading to western consciousness cannot be underestimated: it remained the sole legitimate view of history for nearly a millennium. This meant, however, that the way of understanding on which figural 67

George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art and Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 3.

Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah

interpretation was based necessarily became one of the most important constitutive elements of the Christian understanding of history and reality and of its concept of concrete reality in particular.68

Like Talal Asad, Auerbach understands the relationship between practice and concept as a dialectical process. Typology is not a practice which answers to a theory about the universe: it is an activity which is constitutive of belief. It was also one of the greatest ministerial exports of the Christian mission. As Augustine recognised, typology was a method which could be taught, and what can be taught can be mastered, taught again, and can spread. Yet although typological interpretation had a pattern to it, it was also deeply personal, since the ability to see correspondences in the course of one’s reading, guided by the intellectus spiritualis, or spiritual sense, also allows for personal insight into God’s promise to humans at work in human history. According to Auerbach, ‘Figural interpretation continued to play a role for most European peoples up through the eighteenth century.’69 For George P. Landow, it was still a dominant ‘habit of mind’ right up until the end of the nineteenth century, although ‘Ultimately, the very historical pressures which made typology so appealing to many Victorians made it intellectually untenable.’70 Arnold’s notes depend upon this hermeneutical practice, at the same time that they supersede it. It is perhaps because his practice is so structurally similar to that of typological practice that the radical nature of his practice went undetected by all but the most discerning among his original audience. In order to show just how far Arnold’s Isaiah works to lead his elementary school reader beyond established typological practice, we need to understand how his notes work. To do so, I want to explore four kinds of note at work in his version of Isaiah: the first has to do with historical detail; the second works to uncouple established typologies; a third category of note works to identify and place quotations which might otherwise be taken as typological links; the fourth class of note concerns an omission where we might usually expect a typological link. The first kind of note is in many ways an extension of the historical sketch with which the Bible Version opens. It is perhaps best illustrated by one of Arnold’s earliest notes. Reading Isaiah 1:8, the chapter which Arnold mentions in his letter to his mother, we encounter the line: ‘And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden 68

69

Eric Auerbach, ‘Figura’, in Time, History and Literature: Selected Essays of Eric Auerbach, ed. James I. Porter, trans. Jane O. Newman (Princeton University Press, 2014), 65–113 (at 96). Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 102. 70 Landow, Victorian Types, 15, 54.

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of cucumbers, as a besieged city.’ Child or no, we turn to the notes, where we discover the following explanation: 1.8. Lodge in a Garden of Cucumbers.– 5 Kitto says: – “Cucumbers, melons and similar products are seldom (in the Holy Land) protected by enclosures, but cultivated in large open fields, quite exposed to the depredations of men or beasts. To prevent this, a slight artificial mount is raised, if required, and on this is constructed a frail hut or booth, such as is used in the vineyard also, just sufficient for one person, who in this confined solitude, remains constantly watching the ripening crop. Very often has our travelling party . . . often seeing no object around to a great distance in the plain but this one man and his solitary shed . . . been most forcibly reminded of the peculiar appropriateness of the image of desolation suggested by the prophet.” (CPW, X:375)

This received wisdom on the precise methods of growing cucumbers in the area now known as the Holy Land is exactly the kind of thing Arnold revels in. Whether he is converting shekels into contemporary money, or identifying the provenance of Isaiah’s dragons (CPW, X:416; apparently they are really just crocodiles), this kind of note asks the reader to approach the text of Isaiah as a historically particular, situated expression, which must be understood in its time.71 There’s a delightful kind of literary-critical tact in evidence here, effective in bringing a whole historical moment to the surface on the strength of a single detail, like Stephen Greenblatt on Renaissance millinery. Writing on the notes he provides for the extravagances of female dress, apRoberts remarks that: ‘It is pleasant to see Arnold coping with these details. One wonders if he saw “round tires like the moon” as Victorian hoop-skirts.’72 Yet Arnold’s continual direction of his readers to the historical particularities of his text also has a less frivolous side to it, for example, when dealing with Isaiah 26:19ib: ‘The earth shall bring forth the dead.’ The elementary school pupil might not necessarily skip to the notes here, since the ‘fact of the resurrection’ as Thomas Arnold put it in his sermon on Isaiah quoted above, is nothing controversial. Matthew Arnold’s note on this line, however, is: It may easily be conceived how this magnificent verse, taken literally, became a signal text for the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead which from this time onwards began to prevail among the Jews. (CPW, X:446) 71

72

Arnold also manages to dispense with satyrs and cockatrices in his Isaiah, although he does not comment on the hedgehogs, pelicans, ravens and ostriches which also feature. Either the reader has by now got the gist, or these animals were somehow more credible. ApRoberts, Arnold and God, 254.

Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah

In consigning the interpretation of ‘resurrection’ to the realm of the literal, and placing it in its historical moment, Arnold achieves a measure of distance which suggests that his reader should be more cautious. Noticing this, apRoberts recognises that ‘The ploy here is rather clever: the term “magnificent verse”, rather than “central doctrine” or whatever, certainly suggests a figurative reading and discreetly sustains his values of literature over dogma.’ She connects this further with the fact that, in his text for 59.20, Arnold substitutes the lower-case ‘redeemer, with obvious implications’ for ‘the King James Version’s “the Redeemer” with a capital “R”’.73 Cheyne, who is relevant both as an early reviewer of Arnold’s Isaiah and as a point of comparison, picks up on another of Arnold’s notes also dealing with the resurrection, 26.19b, in which Arnold observes how, ‘sublimely recovering himself, the prophet cries that God’s saints though they are dead shall live’. Whereas Arnold again tracks the writer’s idiom, enforcing a critical distance between the belief and its expression, Cheyne’s notes to his own version of Isaiah take a subtly different approach, adding that ‘the whole context of our passage . . . shows that the language of the writer is to be taken literally. It is in fact an expression of faith in a resurrection, though in a resurrection as exceptional as those of which we read in the Book of Kings.’74 It is striking that Cheyne, while he remains committed to a comparative textual biblical criticism, is yet able to argue for the ‘literal’ meaning of the text. In contrast, the accumulation of historical notes across the whole of Arnold’s version does more than ‘discreetly sustain’ his treatment of the Bible as literature, as apRoberts suggests. Where these historical notes do not explicitly undermine the same aspects of Christian doctrine which he was at pains to dislodge in Literature and Dogma, Arnold’s critical tact works to create a historical distance between the reader and his text. Far from promoting typological connections between two answering points in Christian history, these notes seek instead to engage the reader’s imagination as a way of overcoming that assumed historical distance between the reading present and the writer’s past moment, picturing the author’s journey through the desert to the ancient equivalent of the kitchen garden. And there are many more notes like this.75 The second kind of note goes further than the first kind in actively seeking to uncouple a link which has long been established in typological 73 75

ApRoberts, Arnold and God, 255. 74 Cheyne, Prophecies of Isaiah, vol. I, 149. Consider, for example, Arnold’s notes to the following verses: Isaiah 21, 26.19ib, 36.17, 45, 49.16, 49.2, 44.7, 44.6, 63.15.

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reading. Perhaps the most crucial of these is the uncoupling of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53 with Christ. For this chapter, Arnold includes a long note, in which he gathers historical evidence to deflect the reader from making this link, disrupting nearly 1,900 years of Christian interpretation. Arnold begins by admitting that: The application of this well known chapter to Jesus Christ will be in every one’s mind. But it must be our concern here to find out its primary historical import, and its connexion with the discourse where it stands. (CPW, X:418–19).

Through exhaustive textual comparison with other chapters in Isaiah, Jeremiah and the New Testament, Arnold’s two-page ‘note’ works to uncover the ‘ideal’ of the suffering servant as a kind of Aberglaube which was in currency at the time of Isaiah’s composition. ‘Adding all this to the data furnished by the 53rd chapter itself’, he concludes: we have for the original subject of this chapter a martyred servant of God, recognisable by the Jews of the exile under the allusions here made to him, who eminently fulfilled the ideal of the servant of God, the true Israel . . . whose death, crowning his life and reaching men’s hearts, made an epoch of victory for this ideal. More as to the first and historical meaning, cannot be said with certainty. (CPW, X:419).

Attempts have been made to identify the suffering servant of God with Hezekiah, Josiah, Isaiah himself, Jeremiah, as well as Christ, he concludes, ‘but there are no sufficient grounds to establish his identity with any one of them’ (CPW, X:419). It is hard to convey just how radical this is. For Delitzsch, one of Arnold’s acknowledged sources for the text of Isaiah, the fifty-third chapter presents ‘the complete antitype, the truth, the object and the end of all sacrifices’.76 For Cheyne, Arnold’s contemporary, ‘The cruel treatment of the Servant [with a capital ‘s’] and his patient endurance of it, form the contrast of this paragraph. Meantime his persecutors ‘know not what they do’. Quoting Luke 23:34, Cheyne makes the link between Isaiah and Jesus’ act of forgiveness on the cross explicit.77 And this from a translator who puts a high value on grammatical meaning overriding ‘a Christian interpretation of the Old Testament’, elsewhere refusing to translate ‘a certain famous text of Isaiah’ (‘the virgin shall conceive’) even despite ‘believing 76

77

Franz Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Prophecies of Isaiah, trans. James Martin (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1877), 334. Cheyne, Prophecies of Isaiah, vol. II, 46.

Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah

personally in the virgin-born’.78 Of the selections of Isaiah in The School and Children’s Bible (1873), the subheadings focus the reader’s attention on ‘The Servant of God’, ‘The Mission and Preaching of the Servant of God’ and ‘The Suffering of the Servant of God’ for an obvious reason: readers were being encouraged to recognise, in Isaiah 53, a prefiguring of Christ.79 However, perhaps the most apposite point of comparison for Arnold’s text is Charlotte Yonge’s Scripture Readings For Schools and Families, also published by Macmillan and aimed at young readers. The book on ‘The Kings and the Prophets’ which includes substantial selections from Isaiah was published in 1874, just two years after A Bible Reading for Schools. Unlike Arnold’s Version, in Yonge’s lessons Bible passages are grouped thematically, with commentary following the texts. For example, Lesson LXVII is subtitled ‘Ahaz’s alliance BC. 741–2; Kings xvi 78; 2 Chron. xxviii 17–19; Is. viii 1,8’, combining a historical thread with a more typological grouping of texts. Lesson LXXXIV ‘The Man of Sorrows BC. 709’ links Isaiah 53.1–12 – the same chapter for which Arnold provided his long note – with Isaiah 52.13–15. Yonge’s commentary is explicitly typological. Isaiah is read as ‘announcing the Messiah’: ‘We think of the Saviour led out by cruel soldiers.’ And yet it is, at the same time, a ‘wonderful prophecy’, since the announcement of Christ is also the promise of the atonement and life everlasting. In a final flourish, Yonge also spins the typological reading out to give her young readers a further link in the typological chain: an example of successful typological reading, resulting in a conversion. ‘No wonder’, she comments, ‘that when Philip interpreted it, it won the heart of the Ethiopian.’80 For Yonge, the typological practice in which she hoped to school her young readers was a vital part of what it meant to read the Bible. In Arnold’s notes, however, we encounter the repeated dismantling of typological practice for a more literary-critical, imaginative engagement.81 A third, related, class of note also seeks to untie typological connections, but it does so by identifying New Testament writers quoting from Jewish scripture. This allows Arnold to detect idioms at work and to dismiss Aberglaube when it threatens his hope for a believable Bible, grounded in 78 79

80

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Cheyne, Prophecies of Isaiah, vol. II, 171. The School and Children’s Bible, prepared under the superintendence of William Rogers (London: Longman, Green, 1873). Charlotte M. Yonge, Scripture Readings for Schools and Families, 7 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1871–9), vol. IV, 254–7; it is worth noting that Arnold later takes issue with the Greek version quoted by Philip, and in doing so deflects attention away from a potential typological resonance, directing the reader back towards a correct rendering of the original Hebrew. See Complete Prose Works, vol. X, 420. Further examples include his notes on Isaiah 7.14, 19.23, 42.1, 59.2, 59.15, 59.20, 62.1, 65.

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empirically verifiable truths. However, it also allows Arnold to further undermine the idea of supernatural prediction, arguing – as he did in Literature and Dogma – that Jesus did not fulfil the Old Testament prophecies but, having ‘nourished himself’ on their words, lived their message to the point of identifying with them. This connection was taken literally by the Gospel writers, who saw his life as the fulfilment of the old covenant. Arnold is insistent that we should not make the same mistake, and his notes draw on his impressive knowledge of scripture to trace the provenance of quotations, replacing a typological link with a textual one. It is significant, then, that Arnold spends part of his introduction in thinking about Isaiah’s standing as the most quoted book in the New Testament. Gesenius, he notes, identifies thirty-four passages in the New Testament (CPW, VII:52–3). This puts him in mind of St Augustine, who was told to read the Book of Isaiah soon after his conversion by St Ambrose, presumably, Arnold argues, because ‘he foreshadowed more clearly than the others the Gospel and the calling of the Gentiles’ (CPW, VII:52). However, when we consider this comment alongside Arnold’s letter to his mother concerning his vocation, connecting it with Augustine’s conversion, and reading it against his notes on quotation in Isaiah, it is difficult to maintain that by ‘foreshadowing’ he means a typological link between the prophecies of Isaiah and the Christian mission. Instead, Arnold’s work with quotation across the Bible Reading for Schools seems to suggest a different connection between readers and texts: just as Jesus was nourished by the Hebrew prophets, Augustine was called to live the Gospel by reading a passage of Romans. Quotation emerges here as more than a literary device. It is a getting by heart, a living by the words of a past prophet, which has everything to do with moral behaviour and nothing at all to do with the prophetic coincidence of similar phrases fulfilled at a later historical moment. Take Arnold’s note on Isaiah 42:2: ‘He shall not strive, nor cry, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street.’ This line, which is often connected with the suffering of Isaiah 53, provokes a long reflection on the inadequacy of later quotations and translations: The whole passage, vv.1–4 is applied to Christ in the New Testament, St. Matth xii. 1721; but neither the Greek version nor the Hebrew original are closely followed. The occasion of quoting the passage is Jesus Christ’s charge to those whom he healed that they should not make him known, the point primarily to be illustrated being Christ’s mild, silent, and uncontentious manner of working.

Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah 2. He shall not strive. – More literally, shall not clamour: shall not speak with the high, vehement voice of men who contend. God’s servant shall bring to men’s hearts the word of God’s righteousness and salvation by a gentle, inward and spiritual method. (CPW, X:405)

In drawing attention to St Matthew’s quotation as a quotation, Arnold accomplishes two things at once. In ‘applying’ the verse from Isaiah to Christ, he suggests that Matthew is making a wilful link which does not do justice to the original historical meaning of Isaiah. Having reduced the potential typological link between Isaiah’s servant and Christ’s serving the sick to the status of an apt quotation, Arnold is then able to offer a different, more ‘literal’ take on the quotation, pointing to Christ as someone who got Isaiah’s message by heart and put it into practice in his own life, converting people quietly – an inward, not a loud and coercive example. This tactic is a sharp practice when compared with Arnold’s own sources and contemporaries. For Delitzsch, Matthew is not quoting Isaiah, he is witnessing the fulfilment of Isaiah’s words in his own time. Noting that the prophet’s words are ‘rendered freely and faithfully’ in Matthew, Delitzsch refers to the servant as ‘Him’, with a capital letter, sustaining the typological link.82 Yonge is even more straightforward, advising her young readers that ‘the gentleness of Christ’s teaching is foretold in xlii’.83 Cheyne has much to say on this question of whether quotations should be read as quotations, or as a special kind of typological link. Acknowledging the difficulty of resemblance between the servant in Isaiah and the Gospels, he suggests we must choose between two alternatives. Either we can contend, with Arnold, that Jesus was ‘nourished’ by the Gospels, and fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah in his manner of quoting, speaking and acting, or, alternatively, ‘we may hold that the Divine Spirit overruled in such a way the divine process of the prophet that he chose expressions which, while completely conveying his own meaning, also corresponded to a future fact in the life of Jesus Christ’.84 Committed, though he remains, to grammatical and textual accuracy, this latter explanation is to be preferred, since: it does not prevent us from accepting thankfully the element of truth in Mr Matthew Arnold’s too self-eulogistic observation. The harmony between Isaiah and the Gospels is . . . perfectly natural. But it is also perfectly unique, and what is unique may in one very good sense be called

82 84

Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary, 315. 83 Yonge, Scripture Readings, vol. IV, 258. Cheyne, Prophecies of Isaiah, vol. II, 185–6.

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supernatural. And so we come round again to the judgement of the plain reader, that the hand of God is in this extraordinary correspondence.85

Even Cheyne, who has every sympathy for Arnold’s precise approach to the transmission of texts, eventually prefers the ‘plain reader’ approach, inviting his reader to interpret textual correspondences between the Old and New Testament typologically, in stark contrast to Arnold’s own practice.86 The last kind of note which Arnold’s reader might encounter, turning the pages between the text and his commentary, is a note of omission – a lack of comment where one might reasonably expect to note a typological resonance. Rather than undoing a typological connection, this note refuses to support one, meaning that the reader must fall back on the historical, textual and imaginative practices of reading the Bible which, as we have seen, Arnold cultivates in his reader. Perhaps the most striking example of this kind of omission is the lack of a note to Isaiah 7:14: ‘Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, the virgin shall conceive, and shall bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel’ (CPW, X:270). Incidentally, this verse is the example which David Jaspers gives in his definition of typological reading: ‘Thus Isaiah.7,14 with its reference to the birth of a child called Immanuel is linked to the identity of Jesus.’87 However, Arnold makes no comment on this line. Another example is verse 53.12 (CPW, X:340), which in Arnold’s version runs: Therefore will I divide him his portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

The reader who has become wise to Arnold’s tactics might well turn to the notes here (CPW, X:421) but no note on this tremendous passage, so suggestive of Christ’s crucifixion and atonement for the sins of the world, exists. We draw a similar blank if we look for Arnold’s take on chapter 50.6, which is often read as prefiguring Jesus’ questioning and scourging by the soldiers. Again, a traditional typological resonance is passed over without comment. No doubt a more subtle theologian or scholar could uncover many more. And yet there was one contemporary reader whom Arnold’s practice did not escape. Writing to John Llewellyn Davies, his old colleague in the 85 86 87

Cheyne, Prophecies of Isaiah, vol. II, 186. Further examples of notes of this kind include: Isaiah 53.8, 56.1, 56.7, 57.19, 61.1, 65.1. Jaspers, ‘Biblical Hermeneutics’, 23.

Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah

Education Department, on 31 May just thirteen days after A Bible Reading for Schools was published, Arnold adds a postscript: P.S. [John Henry] Newman has written me a most interesting letter, objecting to the danger of giving any but the typical & applied side of prophecy to the young, yet fascinated, like a born humanist as he is, by the literary chance given us in the popular schools by the Bible, and by the Bible only.88

It’s impossible to evade the potential play on words here, where ‘typical’ implies both standard practice and typological. Arnold’s suspicion of Newman’s ambivalence about A Bible Reading for Schools makes for interesting reading when placed against the exchange of letters. On the question of Arnold’s reading practice, Newman is forthright. ‘The idea of your book is excellent’, he begins. ‘It is pleasant indeed to find a writer in this day that champion of “letters” in popular education . . . which you are; and doubtless the Old Testament is the only book . . . which can serve as literary matter in popular schools’: On the other hand, I should dread to view it as literature in the first place – and there will be no time, in the years available for the education of the masses, to read it over a second time, viz., in its literary aspect. A devout mind, which loves the objects which are its ultimate scope, and which instinctively sees our Lord moving along the successive prophetical announcements, may and will (if cultivated) go on to admire its wonderful poetry, and will bear safely, in a critical and scholarlike way, to investigate its literal or first meaning. But how few children are devout. As things are, the prophecies of Isaiah come to the young as their creed in the garb of poetry. The great dogmatical truths of the Gospel are inculcated on them in the medium of the imagination and the affections. If the duty of mastering the literal text and its historical and geographical circumstances is put upon young minds, who have not learned to be devout, nor have the subtlety necessary for being at home with the method of type and antitype, either they will be perplexed and put out to find (e.g.), Isai. liii. means at once Jeremiah or an abstract prophet and our Lord, or they will never learn the secret sense of the sacred text at all.89

Far from appearing torn, as Arnold implies, Newman appears completely candid in his opposition to Arnold’s decision to ‘foreground the historical and geographical circumstances’ at the expense of the ‘method of 88 89

Letters of Matthew Arnold, vol. IV, 125. Unpublished Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Arnold Whitridge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1923), 62.

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type and antitype’. Arnold’s response, four days later, overflows with pleasure at Newman’s praise, placing him among the four most influential thinkers on his work.90 Yet on the question of whether schoolchildren should learn to read the Bible along historical or typological lines, he must protest: What you say about the reception of the prophetical Scriptures by the young has great weight; if I were to say the very truth I should say that I thought the typical side alone would perhaps be best and safest for them, if it were given to them rightly; but that it is so wrongly, for the most part, conceived and given to them that it is better to give them the historical side plainly. But I did not mean to write of this; only to thank you . . .91

Arnold can clearly differentiate between the ‘historical side’ and the ‘typological side’ of reading; however, he is much less clear here on their relative merits. In a sense, the historical side is to be preferred only because the ‘typical’ side is often taught so wrongly. This in turn begs the question of what Arnold thought ‘the right way’ to do typical reading is, or, indeed, how far he was prepared to accept his own practice as a departure from the norm. Newman did not send a further letter; however, he does pick the argument back up a year later, when writing – punctilious as ever – to thank Arnold for a copy of (Lang assumes) Higher Schools and Universities in Germany: As to your other Volume, your Edition of Isaiah, I will only say that it is a most attractive book – and your (excuse me) standing aloof from Revelation does not mar its beauty. It is that sympathy you have for what you do not believe, which so affects me about your future. It is one of my standing prayers that you and your brother may become good Catholics.92

A more unequivocal end to theological debate there never was! Arnold’s response to this letter is not extant. However, Newman’s perceptive diagnosis of Arnold’s ‘standing aloof from Revelation’, yet retaining a kind of ‘sympathy for what you do not believe’ – a phrase which recalls the curious grammar which we encountered in Arnold’s profession of sort-of-faith in his 1867 letter to Dunn with which we began – gracefully sums up Arnold’s radical reading practice. Arnold could not support typical reading, yet he 90

91 92

The other three thinkers whom Arnold held in high esteem are Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth and Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve. Unpublished Letters of Matthew Arnold, 66. Letters of Matthew Arnold, vol. IV, 301. Lang assumes here that Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible could not be sent ‘without impropriety’.

Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah

could not abandon the imaginative engagement with the Bible or the insight of Jesus that moral behaviour leads to happiness. His compromise, struck again and again in the notes to A Bible Reading for Schools, can be seen as both a continuation and a radical departure from the ‘typical’ method of reading defended by Newman.

