Dean Swift: The Satirist and his
Faith
A Symposium on Jonathan Swift and
Christianity, St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin,
October 19 2002
Public Certainty, Private Doubt:
Swift in and out of the Pulpit
Michael DePorte (University
of New Hampshire, USA)
Prof. DePorte has been a prominent commentator on Swift
since his Nightmares and Hobbyhorses: Swift, Sterne and Augustan Ideas of
Madness appeared in 1974.
As a spokesman for the Church of
Ireland Swift's views are hardly
ambiguous. He was a fierce defender of church doctrines and prerogatives. He
saw the church as besieged by secular and sectarian enemies. He never tired
of arguing that the church must prevail if society were to survive intact. He
urged anyone who questioned the importance of an established church to think
hard about the English revolution. And he identified Christianity so strongly
with the church that toward the end of his life he wrote his friend Charles
Ford that opposition to the church in both England and Ireland had made him
give up "all hopes of.Christianity" (Correspondence 4: 505).
Dissenters, he insisted, were not motivated by theological or liturgical
concerns, but by the "Spirit of Opposition" (Prose Works 2: 34.) They aspired to power, not purity.
He refused to acknowledge that freethinkers might be engaged in honest
inquiry, afflicted by honest doubts, in search of greater clarity. All they
really wanted, he said, was freedom from moral restraint.
Swift preached sermons on the superiority of Christianity to Greek
philosophy and on the need to believe in the Trinity whether one understood
it or not. He wrote that the biblical account of Creation seemed "most
agreeable of all others to probability and reason." He was
uncompromising in his support of the Test Act and scornful of republican
governments for "treating Christianity as a System of Speculative
Opinions, which no Man should be bound to believe" (Prose Works 3: 49).
In his Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately entered into Holy Orders,
Swift argues that Christianity triumphed over Greek and Roman philosophy
because it could draw on a source of power greater than intelligence or
firmness of character. "The true Misery of the Heathen World," he
said, was "the Want of a Divine Sanction; without which, the Dictates of
the Philosophers failed in the Point of Authority" (Prose Works 9: 73).
The ancient philosophers had no notion of "relying" on Providence;
they would not have understood what it meant to place one's trust in God;
they "trusted in themselves for all things," and therefore, Swift
said, had no sure recourse in hard times: "upon every blow of adverse
fortune, [they] either affected to be indifferent, or grew sullen and severe,
or else yielded and sunk like other men" (Prose Works 9: 245-46).
More importantly, the ancient philosophers were never able to posit a
compelling reward for virtue. "Human nature is so constituted," he
argued, "that we can never pursue any thing heartily but upon hopes of a
reward." As for the notion that virtue is its own reward, Swift said
that if there was "any thing in this more than the sound of the words,
it is.too abstracted to.be of general use" (Prose Works 9: 244). But
Heaven and Hell are concepts even the simplest person can understand; they
are, Swift insists, in one of his sermons, "the great Principle for
Conscience to work upon" (Prose Works 9: 156), and essential to the
welfare of society. "Great Abilities, without the Fear of God," are
most dangerous Instruments when they are trusted with Power. The Laws of Man
have thought fit, that those who are called to any Office of Trust should be
bound by an Oath to the faithful Discharge of it: But, an Oath is an Appeal
to God, and therefore can have no Influence except upon those who believe
that he is...a Rewarder of those that seek him, and a Punisher of those who
disobey him." (Prose Works 9: 156-57)
As a public spokesman for the church, then, Swift's views are absolutely
straightforward. He sought to secure its position from attack, to discredit
the motives of those who took part in such attacks, and to demonstrate that
Christianity itself, particularly the doctrine of eternal rewards and
punishments, is the only sure foundation of moral life. Elsewhere in his
writings, though, we run up against more problematical reflections. Consider
this strange entry in the disgruntled journal Swift kept at Holyhead while
waiting for the weather to clear so he could get a ship to Ireland:
"...Last night I dreamt that Ld Bolingbroke and Mr Pope were at my
Cathedrall in the Gallery, and that my Ld was to preach. I could not find my
Surplice, the Church Servants were all out of the way; the Doors were shut. I
sent to my Ld to come into my Stall for more conveniency to get into the
Pulpit. The Stall was all broken; the[y] sd the Collegians had done it. I
squeezed among the Rabble, saw my Ld in the Pulpit. I thought his prayer was
good, but I forget it. In his Sermon, I did not like his quoting Mr. Wycherly
by name, and his Plays...." (Prose Works 5: 205-06)
Looked at one way, this dream is a major psychic affront, a nightmare of
impropriety, violation, and loss that assails Swift's dignity on several
cherished grounds. His pulpit is usurped by Bolingbroke, who, though a
friend, was also an outspoken deist. Worse yet, Bolingbroke quotes Wycherley.
