Victorian Review

In the early 1960s, no one—not my fellow graduate students, not our professors—ever used the pronoun "I" in scholarly work. In preparation for our own teaching and writing, we were expected to be objective, to produce work based on the evidence of the texts and the context in which they were written. If those texts had a personal impact, we kept quiet about it, on the assumption that anything beyond general expressions of interest or curiosity had no bearing on our education.

So a student coming to the Victorian preoccupation with faith did not expect the texts he read to have anything to do with his personal beliefs. I was brought up in the United Church of Canada, where people—at least those in our small country church—did not talk about their faith, and I often wondered if they really believed the Apostles' Creed we repeated every Sunday. I could not say what I really believed. I knew only that it was an issue I wanted to explore.

If I were to teach Victorian literature and write about it, I needed to understand all that the Victorians said about faith, from John Henry Newman's argument about "converging … probabilities" (333) in A Grammar of Assent (1870) to Samuel Butler's exploiting the textual inconsistencies of the New Testament in The Way of All Flesh (1903), from Matthew Arnold's wistful lines on the loss of faith in "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" (1855) and Arthur Hugh Clough's blunt refrain "He is not risen" in "Easter Day. Naples, [End Page 199] 1849" (1849) to Gerard Manley Hopkins's anguished "Thou mastering me / God" (lines 1–2) in "The Wreck of the Deutschland" (1918).

My own sorting out of the nature of faith and of the issues it raised began in F.E.L. Priestley's graduate seminar on Tennyson and Browning, with our reading and discussion of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850). The lines that struck me then are the first quatrain of the prologue:

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,        Whom we, that have not seen thy face,        By faith, and faith alone, embrace,Believing where we cannot prove;

(1–4)

I had always assumed that the opposite of faith is doubt. Tennyson was saying—and this was a revelation to me—that knowledge, and doubt, the denying counterpart of faith, is no more susceptible of empirical proof than faith is. Tennyson would also confirm that knowledge is limited and not a sufficient basis on which to live our lives. The instinctive affirmation that life has value—the unspoken assumption by which we conduct our daily lives—is faith that cannot be proved, though we act as if we could. There is a passage near the end of David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) in which he presents that instinctive affirmation as the antidote to doubt: "action, and employment, and the occupations of common life" are "the great subverter" of skepticism (159). It is all very well for the philosopher in his study to construct arguments casting doubt on everything, but once he steps out into the street he finds himself "in the same condition as other mortals" (159), going about "the occupations of common life" with unacknowledged affirmations that seemed to me important in ways I could not yet define.

Long after graduate school, when I was in the process of making sense of my education, I began exploring the philosophers whose work lay behind Tennyson's thinking. Chief among them were John Locke and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the nineteenth century, Locke was considered an unlikely defender of faith, and Thomas Carlyle's charge that Locke "paved the way for banishing religion from the world" (33) is typical. That is a misreading of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which I immersed myself. Locke was not concerned with defining beliefs but with the way in which we hold them, and knowledge and faith, as he explains them, are not opposites but part of a continuum, beginning with knowledge of which we can be certain because of the...