Practice III: Typology and Employing Parallels Arnold called this compromise ‘employing parallels’, a phrase which he began to use more often in his writings about Isaiah following his exchange with Newman in 1872–3. In the introduction to the first 1872 edition of A Bible Reading for Schools, Arnold is still prepared to countenance a situation in which a reader might prefer to explain correspondences between the Old and New testaments typologically, explaining that ‘We desire to place the reader in the position of a Jew reading the chapters at this particular moment . . . But anyone is free to suppose . . . that these chapters . . . were an old prediction’ (CPW, VII:67). In 1872, Arnold is still able to talk about ‘the two sides of prophecies’, ‘a side towards their nation and its history at the moment’ and ‘a side towards the future and all mankind’ (CPW, VII:68). This is located in practice in ‘an application of the Bible and an edification by the Bible which belongs to religion and churches’, and ‘a substratum of history and literature which belongs to science and the schools’ (CPW, VII:510–11). In this he may have been influenced by his reading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for whom ‘both Facts and Persons must of necessity have a two-fold significance . . . They must be at once Portraits and Ideals.’93 For Arnold writing in 1872, these remain separate, and equally valid, ‘though its application and edification are what matter to a man far most’. However, by the time he wrote the articles for The Nineteenth Century in 1883, Arnold’s tolerance of the two sides to the prophecies has given way to a different formulation, which combines the historical timeframe of Goethe’s concept of ‘world history’ with ‘application’ and ‘edification’: For my part, I often gladly allow myself to employ parallels from such passages, in order to bring out for my own mind the events and 93

S. T. Coleridge, ‘The Statesman’s Manual, or The Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight’, collected in Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, The Collected Works, vol. VI (Princeton University Press, 1972), 30. For Arnold’s debt to Coleridge, see Jaspers’ discussion in ‘Biblical Hermeneutics’, 28.

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personages of Isaiah’s time more vividly. What is Assyria but the French empire as it presented itself to the eyes of our fathers – conquering, rapacious, aggressive, insolent, unscrupulous, unrighteous? What is Sennacherib withdrawing baffled from Jerusalem, but Napoleon withdrawing from Moscow . . . (CPW, X:559)

This whole paragraph, half-joking and half in earnest, strikes one as a grade-A response to his father-schoolmaster’s question: ‘What does this remind you of?’ But the example which Arnold gives to demonstrate his practice means that we can be in no doubt as to the radical shift which Arnold’s thinking seems to have undergone since 1872. Going back to Isaiah 7:14, Arnold suggests we ‘take his famous prophecy of Immanuel’ (CPW, X:563). This prediction to Ahaz, Arnold suggests, should be understood in its historical situation as a forecast of immediate ruin if the people witnessing his prophecy did not return to the Eternal law of righteousness represented by the remnant. ‘Such is really the prophecy to Ahaz. Literally and exactly it was not fulfilled . . .’. The person of Jesus Christ is nowhere mentioned. He concludes by suggesting that Isaiah ‘showed a profound and just insight into the inevitable future course of events, and his prophecy was substantially true although not true exactly and preternaturally’. The implication is that the reader, too, might employ a parallel, and imagine the historical relevance of Isaiah’s message in their own time. Both this passage, and the earlier passage about employing parallels, included in the articles published in The Nineteenth Century, do not reappear in the 1883 introduction to Isaiah of Jerusalem. Perhaps Arnold, reflecting on his exchange with Newman, thought the argument too risky. I have shown how the notes in Arnold’s Bible Reading for Schools encourage the reader to break with typological practice, and have suggested – in my discussion of Arnold’s exchange with Newman – that Arnold may have seen his method of ‘employing parallels’ as a kind of qualified typology. In so doing we get a sense of just how complex and haphazard the growth of Arnold’s reading practice was. The two methods of reading – typological and ‘employing parallels’ – are structurally so similar that it can be hard to disentangle them. Both practices focus on the relationship between two texts, taking place at two distant moments in time. The connection the reader makes between the two texts brings both moments within the compass of a third: the reading present. When this connection strikes a personal note, has a particular relevance, or in other words means something to the reader; it may produce what Trilling calls ‘vibrating moments’. Since Arnold’s method develops out of typological

Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah

practice, it is not at all surprising that ‘employing parallels’ operates in a similar way: an anthropologist might call them ‘syncretic’ practices. It is only when we begin to draw out how the changes in practices articulate changes in concepts – to turn Asad’s phrase around – that we can truly grasp how radical Arnold’s reading practice really is.94

Practice and Theory: ‘Lines Written in Kensington Gardens’ The subtle differences between a typological and parallel reading are perhaps best demonstrated if we ask what second-order decisions are involved when we choose to read a text in one mode or the other. Consider the biblical quotation which appears in Arnold’s poem ‘Lines Written in Kensington Gardens’ (1851–2).95 Written at a much earlier period of his life, this poem is caught between the Wordsworthian ballad and an almost modernist detachment, seeking that peace in an inward turn which, as W. B. Yeats would later write, ‘comes dropping slow’ against the rush and roar of the city. Each stanza of the poem meditates on a new object, as the speaker listens to the birds, observes a child playing and the ‘endless active life’ of the insects in the grass at his feet. The sound of the ‘huge world’ (the Great Exhibition was held nearby), for which the city of London acts as synecdoche, makes the peace encountered here seem incredible, though it proves short-lived as the day grows darker and the birds, children and city-dwellers retreat to rest. The breaking off of this meditation provokes an apostrophe – or is it a prayer? – in the last two verses: Calm soul of all things! make it mine To feel, amid the city’s jar, That there abides a peace of thine, Man did not make, and cannot mar. The will to neither strive nor cry, The power to feel with others give! Calm, calm me more! nor let me die Before I have begun to live.

Scholars have tended to connect this poem and its invocation to nature with other poems from Arnold’s ‘Marguerite’ period, such as ‘The Youth of 94 95

Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 25. The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth and Miriam Allot, 2nd edn (Bungay: Longman, 1979), 269–73.

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Man’ and ‘Youth’s Agitations’, which express a similar fear about dying before one’s time – a fear which was for Arnold both metaphorical and literal. For editors Allott and Allott, the ‘Calm soul of all things’ is a ‘Spinozist prayer’ to the ‘anima mundi or Weltseele of ancient and modern speculation, that active principle in the universe which we also encounter in Wordsworth’s “The Excursion”’.96 However, the line from Isaiah 42, which appears in prominent position at the opening of the last stanza, passes without comment in the standard edition of Arnold’s poems. Either the sudden intrusion of the suffering servant ideal did not fit with the Spinozist opening, or the reader is trusted to pick up on the biblical allusion themselves. It is noticeable that Arnold chooses to place this line – which appears without quotation marks – at the beginning of the stanza, and so contort his syntax into a Keatsian inversion, with the imperative verb ‘give’ delayed to the end. Since the rhyme scheme abab was not yet established, he could have easily switched the first and second lines around – a fact which suggests that he did not want to dampen the force of the quotation. The verse in question, from Matthew 12:19, refers, as we have already noted, to Jesus and in the Authorised Version runs: ‘He shall not strive, nor cry; neither shall any man hear his voice in the streets.’ This is itself a quotation from Isaiah 42:2: ‘He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street.’ Although Arnold, as we have seen, would later take issue with Matthew’s supernatural take on what, Arnold contends, is a quotation, not a prediction, it is curious to note that Arnold’s poem works to cement the link between the two texts, subtly reworking the Authorised version to replace ‘lift up’ with ‘strive’, reworking the Old Testament text to fit with the New and strengthening the textual echo down the centuries (CPW, X:318). Although Arnold’s poem was written a good two decades before he began work on A Bible Reading for Schools, the consistent choice to stick with ‘strive’ suggests a long attachment to this line. Appearing at the end of this poem, and within the apostrophe to the ‘Calm soul of all things’, the allusion suggests the speaker’s desire to be Christlike, modest, inwards in pursuit of their vocation, while also hinting at the isolation involved in doing so. It is only after having introduced the poem that I realise I have already taken a number of decisions as to how I choose to read this biblical intertext. Almost unthinkingly I have referred to the line in Arnold’s poem as a ‘quotation’, a ‘line from’ the Bible, a biblical ‘allusion’, and a ‘biblical text’; however, when talking about the occurrence of the same 96

See Poems of Matthew Arnold, 272.

Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah

words in the same order as they occur in the Bible, I prefer to refer to chapter and verse, or a ‘textual echo’. Clearly there are assumptions at work here which the sheer dailiness of practice can easily obscure. One of the first differences to note between a typical and a parallel reading is the different attitude they take to the reality of events. As Auerbach notes: ‘Figura is something real and historical that represents and claims in advance something else that is also real and historical.’97 This is categorically not an allegorical relationship: ‘The prophetic figure is a material historical fact and is fulfilled by material historical facts.’98 It is for this reason that St Augustine urges his audience that when they ‘hear the hidden meaning explained of a story in Scripture . . . you must first believe that what has been read to you actually happened as read’. Though he included allegorical interpretation as one of his four layers of reading, for Augustine, the historicity of events is crucial: to believe different is like ‘trying to build castles in the air’.99 That this was still very much the case in the nineteenth century is suggested by Landow. ‘Broad Churchmen’, he argues, ‘who rarely employed orthodox typology, found these types to be general symbols of basic religious ideas.’100 Yet for Landow, this is a deviation from typological practice, which insists, not on symbolism, but on the historical fact of the revelation of God’s plan throughout human history. A similar sense of the need for historical fact is also present in Stephen Prickett’s account of John Keble’s ‘symbolic’, ‘psychologised’ typology: ‘the idea of a historical somewhere within the enigmatic language of biblical narrative continues to haunt us’ – if only through the principle of analogy.101 In contrast, Arnold’s parallelism falls far outside the bounds of accepted typological practice. Auerbach insists that, for a typological reader, even Jesus’ explanation to Pilate that ‘my kingdom is not of this world’ must be understood as ‘a real kingdom, not an abstract and immaterial entity’.102 In contrast, Arnold’s treatment in his notes of the verses in Isaiah which deal with the resurrection consistently work to undo this historical veracity. Later, in Literature and Dogma, he would use the same metaphor to distinguish between Aberglaube and Jesus’ true meaning, taking the verse from Luke 12:32 – ‘it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom’ – as an example of how Jesus was ‘forever translating it into the sense of the higher ideal’ (CPW, VI:304–5). For Auerbach, this move away from historical veracity is distinctly atypological: ‘We would not be 97 100 102

98 99 Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 79. Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 80. Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 86, 96. Landow, Victorian Types, 30. 101 Prickett, Words and the Word, 17. Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 96.

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mistaken if we were to designate the figural approach as primarily Christian and medieval, while the allegorical method . . . tended to appear when classical, pagan, or even strongly secular influences were on the rise.’103 Joshua King has recently made the argument, in his Imagined Spiritual Communities, that rather than using the term ‘Broad Church’ to identify a sub-denomination or splinter-group, we might think instead about the joint effort of certain thinkers writing in the Coleridgean tradition to harness Britain’s growing print network as ‘a medium through which readers of all classes and ideologies could imagine themselves in a Christian community spanning the nation’.104 My reading of Arnold’s reading practices also suggests that, in addition to referring to a literary network, the term ‘Broad Church’ might also usefully be applied to a set of reading practices, originating in, but differing in radical ways from, traditional typological practice. Might these practices still be at work in how we read today? When I read the line from Isaiah in Arnold’s ‘Lines Written in Kensington Gardens’ as quotation, I am not paying attention to the reality of two historical moments, but to ‘a line of texts’ (CPW, VI:302), a phrase which Arnold uses in Literature and Dogma when he is exploring a nexus of connected ideas and their expression in a tradition and idiom across time. In this case, I connect the text of Arnold’s poem with the text describing the suffering servant of Isaiah 42.105 It would, of course, be perfectly possible for me to read this line in the poem as a typological moment, as the speaker imagines the suffering servant in Isaiah as the type of Jesus’ humility recognised in Matthew. And yet I simply, naturally, did not choose to. These two different methods of reading imply very different understandings of our place in and ability to perceive the historical process. Landow explains that, since ‘Typology connects two times, the second of which is said to “complete” or “fulfil” the first . . . It provides a meaningful structure to human history.’ Earl Miner even goes so far as to argue that the Protestant emphasis on the daily reading of scripture along typological lines meant that this period discovered a more modern idea of history.106 Yet this more modern idea of history is not yet world history as Auerbach understands it. For Auerbach, the difference between typological and 103 105

106

Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 104. 104 King, Imagined Spiritual Communities, 123. Arnold’s full line reads: ‘there was another line of texts pointing to a servant and emissary of God’. See Earl Miner, Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present (Princeton University Press, 1977).

Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah

modern understandings of history is a difference in how we perceive the connections between events: The relation of the living individual towards [typological] events of this kind is that of someone who is being tested and who lives in a state of hope, belief, and expectancy. The provisional nature of events in figural understanding is also fundamentally different from the modern idea of historical progress; here, the provisional nature of history is steadily and consistently interpreted as part of a never-ending horizontal sequence of future events. In figural understanding, however, meaning must at all times be sought vertically, from above, and events are understood individually, not as part of an unbroken sequence, but as torn apart from one another, and always waiting for a third thing that has been promised but has not yet come to pass. And whereas in the modern notion of linear progression facts are always guaranteed in their autonomy, but their meaning is always fundamentally incomplete, in figural interpretation facts are always subordinated to a meaning that is fixed in advance.107

No wonder, then, that figural understandings of time seem to assume an otherworldly perspective: ‘The formulation is reminiscent of Platonising ideas about an original that is located in the future.’108 This difference between typological and parallel reading, between a ‘vertical’ and a ‘horizontal’ perception of time, also corresponds to a shift in focus. The first is messianic, the second, world-historical. In typological reading, Landow points out, ‘The one point from which all these hermeneutic emphases derive and to which they always return is that Christ is the central reality of human history. He is the centre to which all things move and from which all other things derive their meaning and relative value.’109 On this point, Arnold’s parallelism could not be more different. Though he remained devoted to the historical example of Jesus, he is, like the prophet Isaiah, just one of the ‘remnant’ which holds true to the ‘Eternal’ in every generation. Is there not something similar in my instinctive rush as a cultural critic to contextualise and connect Isaiah in his time, Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, and the speaker, speaking through and across me in these ‘Lines Written in Kensington Gardens’ in 1851? There is a difference in emphasis here: not one moment counts, but many. Yet although messianic and world-historical understandings of time perceive events differently, they both seek meaning in a third moment: the present. In a sense, both reading practices anticipate something. As Auerbach reminds us, the typological method is really made up of three moments: the Old Testament type, the New Testament antitype and the end 107

Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 100.

108

Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 100.

109

Landow, Victorian Types, 39.

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of days – when the promise of the Old Testament will be finally fulfilled. However, the typological reader’s perception of that final fulfilment of all history is necessarily provisional, and only intuited in the present tense act of connecting two moments at which God’s providence dawns upon human history. Yet even without Arnold’s frequent attempts to cancel the afterlife in his notes to the Bible Reading and in Literature and Dogma, the yet-to-come which we encounter as the third moment in his reading method is entirely different. Arnold’s ‘good time coming’ is not heaven, but a kind of peace in the present, though the possibility of gaining such peace is grasped only through the historical sense. In his Bible Reading, he admits that ‘the life of the generality of people is such that in literature they require joy. And if ever that “good time coming”, for which we all of us long, was presented with energy and significance, it is in these chapters [of Isaiah]; it is impossible to read them without catching their glow’ (CPW, VII:71). Arnold takes up that theologically loaded word – joy – and locates its promise in the Book of Isaiah. But this promise is glimpsed, not through the typological revelation, but through employing a parallel. He explains: ‘Many of us have a kind of centrepoint in the far past to which we make things converge, from which our thoughts of history start and to which they return.’ This might be the Persian or Peloponnesian wars, the time of Alexander the Great, or of Caesar. However, if forced to choose, he argues, ‘one who took the conquest of Babylon and the restoration of the Jewish exiles would not have a better’ (CPW, VII:72). This is a really radical moment in the history of typological practice. Instead of a providential, continuous revelation of God’s plan, there are many, many routes to hope – we can even choose our own centre-point! Though Arnold recommends the Book of Isaiah as the locus classicus of joy, the revelation that morality leads to happiness could, he admits, also be grasped through reading other works. And here Christian history has been replaced by world history. Is this perhaps why I did not instinctively look for a typological link in Arnold’s poem? Can a poem maintain, within the limits of its own thinking, a Spinozan and a Christian intimation of joy? Finally, this vastly different conception of human history, registering in two similar yet subtly different reading practices, comes to the fore when we consider how both practices conceive of the act of reading. As Auerbach reminds us, the reader’s fitting together of a typological linkage is a personal and spiritual act: Figural interpretation creates a connection between two events or persons in which one signifies not only itself but also the other . . . As I have repeatedly emphasized, both figures are part of the ongoing flow of historical life. Only

Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah

the act of understanding, the intellectus spiritualis is spiritual. But this spiritual act must deal with each of the two poles in their given or desired concrete reality as past, present, or future events, respectively – and not as abstractions or concepts.110

However, in Arnold’s method, the intellectus spiritualis is replaced by a more secular method of imaginative engagement. This has far-reaching consequences for how the reader finds themselves positioned. A secular intellectus culturae, or cultural sense – what Arnold calls critical tact – comes to replace the traditional method of reading scripture. Instead of a typological resonance, which may have a bearing on how I choose to live my life in accordance with Christian values, I make a connection between the historical moment of the text and my reading present and ask how this might guide me in my future actions. This subtle shift essentially turns all typological resonance into a quotation which the reader tries on for size. Or as Arnold put it, in a draft of his letter about A Bible Reading for Schools to William Steward: ‘A single line of poetry, working in the mind, may produce more thought and lead to more light, which is what man wants, than the fullest acquaintance . . . with the processes of digestion.’111 It may be for this reason that, more than any other genre, it was lyric poetry, with its focus on first-person narration and experience, that became synonymous with literature in the Arnoldian legacy. Does Arnold’s parallel method dispense with the assumption that, in making a typological connection, the reader is the recipient of God’s grace? The fact that we can choose our own centre-point in the past suggests a greater degree of self-moving and individual application than the typical reader being moved by revelation. And yet Coleridge, so often identified as the father of the Broad Church movement and a considerable influence on Arnold, was still able to suggest that, when reading: ‘Whatever finds me, bears witness for itself, that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit.’112 A secular equivalent perhaps inheres in Trilling’s ‘vibrating moments’. Despite its inherent secularism, the Arnoldian practice remains compelling, but in a way that differs from typological reading. Auerbach suggests that ‘The relation of the living individual towards [typological] events . . . is that of someone who is being tested and who lives in a state of hope, belief, and expectancy.’113 A state, in other words, that is ripe for conversion. It is for this 110 111

112

Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 96. Letters of Matthew Arnold, vol. IV, 84. Lang has a question mark ‘[To?]’ over the recipient, but since the same phrase occurs in Arnold’s letter to William Steward quoted above, I feel justified in connecting it with this correspondence about the role of poetry – and Arnold’s hopes for his version of Isaiah – in popular education.118 Quoted in Trilling, Matthew Arnold, 327. Quoted in Trilling, Matthew Arnold, 327. 113 Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 100.

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reason that figural interpretation ‘played an important role in the missionary work of the church from the very start’.114 Yet for all that it marks a departure from typological practice, Arnold’s method of employing parallels also engages in a mission of a different kind. Acknowledging the syncretism between typical and parallel reading makes it impossible to ignore the legacy of the canon. Arnold’s adapted method of reading assumes a similar expectancy in the reader. Yet what exactly are they waiting for? Not the end of days, which will fulfil the triple promise of old, new and future covenants, but something much more empirically verifiable: a centre-point in the far past, brought into contact with an analogous present, spurs him to consider what he too might achieve as a moral being. But this cultural mission also has its dark side, as any appeal to world-historical forces as a brute fact always will. As Arnold’s biographer reminds us: The fluidity with which Arnold links the cosmopolitan influences of imperialism into the binding charms of the English Bible indicates the ease with which his apologies for the Bible’s regulating poetic force can blend into support for the worldly force required to pull recalcitrant subjects into the great progressive “stream of the world’s history”. Only seven years after publishing A Bible Reading . . . Arnold expressed his hope that British troops might thoroughly subjugate the Zulus and speedily extend the spread of English influence for the good of humanity’s future civilization.115

Though Arnold’s method allows for a multiplicity of ‘centre-points’, undoing the anti-semitic supersessionism implicit to typology, he himself did not move beyond the prejudices of his time. Arnold’s unexamined colonialism is inescapably facilitated by his method. Identifying this fact asks that we instead recognise that the question of whose literature, or which ‘centre-point’ in whose past we choose to engage with, cannot any longer go unasked.116

Conclusion There is a brilliantly funny, and disturbing, parody of this Arnoldian ‘vibrating moment’ in Alan Bennett’s play about the British education system, The History Boys (2004). David Posner – by his own admission ‘small . . . [Jewish] . . . homosexual . . . from Sheffield, . . . and fucked’ – undergoes an 114 115 116

Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 94. Nicholas Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold (New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), 294–5. I also have in mind Chris Baldick’s argument about canon formation in the civil service. See The Social Mission of English Studies, 1848–1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 108–9.

Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah

uncomfortable private lesson with his predatory English teacher Douglas Hector. Larkin and Hardy, the two poets under discussion, are recognised by Hector as social outcasts: ‘Not being in the swim.’ Hector then suddenly asks Posner if he also feels like that, something Posner can hardly deny, before his teacher declares that: The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.117

This is the legacy of Arnold’s ‘employing parallels’ in action, yet the searing sincerity of the moment is cut short by the stage direction: ‘ [He puts out his hand, and it seems for a moment as if Posner will take it, or even that Hector may put it on Posner’s knee. But the moment passes.]’ The pathos evoked by Hector’s insight is almost immediately undercut by the discomfort we feel, witnessing an unsupervised after-school conversation between a vulnerable schoolboy and his pederast English teacher. There may be a further edge to Bennett’s critique of Hector’s nineteenth-century predations on his student’s feelings and person in his decision to cast Posner, the only Jewish student in the class, in this scene. Yet even here, in this deeply troubling scene of reading, there remains something irresistible about the Arnoldian recognition that to be moved by a text may also involve the feeling of being moved. Reflecting on the twelve years he spent working on and in response to the text of Isaiah, Arnold finds himself caught between two worlds: ‘With a book of this kind it is particularly hard to make an impression in England at this moment’, he writes to Charles Eliot Norton in 1884: the new world thinks it knows all about the matter, and that nothing is to be made of it, and is sick of it; the old world profoundly distrusts the dealings with it of an innovator such as I am, wants no change in its ideas on the subject, and draws its bed-clothes over its ears. But the book will be useful someday, perhaps.118

Arnold’s legacy is also a mixed one: a way of reading, and a set of theoretical assumptions about what reading involves, which remains with us, even though the text he set out to read has long since lost its centrality in British society. 117 118

Alan Bennett, The History Boys (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 56. Quoted in Complete Prose Works, vol. X, 484–5. Arnold may also have had in mind the different reception his ideas had in the United Stated and in the United Kingdom.