Meanwhile, Swift not only loses his surplice, he loses control of the Church
servants, who vanish just when he needs them. As if this were not bad enough,
undergraduates from his old college advertise their disrespect by wrecking
his stall, leaving him to hear the offensive sermon 'squeezed among the
Rabble.'
But we should not forget that while Swift is the authority mocked in this
dream, he is also the one who conjures up the mockery. In dreams, Addison
observed, the soul "converses with numberless Beings of her own
Creation...is transported into ten thousand Scenes of her own raising...is
herself the Theatre, the Actors, and the Beholder" (Spectator 487).
Johnson once dreamt that someone got the better of him in argument.
He brooded over the defeat till it dawned on him that the dream was, after
all, his dream. "I should have seen," he told Bennet Langton,
"that the wit of this supposed antagonist, by whose superiority I felt
myself depressed, was as much furnished by me, as that which I thought I had
been uttering in my own character." Swift himself wrote, in memorable
imitation of Petronius, that dreams are never sent downward from Jove or up
from the Devil's "infernal Mansions"; they are "mere
Productions" of our own brains ("On Dreams," ll. 1-5). It is
perhaps worth recalling here that when an undergraduate at Trinity, Swift was
cited for an unusually large number of disciplinary infractions, once for
starting "tumults" in the college and insulting the junior dean,
whose pardon he was forced to beg on bended knee.
So in this dream we may say that Swift is not only the insulted dean, he
is also those agencies of anarchy and irreverence: Bolingbroke, the
neglectful servants, the rowdy students. However scrupulous Swift's public
behavior, however militant his service to the church, in the dream he goes on
holiday, makes mischief in the pulpit, "loses" his surplice and
refuses to look for it, creates havoc in the stalls, then squeezes in among
the rabble where he is safe from detection. This final touch seems an apt
metaphor for the way Swift's irony often dissociates him from unseemly
thoughts.
Swift's dream of cathedral monkey business epitomizes the problem of
gauging his true religious convictions. In his satires, we often rub up
against things that don't square with the orthodox assertions of the
religious tracts and sermons. In his ironical attack on the famous free
thinker Anthony Collins, for example, Swift spectacularly ignores his own
advice that clergymen should not preach against atheism. To do so, he said,
is to risk perplexing "the Minds of well-disposed People with Doubts,
which probably would never have otherwise come into their Heads" (Prose
Works 9: 78).
Here are a few of the things Swift gives "well-disposed people"
to think about as he parodies Collins: first, that many other cultures in the
world have scriptures they believe to be divinely inspired, and that some of
those scriptures contain striking parallels to the New Testament: "the
Bonzes in China have theirs, written by the Disciples of Of-he, whom they
call God and Saviour of the World, who was born to teach the way of
Salvation, and to give satisfaction for all Men's Sins"; the clergy of
Siam "have a Book of Scripture written by Sommonocodum, who, the Siamese
say, was born of a Virgin, and was the God expected by the Universe; just as
our Priests tell us, that Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary, and was
the Messiah so long expected" (Prose Works 4: 32); second, that the
Bible itself is so complex a work that a bishop said he thought it more
"a Trial of our Industry than a Repository of our Faith" (Prose
Works 4: 33); third, that learned Christians cannot even agree about such
central articles of faith as original sin and the resurrection of the dead.
