TY - JOUR
AU - Hadfield, Andrew
AB - Religion, as we all know, shapes the secular world. But it also shapes other forms of religion in ways that are not always—or even often—apparent. In this absorbing, albeit sometimes dense, study, Philip Connell shows how literature written in the year of Charles I’s execution to that produced long after the dawn of the Enlightenment was created in the shadow of sectarian division and conflict. In the introduction he cites the bleak description in Paradise Lost of a corrupt church which Michael conveys to Adam as he is about to leave the Garden of Eden (XII, 508–24), pointing out that this prophetic vision applies to both ‘Laudian sacerdotalism, and the wave of persecution that followed the Conventicle Act of 1664’. But it could equally well refer to Milton’s contempt for the ‘“hireling wolves” of Cromwell’s church in the 1650s’, as the Commonwealth was characterised by ‘widening ecclesiological divisions within republican argument’ (p. 9)—an issue which Milton turns to time and again in his prose writings. Serious narrative poetry written in the century after the Civil War invariably represents ‘the eclipse of religion’ (p. 17) as the descent of darkness, taking its cue from Paradise Lost, Pope’s Dunciad being an obvious example. The book consists of six chapters divided into three sections. Chapter One, which is also Part One, analyses the poetry of republican England, in particular the work of Milton, Marvell and Harrington. Perhaps the most telling point of this section is the argument that Milton needs to be understood as a ‘quite specific variety of republican’, through his argument that civil magistrates should not have any power over the ‘“inward man” who is freed from the law by the gospel’ (p. 45). In making this case he needs to be distinguished from other republicans such as Harrington, who did not see the godly Christian as exempt from the constraints of secular society: the distinction between the two figures would have been obvious to their contemporaries even if it is more opaque to us now, and we need to acknowledge ‘the religious divisions within republican thought as a guide to the tensions and ambiguities of [Paradise Lost]’ (pp. 58–9). Part Two, ‘Restoration’, consists of two chapters, ‘The Failure of Uniformity’, which concludes with discussions of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, and ‘Dryden and the Politics of Irreligion’. Chapter Two shows how Milton continued along a godly sectarian route, despite the widespread hostility to divisive thought represented in powerful satires such as Samuel Butler’s Hudibras. In Paradise Regained, Milton launches a savage critique of the worldly appropriation of religion in Satan’s temptations of Jesus, a rallying cry to nonconformists not to be bought off by Charles II’s regime and imagine that ecumenical compromise was a desirable option instead of supping with the devil. The briefer epic continues the ‘godly republicanism’ (p. 91) of the longer poem. Samson Agonistes is even more abrasive in its critique of the Restoration Church, showing that Samson is sanctioned by God not the king and that his righteousness comes from within. Dryden, in contrast, became ‘the leading literary scourge of whiggery and dissent’ (p. 104), but had his own struggles with the relationship between his faith and authority. He eventually converted to Catholicism, placing his trust in the worldly authority of James II and excoriating spiritual authority as ‘a screen for political self-interest’ (p. 110). Part Three, ‘Enlightenment’, consists of three chapters and is, for me, the most illuminating section of the book. Chapter Four, ‘Whig Poetics and the Church in Danger’, shows how the English Enlightenment cannot be separated from religion, but was actually ‘bound up with the institutionalization of ideological conflict within later Stuart political culture’ (p. 137). Chapter Five, ‘The Literature of Physico-Theology’, provides some exceptionally interesting analysis of the growth of scientific discourse and its impact on poetry, principally in Thomson’s The Seasons. This long, immensely popular poem emerges not only as a ‘sustained imaginative synthesis of Newtonian apologetic and Shaftesburean enthusiasm’ (p. 205), but as identifying the Enlightenment with Hanoverian whiggism and the Protestant succession, supporting Queen Caroline’s self-representation as the forward-thinking Christian monarch. While sectarianism raged and many felt that it was likely to engulf public culture as well as religion, Thomson argued for moderation and trust in the benign nature of God’s mysterious and wonderful universe. The final chapter explores the different forms of faith adopted by Alexander Pope in his poetry. Pope was a Catholic but felt duty bound to declare his allegiance to the state to counter accusations of disloyalty, renouncing the claims of papal authority in 1717. Pope, following Bolingbroke, used his satires of the 1730s to fashion himself as an ecumenical writer ‘in opposition to the factious, corrupt, and politically submissive character of the whig episcopate’ (p. 217). Pope was never a writer who could rest easily, and throughout his writing career he was concerned that his exposure of the ‘nation’s spiritual corruption’ ran the significant risk of ‘tacit complicity with a politicized, free-thinking critique of religious dissimulation’ (p. 243). This is a learned and tightly argued book which makes a powerful case that we need to examine literature in terms of religion more carefully than we often do. Disputes and conflicts, as often as not, have religious belief and language at their heart. Re-examining Milton brings relatively marginal rewards, but the analysis of such major writers as Dryden and Pope, as well as Thomson, is a most welcome addition to our understanding of the complex culture of the literature of Stuart and Hanoverian England. Connell is both an adept and insightful critic with a fine eye for detail and a learned scholar, and this book is likely to shape our understanding of the period for many years to come. © Oxford University Press 2018. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope, by Philip Connell
JO - The English Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ehr/cey241
DA - 2018-10-05
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/secular-chains-poetry-and-the-politics-of-religion-from-milton-to-pope-D0kHfApmTj
SP - 1317
EP - 1319
VL - 133
IS - 564
DP - DeepDyve
ER -