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Hellenism, Hebraism, and Heathenism in Nineteenth-Century England Connop Thirlwall, George Grote, and the Religions of Antiquity* brian young

One of the noblest and most amiable sides of the Greek character is the readiness with which it lent itself to contract intimate and durable friendships; and this is a feature no less prominent in the earliest, than in the later times. Connop Thirlwall1 Reciprocal frequentation of religious festivals was thus the standing evidence of friendship among cities not politically united. George Grote2

The Founder’s Day Sermon at Charterhouse on 12 December 1845 was delivered by the Bishop of St David’s, Connop Thirlwall, one of the two most distinguished students of ancient history produced by what had been, during their time there, the leading classical school in England. Thirlwall was then much better known to the reading public than was his contemporary, George Grote, the first volume of whose monumental History of Greece would eventually appear the following year, four years after he had resigned from his many pressing duties at the family bank, and five years after abandoning, with some sense of scholarly relief, his equally demanding services as a Radical Member of Parliament.3 Thirlwall’s comprehensive, if ultimately less ambitious, History of Greece had already appeared in eight volumes between 1835 and 1844, begun in the remote North Yorkshire rectory presented to him – on his resigning his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge – by Lord Brougham, and completed in his modest episcopal residence in Abergwili in Wales, to which he had been assigned in 1840, at the comparatively early age of forty-three, by the

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* I wish here to record my own indebtedness to critical readings of this essay made by friends: Joshua Bennett, Mishtooni Bose, Ksenia Levina, and Noël Sugimura. 1 Connop Thirlwall, A History of Greece, 8 vols. (London: Longman et al., 1835–44), vol. I, 176–7. 2 George Grote, A History of Greece, 4th edn, 12 vols. (London: John Murray, 1846–56), vol. IV, 73. 3 See William Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and Practice, 1817–1841 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 406–38.

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scholarly Lord Melbourne, who had unsuccessfully attempted to nominate him for Norwich three years earlier. Thirlwall and Grote remained close; it was Thirlwall who would eventually prove instrumental in helping to organise Grote’s otherwise unlikely burial, as a proclaimed atheist, in Westminster Abbey in 1871. When Thirlwall himself died in 1875, he was in turn laid to rest beside Grote in the same grave.4 It was a testimony to a lifelong Hellenic friendship. Friendship enduringly cut across the fundamental dividing line in nineteenth-century intellectual life, that between believers and unbelievers. Thirlwall would prove an idiosyncratic Anglican, but a devout one; Grote, the descendant of Dutch Calvinists on his father’s side and whose morbidly pious mother came from a devout Huguenot family, became highly critical of religion, both ‘natural’ and revealed. Grote’s father had insisted that his son take up his place at Prescott and Grote, where he was to become a partner at the age of twenty-one, immediately on leaving Charterhouse; not for him the years of university study that lay ahead for Thirlwall, who came from a clerical family. As so often in English life, primogeniture was largely to blame; Grote’s younger brother, John, proceeded to Trinity, where he duly became a fellow, was ordained an Anglican clergyman, and ended his comparatively short life (dying, at the age of fifty-three, in 1866), as Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy, a conscientious critic of the Utilitarianism in which his brother had been early inducted.5 Had George Grote accompanied Thirlwall to Trinity, it is hardly likely that he would have fallen into the Benthamite circle of James Mill, who weaned his young protégé painfully from his faith, irretrievably drawing him apart from the learned Anglicanism of the great majority of his contemporaries. It was a liberal variant of such belief that permeated Thirlwall’s sermon at Charterhouse; one should not look for originality in such a testimony, but it contains moments that would have been appreciably recognised by Grote. Speaking of what remained in the sublunary world of the creativity provided by departed benefactors to humanity, 4

5

The standard biographies were written by family members, by an American great-great-nephew, and by the subject’s widow, respectively: John Connop Thirlwall, Jr, Connop Thirlwall: Historian and Theologian (London: SPCK, 1936); and Harriet Grote, The Personal Life of George Grote (London: John Murray, 1873). The entries in the ODNB, on Thirlwall by J. W. Clark and revised by H. C. G. Matthew, and on Grote by Joseph Hamburger, are exemplary. I have drawn on this work throughout for directly biographical information. John R. Gibbins, John Grote, Cambridge University and the Development of Victorian Thought (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2007); John Grote, An Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, 1870).

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Thirlwall sounded like the residual Platonist he was: ‘The material work may indeed indicate and attest the creative thought to which it owes its being; but it is something so distinct from it, that the one does not always by any means adequately represent the other.’ This was as true of Sir Thomas Sutton’s foundation at Charterhouse as it was of classic works of literature, to the explication of which a younger Thirlwall had been singularly dedicated, and which he rhapsodised as a work which can never become antiquated or effete, because there is nothing to prevent it from continually adapting itself to the wants and the progress of society; nothing to connect it with the past rather than the future; nothing to forbid the hope that its best days, its highest honours, and its richest increase are yet to come. It is not a failing, mouldering cistern, but a spring of living waters, flowing not the less freely because it has flowed long.6

Water imagery abounds in Thirlwall’s writings on religion; literally elemental natural religion blended with that of Revelation in his classicising conception of Christianity. Biblical though Thirlwall’s cadences deliberately were, they conveyed a ‘classic enthusiasm’ Grote had fully shared from their schooldays onwards. Thirlwall’s name is now much less well known than is that of Grote, and this already began to be the case by the early 1850s, within a few short years of his Charterhouse sermon, although the histories of Greece both men wrote were quickly translated into German, the ultimate scholarly compliment in nineteenth-century classical studies. As this chapter will demonstrate, the relationship between the two men abounds in paradoxes, but Thirlwall’s career was much more paradoxical than was that of Grote. On Thirlwall’s grave he was described as ‘scholar, historian, theologian’ in exactly that order; but it is well to remember that of the two exacting exercises in translation that he undertook, the first was of a work of critical scriptural exegesis and the latter of a history of Rome. What is more, Thirlwall’s translation of Schleiermacher on St Luke’s Gospel was undertaken when he was a young barrister at Lincoln’s Inn, and not intended for the Christian ministry; his translation of Niebuhr, on which he collaborated with another Charterhouse contemporary, Julius Hare, was the work of two young men who were by then ordained fellows of Trinity. A younger Cambridge divine, Louis Stokes, fellow of Corpus Christi College, described the first translation as ‘an epoch in the history of English 6

Connop Thirlwall, ‘Works which Remain, and Works which Follow Us’, in Remains Literary and Theological of Connop Thirwall, Late Lord Bishop of St. David’s, ed. J. J. Stewart Perowne, 3 vols. (London: Daldy, Ibister, 1877–8), vol. III, 316, 325.

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Theology’, but what was even more remarkable is that it was the work of a layman. It was to make Thirlwall’s clerical career profitable: Melbourne had read it with admiration and had immediately decided to promote its author.7 Or at least, so official memory chose to record it. In an anecdote he gleaned from a friend of Thirlwall, the Assyriologist and Anglican cleric A. H. Sayce recorded an exchange between the religiously observant, if somewhat sceptical, prime minister and the newly preferred bishop: ‘“I have done you a favour by presenting you with a bishopric; now I want you to do me a favour in return.” Thirlwall having expressed his readiness to bestow it, Lord Melbourne asked: “Then what the devil made you translate Schleiermacher?”’8 Melbourne’s idiom expressed the bewilderment of an older man who prized scholarship but who also understood diplomacy in an era of increasing religious respectability; Thirlwall’s devotion to learning did not always accompany mastery of the very public virtue of diplomacy. Whatever the personal consequences he was to face for such intellectual daring, including losing out at Norwich before being preferred to St David’s, Thirlwall’s translation brought German theology irrevocably into English religious thought; hitherto it had been treated with suspicion, as heretical and dangerous, and he had shortly afterwards to spend some time in rebutting an ignorant attack on it made by J. J. Conybeare in his 1824 Oxford Bampton Lectures. In common with most English scholars of the era, Conybeare could not read German, and was therefore obliged to read the work only of those German theologians who had written in Latin.9 Thirlwall harangued him accordingly and effectively; the young lawyer had imbibed much of the critical scepticism of such theologians as Semler, and it was as an historian that he felt enabled to say of the stories used by early Christians to convert learned heathens, that they were such as ‘could only have given rise to wild, fantastical and most unprofitable speculations’.10 This set the tone of all that was to follow in Thirlwall’s life of scholarship, and it naturally entailed controversy. When Thirlwall praised Schleiermacher’s inquiry for its ‘perfect freedom and impartiality’, the young barrister – the pupil of Basevi, Disraeli’s 7

8

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Letters Literary and Theological of Connop Thirlwall, Late Lord Bishop of St. David’s, ed. J. J. Stewart Perowne and Louis Stokes (London: R. Bentley & Son, 1881), 54. A. H. Sayce, Reminiscences (London: Macmillan, 1923), 97. I owe this reference to Simon Goldhill. J. J. Conybeare, The Bampton Lectures for MDCCCXXIV, Being an Attempt to Trace the History and to Ascertain the Limits of the Secondary and Spiritual Interpretation of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 1824), 6–37, 249–331. Thirlwall, ‘Introduction’ to Friedrich Schleiermacher, A Critical Essay on the Gospel of St. Luke (London: J. Taylor, 1825), ix–xiii, li, lxxviii.

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uncle – was invoking values that not all orthodox and tradition-bound theologians rated as highly as he did; as with Schleiermacher, so with Thirlwall, this ‘extraordinary writer’ opened ‘a new path in every field of literature’, but both men were condemned to ‘travel alone’.11 Thirlwall’s was to prove a lonely scholarly life, and he was not to enjoy the international reputation that eventually came Grote’s way: internationally, at least, Hellenism eclipsed Christianity, but it was a more complex journey in England, as the burial of the two lifelong friends in the ceremonial centre of the Church of England was to prove. It is with an explanation of how this journey was possible that this chapter is primarily concerned.

I. Had Grote studied at Cambridge he might well have become a Trinity Liberal and, in common with Thirlwall, one of those identified by Duncan Forbes as a liberal Anglican historian.12 He took instead an entirely contrary course, and in 1822, under the Hellenic-cum-Gallic pseudonym of Philip Beauchamp, he collaborated with the elderly Jeremy Bentham on a pamphlet entitled Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind. What Leslie Stephen said of it in 1900 remains true: ‘it is probably as forcible an attack as has often been written upon the popular theology’.13 It was an assured and incendiary performance, published by the notorious radical Richard Carlisle who could legitimately do so under his own name as he was then uniquely free from prosecution, incarcerated as he already was for publishing the political and religious writings of Thomas Paine. Under this very particular title the tract looked disinterested, but of course it was not, and the shift into a brief discussion of revealed religion made it look even worse than merely natural religion, for as ‘Beauchamp’ observed, ‘if it be discovered that Religion, unassisted by revelation, is the foe and not the benefactor of mankind, we can then ascertain whether the good effects engrafted upon her by any alleged revelation, are sufficient to neutralise the bitterness of her natural fruits’. Likewise, few readers of such a text would readily have accepted the 11

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Thirlwall, ‘Introduction’, cli–clii. See James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2014), 213, 218. Richard Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion, and Reform, 1830–1841 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 144–83; Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge University Press, 1952). Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians, 3 vols. (London: Duckworth, 1900), vol. II, 339.

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claim that ‘where the terms, sacerdotal class, or any synonymous phrases, are employed in it it is only the ministers of Natural Religion who are designated’.14 The offensiveness of the tract was meticulously calculated, as when the authors regretted the ‘mischief’ attendant on ‘creating a particular class of persons incurably opposed to the interests of humanity’: that is, priests.15 The authors instanced that he, ‘who reposes faith in the accounts of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, must have a mind so constituted, as to believe on many occasions without the warrant of experience’. Belief in a Being who could not, by definition, be seen, heard, touched, or smelled was tantamount to an ‘extra-experimental belief ’; the contrastingly evident consequences of such belief were accorded in appeal to the victims of beliefs in witchcraft and the trial by ordeal.16 The priesthood was derided in residually republican language: Natural religion is thus provided with an army of human force and fraud for the purpose of enforcing her mandates, and realizing her mischievous tendencies. A standing army of ministers is organized in her cause; formed either of men who are themselves believed to be specially gifted from the sky, or of others who pretend not to any intermediate inspiration in their own persons, but merely act as the sub-delegates of some heaven – commissioned envoys of aforetime.17

Liberalism in such a situation was impossible, as the pairing of young and old Philosophic Radicals opined in classic Benthamite style that ‘all sinister interests have a natural tendency to combine’, emphasising that ‘between the particular interest of a governing aristocracy and a sacerdotal class, there seems a very peculiar affinity and coincidence – each wielding the precise engine which the other wants’. The sovereign provided ‘physical force’ to ‘the supernatural terrors’ induced by priests, and hence the criminalisation of heresy and irreligion.18 No less than Grote, however, Thirlwall would prove more than merely receptive to reform in the 1830s; but an enlightened ‘sacerdotal class’ was still suspect to Grote, whose role in the authorship of the ‘Beauchamp’ tract was not revealed until it was mentioned, two years after his death, in The Athenaeum in 1873, an extract from which faced the title page of an 1875 reprint of the Analysis. It would never have been particularly difficult to 14

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Philip Beauchamp [pseud. of George Grote], Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind (London: R. Carlisle, 1822), v, vi. Beauchamp [Grote], Analysis, 116. 16 Beauchamp [Grote], Analysis, 95, 96, 102, 104–5. Beauchamp [Grote], Analysis, 123, 129. 18 Beauchamp [Grote], Analysis, 137, 139.

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detect anticlericalism in Grote, and he had appreciatively reviewed, in 1839, Sir William Molesworth’s edition of the works of Hobbes, celebrated by Grote as a sort of proto-Bentham.19 Jointly written works are always difficult to judge, however, and it seems that Grote essentially ‘finished’ Bentham’s text, so much so that it is effectively his work: what, therefore, can one deduce from this?20 First, the text builds on an 1820 essay Grote had written on magic, that was effectively a critique of religion, and much of the language he used in it was reproduced in the Analysis.21 Second, the Analysis is more elegantly Latinate than pseudo-Hellenic, with few of Bentham’s neologisms or linguistic contortions; and third, what is in essence an ahistorical argument occasionally, but only occasionally, looks towards history for verification. Aside from witchcraft and the trial by ordeal (and a passing reference to mortmain), there is conjectural history – ‘the belief in particular persons, as inspired by God, is proportionally prevalent in an early stage of society’ – and also classical learning, as appeal is made to Cicero’s de Divinatione as a convenient illustration of ‘the imaginary science of augury’.22 Greek philosophy, even of an unbelieving variety, is derided when the nature of the universe, particularly its creative energy, is falsely claimed to have been understood, leading ‘Beauchamp’ to ask rhetorically, ‘Why was Epicurus forced into such absurdities in attempting to explain all phenomena by the doctrine of atoms, or Thales by that of water?’23 Grote was here manifestly the young apprentice; in his middle years he would prove himself the master of philosophical history. But it was the future bishop who began his History of Greece in full Enlightenment mode, influenced by Montesquieu and Gibbon, with a minute account of the physical geography of the region; whereas the former banker reserved such analysis to the first chapter of the second part of his History of Greece, early in his second volume, continuing it in volumes three and four.24 Thirlwall was following, in 1835, the combined imperatives of historical geography and philology that had informed his essay on ‘Kruse’s 19 20

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The Minor Works of George Grote, ed. Alexander Bain (London: John Murray, 1873), 557–72. Philip Schofield, Utility and Democracy: The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham (Oxford University Press, 2006), 186–7; John R. Gibbins, ‘George Grote and Natural Religion’ (85–116), and Catherine Fuller, ‘Bentham, Mill, and Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind’ (117–33), in Brill’s Companion to George Grote and the Classical Tradition, ed. Kyriakos N. Demetrious (Leiden: Brill, 2014). John Vaio, ‘Seventy Years Before The Golden Bough: George Grote’s Unpublished Essay on “Magick”’ (263–74), and George Grote, ‘An Unpublished Essay on Magick by George Grote’ (275–95), Illinois Classical Studies, Supplement 2: The Cambridge Ritualists Rediscovered, ed. William M. Calder III (1992). Beauchamp [Grote], Analysis, 131, 136. 23 Beauchamp [Grote], Analysis, 98. Thirwall, History, vol. I, 1–31; Grote, History, vol. II, 279–450, vol. III, passim, vol. IV, 1–67.

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Hellas’ in the first number of the Philological Museum, a journal he edited with Julius Hare, in which he had been critical of a number of German historians of antiquity, preferring to draw instead on the antiquarian accounts of Greece made by experienced English travellers.25 As with the astringently negative capability of Grote’s indictment of Henry Fynes Clinton’s Fasti Hellenici, published in the Benthamite Westminster Review in April 1826, out of which much of the energy of his own History of Greece would come, so it was with his many essays in the Philological Review that Thirlwall laid the foundations for his larger, more purely historical study. But there is a difference: Grote’s essays and his History of Greece are continuous in scholarly tone and ambition, whereas Thirlwall’s essays are more determinedly learned and rigorously erudite than are his multi-volume studies in ancient history.26 Thirlwall’s History of Greece appeared initially as an extended contribution to a series edited by Dionysus Lardner under the title of The Cabinet Cyclopӕdia, expressly designed to circulate knowledge and learning to the widest possible audience: each volume could easily have fitted into a capacious coat pocket, whether clerical or lay. His was a work of popularisation of the kind favoured by his early patron Lord Brougham, a leading light both in the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1826 and with which he remained associated until its demise in 1846, and in the foundation in 1826 of London University, with which Grote would long be deeply involved.27 Neither of Thirlwall’s political patrons, both educated in part in late Enlightenment Scotland, proved to be conventionally religious, and hence his preferment might have seemed doubly suspicious to his more orthodox contemporaries. As might have been expected of the beneficiary of such patronage, Thirlwall tended to follow progressive public opinion, only seeking to shape it as a Churchman within the strictly defined boundaries of the religious sphere, as subsequently with his liberal interventions on Jewish Disabilities and the loosening of Church ties to the Athanasian Creed; Grote, both as an MP and continuously as an ancient historian, sought to shape public opinion, and in a firmly secular and secularising direction, from his occasional contributions to the Westminster Review to his later studies concerning Plato and philosophy.28 This once appreciated, it 25 26

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Connop Thirlwall, ‘Kruse’s Hellas’, Philological Museum 1(1832): 305–58. George Grote, review of Fasti Hellenici by H. F. Clinton, Westminster Review 5 (1826): 269–331; Grote, History of Greece, vol. II, 47–78. See Robert Stewart, Henry Brougham: His Public Career, 1778–1868 (London: Bodley Place, 1985). Thirwall, Remains, vol. III, 213–36, vol. II, 317–30; George Grote, Plato and the Other Companions of Sokratěs, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1865). See Joshua Bennett, ‘The Age of

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becomes clear as to why it was the Radical politician who began his History of Greece with an account of the myths surrounding the gods; demythologisation accompanied by a rational account of the origins of mythology was a twin obsession maintained throughout his work alongside an equally long-expressed desire to restore the achievements of Athenian democracy in order to counter the reactionary championing of autocracy that had, in his opinion, defiled William Mitford’s High Tory account of classical history; and in this matter, Grote and Thirlwall were as one.29 Neither Grote nor Thirlwall was embarrassed by retailing the deeply sexual elements of early Greek religion, but of the two Grote was the more circumspect as can be seen in his opening discussion of the castration of Kronos, where he hovers between the borders of becoming reticence and full disclosure. Acknowledging the ‘violence and rudeness of the Homeric gods’, Grote declared that the tales concerning Kronos and Uranus told by Hesiod were the ’standing reproach against Pagan legendary narrative’. In Grote’s reckoning, Hesiod’s tales of the gods ‘cast us down to a cast of fancy far more coarse and indelicate than the Homeric’, but this did not prevent him from tracing myths of castration throughout Asia, although he was tersely indirect in detailing its consequence: The ceremonies of the Curê ̣tes in Crê ̣te, originally armed dances in honour of the Idӕan Zeus, seem also to have borrowed from Asia so much of fury, of self-infliction, and of mysticism, that they became at last inextricably confounded with the Phrgyian Corybantes or worshippers of the Great Mother; though it appears that Grecian reserve also stopped short of the irreparable self-mutilation of Atys.30

Thirlwall was altogether less restrained in his discussion of the early religion of nature that preceded the later sophistication of ancient polytheism. Elaborating, in an essay on ‘Ancӕus’ (published in the Philological Museum in 1832), on the imagery of male and female generation through the work of the notably anticlerical scholarly provocateur Richard Payne Knight among others, he was seemingly less troubled by the role played by women in ancient ritual, particularly that of Dionysus,

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Athanasius: The Church of England and the Athanasian Creed, 1870–1873’, Church History and Religious Culture 97 (2017): 220–47; and Bennett, God and Progress: religion and history in British religious culture, 1845–1914 (Oxford University Press, 2019), 56–104. Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 14; Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 194, 213–34. Grote, History, vol. I, 19–22, 41–2.

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than was Grote, whose gendered regrets were only qualified by ethnographical niceties: The manifestations of this frenzy were strongest among the women, whose religious susceptibilities were often found extremely unmanageable, and who had everywhere congregative occasional ceremonies of their own, apart from the men – indeed, in the case of the colonists, especially of the Asiatic colonists, the women had been originally women of the country, and as such retained to a great degree their non-Hellenic manners and feelings.31

Grote absorbed newly emerging Victorian proprieties in 1846 with some speed, as opposed to the late Hanoverian liberality that permeates discussion in Thirlwall’s exploratory essay; admittedly, the discussion of such issues in the first volume of his History of Greece tones down these elements somewhat, but this is probably at least as attributable to his intended audience as it is to his own scholarly conceptions of propriety. Grote was, nevertheless, the more daring in opening his History of Greece with an exposition of mythology that would have made deeply uncomfortable reading for many Christians. As ‘Beauchamp’ had disapprovingly observed, almost a quarter of a century earlier, regarding the constricting morals imposed by the sacerdotal class: ‘Such therefore will be the code constructed by the supernatural delegate in the name of his unearthly sovereign – including the most rigorous demarcations against human pleasure, and interdicting it the more severely in proportion as it is delicious and harmless.’32 The diction here is more that of Bentham than it is that of Grote, although it was a sentiment he shared; he was later to pursue an affair with a young sculptor, Susan Durant (over thirty years his junior), away from the allprotective embrace of his wife and memorialist, Harriet Grote. Coincidentally, at exactly the same time, the early 1860s, Thirlwall began an intimate correspondence with Elizabeth Johnes, with whom he enjoyed a platonic relationship that continued to his dying days in retirement in Bath.33 What chiefly marks out Grote’s unbeliever’s account of ancient religion was a strictly unnecessary, if enjoyably egregious, contrast by way of interpolation, when he observes: Both the Christian and the Mahomedan religions have begun during the historical age, have been propagated from one common centre, and have 31

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Connop Thirlwall, ‘Ancæus’, in Remains, vol. I, 106–21; Grote, History, vol. I, 39, and vol. III, 112, 114–15. Beauchamp [Grote], Analysis, 127. M. L. Clarke, George Grote: A Biography (London: Athlone Press, 1962), 92–6; Letters to a Friend by Connop Thirlwall, Late Lord Bishop of St. David’s, ed. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (London: R. Bentley & Son, 1882).