Swift was, of course, writing under cover of satire. In later years, Pope
would tease him about the effectiveness of that cover: "your method of
concealing your self puts me in mind of the bird I have read of in India, who
hides his head in a hole, while all his feathers and tail stick out"
(Correspondence 4: 217-218) From no work of Swift's do more feathers protrude
than from A Tale of a Tub. As Voltaire recognized, the central religious
allegory in which a father leaves coats to each of his three sons, with
instructions not to alter them in any way, has subversive implications. The
father's most striking quality is not rectitude, or love for his children,
but determination to exercise power over them after he is gone. The will he
leaves instructs his sons on the care of the coats, threatens them with
penalties for "every Transgression or Neglect," and warns them that
their "future Fortunes will entirely depend" on following his
wishes to the letter (Prose Works 1: 44).
The will does not explain why such exacting care of the coats should matter.
In the "Apology" he wrote for the fifth edition of the Tale
Swift said he could not understand why anybody should think the it dangerous
when other books "are kindly received, because they are levell'd to
remove those Terrors that Religion tells Men will be the Consequence of
immoral Lives. Nothing like which is to be met with in this
Discourse..." (Prose Works 1: 2). His footnotes to the story of the
coats, however, tell us straightout that the father represents "the
Divine Founder," and the will, "the Doctrine and Faith of
Christianity" (Prose Works 1: 44).
Considering that the brothers never seem to suffer any of their father's
threatened penalties, it is hard to see how the allegory really supports
belief in those salutary "Terrors" Swift says are so essential to
religion. One can argue that going mad, as do two of the brothers, is penalty
enough. But one can just as well argue that Peter and Jack would never have
lost their wits had their father left them the coats to wear as they saw fit,
or had the brothers ignored the will and gone about their business. One
hard-headed moral of the story might be that the father has no power except
the power his sons accord him in their minds.
Did Swift privately believe eternal rewards and punishments--that
"great Principle for Conscience to work upon"--exist only in the
minds of believers? Perhaps he did. In his Thoughts on Religion, Swift
describes love of life as an extraordinarily irrational impulse. Were people
guided by "the dictates of reason, every man would despise [life], and
wish it at an end" (Prose Works 9: 263). But if there truly are terrible
punishments for vice in the hereafter, and if the world is as full of knaves
as Swift continually assures us, why would it be rational for "every man"
to wish life at an end?
When preaching, Swift argues that the "excellency" of
Christianity is that it enables ordinary people to achieve a nobility they
would never otherwise attain by making virtue and self-interest one:
"the primitive Christians...were altogether the product of their
principles and doctrine," whereas "the great examples of wisdom and
virtue, among the Grecian sages were produced by personal merit, and not
influenced by the doctrine of any particular sect" (Prose Works 9:249).
While it is true, he says, "that there hath been all along in the world
a notion of rewards and punishments in another life...it seems to have rather
served as an entertainment to poets, or as a terror of children, than a
settled principle, by which men pretended to govern any of their actions. The
last celebrated words of Socrates, a little before his death, do not seem to
reckon or build much upon any such opinion" (Prose Works 9:245).
Yet it is precisely the individual merit of men like Socrates (fellow
master of irony) that most attracted Swift. He owned a signet ring with the
head of Socrates, and often used this seal when signing important documents.
Swift preached that the doctrine of future rewards and punishments was
important for ordinary people, but it is by no means clear how much real
efficacy he thought that doctrine had. The most immoral people Gulliver
encounters on his travels, the Lilliputians, are also the only people said to
believe in Divine Providence, an afterlife, and a system of rewards and
punishments.
Their case for making belief in God a prerequisite for public office
sounds exactly like the case Swift often made: "since Kings avow
themselves to be the Deputies of Providence, the Lilliputians think nothing
can be more absurd than for a Prince to employ such Men as disown the
Authority under which he acteth" (Prose Works 11:44). No one else
Gulliver visits even seems to have a religion, except for the
Brobdingnagians, who, to judge from the description of their great temple,
"adorned on all Sides with Statues of Gods and Emperors," are
polytheists (Prose Works 11:98). As for the Houyhnhnms, they regard death
just as Swift said reasonable people should, without "the least
Regret" (Prose Works 11:258).
