Contemplating the sense of religious crisis that afflicted many Victorians place

Question

Contemplating the sense of religious crisis that afflicted many Victorians places us on potentially sensitive ground, but so long as we’re all respectful to one another’s beliefs, I think it’s a subject we should confront.  To what extent do we feel assailed by the same kinds of existential doubts that confronted Tennyson in In Memoriam?  Does our culture provide us with the resources we need to successfully face them?  Where do we stand with regard to the conflict between science and the conventional religious beliefs of the Judeo-Christian tradition?  Is the (relative) decentralization of religion in our cultural life something to be regretted or not?  Is the seeming resolution of Thomas Hardy to confront life without faith in a transcendent spiritual realm a sustainable human stance?  Do we admire his example or deplore it?

Explanation / Answer

A clergyman's son, depressive, heavy-drinking, heavy-smoking, Alfred Tennyson suffered an appalling emotional blow when he lost his best friend Arthur Hallam on 15 September, 1833. Many of Hallam's friends, including Gladstone, who had been all but in love with him at Eton, had seen him as the white hope of his generation. In a series of lyrics, written piecemeal over a number of years, Tennyson confronted not merely his personal bereavement, in the loss of his friend, but the collective bereavement felt by all thinking people of that generation as they said farewell to the religious certainties of the past. England under the reign of Victoria (1837-1901) was undisputedly Christian; very few families would have chosen not to visit church on Sundays, and Christians dominated public life. The period of Queen Victoria's reign was, however, a period of change. Over its 64-year span, life changed rapidly: industrialization took hold and brought the development of the railway, thus widening people's horizons by effectively shrinking England. Scientific thinkers began to contemplate evolutionary theories and to question their implications and compatibility with a religion nearly two millennia old. As Tennyson's work spanned almost the entire Victorian period, it is perhaps not surprising that the concepts of religion and faith feature heavily in his poetry - how, we can ask, did personal experience effect Tennyson's views on religion? And what can we make of the references to religion in Tennyson's poetry, both in isolation and as a body of work written by a man who undoubtedly suffered uncertainties about his own faith

Discussing religion and faith within Tennyson's work is difficult to say the least. We can come to the conclusion that 'faith' and 'religion' were not synonymous for the poet, but it is impossible to fully derive Tennyson's own beliefs from his work. There are two final important clues that we must consider: what Tennyson himself said on the matter, and his final wishes. It is not easy to define being because in our society we often subordinate the sense of being to our economic status or the external type of life that we lead. This “I-Am” experience is not in itself a solution to an individual’s problems. It is, rather, the precondition for the solution. The patient in the preceding example spent some two years thereafter working through specific psychological problems, which she was able to do on the basis of her experience of being. This experience of being points also to the experience of not being, or nothingness. Nonbeing is illustrated in the threat of death, or destructive hostility, severe incapacitating anxiety, or critical sickness. The threat of nonbeing is present in greater or lesser intensity at all times. When we cross the street while looking both ways to guard against being struck by an automobile, when someone makes a remark that disparages us, or when we go into an examination ill-prepared—all of these represent the threat of nonbeing.

With regards to traditional creationism, the answer is clear. Modern radiometric dating, which has produced very consistent and reliable dates for the various epochs of the earth's development, overwhelmingly contradicts the central creationist tenet that the earth was created a few thousand years ago. Indeed, the young-earth creationist worldview is no more tenable today than is the ancient notion that the sun, planets and stars are only a few miles (or a few thousand miles) above the earth -- both reckonings are off by factors of millions and billions. And evolution, at this point in time, is much more than a "theory" in the colloquial sense of the word, having been confirmed in hundreds of thousands of exacting studies and having long ago supplanted any competing paradigm in peer-reviewed scientific literature. Indeed, the latest DNA sequence data screams "common ancestry between species" -- there is no other reasonable way to interpret these results. Further, there are significant difficulties even with this more limited agenda. To begin with, the intelligent design writers' search for design in nature is not particularly novel. Similar arguments were advanced by Paley in the 19th century. In any event, their claimed examples of "irreducible complexity" and the like are countered by published research showing how these features could and likely did arise by natural processes. In general, attempting to exhibit "design" in nature as evidence for God is problematic in light of the many features of nature (including numerous features of the human body) that are clearly deficient. At the least, "design" must be thought of in a high-level sense, not in specific low-level mechanics as argued by intelligent design writers.