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been erected upon the ruins of a pre-existing faith. With none of these did Grecian Paganism correspond. It took rise in an age of imagination and feeling simply, without the restraints, as well as without the aid, of writing or records, or history or philosophy . . .34

The reader is left to infer from this that the advantage lay with ancient heathenism; history itself demonstrated the fallacies of the revealed religions that both ‘Beauchamp’ and Grote chose to weaken by indirection. By refusing ever to bring Christianity directly into comparison with ancient religion, other than by occasionally contrasting its moral sentiments to the conspicuous advantage of revealed religion, Thirlwall circumspectly avoided all such discussion. In an era dominated by various forms of religious diffusionism, on the one hand, and by radical adoption of the arguments of Hume’s Natural History of Religion, on the other, it would have been disappointing for Christian readers to notice the decidedly cautious register in which Thirlwall began his section on Hellenic religion in the first volume of his History of Greece:35 It has sometimes been made a question whether polytheism or monotheism is the more ancient form of natural religion. This is one of those inquiries, grounded on the contemplation of human nature in the abstract, which can scarcely ever lead to any safe conclusion. The form which the religious impressions of a people assume, so far as they are not determined by tradition for example, must depend on the character and condition of each community.

This is not a philosopher’s response, but neither is it that of a theologian, it is the informed insight of what Thirlwall consummately was, an historian. The religion of the Pelasgians was a simple form of nature worship, and the logic of Thirlwall beginning his work with geography was thereby firmly substantiated: ‘This was not a poetical view, the privilege of extraordinary minds, but the popular mode of thinking and feeling, cherished undoubtedly by the bold forms, and abrupt contrasts, and all the natural wonders of a mountainous and sea-broken land.’36 He confirmed this by drawing on the history of Persia and the example of the indigenous ‘North American hunter’. This was a natural history of natural religion; it was in no way religious apologetic. While Hesiod’s Theogony ‘breathes the first lispings of Greek philosophy, they are only 34 35

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Grote, History, vol. I, 70–1. On which trends, see Colin Kidd, The World of Mr Casaubon: Britain’s Wars of Mythography, 1700–1870 (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Thirlwall, History, vol. I, 183, 184.

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the faint echoes of an earlier and deeper strain’. And the means of discovering the nature of that earlier strain was entirely by way of a scholarly hypothesis: ‘Etymology alone, it is supposed, can furnish the clue to this labyrinth, and enable the inquirer to trace the Greek theology to its fountain head, where it will be found to spring up in the simple form of physical speculations.’37 Thirlwall’s metaphors are mimetic of his mode of explanation, and he was to continue to be fascinated by the interplay between nature and religious mythology, as in a paper he delivered in the 1860s before the Royal Society of Literature on ‘Traditions Relating to the Submersion of Ancient Cities’, in which discussion of the biblical deluge is conspicuous by its absence (other than in an implied disagreement with the explorer David Livingstone on the subject), and which draws on a number of languages, including Danish and the Welsh he had learned as Bishop of St David’s. The essay, which concludes with an anecdote taken from Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great, is devoted to the idea of water worship which, for Thirlwall, ‘in all the endless varieties of its forms, springs from one root – the universal experience of the value of water’.38 An ethnographer as well as a classicist, Thirlwall wrote in a manner thoroughly divorced from religious apologetic, and it was not obviously their differing views of religion that Grote referred to in the ‘Preface’ to his first volume when, respectively, marking distinctions between his History of Greece and that of his clerical friend.39 When Grote referred to the myth of a deluge in the days of Deucaliŏn, he made no parallel, explicit or implicit, with the biblical Flood.40 An echo of their shared schooldays can be heard in a suitably measured moment in Thirlwall’s discussion of religion, when he observes that: ‘Most of the fables which offended both the Christian fathers and the Greek philosophers, by the debasing conceptions they suggest of the divine nature, and which will render it difficult to convey the knowledge of the Greek mythology without danger of polluting the youthful imagination, were undoubtedly of physical origin.’ Even the wiser Greeks lived only in ‘a half-enlightened age’, and ambiguity characterised Thirlwall’s account of their religion: ‘Considered from one point of view, the sacrifices of the Greeks appear in a highly pleasing light, as an expression of pure, though misdirected piety; viewed from another side, they present only the blind impulses of a rude superstition.’ Similarly, ambiguity can quickly shade into ambivalence, as when he notes that ‘the same unworthy conceptions of 37 39

Thirlwall, History, vol. I, 185, 188, 197. 38 Thirwall, Remains, vol. III, 189–210. Grote, History, vol. I, vi. 40 Grote, History, vol. I, 132–6.

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the divine nature which led Greeks to treat the material offering as the essential part of every sacred service, gave birth to more luxurious and less innocent rites’. Thirlwall readily adopted anticlerical language; asked to judge whether the following sentence came from Grote’s or Thirlwall’s History of Greece, the innocent reader would face a genuine challenge: ‘Priestcraft had inducements as effectual, and as large a field, in Greece as elsewhere, and it was not less fertile in profitable devices, in the invention of legends, the fabrication of relics, and other modes of imposture.’ Practical naturalism likewise informed his comment on a characteristic feature of priesthood in ancient Greece: ‘Even celibacy was frequently required; but in many instances the same end was more wisely pursued by the selection either of the age when the passions are yet dormant, or that in which they have subsided.’41 (Thirlwall himself did not marry.) In his ‘Advertisement’ to the first volume of the History of Greece, Thirlwall noted that it had been completed before the final volume of F. H. Clinton’s Fasti Hellenici had appeared, also in 1835, and here is another suggestive silence. Clinton’s Fasti had been devoted to producing a chronology for ancient Greece, one that was placed alongside scriptural history; the young Grote had vigorously denounced such an old-fashioned enterprise, although he did occasionally draw on Clinton. Chronology was not a subject that greatly appealed to Thirlwall, and when he did write about it, in 1857, it was to demonstrate that Kagel’s attempt at forming an ‘Alleged connexion between the early history of Greece and Assyria’ was a failure, and that an allied attempt at reconciling both with Hebrew chronology fared no better.42 Thirlwall’s enterprise and that of Grote were remarkably similar, not least in their note of historical scepticism and their commitment to writing the prehistory of mythological Greece according to the script afforded by philosophical history. But where Thirlwall preferred etymology to chronology, Grote preferred chronology to etymology, going so far at one point as to record his agreement with Clinton on the matter.43 For all their mutual indebtedness to eighteenth-century modes of thought, from Vico and Montesquieu to the conjectural history favoured by Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, both men were more substantially the beneficiaries of more recent styles of thought; immediately after noting his differences with Thirlwall, Grote acknowledged that both men had gained much from ‘the new lights thrown upon many subjects of antiquity by the 41 43

Thirlwall, History, vol. I,192, 195, 198, 204. Grote, History, vol. II, 75.

42

Thirwall, Remains, vol. III, 154–88.

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inestimable aid of German erudition’.44 Such an acknowledgement was easier for a layman to make in 1846 than for a clergyman; Thirlwall was to know no further preferment after his translation to St David’s, and that appointment had proved controversial enough in itself. Absorbing the ‘German Idea’ was easier for the laity to achieve than it was for the clergy in the nineteenth century;45 English theologians were more insular than were its historians, and theologians who were also historians were doubly exposed to the censures of self-ascribed orthodoxy. A theologian of the succeeding generation, A. P. Stanley, refined Thirlwall’s theological liberalism in a more consciously nativist manner. In two appreciative reviews of later volumes in Grote’s History of Greece, published in the Quarterly Review in 1850, Stanley emphasised that Grote, following Mitford and Thirlwall, was the third of the English historians of Greece, taking the palm of such study away from Germany. Grote’s secularism notwithstanding, he was estimated by Stanley as the greatest of the three, and though he praised Thirlwall’s ‘cool practical wisdom’ he was more vocal in his appreciation of ‘the high moral tone which breathes through’ Grote’s History. While accepting that his conservative readers might not share Grote’s politics, he quietly assumed that his fervour for ‘what is free and just’ gave his narrative ‘a permanent value’; but ethics were less important than religion, and he regretted that Grote, unlike Niebuhr, never invoked Providence, as well as lamenting ‘the loss of those touches of Christian feeling’ which contrastingly informed the work in ancient history of Thomas Arnold. It was only through highly specious special pleading that Stanley contrived to make Grote’s account of Socrates conform in any way with his own conviction that, in Socrates alone, ‘in the Grecian world we are breathing an atmosphere, not merely moral, but religious, not merely religious (it may be a strong expression, yet we are borne out by the authority of the ancient Fathers of the Church), not merely religious, but Christian’.46 Grote would never have acceded to the authority of Patristics, and it was not a field of Christian apologetic favoured by Thirlwall. Uniquely, Stanley used Grote to re-Christianise a conception of history, ancient and modern, in a way that Grote would never have countenanced; such, paradoxically, was his cultural authority at mid-century.

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Grote, History, vol. I, vi–vii. Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800–1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1980). Arnold Stanley, ‘Grote’s History of Greece’, Quarterly Review 86 (1850): 384–515 (at 384, 385, 394, 395), and 88 (1850): 41–69 (at 62).

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As with many of his fellow liberal Anglicans, Thirlwall was both a theologian and an historian, and he was profoundly influenced in both callings by German scholarship. A natural linguist, Thirlwall had early mastered German (he informed Elizabeth Johnes that fully mastering the language would entail six months of steady to something like a year for more easy study), and was no doubt helped by Julius Hare, who had learned German in Goethe’s Weimar when living there with parents exiled to continental Europe by a combination of penury and Republican conviction.47 Together with Thirlwall, Hare translated the first two volumes of the second edition of Niebuhr’s History of Rome, printed at the Cambridge University Press but published, in 1828, by John Taylor, ‘Bookseller and Publisher to the University of London’; the two young clerical fellows of Trinity had sold their work through the agency of what Thomas Arnold, their fellow liberal Anglican historian, had called ‘that Godless Institution in Gower Street’, with which Grote was to be long associated, and to whose council he would arrange the appointment of Thirlwall: Godliness and godlessness were closer than might otherwise be suspected in the year in which the Test and Corporation acts against Dissent were repealed by parliament, and Thirlwall got his fingers badly burned by defending the rights of Dissenters to study at Cambridge, leading to his withdrawal from Trinity.48 Niebuhr’s own religious views were attacked by an irate contributor to the Quarterly Review, to which Hare expertly offered an immediate reply.49 The Tory critic of Niebuhr also adverted against his supposed politics, although as Arnaldo Momigliano, an occupant of the Grote Chair of Ancient History at University College London, was later to note, Niebuhr’s politics were distinctively those of a counter-revolutionary conservative from peasant stock, whose championing of the plebeians against the Roman nobility had its origins in his own reactions to the French Revolution and its many German admirers.50 Niebuhr’s conservatism was perfectly compatible with a suspicion of priests, and this is apparent at many moments in his History of Rome. 47

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Thirlwall, Letters to a Friend, 47–8; Augustus J. C. Hare, Memorials of a Quiet Life, 2 vols. (London: Strahan, 1872), vol. I, 166–9, 190–206. On the prescience (and transience) of the contribution of Hare and Thirwall, see Turner, Philology, 172–7, 190, 204–7. Thirlwall, Letters Theological and Literary, 113–28. Julius Charles Hare, A Vindication of Niebuhr’s History of Rome from the Charges of the Quarterly Review (Cambridge: J. Smith, 1829). Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘George Grote and the Study of Greek History’, in Studies in Historiography (London, 1966), 56–74; Momigliano, ‘Perizonius, Niebuhr and the Character of Early Roman Tradition’, in Momigliano, Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), pp. 231–51; Momigliano, ‘Niebuhr and the Agrarian Problems of Rome’, History and Theory 21 (1982): 3–15.

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One can only imagine, for example, the frisson the two translators must have felt as they rendered the first such ambivalence, referring to the Etruscans as a ‘priest-ridden people’.51 And theirs was a faithful translation: ‘Wo Priesterwesen herrschte wie bey den Etruskern . . . ’.52 Yet more potentially comprising asides were rapidly to follow. The Etruscan chiefs constituted ‘a warlike sacerdotal caste’, whilst the priests of Tarquinii were effectively ‘fanatics and jugglers’. Past and present collude in Niebuhr’s use of the present tense, when he observes that ‘priestly subtility . . . betrays perverted ingenuity much oftener than depth of thought’. Hard winters and pestilential summers ‘afforded the priests a handle for declaring that the gods were visibly displaying their anger at the profanation of their auspices by unworthy people’.53 This was standard eighteenth-century fare, an implied rebuke worthy of Gibbon, whom Niebuhr greatly admired, and of such freethinking clergy as Conyers Middleton, a predecessor of the translators as a fellow of Trinity. In common with Middleton and Gibbon, Niebuhr associated what he called the ‘theology of the Romans’ with the excesses of Roman Catholicism; there is also an echo of Hobbes when regretting that Christian Rome, ‘for ever disarmed, was become the capital of a spiritual empire, which after the lapse of twelve centuries we have seen interrupted in our days’. Niebuhr laid out a telling exercise in bricolage, detailing ancient and early medieval agrarian laws: ‘All the epochs of Roman history stand here side by side; – the ancient aruspicy and religion, and Christianity; – ordinances of the plebs, and sections of the Theodosian code and the Pandects; – the Latin of the earliest ages, and the embryo Italian of the seventh century.’54 Separating aruspicy from Christianity only by a comma was precisely the sort of conjunction that aroused the suspicions of the orthodox; the two young translators were in compromisingly classical country for Christian clergy. Niebuhr repeatedly paralleled ancient Roman religion with people and events in the Old Testament, usually explicitly, but occasionally implicitly, as when he referred to those ancients who wished to explain the peopling of the world by clinging to ‘the miracle of a confusion of tongues’. As 51

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Barthold Georg Niebuhr, The History of Rome, trans. Connop Thirlwall and Julius Hare, 2 vols. (Cambridge: J. Taylor, 1828, 1832), vol. I, 95. Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Römische Geschichte, 3 vols. (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1827–32), vol. I, 130. Niebuhr, History, vol. I, 100, 209, vol. II, 495. Niebuhr, History, vol. I, viii, 189, 384, vol. II, 101–2, 632. See B. W. Young, ‘“Scepticism in excess”: Gibbon and Eighteenth-Century Christianity’, Historical Journal 41 (1998): 179–99; and B. W. Young, ‘Conyers Middleton: The Historical Consequences of Heterodoxy’, in The Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy, ed. Sarah Mortimer and John Robertson (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 235–66.

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historians, he paralleled Thucydides and Rehoboam, and he noted approvingly that both the ancient Romans and the Levites had had an agrarian law.55 His comparisons remind the reader constantly of the equivalence that Machiavelli drew in his Discorsi between such founder-legislators as Lycurgus, Numa, and Moses, with the implication that all three were fictional beings.56 Grote proved to be of the same mind, but Thirlwall justified his belief in the reality of the founder-legislator, noting rather more positively how, ‘as in that of Moses, religion is not merely the basis, but the main element of the system’.57 Niebuhr made no secret of his admiration for Machiavelli’s reading of Livy, and allusions to Ezra and Judith betray a similar degree of scepticism, but alongside such references the reader encounters Niebuhr’s admittedly ambivalent piety.58 When weighing his reference, in his second volume, to ‘the despair excited by vain attempts to fathom the mysteries of theology’, one recalls that moment in the first volume when he declared, ‘I aim not at prying into the mysteries of the ancient theologies.’59 Equivocation effectively results in equivalence, albeit retrospectively. Aside from such doubtful moments, Thirlwall and Hare had translated an historian most famed for pointing to the dubious myths and poetry which Livy and others had drawn on when writing their histories of Republican Rome; the early nineteenth-century reader readily inferred that Moses, as much as Numa, stood exposed on such critical foundations.60 Grote was quite explicit about this, and gloried in retailing such parallels in his History of Greece, indebted as his work was to reflection on Niebuhr both on Roman history and on Greek mythology, as he made clear in an admiring essay in the Westminster Review, in 1843, in the course of which he compared the speech of the horse Xanthus in the Iliad with Balaam’s equally articulate ass in the Book of Numbers, citing as his authority in so doing the ‘learned and pious’ Le Clerc and the medieval rabbi Maimonides.61 Grote could be more direct in the Benthamite Westminster Review than was possible in his History of Greece, where his preferred modes of assault on 55 56 57

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Niebuhr, History, vol. I, 44, vol. II, 112, 136. Niebuhr, History, vol. I, 21–2, 166, 201–2, 441, 444, vol. II, 275, 341, 616. Grote, History, vol. II, 451–554; Thirlwall, History, vol. I, 291–7. Grote was highly suspicious of Thirlwall’s interpretation: Grote, History, vol. II, 531, 535, 537–8, 541–6. Niebuhr, History, vol. II, 11, 46, 570, 571. 59 Niebuhr, History, vol. II, 132, vol. I, 365. Norman Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 61–70; and Norman Vance, ‘Niebuhr in England: History, Faith, and Order’, in British and German Historiography 1750–1950: Traditions, Perceptions and Transfers, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Peter Wende (Oxford University Press, 2000), 83–98. Minor Works of George Grote, 96–7; Grote, History, vol. III, 79–80.

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Christianity were the indirect ones of innuendo and irony, often hiding behind criticism of ancient Hellenic and what he called ‘Oriental’ religion. But parallels did recur in the History of Greece, as when Zeus puts falsehood into the mouth of Oneirus just as Jehovah had put ‘a lying spirit’ into the mouth of Ahab’s prophet (1 Kings 22:20). Such parallels domesticated and naturalised religion, as when Rebecca, Rachel, and the daughters of Jethro are akin to the women baking at the hearth in Homer.62 More discordantly, and disturbingly, the Phoenicians, kinsmen of the ancient Jews, exhibited a Jewish ‘character’, albeit ‘with greater enterprise and ingenuity, and less of religious exclusiveness, yet still different from, and even antipathetic to, the character of the Greeks’.63 Jewish exceptionalism was anything but positive in Grote’s appraisal, despite his friendships with Jewish politicians and intellectuals. And such exceptionalism as he did accord to Judaism was not total: Grote made much of the ‘theocratic’ civilisations of Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt; priestcraft originated in the Orient – and was also to be found in ancient China and Hindustan – and he referred excoriatingly to the ‘ecstatic and maddening religious rites’ of Asiatic religion.64 Scripture did not afford reliable history: ‘we are informed by the Old Testament’ of Sennacherib, and also ‘by Herodotus’, but only at his most gullible: ‘in both cases his army experienced a miraculous repulse and destruction’. The parallel between the Old Testament and Herodotus was adduced again in connection with Nebuchadnezzar, and similarly neither proved trustworthy.65 Fundamentally, the mysteries of religion and priesthood began to be dissipated once ‘the historicising Greeks’ and the ‘historicising mind’ of Herodotus began to undo the mythopoeic world ably described by Vico. When Grote claimed that between 700 and 500 BCE ‘an historical sense arrives in the superior intellects’, he was looking forward to the superior intellects of his own day: history was undoing religion.66 And there was an echo of his explicitly Swiftian irony in the Analysis, as he noted ‘the story of that man who after reading Gulliver’s Travels went to look on his map for Lilliput’:67 mythology and religion offered only a map of misreading; the historian had to be a scientific cartographer. In Grote’s ancient Greece ‘dogmatic theology’ was allied with ‘professed romance’, and both satisfied ‘that craving for adventure and appetite for the marvellous, which has in 62 64

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Grote, History, vol. II, 246, vol. IV, 135–6. 63 Grote, History, vol. II, 137–8. Grote, History, vol. III, 386–91, 401, 410, 415–16, 423, 426, 448, vol. IV, 29. Thirlwall had remarkably little to say about Egypt, and what he did say was positive: History, vol. II, 108–9. Grote, History, vol. III, 428, 436–8. See Turner, Greek Heritage, 83–94. Grote, History, vol. I, 402, 417, 473, 491. 67 Grote, History, vol. I, 336.

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modern times become the province of fiction proper’. In the style of a proto-modern, Pausanias denied the existence of miracles ‘during times of recorded history’ but admitted them ‘during the early and unrecorded ages’. Marvellous tales were compared with the ‘lives of the Saints’.68 Again and again, Grote ran ‘fancy’ along with ‘faith’ and ‘religion’.69 Along with this he promoted the idea of a ‘discrepancy between the scientific and the religious point of view’, which ‘was dealt with differently by different philosophers’. The first hero here is Thales.70 Socrates was also portrayed by Grote as moving towards a more scientific worldview, and he noted with interest Aristophanes’ conservative satire on the philosopher in the Clouds.71 Grote’s treatment of Socrates has been examined at length by Frank M. Turner, who compared it tellingly with that of Thirlwall.72 Where the two men were absolutely agreed was in their dissatisfaction at the way in which German authorities had dealt with Socrates; Grote elaborated on their inconsistency in their loudly voiced disapprobation of the Sophists – ‘the practical teachers of Athens and of Greece, misconceived as well as misrepresented’ – and their adamant refusal to see that Socrates, at least as interpreted by Grote, shared much in common with them.73 And while Grote differed from Thirlwall in his treatment of the Sophists, he remarked that, in an appendix to the second edition of his History of Greece, the bishop made ‘an interesting and instructive review of the sentiments expressed by Hegel, and by some other eminent Germans, on Sokratȇ s and his condemnation’.74 Hegel, for all his appeal to a younger generation of British Idealists, was not to the taste either of Grote or of Thirlwall, who expressed himself forcefully to his old friend William Whewell, the Master of Trinity College. His reading of Hegel led Thirlwall to conclude that he was ‘one of the most impudent of literary quacks’, declaring that, ‘I have so much faith in the force of truth as to believe that sooner or later Hegel’s name will only be redeemed from universal contempt by the recollection of the immense mischief he has done.’ He condemned ‘Hegel-worship’ and feared the impact of his Berlin 68 69 70 72

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Grote, History, vol. I, 460–1, 240–1, 498, 626. Grote, History, vol. I, 609, vol. II, 152, 177, vol. III, 401, 447. Grote, History, vol. I, 483, 498, 503, vol. II, 152. 71 Grote, History, vol. I, 499, 538. Turner, Greek Heritage, 278–83, 286–98. Both Grote and Thirlwall were indebted to Schleiermacher’s work on Plato’s Apology: Thirlwall, ‘Socrates, Schleiermacher, and Delbrueck’, Philological Museum 2 (1833): 562–87; Thirlwall, History, vol. IV, 276; Grote, History, vol. VIII, 558. Grote, History, vol. VIII, 477, 503, 505, 512, 532, 567, 573, 580–4, 591, 665. See Thirlwall, History, vol. IV, 265–80. Grote, History, vol. VIII, 671; Connop Thirwall, A History of Greece, 2nd edn, 8 vols. (London: Longman et al., 1845–52), vol. IV, 526–41.