Swift's last, and most moving poem to Stella, written when she was gravely
ill, acknowledges the importance of future rewards, then side-steps the
doctrine to offer consolation of a more immediate sort:
Were future Happiness and Pain,
A mere Contrivance of the Brain,
As Atheists argue, to entice,
And Fit their Proselytes for Vice...
Grant this the Case, yet sure 'tis hard,
That Virtue, stil'd its own Reward...
Should acting, die, nor leave behind
Some lasting Pleasure in the Mind,
Which by Remembrance will assuage,
Grief, Sickness, Poverty, and Age
And strongly shoot a radiant Dart,
To shine through Life's declining Part.
Say, Stella, feel you no Content,
Reflecting on a Life well spent?
(ll. 19-22, 25-26, 29-36)
The allegory of the coats in A Tale of a Tub raises unsettling questions
about the "Divine Founder's" arbitrariness and the nature of his
power; the "Digression on Madness" in the Tale raises potentially
unsettling questions about the origin of Christianity: "if we take a
Survey of the greatest Actions that have been performed in the World,"
one of which is "the contriving, as well as the propagating, of New
Religions: We shall find the Authors of them all" to be mad (Prose Works
1: 102). No sane person would dream of "subduing Multitudes to
his...Visions" (Prose Works 1: 108).
Indeed, the importance of preserving established religion is so persistent
a theme in Swift's later writings, that he insists even a change to a new,
"more pure and perfect [religion] may be an Occasion of endangering the
publick Peace; because, it will compose a Body always in Reserve, prepared to
follow any discontented Heads, upon the plausible Pretexts of advancing true
Religion, and opposing Error, superstition, or Idolatry. For this Reason,
Plato lays it down as a Maxim, that Men ought to worship the Gods, according
to the Laws of the Country; and he introduceth Socrates, in his last
Discourse, utterly disowning the Crime laid to his Charge, of teaching new
Divinities, or Methods of Worship." (Prose Works 2: 11-12)
But what of the new divinity and method of worship taught by St.
Paul? Claiming certain knowledge of "things
agreed on all hands impossible to be known" (p. 166) is the sure sign of
madness. How are we to distinguish Jesus from other propagators of new
religions? The predictable answer, and the answer Swift gives in his sermons,
is, of course, that Christianity is not the vision of a single man, but the
revelation of divine will. A common response to this question in the period,
was to argue that we can know the apostles were divinely inspired, rather
than deluded enthusiasts, because their claims had empirical support:
miracles.
In his sermon On the Trinity, though, Swift reverses the argument, saying
not that miracles prove the authenticity of Scriptural revelation, but that
miracles are so contrary to the "Rules of Nature and Reason" we
would never believe them unless they were affirmed by Scripture: "It is
against the Laws of Nature, that a Human Body should be able to walk upon the
Water...or that a dead Carcase should be raised from the Grave after three
Days...Yet these Miracles, and many others, are positively affirmed in the
Gospel; and these we must believe, or give up our Holy Religion to Atheists
and Infidels." (Prose Works 9: 165-66)
In other words, we should believe because the consequences of disbelief are
unthinkable: "Men should consider, that raising Difficulties concerning
the Mysteries in Religion, cannot make them more wise, learned, or virtuous;
better Neighbours, or Friends, or more serviceable to their Country; but,
whatever they pretend, will destroy their inward Peace of Mind, by perpetual
Doubts and Fears arising in their Breasts" (Prose Works 9: 166-67). This
is as close as Swift gets to discussing the need for religion from the
inside. He talks about God as the ultimate authority for doctrines of
imperative social importance, about crimes against social order being crimes
against God, but about individual relationships to God he says remarkably
little.