The term ‘religion’ is much disputed. Again, we can learn from the etymology. The origin of the word is probably the Latin religare, to bind back. Not all uses of the term require reference to a divinity or divinities. But this entry will use the term so that there is such a reference, and a religion is a system of belief and practice that accepting a ‘binding’ relation to such a being or beings. This does not, however, give us a single essence of religion, since the conceptions of divinity are so various, and human relations with divinity are conceived so variously that no such essence is apparent even within Western thought. Culture and Religion are not the same, though they are very close. There are various theories that suggest a model of relationship between them. One of them tries to see Religion as the soul of culture. This view doesn't consider the fact that there could also be non-religious cultures. Perhaps, one may quote the Pirahas as an example of such a culture. Of course, this doesn't rule out the fact that some kind of belief-system may be involved in a culture. However, perhaps, we can keep culture and religion totally separate. The cultural elements must not be confused with the religious elements. Thus, people having differing beliefs can still follow one culture and only disagree with regard to religious elements or belief-related elements (such heterogeneity is intense in metropolitan cities); however, there usually is a particular spirit of the age and world view in general. Also, certain cultural traits may be identified as grammatical directives of a particular culture providing the functional rules for interpreting the meaning of symbols.

Doubts have arisen today about the universality of Christian faith. Many no longer see the history of worldwide mission as the history of the diffusion of liberating truth and love, but as a history of alienation and violation. The new consciousness expressed here demands that Christians consider radically who they are and who they are not, what they believe and what they do not believe, what they have to give and what is not theirs to give. Within the frame of this address, I can only attempt a small step in such a large undertaking. First of all, culture has to do with knowledge and values. It is an attempt to understand the world and man’s existence in the world, but it is not an attempt of a purely theoretical kind. Rather it is ordered to the fundamental interests of human existence. Understanding should show us how to be human, how man is to take his proper place in this world and respond to it in order to realize himself in his search for success and happiness. Moreover, in the great cultures this question again is not posed individualistically, as if each individual could think up a model for coming to terms with the world and life. Man can succeed only with others; the question of right knowledge is thus also a question about the right formation of the community. The community, for its part, is the prerequisite for individual fulfillment. In culture we are dealing with an understanding, which is knowledge, which gives rise to praxis, that is to say, we are dealing with a knowledge which encompasses the indispensable dimension of values or morals. We must add something else which was self-evident to the ancient world.

The denunciations of man’s cruelty and the underlying assertion of the value of loving-kindness can thus be found quite explicitly in Hardy’s attitude to war, particularly in his redefinition of patriotism, simply put for example in a short note from 1922: Patriotism, if aggressive and at the expense of other countries, is a vice; if in sympathy with them, a virtue. What Hardy seems to be defending here is a form of internationalism, yet one of a purely theoretical nature since it clearly bears no economic consideration? In order to promote his own vision of equity Hardy denounces the aggressive chauvinism of both nations alike, hence paying particular attention to the rhetorical implications of the patriotic terminology. Something similar can be said of what Hardy named “the beauty of association”, which also testifies to an extraordinary respect for the individual. This idea brings us back to the connection between subject and place, individuality and geography – as initially presented. One final aspect of our perspective on Hardy I’d like to explore here is how the idea of “individuation without a subject” reveals itself in Hardy’s writing as a form of dispossession of the self, a divestiture or de-ssaisissement. That divestiture is a condition to true altruism and is itself made possible precisely by the acknowledgement of the variousness of experience evoked.

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