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worshippers.75 Left-Hegelianism had no attraction for Grote, the materialist philosopher, and Right-Hegelianism held none for Thirlwall, the religious apologist. They were pre-Victorians, both by birth and by conviction. Idealism was to be the preferred German import of the following generations; for that of Thirlwall and Grote, it had been philology.

II. Thirlwall and Grote were both in their early forties when Victoria ascended the throne, and their histories were completed in the 1840s and 1850s respectively. Grote’s Nachlasse were subsequently collected by Alexander Bain, a professor of philosophy at Aberdeen University, and his antagonism to religion had thereby become visible, not least his assiduous assault on deontological ethical theory.76 Thirlwall published little after the 1840s, aside from the literally occasional sermon and his theologically incisive Charges to his diocese, retreating in the company of his family of cats into what he called his ‘Chaos’: his collection of papers and books in the library at Abergwili. He believed Grote’s History to be infinitely superior to his own, confessing to his friend in 1847 ‘my necessary consciousness of the great inferiority of my own performance’. He wrote again to Grote in 1856, congratulating him on ‘the completion of this glorious monument of learning, genius, and thought, to which I believe no other literature can exhibit a parallel’. In 1867, he admiringly remarked to Elisabeth Johnes on Grote’s ‘extensive and accurate learning’ and his ‘depth and originality of thought’.77 From Hellenism Thirlwall eventually turned to Hebraism, taking part enthusiastically towards the end of his life in a revised translation of the Old Testament, expressing a particular interest in the Psalms, and devoting to Hebrew the intricate philological care and love that had earlier made him a pioneer of scientific classical scholarship in England.78 Hebrews predominated over Hellenes in such quietly devotional study, but never in the way that Matthew Arnold had regretted that they did in the many varieties of British Protestantism, many of which had become all too familiar to Thirlwall in his Welsh diocese. As he chose to put it when 75 76

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Thirlwall, Letters Literary and Theological, 195–7. George Grote, Minor Works, and Fragments on Ethical Studies: A Selection from His Posthumous Papers (London: John Murray, 1876). Harriet Grote, Personal Life, 173, 226; Thirlwall, Letters to a Friend, 131. James Turner’s assessment is damning, but fair: ‘This present-minded political agenda distinguishes Grote’s history from Thirlwall’s equally scholarly, better-written, but drabber work’ (Philology, 206). Thirlwall, Letters Literary and Theological, 346.

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adverting to Puritanical Sundays, ‘I am by no means a rigid Sabbatarian, or in any way a Judaiser.’79 After the retired bishop’s death, a younger Cambridge divine, J. J. Stewart Perowne, brought out three volumes of his Remains Literary and Theological, in 1877 and 1878, republishing some of the best of Thirlwall’s essays from the Philological Museum, as well as his episcopal Charges and several sermons: but they had nothing of the impact that Grote’s papers were immediately to enjoy. Nor yet is this simply a matter of any supposed secularisation of the English mind, as Myles Burnyeat suggests was proceeding apace in nineteenth-century England.80 Matters were altogether more ambiguous than that. By the 1860s, Thirlwall had gone into a form of internal intellectual exile and Grote had been unexpectedly and paradoxically rescued from the disappointments of mid-nineteenthcentury politics by the Anglican scholarly world of which Thirlwall had hitherto been the primary classical ornament. Much of the thought of Grote and John Stuart Mill had become mainstream a decade before Grote’s burial in Westminster Abbey, and Harriet Grote took obvious relish in recalling a moment in May 1863, when as the guests of A. P. Stanley, then Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, the historian of Greece was fêted by the young men of Christ Church. A fellow guest on that memorable occasion was the historian and Dean of St Paul’s, Henry Hart Milman, whose History of the Jews had caused great offence due to its naturalistic appeal to history over myth, leading Grote to defend it against clerical obscurantism.81 Harriet Grote savoured the multiple ironies at play, as when she reported remarks made by ‘serious-minded’ interlocutors during their brief Oxford stay: Grote and Mill may be said to have revived the study of the two master sciences – History and Mental Philosophy – among the Oxford undergraduates. A new current of ideas; new and original modes of interpreting the past; the light of fresh learning cast upon the peoples of antiquity: such are the impulses given by those two great teachers, that our youths are completely kindled to enthusiasm towards both at the present time.82

As John Morley put it in On Compromise in 1874, looking back on his days at the university in the late 1850s: ‘the star of Newman had set, and the sun 79 80

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Thirlwall, Letters to a Friend, 107. M.F. Burnyeat, ‘The Past in the Present: Plato as Educator of Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (London: Routledge, 1998), 352–72. Minor Works of George Grote, 95. 82 Harriet Grote, Personal Life, 268.

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of Mill had risen in its stead’.83 On coming down from Lincoln College, the young Morley was introduced by Mill to Grote in 1865, two years after he had been fêted at Oxford.84 The rationalist idyll could not last at Oxford as it would in London, and younger men, such as Leslie Stephen, would later lambast the likes of Stanley and Jowett for seeking to maintain a compromised and shadowy Christianity alongside the demythologising scholarship stoutly promoted by Grote and, in his own more circumscribed way, by Thirlwall.85 Study of classical literature provided a neutral space, free from religious controversy and philosophical polemic: when Grote died, Thirlwall succeeded him as honorary professor of Ancient History at the Royal Academy, and he in his turn was succeeded by Gladstone: a Philosophic Radical gave way to a liberal theologian, who was in turn followed by a consciously orthodox Anglican layman whose views of ancient Greece were much more conservative than those of either of his immediate predecessors. Gladstone angrily repudiated much that Grote had had to say and despite their occasional scholarly correspondence was to prove no more accommodating of the views on ancient Greek religion of the liberal Thirlwall, despite or because of his standing as a bishop.86 Thirlwall was indeed an historian first, a philologist second, and a theologian last (and perhaps cumulatively). The former avocations affected the way he thought about revealed religion: he was certain that ancient philosophers had believed in a future state, but confidently declared that it was not a belief in any way discernible in the Book of Job or in the teaching associated with Moses; what separated Christ’s moral teaching from that of wise ancients was what the bishop called his ‘divine personality’ and his ‘animating principle’. All of this eschatological rumination, replete with a conviction of personal resurrection, was at once vague yet firmly held.87 When retailing a Hindu parable, he declared it ‘wonderful 83 84

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John Morley, On Compromise (London: Chapman & Hall, 1874), 90. John Morley, Reminiscences, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1917), vol. I, 52. In a review of Pattison’s Memoirs, Morley cited a friend who had attempted to get Pattison to write a study of eighteenth-century intellectual history even though Leslie Stephen had already done so: ‘Would not Grote have inflicted a heavy loss upon us if he had been frightened out of his plan by Thirlwall?’ John Morley, Critical Miscellanies, 4 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1873–86), vol. III, 170. Leslie Stephen, ‘Jowett’s Life’, in Stephen, Studies of a Biographer, 4 vols. (London: Duckworth, 1898–1902), vol. II, 123–59. See David Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2004), 38–9, 146–7, 150, 164–72, 180, 223, 309. Thirlwall, Letters Literary and Theological, 38, 299–300; Thirlwall, Letters to a Friend, 16, 50, 253.

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to find so much of the purest Christianity in the midst of the grossest heathenism’. Thirlwall was an eclectic theologian, not a systematic one. He admired open-mindedness, as when noticing that G. H. Lewes, despite his own avowed atheism, commissioned as editor of the liberal Fortnightly Review excellent essays ‘on the religious side’, and he expressed similar sentiments regarding Lewes’s partner, referring approvingly to George Eliot’s ‘capacity for sympathy with religious feeling, and the power of exhibiting it’.88 Thirlwall and Grote were thus recognisably men of their immediate, preVictorian generation. If any Anglican grandee was close to Thirlwall’s variant of theological liberalism it was Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, who had entered Charterhouse as Thirlwall began his career at Trinity and Grote at the family bank. Liddell, a good German scholar, had a distaste for theological controversy that he shared with Thirlwall.89 Both dean and bishop proved distant from the Broad Church collection, Essays and Reviews, which met with controversy on its appearance in 1860.90 This was too radical an enterprise for Thirlwall, and he added his signature to that of his fellow bishops who condemned the collection; was Jowett too explicit for Thirlwall when he insisted that the meaning of Scripture should be ascertained ‘in the same careful and impartial way that we ascertain the meaning of Sophocles or of Plato’?91 Not for nothing was Thirlwall the author of a ground-breaking essay on ‘Irony in Sophocles’, and he would later express admiration for an article, published in 1870 by a Cambridge theologian, on ‘The Irony of Christ’.92 One of Jowett’s fellow contributors, Rowland Williams, had been lured by Thirlwall away from a classical fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge to the chair in Hebrew at St David’s, Lampeter. Williams, however, felt obliged to resign after condemnation for his contribution to Essays and Reviews, a scholarly piece on ‘Bunsen’s Biblical Researches’. Bunsen had been a particular friend of Thirlwall; why, then, did he subsequently feel obliged to distance himself from a consistent reading of the implications of 88 89

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Thirlwall, Letters to a Friend, 72, 78, 79. See Henry L. Thompson, Henry George Liddell, D.D., Dean of Christ Church: A Memoir (London: John Murray, 1899). Ieuan Ellis, Seven Against Christ: A Study of “Essays and Reviews” (Leiden: Brill, 1980); Josef L. Altholz, Anatomy of a Controversy: The Debate over Essays and Reviews 1860–1864 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994). Benjamin Jowett, ‘’On the Interpretation of Scripture’, in Essays and Reviews: The 1860 Text and Its Reading, ed. Victor Shea and William Whitla (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 477–536 (at 504). Thirlwall, Remains, vol. III, 1–57; Thirlwall, Letters Literary and Theological, 323.

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his own style of scriptural studies? Irony abounded in this collision of the generations. How much did Thirlwall think of his younger self when commenting equivocally, in a Charge to his clergy, on Rational Godliness, a widely condemned 1857 collection of sermons by Williams?93 Thirlwall felt increasingly isolated by the theology of the second half of the nineteenth century, declaring in anxious retirement, that: I was never less satisfied with the present condition of Anglican theology; never, as it appeared to me, had our divines more need of a larger measure of modesty and reverence to prevent them from believing that they had mastered the whole counsel of God, or as much of it as is still accessible to human investigation, while they aimed at nothing more than vamping up an orthodox phraseology, so as to give it an air of novelty.94

Such curiously sexualised imagery as ‘vamping’ denoted his great anger; and he knew that science was offering a challenge to theology that it could not afford to ignore. The Bible, in language that Lessing would have recognised, was indeed a record of the ‘moral and religious education’ of humanity, but it had not and could never have been a vehicle for scientific education: as a member of the Metaphysical Society, a debating club constituted by leading public moralists and scientists, he knew whereof he spoke.95 Thirlwall predicted ‘a tremendous struggle’ for the next generation of Churchmen.96 His was the fate of all prophets in their own country: becomingly for a Christian classicist, he was effectively a clerical Cassandra. Leslie Stephen would prove scathing of Jowett’s theology; evasions about dogma were deeply suspect to the Darwinian advocate of Agnosticism, a renegade from the Anglican priesthood, and Thirlwall only avoided detection by virtue of belonging to an older generation.97 By contrast, Grote was the subject of an extended encomium when, writing towards the end of his own life in doubly valedictory mode, Stephen commemorated him as the last of the classical Utilitarians, identifying in his History of Greece the great masterpiece of nineteenth-century philosophical history.98 Grote was to leave a legacy in philosophy as well as in history; Thirlwall’s theology was to prove as barren as his own later, rather lonely life, forever 93 95

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Thirlwall, Remains, vol. I, 291–309. 94 Thirlwall, Letters Literary and Theological, 385. Thirlwall, Letters Literary and Theological, 255; Catherine Marshall, Bernard Lightman, and Richard England (eds.), The Papers of the Metaphysical Society, 1869–1880: A Critical Edition, 3 vols. (Oxford University Press, 2015). Thirlwall, Letters Literary and Theological, 346. See Leslie Stephen, ‘The Broad Church’, in Stephen, Essays on Freethinking and Plain Speaking (London: Longmans, Green, 1873), 1–40. Stephen, English Utilitarians, vol. II, 29–30, vol. III, 336–44.

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reading in ‘Chaos’ and avoiding the many exigencies (and exactitudes) of writing. The early victim of an idealising father who had published his eleven-year-old son’s ‘writings’ as Primitiæ, in 1806, Thirlwall was to write continuously into his early forties, with the last volume of his History and its second edition, but he then went rapidly and very consciously into reverse, collecting and destroying such copies of that first publication as he could find, just as Pusey would do whenever confronted by his own – to his mind, premature – contribution to German-inspired theological liberalism. Pusey’s first (and most uncharacteristic) book, An Historical Enquiry into the Probable Causes of the Rationalist Character lately predominant in the Theology of Germany, was an extended rebuke of Hugh James Rose’s slight and slighting sermons on German theology.99 Pusey quickly repudiated his own hard-earned German learning as his intense scholarly energy gradually gave way to enervating Ritualism.100 Thirlwall grudgingly admired Pusey’s own biblical scholarship, writing in a letter in 1870, that ‘I have a high opinion of his learning as a Hebrew scholar, and am fully conscious of my own inferiority in this respect; but I do not believe him to be open to conviction on any point in the remotest degree connected with dogmas on which he has once made up his mind.’101 The bishop found the Regius Professor of Hebrew ‘a painful enigma’, and an instance of ‘moral self-maiming’.102 The two men had travelled very different paths when reflecting on the impact that German scholarship, classical and theological, had had on them in the 1820s and 1830s respectively. By the time that Stanley was entertaining Grote at Christ Church, Pusey was living the life of a scholarly recluse in his canonry across the Great Quad. Hebrew, but not Hebraism was thus judiciously preferred late in his life by Thirlwall over his beloved Hellenism, a tension ultimately resolved in the latter’s favour when the former bishop was finally immured with the former banker in their shared grave in Westminster Abbey. Has Coleridge’s 99

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Hugh James Rose, The State of the Protestant Religion in Germany; in a Series of Discourses Preached at Cambridge (Cambridge University Press, 1825). Henry Parry Liddon, Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, 4 vols. (London, 1893–7), vol. I, 7–114, 146–77; H. C. G. Matthew, ‘Edward Bouverie Pusey: From Scholar to Tractarian’, Journal of Theological Studies 32 (1981): 101–24; Leighton Frappell, ‘“Science” in the Service of Orthodoxy: The Early Intellectual Development of E.B. Pusey’, in Pusey Rediscovered, ed. Perry Butler (London: SPCK, 1983), 1–33; Albrecht Gieck, ‘From Modern-Orthodox Protestantism to Anglo-Catholicism: An Enquiry into the Probable Cause of the Resolution of Pusey’s Theology’, in Edward Bouverie Pusey and the Oxford Movement, ed. Rowan Strong and Engelhardt Herringer (London: Anthem Press, 2012), 49–66. Thirlwall, Letters Literary and Theological, 315. Thirlwall, Letters Literary and Theological, 261.

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‘National Church’ ever been so broad, or so unexpectedly accommodating of its illustrious dead? Classicism and Christianity had affected an Anglican compromise; Dean Stanley, in the address spoken at Thirlwall’s internment, confidently declared of the late bishop that ‘He was the chief of that illustrious group of English scholars who first revealed in this country the treasures of German research, and the insight which that research had opened into the mysterious origin of the races, institutions, and religions of mankind.’103 In the pregnant pluralism of that final clause, there is much that made it possible for Thirlwall, a Christian worthy, to be buried with the unbelieving Grote: Hellenism had effectively absorbed Christianity. With their interment went much of their scholarly authority, effectively both celebrated and marginalised within the historic centre of English religious culture. In 1876, barely a year after Thirlwall’s funeral, Matthew Arnold completed a series of anonymous reviews for the Pall Mall Gazette of A. W. Ward’s translation of Ernst Curtius’s History of Greece, which had begun to appear in 1868. Arnold was concerned to emphasise the provincial nature of the work of Grote and Thirlwall, and not just stylistically, as he noted that Thirwall ‘seems to move in an atmosphere somewhat far off and shady’ and that over Grote’s History ‘there seems to hang a certain air of the isolated scholar’s study, an air of tentative labour and still continuing research’; both lacked Curtius’s alleged vitality. Grote’s ‘very fulness’ prevented any attempt at conveying the ‘characteristic and essential connection’ of Grecian history that was the achievement of Curtius. Curtius ‘leaves, and it is his signal merit, the impression of a whole’. In the final instalment of his review sequence, Arnold, a convinced believer in ‘national character’, invested heavily in a language of race that was largely foreign to Grote and Thirlwall, reaching in his closure language pregnant with much that was troubling about later nineteenth-century scholarship, both English and German as befits a review of an English translation of a German original: In its close, as also throughout its entire course, his history remains faithful to those moral ideals which, however they may be sometimes obscured or denied, are yet in the natural order of things the master-light for men of the Germanic race, for both Germans and Englishmen. And in our common, instructive appreciation of those ideas, lies the true, the indestructible growth of sympathy between Germany and England.104 103 104

In Thirlwall, Letters to a Friend, viii–ix. Matthew Arnold, ‘A New History of Greece’ in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R.H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–74), vol. V, 257–94 (at 258, 259, 268, 269, 292, 294).

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The importation of German erudition by a liberal Churchman and an atheist radical of an immediately pre-Victorian generation had been relatively innocent of the occasionally sinister strains that Arnold the agnostic Liberal had imported in his critique of English provincialism. Arnold’s classical cosmopolitanism was of a very different kind from that of Thirlwall and Grote, as philology was absorbed less by theology and philosophy and rather more by ideology.

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Epilogue Bible, Antiquity, and the Shock of the Old* ruth jackson ravenscroft

The overall thesis underpinning this collection of essays is that Victorian self-understanding can only be properly appreciated if we take into account the critical engagement with the past that took place through the long nineteenth century, through a dual preoccupation with the Bible and Antiquity, religion and historicity, the theological and the classical. In pursuing this line of argument, the chapters you have read highlight in various ways how these transformative encounters with biblical and classical pasts persisted alongside a future-oriented desire for progress, cultural refinement, and technological achievement. In Kate Nichols’ chapter on the 1887 Manchester Jubilee exhibition, for example, we read about a fresh conceptualisation of Victorian art, preoccupied with the ‘living’ pasts of Bible and antiquity. And yet these art objects were forged and reproduced in industrial manufacturing conditions and judged according to the standards facilitated by the emergent technologies of photography and archaeology. In Dorothy M. Figueira and Brian Murray’s work on nineteenth-century Protestant travellers to Rome, we likewise find new encounters with the apostolic past – what Newman calls ‘a scene of sacred history’.1 Yet these encounters were enabled by increased opportunities for continental journeying. This, after all, was the age of the railway and of steam travel, of guidebooks for tourists, of the development and expansion of package tourism – spearheaded by agents including Thomas Cook & Son – and of the self-conscious awareness that this was a ‘new age’ of such travel.2 Moreover, in a generous handful of our chapters, we also see crucial engagements with scriptural texts and authors of antiquity facilitated via debates and discoveries in nineteenth-century historiography, philology, * My gratitude to Simon Goldhill, Michael Ledger-Lomas, and Simon Ravenscroft for their respective comments, suggestions, and bibliographic influence on this Epilogue. 1 J. H. Newman to Jemima Newman, Naples, 11 April 1833. The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. Ian T. Ker and Thomas Gornall, S.J. vol. III: Jan. 1832 to June 1833 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 282. 2 See e.g. Joseph De Sapio, Modernity and Meaning in Victorian London: Tourist Views of the Imperial Capital (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and Michele M. Strong, Education, Travel and the ‘Civilisation’ of the Victorian Working Classes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

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and biblical studies, fostered and instituted by the modern research university. The foregoing serve as examples of how the Victorians found themselves reflected in the ancient past, at the same time as their habits, their patterns of behaviour, their expectations, and their values were shaped by modern technological, industrial, and cultural developments. Simon Goldhill’s opening chapter on genealogy, and on the contested sites and texts used to construct Victorian spiritual and cultural beginnings, equips us with the core imagery we can use to appreciate this duality at the heart of the nineteenth-century mindset. That is: the Victorians were fixated by beginnings, by roots, and a desire for rootedness, yet all of this yearning took place alongside a heightened consciousness of the historicity of their own cultural moment, and a growing conviction concerning the distinctively human capacity for change, innovation, and development. It is with this in mind that the present piece will highlight how numerous scholars have made connections between the heightening of a specifically historical consciousness across Western Europe in the nineteenth century – a burgeoning appreciation of human existence as fundamentally historical – and the development of the modern nation state as a shared and imagined identity.3 For as John Toews writes, historicism ‘was a critical component in the formation of a public culture in which the emergence of new collective identities was tied to the production of narrative scripts creating the memory of a common past’.4 By way of a closing comment on our collection of essays, this epilogue will offer an excursus. The aim is to tease out some further implications and points for discussion concerning this Janus-faced tendency within Victorian self-identity – this looking back to the religious and classical past, in the very process of charging forward. This excursus will introduce the conceptual vocabulary of simultaneity and of cultural forgetting, used respectively by Benedict Anderson and Paul Connerton, to facilitate some further reflection on Victorian experiences of time and temporality. It thus develops a theme established in Michael Ledger-Lomas’ chapter on time 3

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On the definitional slippage between historicism, historicisation, and historicity, see Frederick Beiser, ‘Historicization and Historicism: Some Nineteenth-Century Perspectives’, in Historisierung: Begriff – Geschichte – Praxisfelder, ed. Moritz Baumstark and Robert Forkel (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2016), 42–54. John Toews, ‘Historicism from Ranke to Nietzsche’, in The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought, vol. I: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Warren Breckman and Peter E. Gordon (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 301–29. See also Johannes Zachhuber, Theology as Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany: From F. C. Baur to Ernst Troeltsch (Oxford University Press, 2013), 4–10.

