Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater by Lyons SarahGlendon;

Author:Lyons, SarahGlendon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

‘Neither for God nor for his Enemies’: Heresy and Disinterestedness in the Critical Essays of Arnold and Pater

In 1871, an anonymous writer published an article on ‘Standards of Heresy’ in the Saturday Review. Noting that, at its etymological root, ‘heresy’ simply means a deliberate choice or preference (‘I choose for myself’) and surveying both the bloody history of persecution for heresy in England and the sheer motley of Christian sects and beliefs that have fallen or could fall under its shifting purview, the writer concluded:

It is equally difficult to define and easy to transgress the invisible boundary which separates heresy from orthodox or innocuous belief [...] Aristotle says that the man who has many friends has no friend, and when every other divine is denounced as a heretic, a suspicion is suggested that the genuine article is non-existent, or has become extinct.83

‘Standards of Heresy’ was occasioned by the Voysey case, the latest in a cluster of mid-Victorian cases in which a clergyman was tried for heresy. Charles Voysey, a Yorkshire clergyman, had imagined that the anti-climactic outcome of the heresy trials of two of the contributors to Essays and Reviews — in 1864, the Privy Council overturned the guilty verdicts handed down to Rowland Williams and H. B. Wilson by the Court of Arches — heralded a new climate of theological liberalism. Emboldened by the precedent, Voysey began publishing a series of sermons under the title The Sling and the Stone, wherein he questioned the divinity of Christ and the Inspiration of the Scriptures, and declared the doctrines of eternal punishment and the Atonement immoral.84 In 1871, he was treated to the professional martyrdom many felt he had been courting: he was convicted of heresy at the chancellor’s court of the diocese of York and stripped of his living (in this instance, the Privy Council upheld the verdict upon appeal).

The paradoxical conclusions of the anonymous writer in The Saturday Review — first, that the freedom with which people accuse one another of heresy shows only that it is a word without a proper referent; and second, that the frequency with which modern clergymen are prosecuted for it confirms its obsolescence — are instructive, for they suggest how the apparent vitality and pervasiveness of ‘heresy’ in the mid-Victorian period could engender cynicism about the category. An ironic perception of the tendency of yesterday’s heresy to become today’s orthodoxy was surely especially acute in this period owing to the widespread cultural impulse to valorise ’doubt’ as a marker of moral and intellectual seriousness, and even as a necessary aspect of religious faith. 85 Yet, as Leslie Stephen remarked of the word ‘atheism’, ‘heresy’ no doubt retained ‘a certain flavour of the stake in this world and hell-fire in the next’; moreover, it retained a few concrete worldly penalties.86 Unlike blasphemy, which was considered a crime against the state, heresy was a clergyman’s offence, and could only be tried in an ecclesiastical court (although secular courts could quash convictions of heresy, and provoked controversy among Anglicans when they did so).

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