What comes across most powerfully in Swift's references to God is a sense
of God's remoteness and unknowability. Swift dismisses people's claims to
have had direct experience of spiritual agencies--good or evil--as
intoxications of pride: "I laugh aloud to see these Reasoners...engaged
in wise Dispute...whether they are in the Verge of God or the Devil,
seriously debating...whether certain Passions and Affections are guided by
the Evil Spirit or the Good....it is a Sketch of Human Vanity, for every
Individual, to imagine the whole Universe is interess'd in his meanest
Concern. Who, that sees a little paultry Mortal, droning, and dreaming, and
drivelling to a Multitude, can think it agreeable to common good Sense, that
either Heaven or Hell should be put to the Trouble of Influence or Inspection
upon what he is about" (Prose Works 1: 180).
One of the few altogether personal religious rituals we know Swift
observed was to read the third chapter of Job every year on his birthday.
That it should be the third chapter, rather than the explanatory prologue or
the celebratory epilogue, is telling. For it is in the third chapter that Job
curses the day he was born and asks "Why is light given to a man whose
way is hid,/ And whom God hath hedged in?" In a sermon, Swift might hold
up Abraham as exemplifying the power of faith, extoll his readiness to
believe "that God would raise from him a great Nation, at the very same
time that he was commanded to sacrifice his only Son, and despaired of any
other Issue"(Prose Works 9: 163).
But Job is a figure to touch his heart. Job epitomized the kind of
undeserved suffering with which Swift identified so readily. Swift's letters
and private writings are filled with complaints of unearned misfortune--from
the great fish that dropped off his line when he was a little boy to the
preferment that eluded him in England.
The weaknesses he confesses to friends are less moral failures, than failures
of power visited on him by sickness or age: loss of memory, of stamina, of
invention, of the ability to do serious work. It is impossible to imagine
Swift standing four hours in the rain, like Johnson, to atone for some long
ago act of thoughtlessness. It is easy to imagine him asking Job's
questions--"Wherefore do the wicked live,/ Become old, yea, wax mighty
in power?"--and hearing in return something like that voice of inscrutable
power out of the whirlwind: "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations
of the earth?" In the Essay on Man, Pope continually reminds readers to
"presume not God to scan." But he reminds them with an assurance
that suggests he pretty much knows what God had in mind for the world:
Why has not Man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly. (I, 193-94)
The God of Swift's poem "On the Day of Judgment" is much like
the God of Job: aloof, implacable, something of a trickster.
Of all the stories that bear on Swift's religious outlook, I think the
most haunting is Deane Swift's account of a Sunday visit to Swift two years
after he had been declared of unsound mind. Swift was sitting in a chair, and
when he reached for a knife that lay on the table, his housekeeper moved it
away. Deane Swift recalls that Swift shrugged his shoulders, and, rocking
back and forth, said, "I am what I am, I am what I am: and, about six
minutes afterwards, repeated the same words two or three times over"
(Correspondence, 5: 214).
The words may mean nothing. They may mean only that despite loss of powers
Swift still knows who and what he is--more than can be said of Gulliver, who
at the end of his travels studies himself in a mirror yet continues to think
himself what he is not: a Houyhnhnm. But inasmuch as the words are St.
Paul's, who Swift cites more than perhaps any other
figure in the Old or New Testament, they invite a larger reading. Paul had
been speaking of the promise of eternal life offered all people through
Christ's Resurrection, and of his own place among those who witnessed it:
"...And last of all he was seen of me also, as one born out of due
time. For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an
apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am
what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I
laboured more abundantly than they all" (I Corinthians, xv, 8-11)
It is tempting to see flitting across Swift's mind, some deeply personal
and darkly ironic sense of kinship with Paul. Like Paul, he had been
"born out of due time." Like Paul he had not come early or easily
to the Church. Like Paul, his writings had been misunderstood. And he, too,
had tried to make up for his lateness by laboring "more abundantly than
they all," fighting, as he had told Lady Worsley ten years before,
"with Beasts like St. Paul, not at Ephesus, but in Ireland"
(Correspondence 4: 79). This labor might well have seemed abundant to Swift
because he appears to have performed it without Paul's experience of personal
revelation, without Abraham's faith, which embraced impossibility and
contradiction, and without clear expectation of that personal reward he
assured his parishioners was the very basis of Christianity.
Michael DePorte
Department of English
University of New
Hampshire
Durham, New Hampshire U.S.A.
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