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travel and the Victorian monarchy, and his discussion of how the nineteenth-century modernisation of communication technology affected Victorian conceptions of time and space in crucial ways. Having explored the notion that Victorian self-understanding was marked by mechanisms promoting cultural forgetting in the present at the same time as it was shaped by encounters with the past, the epilogue will close by invoking a few scenarios that serve to further qualify and perhaps even unsettle this narrative. In this vein, it will briefly reprise notes from a further selection of the foregoing chapters – the haunted manuscripts of M. R. James’ biblical borderlands and ghost stories, the preservation of the sacred in Murray and Figuera’s discussion of Victorian encounters with Roman Catholicity, and Robert Priest’s spotlight on the Dionysian theatre of Oberammergau. The aim here is to suggest that Victorian cultural engagements with the Bible and antiquity were always mediated via distinctly modern ways of knowing. If the book as a whole details a series of critical engagements with biblical and classical pasts through the long nineteenth century, then in this epilogue, an opportunity arises for analysing the very conditions – the material and epistemological frameworks – which shaped such engagements.

I. Nineteenth-Century Temporalities G. W. F Hegel once made the following pronouncement about the everyday habits and devotions of the modern ‘realist’ gentleman: ‘Reading the morning newspaper is the realist’s morning prayer. One orients one’s attitude toward the world either by God, or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands.’5 The significance of this snippet for the present discussion is twofold. The focal point of this passage is of course Hegel’s sense that contemporary journalism becomes a tool by which the modern person makes sense of the world and its values, in the light of worldly events and occurrences. The contrast here is drawn against the religious perspective, the man of faith who – via morning prayer – gives his attention foremost to the divine as the orientation of his perspective on the world. In Hegel’s ‘realist’, we thus see a commitment to what Charles Taylor refers to as an ‘immanent order in Nature’. That is, a commitment to a way of 5

Miscellaneous Writings of G.W.F. Hegel, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanstan, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 247.

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understanding the world order ‘on its own terms, leaving open the question whether this whole order had a deeper significance, and whether, if it did, we should infer a transcendent Creator beyond it’.6 Having established that the passage makes a note about the incursion of a secular viewpoint, however, what is also interesting here is how Hegel’s words have prompted various theorists, among them Benedict Anderson and Paul Connerton, to consider how modern technological, industrial, and socioeconomic developments have shaped and disciplined human experience in the world, including human perceptions of time, space, and place. Connerton is keen to point out that the mass production of newspapers is largely a twentieth-century development – that in Hegel’s own largely pre-Victorian day (1770–1831), newspapers were too pricy to be subscribed to on a widespread popular level – and that the news literally did not travel as fast as it would go on to do in the 1900s. Indeed, Connerton notes that the success at Trafalgar on 21 October 1805 ‘was not reported in London until 2 November’, and that it was almost two months before news of Napoleon’s death was reported in London.7 In her groundbreaking book Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, Claire Pettit likewise charts the development of different scales of ‘media time’ in the early nineteenth century, including the varying time lags between event, report, and reader access.8 In 1820s England, she explains, the vast majority of Londoners were for instance unable to afford daily newspapers, and thus would ‘encounter history as news’, and were forced to rely on dated information. It was not until the 1840s, Pettit points out, that the notion of daily news became familiar across the English population as a whole. Elsewhere, socioeconomic factors and literacy rates did spawn different press practices and possibilities: in 1836 a cheap quotidien, La Presse, was published in Paris, and by the same year at least three different daily papers could also be purchased on the East Coast of the United States for just one or two cents an issue.9 With all of this concerning the availability of ‘the news’ in mind, however, it is in dialogue with Walter Benjamin’s short essay ‘The Storyteller’ that Connerton contends that Hegel’s words, even at this early stage, nevertheless introduce us to the notion of reading 6 7 8

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Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), 15. Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 79–80. Claire Pettit, Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity 1815–1848 (Cambridge University Press 2020). See also Ivon Asquith, ‘The Structure, Ownership and Control of the Press, 1780–1855’, in George Boyce, James Curran, and Pauline Wingate, eds., Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (Constable: Sage Publications, 1978), pp.98–116. Pettit, Serial Forms, 32–3, 35–6.

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newspapers as a distinctly modern ritual. And as ritual, this modern phenomenon provides a means for standardising the experience of the world across myriad consumer subscribers. A point I will return to below, is that Benedict Anderson has identified the newspaper as central to the development of a distinctively modern national identity – the imagined community of a people united in the ‘steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity’ of being able to read the same thing about the same event at the same time.10 What is more pressingly significant here, however, is that the newspaper – and this is Benjamin’s insight – is also capable of inducing a kind of ritualised forgetting, and in this sense might even be theorised as a kind of anti-ritual.11 For while traditional rituals are formed around the rhythm of repetition, and thus reinforce and deepen one’s knowledge of what one has heard, felt, seen, or tasted before, the newspaper in fact precludes such repetition, and it does so by supplying a constant flow of new, different, supplantable information. To be confronted with a new paper every morning does not enable one affectively or experientially to put down roots in the world. It does not offer a person a sustained context for developing an embodied and therefore localised perspective on their lived environment. Instead, it can only generate the semblance, the spectre, the mere threat, of a community. Pettit argues very convincingly that in the nineteenth century, the idea of an ‘historical present’ was ‘created by a growing daily news culture and an emergent popular interest in history which were vitally connected by their serial formats’.12 Nevertheless, this still leaves us with the question as to what kind of societal bond, or what kind of grounding in the present, the historicising practice of reading the newspaper and sharing the news might offer. In response to this issue, Connerton’s view is clear. He writes that ‘the principles of journalistic reportage – freshness of news, brevity, rapid comprehensibility, disconnection between discrete items – isolate what is reported to have happened from the sphere in which it could deeply enter into the affective experience, and so the affective time, of readers’.13 The newspaper’s effects are characterised by fleetingness – by detachment. We could add to this perspective that even in 1846, Søren Kierkegaard engaged a highly polemical register to argue that ‘the press is an abstraction . . . which in conjunction with the passionless and reflective character of the age produces that abstract 10 11

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Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. edn (London: Verso, 2006), 26. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 83–107 (esp. 90–1). Pettit, Serial Forms, Introduction. 13 Connerton, How Modernity Forgets, 82.

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phantom: a public’.14 Kierkegaard here engages the catalysing power of gossip, by which a small community – whether a parish, a village, or an office team next to a water cooler – is integrated in its divisiveness. When this catalysing effect is abstracted and expanded to a national or even global level, the impression of a shared world is generated; what Anderson famously refers to as an ‘imagined community’. The notion that an undue reliance on the written word for finding one’s place in the world can induce a kind of forgetfulness is of course as ancient as Plato’s Phaedrus. Nevertheless, in Anderson’s appeal to a distinctively modern understanding of what it means for events to be ‘simultaneous’ with one another, we can see another way in which the structure of nineteenth-century societies inculcated a shift in how time and space were experienced and understood.15 In the late antique or medieval Christian mind, Anderson asserts, human ‘history’ was not conceived of in strict linear terms, as a flat and unending succession of cause and effect. Nor did patristic or medieval authors – unfettered by a historical consciousness, or by a spatialised conception of the long march of linear time – thus feel remote or separated from their own pasts, or the pasts of their Christian brethren. This was because for these minds, all events in the world took place providentially – all of them ordered from all eternity by divine will, and thus all of them held in relation to one another eternally by divine will. In the Christian mystical tradition in particular, this theological outlook was grounded in a Neoplatonic metaphysics of participation, according to which all contingent beings – the entirety of creation in its cosmic history – has its existence only via participation in the divine.16 God is, as Anselm of Canterbury put it, ‘the supreme good needing no other . . . He whom all things have need of for their being and well-being’.17 It was in this light, as Marc Bloch notes, that St Augustine could comprehensibly regard the Hebrew Bible as ‘the shadow of the future’ (Contra Faustum, VI), despite no rational or causal connection pertaining between the two.18 And it was also in this way that Julian of Norwich, a thousand years later 14

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Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age: On the Death of Rebellion, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 37. Emphasis my own. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 22–3. See Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Mystical Tradition from Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); and Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, Preface, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford University Press, 1998), 82. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (London: Routledge, 2014), 90. Anderson also helpfully cites Auerbach on this point. See Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), 64.

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than Augustine, saw that ‘all is done [in the world] as it was ordained before anything was made’.19 By contrast, however, to the modern mind, and indeed to the historicising Victorian mind, what it means for two events to be ‘held together’ or to be ‘simultaneous’, is ‘marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar’.20 The introduction to this volume highlighted the Victorian preoccupation with measuring, calculating, and regulating time, and it also put front and centre some of the material, industrial, and technological underpinnings to this shift in how time was perceived and valued. Indeed, as Simon Goldhill has narrated elsewhere – following Reinhart Koselleck’s groundbreaking work on conceptions of historical time, and work from Vanessa Ogle and Sue Zemka among many others – a standard national time was introduced in Great Britain in 1847, under the demand for a fully standardised and synchronised railway timetable.21 The invention of increasingly accurate and increasingly available clocks and watches facilitated such a standardisation, and together, these industrial and technological developments made clock time (or indeed ‘railway time’) a sign of the modernity of the Victorian world.22 This modern commitment to a newly envisaged simultaneity – one regulated and enforced through the centralisation of clock time – is precisely the kind of togetherness that is also promoted by the layout of the newspaper, upon which all reported events are put into relation with one another simply due to their perceived relevance to the public in the present moment of clock and calendar time. In such a scenario, rather than time apprehended as gathered up in eternity, time is emptied out and homogenised, as in Walter Benjamin’s rendering.23

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Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Barry Windeat (Oxford University Press, 2015), 164. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24. On these points, see also Simon Goldhill’s chapters on ‘God’s Time’ and ‘At the Same Time’, in his The Christian Invention of Time (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Goldhill, Christian Invention, 64–84; Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Sue Zemka, Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2011). See Ian R. Bartky, One Time Fits All: The Campaigns for Global Uniformity (Stanford University Press, 2007); and Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (London: W. W. Norton, 2003). Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations.

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And so, the modern perceptions of time and space underpinned by industry and encouraged by the circulation and consumption of the newspaper thus entails, in Connerton’s words, ‘a form of cultural forgetting’.24 The notion of ‘simultaneity’ in modern parlance means the collapse of spatial distance in the present moment. This is because disparate events can be known – and through technology in a way that overcomes or occludes the limitations of the grounded human body – to take place at the same time. And yet, the historicity of the modern perspective which plots time as linear, and thereby reduces experience in the present to a single co-ordinate on a great timeline, also ends up alienating the human actor from her own past, as well as the human past, via a great and untraversable calendrical distance. I have no access to what has gone before, except through an assessment of the artefacts and ideas that remain. Whereas Augustine would read the Hebrew Bible as ‘a shadow of the future’, it is telling that Jacob Taubes characterises the historical critical method of reading the Bible, after Nietzsche, as ‘a post-mortem, dissecting the body for the sake of anatomical study and writing an obituary’.25

II. Images of the Past At this juncture it is worth briefly considering another nineteenth-century technological innovation – this one made available publicly for the first time in 1839 – for the way it had a effect upon human ways of knowing and perceiving. As I have explored in more detail elsewhere, Martin Jay has identified how a fascination with photography is connected with a shift in the way that moderns have come to understand and identify themselves, and to approach the world around them.26 To deploy Jay’s own words on the topic: ‘without a doubt, the commonplace view of photography ever since its inception . . . is that it records a moment of reality as it actually appeared’.27 This treatment of photography as an instrument for accessing the world in its facticity was also accompanied, Jay suggests, by a creeping confidence in humanity’s ability to make ever more faithful representations 24 25

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Connerton, How Modernity Forgets, 40. Jacob Taubes, ‘Theology and the Philosophic Critique of Religion’, Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 8/2 (1956): 129–38 (at 131). See also Michael Legaspi’s book The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (Oxford University Press, 2010). Here I expand on a discussion I began in an article from 2017. See Ruth Jackson, ‘Photography, Finitude, and the Human Self in Time’, Telos 179 (2017): 89–107. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 126.

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of visible reality. He ventures that to those living after the invention of the camera, ‘each new improvement in the technology, like the stereoscope or color film, was seen as making up a deficiency in the previous ability to record what was really there’.28 Seen in these terms, this attitude to photography as a technology seems to suggest a basic trust in the truthdiscerning power of the human visual system, which, in turn, has increasingly complex instruments at its disposal. Likewise, it indicates an optimistic set of everyday assumptions about the camera’s ability to ‘capture’ reality; a naïve species of scientific realism reductive precisely in its overestimation of the objectivity a given subject can claim over against the environment by which they are formed and to which they belong. Nevertheless – as Jay himself would also attest – the above description of photography as a tool for helping us record ‘the real’ in an incrementally better way is inadequate as an appraisal of how photographic images were, and still are, treated on a popular and public level. One thinks, for instance, of the varied public reaction to the case of the Cottingley Fairies in the early twentieth century – a series of faked and fantastical photographs, two from 1917 and three from 1920 – which depicted fairies and on one occasion a winged gnome in different poses, interacting with cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. And in the Victorian era itself, one could also point to Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait photography, in order to appreciate another dimension to the impact that photography could have upon modern ways of ‘seeing’ or ‘imagining’ reality. At the time, of course, it took hours – and the painstaking preparation then development of glass plates – rather than mere seconds to ‘take’ a photograph. Cameron was apparently known to stay up until the early hours of the morning, poring over her ‘soaking photographs’.29 Most significantly, however, her work was decidedly allegorical in character, intended to signal beyond and even eschew the typical historicity of the medium. What we find in her images is quite clearly no simple attempt to capture a particular moment in time. Numbering among the portraits she made, for instance, were ‘fancy subjects’, which evoked a series of motifs and scenes from the Bible, from myth, and from legend.30 Critics also draw attention to the technical imperfections and flaws that can be found in a number of her images, 28 29

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Jay, Downcast Eyes, 127. Thackeray and His Daughter: The Letters and Journals of Anne Thackeray Ritchie, ed. Hester Thackeray Ritchie (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1924), 138. Cited in Julian Cox and Colin Ford (eds.), Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2003), 4. See Jeffrey Rosen, Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘Fancy Subjects’: Photographic Allegories of Victorian Identity and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2016).

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which often magnified their other-worldly quality, and even the fact that on some occasions she would deliberately etch or scratch the negative to achieve a particular effect.31 In 1864, Cameron would refer to her portraiture in correspondence with the painter George Frederick Watts as a ‘mortal yet divine! art’.32 In addition to the example of Cameron’s work, which serves to complicate Jay’s narrative, there is also the issue of the effect photography had on perceptions of the painted image. John Berger has described how the popularisation of the photograph destabilised a particular artistic tradition that was established in early modernity: that tradition of casting the viewer and her discerning gaze as the ‘unique centre of the world’. Berger writes as follows: The convention of perspective, which is unique to European art, and which was first established in the early Renaissance, centres everything on the eye of the beholder . . . Perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world. Everything converges onto the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God.33

In the mid-nineteenth century, then, when photographs entered circulation on a popular level alongside oil paintings, Berger claims that the juxtaposition of the two kinds of image began to suggest how this convention of ‘perspective’ distorted the actual limits of the human gaze. Since photographs capture particular moments in time, Berger’s point is that they can make apparent the temporal situatedness, the historical contingency, of the individual looking at them. In other words, photographs elicit a historicising tendency. And what we find in Berger’s account is the suggestion that the modern camera worked to reassert such human historicity over against a long-standing proclivity to immortalise, even deify, the human gaze in practices of viewing. Indeed, in comparison to what can be achieved with a painted picture, which may either be seen to stand outside of time or to gather time up into itself, for Berger ‘the camera showed that the notion of time passing was inseparable from the experience of the visual’.34 31

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See Victoria & Albert Museum, London, ‘Julia Margaret Cameron’s Working Methods’, www .vam.ac.uk/articles/julia-margaret-camerons-working-methods (last accessed Sunday 22 May 2022). From an inscription to a presentation album gifted to Watts by Cameron in 1864. Cited in J. Paul Getty Museum, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 1996), 30. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), 16. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 17 (italics my own).

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This observation about the historicising power of the photograph dovetails with Anderson’s point about modern notions of simultaneity. The photograph shows us what was the case at a specific time, on a specific day, in a specific location. Jay evokes here the tendency in French visual theory, and most potently in Roland Barthes’ work, to associate the camera with death – with a stemming of the flow of life’s lively stream.35 The camera may well induct the viewer into an awareness of the limitations of the human perspective, but when looking at a photograph the human is cut off experientially from past and future, and confronted with a deathly pale copy of a time that once was, in the specific, clock-measured moment of the present.36 Having considered a couple of examples of how modern technology shaped nineteenth-century experiences, and Victorian perspectives of time and temporality, there is scope to think again in a new light about the double directionality that can be found across the chapters in this volume: the notion that Victorian preoccupation with classical and biblical pasts was fostered by an investment in the human future. In the earliest stages of the research project on The Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture which led to the crafting of the present volume, Gareth Atkins proposed that the Holmes stereoscope (c.1868) was a Victorian object that could function as a neat motif for the tensions in the cultural mindset we have been describing. Invented by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr, an American polymath and doctor, the stereoscope amounted to a wooden frame holding two prismatic lenses, which would enable the user to view pictures in 3D. A handheld device carrying no patent, it could be cheaply produced. It subsequently became a popular way for the ordinary Victorian to make journeys mentally and imaginatively to the lands of Plato, Paul, Moses, and Jesus, when in reality such voyages were not financially viable. One of the interesting things about this imagery, to follow the logic of the above analysis, is that in the photographic images provided by the stereoscope, the Victorian is invited (albeit lightly, as entertainment) to ‘visit’ a place that no longer exists, in the sense that the photograph captured a time and a place in a moment that has now passed. 35

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Jay, Downcast Eyes, 134. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981). It is also worth noting that the adding of illustrations and finally photographs to newspapers is crucial to the popularity of their circulation. See Brian Maidment, ‘Illustration’, in The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, ed. Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton (London: Routledge, 2016), 101–23; and Jeremy Black, The English Press: A History (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

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In his book The Buried Life of Things, published within the duration of the Bible and Antiquity project, Goldhill explored the development of what he termed a ‘biblical gaze’ in Victorian culture. This was intertwined with a distinctive Victorian interest in ‘seeing’ history – in other words, it meant viewing a scene or image from the present day, through the lens of the notion of an unchanging biblical past. Paradigmatically, Goldhill points to photographs of religious buildings, but also of Palestinian and Lebanese landscapes, as the catalyst for the formation of this kind of visual habit.37 He cites the example of a photograph of an agricultural scene in Palestine, taken by the Bonfils studio of Beirut in the 1880s. The picture, which features four people cutting wheat in the background, with a man and a woman featured in the foreground, was explicitly given the title ‘Ruth and Boaz’.38 Here we thus find a present-day picture of Palestine, transformed and reframed via the perspective of the biblical past. It is worth keeping all of this about the notion of a biblical gaze in mind, while thinking through Victorian engagements with the stereoscope, and with 3D images of Jerusalem, Galilee, or Rome. Jay’s discussion of photographic imagery leads to the notion that whereas the ‘real’ Rome has a cultural permanence and solidity furnished by thousands of years of people living amid its temples and colonnades, having their lives and habits and thoughts shaped by the contours of the city, then a picture of the place can only muster a kind of ‘visual rigor mortis’, cut out from time.39 Indeed, Jesus’ Galilee no longer exists, just as the Galilee of yesterday no longer exists. Yet with Goldhill’s treatment of the biblical gaze we can also recognise a deepened sense of historicity here – how for the Victorians, viewing these present-day images did really mean seeing the past in the present. For many, the photograph or the stereoscope presented the viewer with an image of the place where Jesus stood, or where St Paul preached. To round out the present discussion, however, it is worth introducing a note about ritual. It is abundantly obvious to say that the viewer doesn’t ‘go’ anywhere when they pick up the stereoscope, and that this kind of looking to the past represents an engagement entirely abstracted from bodily experience. This is so, even if one concedes the invitingly haptic experience the stereoscope offers, beyond the flatness of a photograph. But to go further than this, it is possible to compare the experience attached to this particular phenomenon to the discussion above concerning Hegel and his newspapers. Indeed, just as reading a new paper every morning resists 37

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Simon Goldhill, The Buried Life of Things: How Objects Made History in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 72–85. Goldhill, Buried Life of Things, 78. 39 Jay, Downcast Eyes, 234.

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the traditional ritualistic procedure of deepening one’s perspective on the world – of being able to affectively and experientially have a sustained encounter in the specific place that one is sitting – perhaps Connerton, Anderson, Jay et al. would likewise agree that the sort of imaginative journey offered by the stereoscope is one that likewise sets the viewer adrift both from the lived past and from the lived present, ushering in a distinctly modern perception of temporality. These critical ideas are of course very well worn, and have a clear analogue in discussions concerning the social and cultural value of art objects within an industrialised economy. To return again to the insights of Walter Benjamin for example, and to his transformative 1935 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, we find Benjamin’s assertion that social conditions have brought about the deterioration of the ‘aura’ of particular works of art, which is to say an art work’s authority and authenticity, ‘its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’.40 And if the ‘aura’ of a work of art has its foundation in ritual – in the way that it is treated, respected, and valued in respect to its uniqueness – then the deterioration of aura occurs when the work is liberated from its ritual foundations, and becomes something excessively reproducible and accessible. An art object’s authenticity and authority is thus undermined, in this paradigm, by the desire on a mass level ‘to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly’, and to ‘overcome the uniqueness of every reality, by accepting its reproduction’.41

III. The Politics of Nineteenth-Century Temporalities If there is a clear commonality to the way that Connerton, Anderson, and Benjamin theorise these shifts in the perception of time and space that occur across the nineteenth century, then it is their shared interest in the implications of these shifts for political ideas and practices in the period. For both Anderson and Connerton, and notably as well as for Ernest Gellner and later Charles Taylor, this commitment to a modern notion of linear time, to a notion of simultaneity that depends on the temporal coincidence of two events on clock and calendar, and thus to the imagined annihilation of distance between events and people, was crucial for the definition and genesis of the modern nation state. Gellner wrote in 1983 for 40 41

Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, 214. Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, 217.

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instance (the same year Anderson’s Imagined Communities was published) that the political, social, and economic ‘homogeneity’ ushered in via the industrialisation of society is a requirement of the modern state. It is this ‘inescapable imperative’, Gellner writes, which ‘eventually appears on the surface in the form of nationalism’.42 And for his own part, Anderson writes the following: The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which is also conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history. An American will never meet or even know the names of more than a handful of his fellow Americans . . . but he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity.43

It is worth noting that Anderson’s words here also evoke Ernest Renan’s 1882 essay ‘What Is a Nation’, a piece in dialogue with which Connerton also builds his thesis about cultural forgetting. Indeed, for Renan, the ‘crucial factor’ in a nation’s genesis is what he refers to as ‘forgetting’, ‘even historical error’, since that which binds the people of a nation together politically, he argues, must be an elimination of the differences among peoples in a founding and fundamental act of violence and suppression. Instead of being bound together fully in their differences, therefore, the people of a nation are again politically united in Renan’s view through their anonymity. ‘Unity is always effected by means of brutality’, Renan writes; ‘the union of northern France with the Midi was the result of massacres and terror lasting for the best part of a century’. The essence of a nation for Renan is thus ‘that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things’.44 The forgetting effected by the binding together of a nation is the occlusion of the long processes of labour and community formation that underpin such arrangements. Given the focus of this book on the Victorians, it important to keep central the recognition that the United Kingdom was, by definition, not a nation state, unlike nineteenth-century France, and indeed unlike Germany by the 1870s. Nevertheless, these points concerning the politics of time and temporality do serve to bring the present work back around to 42

43 44

Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 39. See also Charles Taylor, ‘Nationalism and Modernity’, in The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism, ed. John A. Hall (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 191–218. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 26. Ernest Renan, ‘What Is a Nation?’, in Ernest Renan, What Is a Nation? And Other Political Writings, trans. and ed. M. F. N. Giglioli (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 251.

Epilogue: Bible, Antiquity, and the Shock of the Old

its opening point of connection with Michael Ledger-Lomas’ chapter on Victorians and time travel, which highlighted how the telegraph seemed to ‘annihilate space’ between British colonies and territories. It was there that we also read how for Duncan Bell, both the steamship and the submarine telegraph together ‘precipitated a fundamental restructuring of imperial political thought’, as well as a shift in forms of reflection and perception on the nature and scope of human community.45 In his work on the technological obliteration of distance in modern industrial societies, Bell cites William Edward Forster as having confidently declared in 1884, with regard to the task of governing and administrating the British Empire, that ‘the inventions of science have overcome the great difficulties of time and space which were thought to make separation almost a necessity’.46 This epilogue has engaged the idea that Victorian encounters with biblical and classical pasts were always already refracted through distinctly modern ways of knowing, marked by mechanisms promoting cultural forgetting in the present. In doing so, it has sought to offer an expanded set of perspectives on the possible implications of this apparent Janus-faced tendency in Victorian self-perception. Chiefly, it has hinted that an acceleration in social and cultural anonymity, abstraction, and forgetting characterised the societal bonds produced by technological ways of seeing, communicating, and reading the world and its events. Benjamin’s vocabulary of ritual and aura, Anderson’s theorisation of modern simultaneity, and Connerton’s commentary on cultural forgetting, all contribute to a critical framework that recognises the burgeoning socioeconomic and cultural homogenisation of relationships within industrialised communities in the nineteenth century. Is it any wonder, one might ask, that an age defined by an increase in cultural anonymity found itself immersed in the production of ‘narrative scripts’ (to use Toews’ words), or genealogies (to refer back to Goldhill’s chapter), aimed at generating the memory of a shared past and identity?47 To venture a comparison with early nineteenth-century Germany here, histories of nationalism and patriotism in the years leading up to the antiNapoleonic Wars of Liberation (1813–15) have detailed how nationalist ideas and sentiments were fostered via a series of policies and initiatives to encourage social, religious, and political belonging across German-speaking 45

46

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Duncan Bell, ‘Dissolving Distance: Technology, Space, and Empire in British Political Thought, 1770–1900’, Journal of Modern History 77 (2005): 523–62 (at 526). W. E. Forster, Imperial Federation: Report of the Conference held July 29, 1884, at the Westminster Palace Hotel (London: Cassell, 1884), 27. Toews, ‘Historicism’.

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lands. In this period, a commitment among the educated classes to a notion of a German Kulturnation – a moral and spiritual unity of peoples connected by a common culture and language, mythology, and history – was inflected by a local patriotism to particular states and territories, including Prussian patriotism.48 As was the case in Britain, state-wide policies of political reform, industrialisation, structural reorganisation, and an increasingly centralised state apparatus were instrumental for the growth of German nationalism and nationalist ideas.49 Yet additionally – as I and others have explored in more detail elsewhere – strategies for political belonging in German-speaking territories and states also included more local activities and initiatives deliberately designed with a view to better rooting their participants affectively, bodily, and even spiritually in their communities, at the same time as they became means for mobilising efforts to forcefully and violently resist the enemy power that was the French.50 A powerful example of this is Friedrich Ludwig Jahn’s gymnasts’ (Turner) movement, which he founded in 1811 with the aim of training its young civilian male members for an uprising against the French.51 In the space of a decade, Jahn stated that the movement had produced 150 separate gymnastics clubs, each one its own centre for inculcating a new brand of German patriotism, but also for remembering and memorialising the events of the Wars of Liberation, as Christopher Clark has pointed 48

49

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51

See e.g. Abigail Green, Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Karen Hagemann, ‘Occupation, Mobilization and Politics: The Anti-Napoleonic Wars in Prussian Experience, Memory and Historiography’, Central European History 39/4 (December 2006): 580–610. Thomas Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 1800–1866, trans. Daniel Nolan (Princeton University Press); Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience 1660–1815 (Cambridge University Press, 1958); Bernd Sosemann (ed.), Gemeingeist und Bürgersinn: Die preussischen Reformen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993); Katherine Aaslestaad and Karen Hagemann, ‘1806 and Its Aftermath: Revisiting the Period of the Napoleonic Wars in German Central European Historiography’, Central European History 39/4 (December 2006): 547–79; Jürgen Kocka (ed.), Das Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, 4 vols. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985–92). For an introduction to several such community-building strategies, see the special issue of Global Intellectual History 5/1. In the issue’s introduction, I detail how my own appreciation of this insight is indebted to Joachim Whaley and Gareth Stedman Jones. See Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft, ‘Theology and Politics in the German Imagination, 1789–1848’, Global Intellectual History 5/1 (2020): 1–8. I also discuss the same themes in Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft, ‘Historical Introduction: Theological Justifications of Nationalism, and the Beginnings of “German Christianity”’, in The Oxford History of Modern German Theology, ed. Grant Kaplan and Kevin Vander Schel (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). See Dieter Düding, Organisierter gesellschaftlicher Nationalismus in Deutschland (1808–1847): Bedeutung und Funktion der Turner- und Sängervereine für die deutsche Nationalbewegung (Munich: Walter de Gruyter, 1984).

Epilogue: Bible, Antiquity, and the Shock of the Old

out.52 Similarly, Paul Kerry has described how J. W. Goethe was captivated by the potential for local religious festivals to build and sustain bonds in the community. These festivals included the reinstituted Carnival in Cologne, the festival of the tercentenary of the Reformation, and the festival at the dedication of the restored St Roch Chapel.53 Furthermore, in the immediate fallout of the wars in 1815, nationalist student associations (Burschenschaften) also established themselves as institutions for remembering the shared experiences of war, as well as fostering loyalty to the notion of a unified German nation. Christian Jansen has argued in this light that ‘the prototype of a nationalist organization in Germany was not the party, but publicly operating clubs and societies’.54 But perhaps even more significant for the focus of the present piece is the deliberate and public pursuit of associations and practices towards establishing a shared past and communal identity between the young inhabitants of German-speaking lands. And these are practices, interestingly, that refuse anonymity and cultural forgetting by incorporating attention to ritual and embodiment in the creation of collective memory. The local and ritual character of these community-building activities in the German context inspires a comment, in closing, on how some of the practices, initiatives, and motifs detailed in the foregoing chapters unsettle (even if unconsciously or accidentally) some of the homogenising tendencies that can be identified in modern Victorian society. Indeed, it is important not to overstate the degree of homogenisation achieved in Britain in the nineteenth century. This is especially so when we are dealing with a series of kingdoms, and not a centralised ‘nation state’ as such – a set of kingdoms and diversified regions, counties, and communities, which eschewed a centralised conception of a shared cultural or human identity. Highlighting three such practices or motifs in particular, moreover, allows a final opportunity to highlight the rich and complex portrait painted in this volume of Victorian self-identity in its cultural retrieval of the Bible and antiquity. The first of these examples remains specific to the German context. Robert Priest’s spotlight on the passion play at Oberammergau 52

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Christopher Clark, ‘The Wars of Liberation in Prussian Memory: Reflections on the Memorialization of War in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany’, Journal of Modern History 68/ 3 (1996): 550–76. Paul Kerry, ‘Zusammenleben: Goethe’s Ideas on Community Building and Transforming Religious Festivals in the Wake of the Napoleonic Wars’, Global Intellectual History 5/1 (2020): 64–85. Christian Jansen, ‘The Formation of German Nationalism, 1740–1850’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, ed. Helmut Walser Smith (Oxford University Press, 2011), 234–59 (at 244).

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introduces us to a set of thinkers in the late nineteenth century, all of whom were interested in harnessing the play as a festal or cultic drama, capable of reviving folk theatre, and contributing to the cause of völkisch nationalism. In Richard von Kralik’s vision for such a project, Priest explains, we have a demonstrable resistance to modernising practices, such that the play’s commercial success was seen as an existential threat to its authenticity as a festal event with community-building potential. The second example is from Dorothy Figueira and Brian Murray’s chapter on Victorian Protestant travellers to Rome. This piece narrates the way encounters with the apostolic past were facilitated by technological advances in continental travel and tourism. Yet while the Protestant moderns struggled with what they understood as superstitious Roman popery, and were urged by their guides against viewing the Catholic mass merely as theatre, Figueira and Murray identify a fascinating set of tensions in Protestant and Catholic minds respectively regarding the theological concepts of pilgrimage and of sacred ground. Is the significance of an ecclesiastical site or object to be found chiefly in its geographical coordinates (i.e. as a place where St Paul once walked), and its historical credentials and provenance? Or is it instead tied up with what we might understand as its unique aura (à la Benjamin), which is generated and sustained through repeated acts of ritual? Whereas the first position is typically associated with the Protestant position, and the latter with the Catholic, Figueira and Murray establish that not only were there certain Protestants (like Frances Trollope) who would engage with a more metaphysically inflected understanding of holy ground and holy space, but there was also a modernising current within the Catholic tradition, willing to attend to mass-produced and entirely portable devotional objects, unadorned by rite or ritual. Here then we can trace a multi-directionality, both denominationally and culturally, where there is apparent scope for modern ways of perceiving to be recaptured by a more traditional religious gaze, just as ancient practices around relics and artefacts might be transformed by the potential of mass manufacture. Of final significance here are the ghost stories of M. R. James, introduced in Chapter 11 by Alison Knight and Scott Mandelbrote. These stories would eventually reach a popular audience – a situation at quite a remove from their genesis, in a number of instances, as Christmas Eve entertainment for students and friends in the Provost’s lodge at King’s College. Yet the reason for highlighting these stories at the very close of this volume is that they narrate in a decidedly spooky register what we might truly call the shock of the old: the breaking in of the supernatural to the

Epilogue: Bible, Antiquity, and the Shock of the Old

mundane, whenever a dusty manuscript or a rare and ancient object reveals itself to be far more dangerous than the organised modern mind could have bargained for. M. R. James’ fictional work might thus be said to deal with the spectre – the persistent menace or shadow – of Benjamin’s aura. Indeed, it could even be read to suggest that there will always be contexts, practices, and traditions resistant to modern industrial society’s homogenising tendencies.

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Index

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Abraham in the work of F. D. Maurice, 269 Achilles, 34, 142, 143 Acts (Bible book of), 48, 74, 115, 239, 252, 304 Adam (first man), 304 Adam Bede (George Eliot), 132 Aeschylus, 38, 77, 174 aestheticism, 93, 94 aesthetics, 94, 96 relation of art to religion, 90, 93, 98, 103, 122, 123 theatrical, 164, 165 afterlife, 34, 322, 354 agnosticism, 246, 381, 384 Albert Victor (Prince), 235, 240, 246, 253, 254, 255 Alfred (Prince), 236, 237, 239, 240, 244 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 95, 103, 107, 109 American Civil War, 189 Amida Buddha, 248 Andersen, Hans Christian, 171 Anglicanism and architecture, 198 and Church history, 203 and Coleridge, 265 and evolution, 381 and F. D. Maurice, 9, 262 and marginalisation, 225 and muscular Christianity, 98 and the Bible, 204, 205 and Thirlwall, 10, 359, 378 and Westcott, 37 ecclesiology, 198 liberal, 45, 275, 362, 372, 380 liberal Anglican idea of history, 324–7 relation to Buddhism, 248 relation to Lutheranism, 291 relation to Roman Catholicism, 156, 184, 190, 192, 200, 204, 214, 215, 222, 226, 230 supersessionism, 9 theology, 206, 292, 381 universalism, 153 versus utilitarianism, 359

Anglo-Saxon notion of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Christianity, 40, 41, 42, 100, 204 Anglo-Saxons Anglo-Saxonism, 40 anthropology, 30, 241 and Greek sculpture, 98 antiquarianism, 211–34, 250, 253, 365 Aphrodite, 29, 133, 135, 138, 142 Apocalypse of Peter, 302 apocrypha, 10, 219, 284–307 Apollo, 30, 33, 34, 112 Apostles, 214, 230, 253 and pilgrimage, 219 as Classical heroes, 225 in art, 127 apostolic succession, 8, 211 archaeology, 20, 24, 25, 26, 28, 37, 53, 77, 79, 80, 107, 202, 253, 285, 385 ’oriental’, 49, 66, 77, 80 fascination with Rome, 208 Aristotle in the thought of F. D. Maurice, 273, 276 Armstrong, Walter, 93 Arnold, Matthew, 32–7, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44, 311–57 Arnold, Thomas, 40, 313, 320, 321, 325, 326, 329, 338, 371, 372 Asad, Talal, 315, 316, 337, 349 ascension, 318 Asia Minor, 60, 255, 273 Asiatic Society of Japan, 245 Assyria, 63, 68, 348, 370, 375 Assyrian artefacts, 112 Assyrian texts, 54 atheism, 10, 53, 59, 380, 384 Athena, 115, 142, 143, 146 Athens, 7, 14, 25, 109, 163, 174, 183, 236, 251, 255, 262, 273, 275, 276, 376 atonement doctrine of, 315, 322, 341, 344 Auerbach, Eric, 44, 336, 337, 351, 352, 353, 354, 355

Index

Augustine of Hippo, 330, 337, 342, 351, 390, 391, 392 Avestan, 73 Babel in the work of F. D. Maurice, 269 Babylon, 47, 48, 52, 60, 61, 65, 67, 72, 269, 354, 375 Babylonian Captivity, 73 Babylonian Flood tablets, 72, 73 Babylonian Talmud, 252 Baggs, Charles, 230, 231, 232 Baggs, Charles Michael, 229 Bampton Lectures, 69, 361 Barrett, Elizabeth, 144 Barth, Karl, 15 Bates, Harry, 135, 136, 142, 153, 156 beauty and anti-semitism, 100 artistic, 93 classical sculpture, 99 Greek, 95, 129, 163 Greek sculpture, 156 of the Greek achievement, 31, 36 worship of, 94, 95 Bede, 141 Bedford, Francis, 239 Bell, Duncan, 399 Benedict Anderson, 386, 388, 389, 390, 395, 397, 398, 399 Benjamin, Walter, 388, 389, 391, 397, 399, 402, 403 Bennett, Alan, 356, 357 Benson, Edward White, 37 Bentham, Jeremy, 277, 359, 362, 363, 364, 365, 367, 374 biblical interpretation. See hermeneutics Bildung, 163, 182 Birch, Samuel, 72 Bohlen, Peter von, 64 Book of the Dead, 251 botany, 53 Botta, P.E., 67 Bourdieu, Pierre, 316 Bradshaw, Henry, 293 British Archaeological Society of Rome, 202 British Museum, 115, 125, 150, 151 Brock, Thomas, 137 Brucker, Johann Jakob, 261 Buddhism, 245, 247, 248, 249, 278, 282 Western converts to, 249 Bultmann, Rudolf, 335 Bunyan, John, 130, 251

Burne-Jones, Edward, 97, 124 Burnouf, Eugène, 65 Butler, Henry Montagu, 43, 44, 45, 46 Butler, Samuel, 143 Caesar, Julius, 185, 354 Cailliaud, Frédéric, 64 Cameron, Julia Margaret, 393, 394 Canova, Antonio, 133 Carlisle, Richard, 362 Carlyle, Thomas, 243, 369 Catholicism, 20, 79, 168, 172 American Episcopal responses to, 184–208 and Lady Trevelyan, 140 and Oberammergau, 7, 161–8, 173–80 and Pierre-Henri Larcher, 53 and sculpture, 125 Austrian Catholic literary revival, 172, 182 Catholic Enlightenment, 169 Charles Kingsley’s anti-Catholic views, 39, 42 in Germany, 183 liberal, 65 Protestant responses to, 211–34 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 25 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 22 Chamberlain, Lord, 171 Champollion, Jean-François, 61, 64, 65 Charles, Elizabeth Rundle, 132 Charterhouse, 358, 359, 360, 380 Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de, 59 China, 47, 59, 236, 244, 249, 375 Church of England. See Anglicanism Cicero, 154, 276, 364 Clinton, Henry Fynes, 365, 370 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 199, 200 Codex Bezae, 292 Codex Sinaiticus, 236 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 265–7, 271, 275, 277, 279, 347, 352, 355, 382 Collier, John, 117 Collini, Stefan, 311, 312, 321 colonialism. See imperialism Connerton, Paul, 386, 388, 397, 398, 399 Conrad, Michael Georg, 176 Constantinople, 236 Cook, Frederic Charles, 71 Cooley, William Desborough, 55 Cornwallis, Mary, 131, 132 Cox, the Revd George, 58, 59, 77 Creuzer, Georg Friedrich, 56, 64, 65 Crimean War, 143 Cromwell, Oliver, 36

449

450

Index

crucifixion, 22, 88, 151, 161, 344 Crystal Palace, 24 Cutts, E. L., 128 d’Eichthal, Gustave, 72 Dahlmann, F. C., 61 Dalton, John Neale, 235–57 Daniel (Biblical figure), 103–6 Dante, 200, 251, 288, 302 Darwin, Charles, 3, 19, 39, 117, 139 David (Biblical King), 44, 272, 289, 304 De Wette, W. M. L., 60, 72 death, 330, 344 association of photography with, 395 in art, 110, 111, 154, 156 in Greek drama, 170 of Christ, 340 of St Paul, 219, 221 of St Peter, 219 of the Virgin Mary, 305 deism, 59, 193 Delaplanche, Eugène, 135 demythologisation, 366 in Bultmann, 335 in Grote and Thirlwall, 379 Diana or Christ? (Edwin Long, 1881), 5, 112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 119 Dickens, Charles, 147, 196, 216, 222, 224, 228, 229 Dobson, William, 100 Douglass, Frederick, 8, 219–22, 225–8 Doulton of Lambeth, 89 du Rocher, Guérin, 47, 48, 54, 65, 73, 77 Dunn, Henry, 312, 346 Dyce, William, 99 East India Company, 243 Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth, 146 Ebers, Georg, 70, 71, 72, 74 ecumenism, 61, 162, 172, 218 Eden, 29 education and Homer, 28 and Matthew Arnold, 34, 311–57 Classical education, 2, 11, 43, 125, 144 education policy, 63 Egypt and Herodotus, 48, 63 and Victorian Monarchy, 236–7 Egyptology, 47–80 in paintings, 108, 109, 118 in the work of Charles Kingsley, 41 in the work of Guérin du Rocher, 48, 54

in the writings of Frederick Douglass, 227 Egyptian Exploration Fund, 74 Egyptian Exploration Society, 250 Elgin Marbles, 128 Eliot, George, 380 Ely Cathedral, 303 English chapel in Rome, 189 English College at Rome, 228, 229, 230 Enlightenment, 4, 174, 364 ideas of reason, 265 post-Enlightenment German thought, 166 pre-Enlightenment drama, 182 Scottish Englightenment thinkers, 370 Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, 365 epics, 23, 27, 28, 29 Epicurus, 364 Essays and Reviews (journal), 380 Eton College, 285, 289, 292, 294, 295 etymology, 369, 370 Euhemerism, 56 Eusebius, 57, 69, 76, 80 Eve, 125, 129, 132, 133, 137, 138, 156, 307 evolution, 1, 3, 74 Ezra (Biblical book of), 374 fairground rides, 86, 87, 88 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 67 Fitzwilliam Museum, 285, 290, 305 Franco-Prussian War, 170 Fraser, Hilary, 90 freedom and Frederick Douglass, 220 and Friedrich Schleiermacher, 361 and orientalism, 59 constitutional, 7 in the teaching of St Paul, 207 individual, 40 of conscience, 197 of religion, 188, 193, 194, 195 of speech, 213 political, 41 Freeman, E. A., 68, 201, 202, 242 French Revolution, 262, 266, 277, 372 Freud, Sigmund, 19 Gale, William, 108 Galilee, 234, 396 Gange, David, 61, 73, 74 genealogy, 19–46 Genesis (Bible book of), 71, 97, 130, 205 geology, 1, 3, 19, 139, 205 George (Prince), later George V, 235, 240, 241, 254, 256

Index

George (Saint), 99 German ‘Mythical School’, 69 German Romanticism, 56, 166, 167 Gethesmane, 235 ghost stories, 10, 284, 285, 302, 306, 307, 387, 402 Gibbon, Edward, 364, 373 Gibson, John, 126, 129, 138–49 Gibson, Margaret, 287 Gildersleeve, Basil, 43 Gladstone, William, 4, 22–44, 142, 143, 145, 196, 379 Glaser, Eduard, 77 Goethe. J. W., 23, 167, 180, 318, 347, 401 Golgotha, 67, 252 Goliath (biblical character), 44 Goodall, Frederick, 101, 108 Görres, Guido, 168 Görres, Joseph, 56 Gospels, 292, 336, 343 and apocryphal texts, 288, 294, 304 as historical sources, 26 Gospel of John, 20, 22, 149, 280 Gospel of Luke, 130, 313, 340, 351, 360 Gospel of Mark, 3 Gospel of Matthew, 141, 146, 313, 343, 350, 352, 353 relation to Greek philosophy, 20, 38 Gosse, Edmund, 3, 91, 132, 290 Gothic Revival, 148, 187, 198, 200 Grand Tour, 219, 220 Great Exhibition, 349 Greek (ancient language), 9, 14, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 45, 51, 57, 76, 292, 293, 294, 296, 305, 342 of Homer, 44 teaching of, 27, 43, 45 translation into, 4, 43, 44 translation of, 37, 43, 45, 51 verse, 43, 44 Greek theatre, 161–83 Greek Tragedy, 38, 110, 125, 170 Griffith, Francis L. L., 78, 79, 393 Grote, George, 358–84 Grote, Harriet, 367, 378 Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift), 375 Hades, 29 Hadrian’s Wall, 141, 142 Hahn, Theophilus, 243, 250 Hammerschlag, Keren, 111 Hare, Julius, 261, 360, 365, 372 Harnack, Adolf von, 20

Harrison, Jane Ellen, 32 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 216 The Marble Faun, 222–3 Hebraism in Matthew Arnold, 34–7 Hebrew (language), 291, 333, 334, 342, 377, 380, 382 Hebrew Bible, 9, 23, 29, 71, 76, 390, 392 Heeren, A. H. L., 64 Hegel, G. W. F., 59, 80, 262, 267, 277, 376, 387, 388, 396 aesthetics, 134 and Greek tragedy, 38 Hegelian prejudices, 47 ideas of historical development, 42 Left-Hegelianism, 377 Right-Hegelianism, 377 Hellenism, 358–84 and F. D. Maurice, 262 and sculpture, 153 anti-Greek thinking, 20, 41, 42 in art, 144 in German scholarship, 42 in Matthew Arnold, 34–7 Hengstenberg, Ernst Wilhelm, 64, 65, 71 Hephaestus (god of blacksmiths), 136 Herder, J. G., 21, 56, 60, 179 hermeneutics, 156, 185 and Matthew Arnold, 311–57 of the Old Testament, 311–57 Herodotus, 4, 5, 47–80, 112, 375 Hesiod, 175, 366, 368 Heyes, Hermann Josef, 74 Hinduism, 278, 281 historiography, 19–46, 385 Ancient Greek, 47–80 Anglican, 203 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, 187 HMS Bacchante, 235–57 HMS Britannia, 240 HMS Euralyus, 236 HMS Ophir, 256 HMS Serapis, 237 Hobbes, Thomas, 66, 364, 373 Hodgson, John Evan, 94, 95, 107, 108, 109, 110, 119 Holy Land, 5, 25, 99, 102, 235, 236, 241, 251, 254, 338 Homer, 3, 4, 24, 27–34, 44, 45, 125, 143, 144, 148, 175, 327, 366, 375 feminization of Homer, 143 Homeric philology, 23 in art, 153

451

452

Index

Homer (Cont.) Odyssey, 105 homosexuality, 44 homosociality, 43 Hort, F. J. A., 293–8 Howells, William Dean, 216 Howes, Graham, 84, 90 Hume, David, 265, 266, 277, 368 Hunt, William Holman, 92, 93, 94, 99, 101, 120, 121, 123, 150 Huxley, Thomas, 117 Iliad (Homer), 28, 44, 142, 145, 374 imperialism, 14, 21, 22, 25–7, 47, 121, 153, 220, 235–57, 266, 356, 399 Incarnation, 29, 263, 270, 281, 315, 322 India ancient India, 264 and the Victorian Monarchy, 236–41, 255 Indian cosmology, 281 India, ancient India, 56, 175, 281, 282 industry and art, 85, 86, 90, 103, 107, 118 and communication, 238 and design, 85 and perceptions of time, 392 and tourism, 204 in Manchester, 86 industrialization and liberalism, 122 iron and coal, 141 industry and art, 88 Isaiah, 311–57 Islam, 239, 278 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig, 400 Jahn, Johann, 62 James, Montague Rhodes, 10, 284–307, 402 James, William, 317 Jameson, Anna, 132, 215 Japan, 236, 240–9 Jerusalem, 262, 396 and Victorian Monarchy, 235–6, 251, 252, 256 archeological interest in, 24, 61 in painting, 108 Jesus Christ, 3, 130, 146, 207, 254, 268, 270, 395, 396 and Matthew Arnold’s hermeneutics, 318, 319, 320, 322, 327, 340, 342, 343, 344, 347, 348, 350, 351, 352, 353 and Oberammergau, 161, 170, 179 archeological interest in, 24 Christology, 29

in art, 88, 132, 154 in Gladstone’s thought, 29, 31 in the thought of F. D. Maurice, 279, 280 in the thought of Westcott, 38 Job (biblical book), 379 Johnes, Elizabeth, 367, 372, 377 Josephus, 48, 80 Judaism, 19, 375 and Hellenism, 291, 295 in nineteenth-century Rome, 189 in photography, 239 in the life of Philo, 276 Temple Judaism, 291 Judith (Biblical book of), 374 Judith (biblical figure), 290 Jupiter in sculpture, 146 Kaiser Wilhelm II, 2 Kant, Immanuel, 265, 277 Keats, John, 215, 350 Keble, John, 235, 333, 351 Keith, Alexander, 63 Kierkegaard, Søren, 389 Kim, Jongwoo Jeremy, 110 King Ludwig II, 169 King’s College, Cambridge, 285, 286, 307 Kingsley, Charles, 39–42, 143, 243, 255 Hypatia, 39 The Water Babies, 39 Knight, Richard Payne, 366 Kralik, Richard von, 173–6 Kulturnation, 163, 400 Lamb, Henry William (Lord Melbourne), 359, 361 Lamennais, Félicité, 65 Landseer, Edwin, 104 Larcher, Pierre-Henri, 51–6, 62, 68 Latin, 21, 26, 51, 154, 231, 288, 289, 291, 294, 317, 373 German theology written in, 361 teaching of, 43, 125 translation into, 43, 62, 302 verse, 43 Layard, A. H., 24, 61, 67, 112 Le Hir, Arthur-Marie, 72 Leighton, Frederic, 89, 94, 98, 99, 109, 111, 112, 118, 119, 121, 150 Alcestis (1869–71), 109, 110, 118, 121 Elisha Raising the Son of the Shunamite (1881), 111 Leighton, Frederick

Index

Daphnephoria (1874–6), 112, 119 Lenormant, Charles, 65, 66 Lenormant, François, 67, 69, 70 Leoussi, Athena, 98 Lepsius, Karl Richard, 57, 67 Lewes, George Henry, 261, 262, 380 Lewis, George Cornewall, 32, 42, 58, 69, 77 Lienhard, Friedrich, 162, 172, 178–80 Life of Jesus (Renan), 25 Lightfoot, J. B., 37, 293, 297 Linton, Elisa Lynn, 2 Liszt, Franz, 169 Locke, John, 265 Lockhart, John Gibson, 23 Loisy, Alfred, 73, 79 London University, 365 Long, Edwin, 112, 115, 117, 119 Luke the Evangelist, 221 Luther, 290 Luther, Martin, 177 Lutherans, 73, 74, 290, 291, 295 Luxmoore, H. E., 286, 289, 293 Lyell, Charles, 3, 19, 139 Lyttleton, Edward, 44 Lytton, Edward Bulwer, 26 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 25, 58, 229, 230 machinery, 85, 86, 87, 176 Macmillan, Alexander (publisher), 330, 331, 333, 334, 341 Macmillan’s Magazine, 171 magic lantern show, 88 Maimonides, 374 Maine, H. S., 19, 22 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition, 83–121 Marx, Karl, 19 masculinity, 44, 143 materialism, 2 and F. D. Maurice, 265, 272 challenge to faith, 59 metaphysical materialism, 248 Maude, Mary Fawley, 63 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 261–83 Melbourne Centennial Exhibition, 120 Methodism, 63, 73 Meyer, Eduard, 79 Michelangelo, 127, 146, 226 Middle Ages and superstition, 291 distinction from Antiquity, 300 German, 176 Goethe’s respect for, 167 positive view of, 293

Romantic fascination with, 166, 174 Middleton, Conyers, 373 Mill, J. S., 359, 378, 379 Millais, J. E., 101 Milman, Henry Hart, 378 miracles, 225, 305, 315, 376 of Jesus Christ, 322 of St. Thomas of Canterbury, 225 of the Virgin Mary, 304 Mitchell, Charles, 95, 112 Mitford, William, 29, 366, 371 Modernism, 125 monarchy, 235–57 Montesquieu, 364, 370 Moore, Albert, 95 More, Thomas, 234 Morgan, David, 90 Morley, John, 378 Morris, William, 124 Moses, 48, 54, 55, 64, 270, 307, 374, 379, 395 in the work of F. D. Maurice, 269 Mount Zion, 235 Müller, Friedrich Max, 32, 57, 243, 247 Müller, Karl Otfried, 42, 57, 66, 69 Murray, John, 216, 217, 231 muscular Christianity, 39, 98, 143, 194, 241 myths and A. H. Sayce, 76 and F. D. Maurice, 273, 281 and Homer, 27 and Oberammergau, 181 Classical mythology in sculpture, 85 Greek, 366, 367, 374 Grote and religious mythology, 375, 378 hagiography as, 3 myth of a deluge, 369 mythological subjects in sculpture, 122–57 Niobe, 129 of Christian origin, 203, 254 Pygmalion, 135 Thirlwall and religious mythology, 369, 370 Nanjō Bunyu, 247 Napoleon, 348 anti-Napoleonic wars, 399 death, 388 Napoleon’s Concordat, 59 Napoleonic Expeditions, 60 Napoleonic occupation of Bavaria, 167 National Anthem, 235, 257 Naville, Eduoard, 77, 249 neoclassicism, 123 neo-romanticism, 163, 181

453

454

Index

New English Art Club, 120 Newman, John Henry, 140, 214, 222, 325, 345–9, 378, 385 Nicene creed, 29, 32, 46 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 23, 57, 69, 77, 325, 360, 371–4 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 26, 162, 163, 173, 174, 178, 180, 181, 392 Nightingale, Florence, 331 Nimrod, 65 Nimrud, 72 Nineveh, 3, 24, 67, 72 non-conformism, 91 nude (art), 95, 96, 125 in Victorian sculpture, 96 protest against, 95 religious distaste for, 96 Oberammergau Passion Play, 161–83 Odyssey (Homer), 34, 105 Old Testament, 48, 50, 54 and archaology, 76 and archeaology, 250 and B.G. Niebuhr, 373 and F. D. Maurice, 263, 264 and F.D. Maurice, 282 and Matthew Arnold, 320, 322, 326, 336, 340, 342, 353 and nationalism, 242 and Thirlwall, 377 apocrypha, 290 as literature, 345, 350 historical veracity of, 60, 64, 74, 205, 375 in art, 100, 143, 161 in sculpture, 156 pseudepigrapha, 287 translation of, 314 truth of, 65 orientalism, 4, 5, 41, 47–80, 107–8, 109–11, 118, 122, 211, 235, 249–54 and Christianity, 251 and Victorian Monarchy, 253 Ovid, 129, 131 Oxford Movement. See Tractarianism Paine, Thomas, 362 painting Biblical, 83–121 classical subject painting \r, 84 Protestant iconography, 84 Palestine, 48, 63, 236, 237, 244, 251, 253, 254 archaeology, 72, 79 in paintings, 108, 118

in photography, 396 Palestine Exploration Fund, 253 Pamela (Samuel Richardson), 132 Pandora, 136, 138, 142, 153, 155 Panigil, Raphael Meyer, 235 Panizza, Oskar, 176–80 Papacy, 185, 203, 211, 214, 219, 221, 305 Parker, J. H., 201, 202 Parthenon, 25, 146, 236 Paul the Apostle, 7, 36, 200, 241, 396 and American Episcopalianism, 184–208 and Protestantism, 208 conversion, 203 resting place, 187 Pentateuch, 63, 71 challenges to Mosaic authorship, 60, 64 relation to Egypt, 64 Perowne, John James Stewart, 378 Persephone, 29 Persepolis, 61 Peter (Saint), 211–34, 252 and Frederick Douglass, 226 cult of, 234 in art, 234 relics, 219, 223, 232 statue, 211, 223, 224, 225, 226, 233 Petrie, Flinders, 74, 75, 77, 78 Phaedrus (Plato), 390 philhellenism, 33, 42, 65, 162, 163, 166, 182 Philo of Alexandria, 296 Philological Museum (journal), 365, 366, 378 Philological Review, 365 philology, 19–46 photography, 256, 288, 307, 385, 392–7 as art, 394 contrast with paintings, 394 portrait photography, 393 relation to reality, 393 pilgrimage and alterity, 232 and aura, 232 and Prince Alfred, 236 and sacred ground, 402 and Victorian Monarchy, 251, 257 in ancient Buddhism, 248 to Rome, 211–34 Plato, 267, 395 Grote’s study of, 365 in the life of Philo, 276 in the thought of F. D. Maurice, 274, 276 Pliny the Elder, 135 Plunkett, Oliver, 234 Pope Leo XIII, 74

Index

Porter, Robert Ker, 60, 65 Power, Hiram, 122, 123 Poynter, Edward John, 98, 99, 100, 112, 117 Praxiteles, 135 Pre-Raphaelites, 99, 117, 122–6, 129, 138, 140, 155 and sculpture, 126 biblical canvases, 101 histories of art, 84 medievalism, 102 second phase, 124 Woolner, 125 Prettejohn, Elizabeth, 95 Prince Albert Victor, 256 prophecy, 291, 315, 341, 345, 348 of Isaiah, 343 Protestantism and reason, 196 attitude to scripture, 131, 185, 201, 203, 204, 205, 208, 211 Providence, 9, 56, 59, 263, 298, 354, 371 Psalms, 272, 331, 377 Psyche Greek goddess, 156 Psyche (Greek goddess), 132–8, 154 Pugin, A. W. N., 198, 200 Puritanism in New England, 222 in the thought of Matthew Arnold, 35, 36 Pusey, E. B., 61, 71, 382 race and art, 123 and art production, 98 and Charles Kingsley, 40, 42 and Christianity, 29 and colonialism, 244, 249, 250, 255 and Matthew Arnold, 36, 40 and national identity, 23 and nationalism, 383 and orientalism, 41 and philology, 21, 22 and poetry, 324 and the Bible, 100 and the English nation, 37, 41 and the German nation, 41, 254, 255, 383 and travel, 220 anxieties concerning, 46 Aryan, 67 Ayran, 98 Hebrew, 243 in the thought of Frederick Douglass, 220, 227

racial theory and genealogy, 37 Rachel (Biblical figure), 132, 375 railways, 1, 170, 237, 238, 248, 295, 385, 391 Ranke, Leopold von, 229, 230 Rawlinson, George, 67–71 Rawlinson, Henry, 61, 69 Rebecca (Biblical figure), 125, 132–8, 156, 375 Red Sea, 80, 256 redemption, 249, 312 of individuals, 263 Reformation, 190, 196, 261, 277, 290 and Protestantism, 84 post-Reformation mind, 163 tercentenary of, 401 relics, 78, 215–34, 370, 402 Buddha’s tooth, 239, 249, 256 Religious Tract Society, 76, 115 Renaissance, 20, 35, 36, 142, 218 and perspective, 394 High Renaissance masters, 200 millinery, 338 Renan, Ernest, 20, 25, 26, 67, 73, 398 Renjō, Akamatsu, 247, 248 resurrection, 128, 250 in art, 110, 111 of individuals, 379 of Jesus Christ, 156, 312, 322, 338, 351 of the dead, 315, 322, 338, 339 Richardson, Samuel, 132 Ritter, Carl, 57, 62 Ritter, Heinrich, 261 Riviere, Briton, 103, 104, 106, 118 Robert Jenkins Nevin, the Revd, 184–208 Roman imperialism, 7, 25, 112, 113, 115, 185, 207, 214, 219, 221 Rome ancient vs modern, 185, 200 as impure place, 196 in the poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough, 199 Protestant Bible culture in, 184–208 Protestant travellers to, 211–34 Reformed churches in, 190, 191 relation to early Christianity, 26 religious toleration in, 206 the American Episcopal Church in, 184–208 theatre culture in, 177 Rose, Hugh James, 382 Rosellini, Ippolito, 64 Rossetti, Christina, 149 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 101 Rossetti, William Michael, 99 Royal Academy, 83, 86, 89, 96, 97, 103, 123, 129, 150, 151, 379

455

456

Index

Royal Society of Literature, 369 Ruskin, John, 124, 138, 196, 198, 293 Ruth (Elizabeth Gaskell), 132 Sabbatarianism, 378 Saint-Sulpice, 72, 234 Sandbach, Henry, 145, 146 Sandbach, Margaret, 146, 148 Sanskrit, 21, 247, 282 Sarah (Biblical figure), 132 Sayce, Archibald Henry, 74–80, 361 Schelling, F. W. J., 262, 277 Schiller, Friedrich, 164, 166, 180, 182 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 166 Schlegel, Friedrich, 166, 282 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 15, 59, 267, 360, 361 Schliemann, Heinrich, 24, 28, 33, 73, 77, 236 Scott, Robert, 32 Scott, Walter, 23 Scott, William Bell, 138 sculpture, 83–121, 122–57 secularism, 312, 355, 371 ’secularization of the mind’, 122 and Biblical art, 84 and F. D. Maurice, 279 and George Henry Lewes, 261 and Herodotus, 54, 55, 57, 80 and literary criticism, 311 and Matthew Arnold, 10 and Oberammergau, 175 and orientalism, 47 and Robert Nevin, 193 and sacred sites, 232 and the modern university, 14, 15 and Voltaire, 51 post-secular, 312 post-secularity, 312 sculpture and the secular, 129 secular classicism, 153 secular deism, 193 secular radical reformers, 266 Septuagint, 27 Shakespeare, William, 145, 327 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 127 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 127, 215 Sidgwick, Henry, 34, 35, 45 Slade School of Art, 99 slavery, 227 Smith, Agnes, 287 Smith, George, 72, 73 Smith, William Robertson, 297

Snider, Denton J., 47, 49, 51 social purity, 95 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 365 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 191 Society of Biblical Archaeology, 72 Sodom and Gomorrah, 129, 132, 269 South Africa, 242, 243, 250 South Kensington Museum. See Victoria and Albert Museum Sparta, 273, 275 Spence, Benjamin Edward, 133, 148 Spencer, Herbert, 19, 246 Spinoza, Baruch, 66, 322, 354 Sri Lanka, 236 St Giles Cathedral, 152 St Peter resting place, 187 St Peter’s Basilica, 211–34 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, 239, 250, 254, 371, 378, 379, 382 Stanley, Dean, 171, 172, 383 steam travel, 107, 237, 238, 248, 249, 385, 399 stemmatics, 21 Stephen, Leslie, 362, 379, 381 stereoscope, 395, 396 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 213 Strauss, D. F., 67, 69 Street, George Edmund, 187, 196, 198, 200, 208 Suez Canal, 236, 249 Swayne, George C., 59, 71 Symonds, John Addington, 44, 143 syncretism, 169, 349, 356 Syria, 29, 41, 108, 251, 254, 255 archaeology, 253 tableaux vivants, 161 Taylor, Charles, 312, 313, 326, 387, 397 Taylor, Isaac, 62, 68 Taylor, W. C., 64 technology, 1, 3, 5, 153, 385–403 of rule, 235–57 Roman, 223 telegraph technological significance of, 237, 238, 242, 255, 256, 399 temperance, 91 temporality, 1, 13, 385–403 Tennyson, Alfred, 43, 44, 255 The Athenaeum (newspaper), 363

Index

The Council of Trent, 291 The Guardian, 290 The Republic (Plato), 267, 274 theatre, 240 and nationalism, 161–83, 402 Greek, 161–83 of the Latin mass, 215, 217 theology and architecture, 208 and cultural production, 13 and genealogy, 4 and Homer, 29 and M. R. James, 10 and the modern university, 15 Anglican, 292, 381 at Cambridge, 10, 261, 262, 292, 293, 294, 296, 297, 300, 306, 360, 378, 380 German, 361, 382 in the Middle Ages, 291 of F. D. Maurice, 261–83 of Gladstone, 30 of Jowett, 381 of St Paul, 184–208 of Thirlwall, 381 Protestant, 184, 185, 196, 206, 248 relation to classics, 26 relation to history, 7, 297, 298 relation to philology, 20, 21, 384 relation to philosophy, 262, 265, 283, 375 Thirlwall, Connop, 358–84 Thirty Years’ War, 161 Thomas Agnew and Sons (fine arts dealer), 92 Thomas Cook & Son (travel agent), 161, 170, 252, 385 Thorneycroft, Hamo, 89, 96, 97 Thorold, Anthony Wilson, 156 Thorvaldsen, Bertel, 133, 146, 147 Tinworth, George, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 96, 107, 119 Tischendorf, Constantin von, 287, 288, 292, 305 Titian, 138 Tomlinson, Walter, 96, 97 tourism, 235–57, 385 biblical tourism, 204 in Rome, 188, 402 literary pilgrimage, 215 to Rome, 211–34 Tractarianism, 63, 191, 203, 265 translation in British education, 42, 43 of the Bible, 27, 37–46

travel writing in Italy, 211–34 Trevelyan, Lady, 138, 139, 140, 142 Trevelyan, Walter Calverley, 139, 141, 142 Trinity College, Cambridge, 43, 290, 358, 376 Trollope, Frances, 217, 218, 219, 224, 228, 229 Troy, 3, 24, 28, 148 Tylor, E. B., 19, 243, 246 typology, 337, 347, 348, 351, 354, 356 utilitarianism, 140, 265, 359, 381 Vance, William, 190, 198 Vasari, Giorgio, 138 Vatican, 186, 189, 190, 206, 218 treatment of Protestant Christianity, 187 Vatican Basilica, 234 Venus, 6, 95, 117, 127, 129, 133, 135, 138, 156 as Eve, 125 Venus de Milo, 95 Vico, Giambattista, 325, 370, 375 Victoria (Queen), 8, 39, 83, 117, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 249, 251, 256, 289, 377 and colonialism, 257 and empire, 238 and the grand tour, 255 Victoria and Albert Museum, 103, 129 Vigoroux, Fulcran, 72, 73 Virgin Mary, 32, 151, 221, 304, 305, 340, 344 Voltaire on Herodotus, 49, 54, 57, 59, 62, 80 von Bunsen, C. J., 57, 61, 67, 69, 70, 380 Vulgate, 291 Wagner, Richard, 164, 173, 174, 177, 178, 181, 182 Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 145 Washington D.C., 194, 234 Watts, George Frederic, 122, 149, 150, 394 Watts, Mary Seton, 149 Weber, Max, 90 Wedekind, Frank, 176 Wellhausen, Julius, 72, 73 Westcott, 293–9 Westminster Abbey, 11, 199, 359, 378, 382 Westminster Review, 134, 333, 335, 365, 374 Wheeler, James Talboys, 61

457

458

Index

Whistler, J. M., 120 Wiedemann, Alfred, 79 Wilde, Oscar, 12 Wilkinson, John Gardner, 61, 64, 68 Williams, Raymond, 313, 321 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 163 Wolf, Friedrich August, 27, 60, 69 Wood, John Warrington, 126 Woolner, 138–45

Woolner, Thomas, 125, 126, 127, 129 World War I, 79, 175, 311 Yiddish, 22 Zend Avesta, 54, 56 Zeus, 33, 142, 366, 375 zoology, 53 Zoroastrianism, 238, 282