Making and remaking saints in nineteenth-century Britain

Gareth Atkins

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780719096860
• eBook ISBN: 9781526100238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

This book examines the place of 'saints' and sanctity in a self-consciously modern age, and argues that Protestants were as fascinated by such figures as Catholics were. Long after the mechanisms of canonisation had disappeared, people continued not only to engage with the saints of the past but continued to make their own saints in all but name. Just as strikingly, it claims that devotional practices and language were not the property of orthodox Christians alone. Making and remaking saints in the nineteenth-century Britain explores for the first time how sainthood remained significant in this period both as an enduring institution and as a metaphor that could be transposed into unexpected contexts. Each of the chapters in this volume focuses on the reception of a particular individual or group, and together they will appeal to not only historians of religion, but those concerned with material culture, the cult of history, and with the reshaping of British identities in an age of faith and doubt.

1

Paul

Michael Ledger-Lomas

IN FEBRUARY 1873, THE art critic and historian John Addington Symonds (1840–93) took an unusually traumatic trip to the dentist. As the laughing gas and chloroform kicked in, he became conscious of ‘utter blankness’ then ‘flashes of intense light’ and then suddenly of the presence of God, ‘manifestly dealing with me, handling me, so to speak, in an intense present personal reality. I felt him streaming in like light upon me, and heard Him saying in no language, but as hands touch and communicate sensation, “I led you, I guided you; you will never sin, and weep, and wail in madness more; for, now, you have seen Me.”’ Symonds told God that while others had been convinced of His existence by miracles or spirit-rapping, this new experience had won him over. God agreed: did Symonds really think he had got a toothache for no purpose? Soon though, the anaesthetic started to wear off and with it this new assurance of God’s existence. ‘“It is too horrible, it is too horrible, it is too horrible”’, Symonds shrieked over and over in his dream. He flung himself on the ground, ‘and at last awoke covered in blood, calling to the surgeons (who were frightened), “Why did you not kill me? Why did you not let me die?”’ How devastating it was to learn that this ‘long dateless ecstasy of vision of the very God’ was ‘after all … no revelation, but that I had been tricked by the abnormal excitement of my brain’. ‘Tell me what you think of it’, Symonds asked his correspondent, the moral philosopher and celebrated agnostic Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900). ‘If this had happened to a man in an uncritical age, would it not have carried conviction, like that of Saul of Tarsus, to his soul? A violent deepening of despair – a sense of being mocked and cheated – remains with me.’¹

Saint Paul was ubiquitous in nineteenth-century religious thought, not only preoccupying Christian theologians but also fascinating those like Symonds who had broken with Christian belief. For Protestants, he was an icon of a faith that was not just ecclesiastical or historic but demanded a profoundly personal connection to Jesus Christ. Protestant scholars reminded popular audiences that he was peculiarly theirs: Catholics might venerate his relics, but their religion was derived from his words, with the Reformation and (for its sympathisers) the Evangelical Revival presented as the rediscovery of his long ignored message. For biblical critics, preachers and Sunday-school children, Paul was a historical person, whose physiognomy, character, early life or voyages could be known with more confidence than many of the murky figures who made up the canon of Roman Catholic saints, or the fantastical English saints discussed elsewhere in this volume.² At the same time, ‘Paul’ could mean not a distinct person but rather, like ‘Deuteronomy’ or ‘the Psalmist’, a majestic outcrop of a Bible understood to speak with equal, inspired authority throughout. His epistles could be quarried for individual verses and then tessellated with other proof texts into the dogmatic patterns that suited Church parties or theological traditions. Pauline phrases were lynchpins in complex, interminable arguments about the atonement or justification. Encountered in Bibles or tracts, they might trigger a religious crisis or even be inscribed on bodies: the tattoos of anchors sported by transported convicts recalled the ‘hope’ that was the ‘anchor of the soul’ (Heb. 6: 19).³

Pauls proliferated throughout the nineteenth century, just as churches did. This chapter concentrates though on the problem to which Symonds was led by his decayed tooth: the struggle to make sense of his supernatural and visionary experiences. Why did Protestants worry about them? The first reason was conversion. For evangelicals in particular, Paul’s life showed how Christ’s grace intervened directly in human lives.⁴ Though ‘superior’, trilled Hannah More (1745–1833) in 1805, Paul’s experience was ‘not solitary; the change, though miraculous in this case, is not less certain in others’. Paul was an ‘exemplification of the great Scripture doctrine which he taught – Faith made him, emphatically, a New Man’.⁵ Evangelicals always differed among themselves and from other Protestant traditions over whether Christians required a conversion experience and of what kind. Yet conversion narratives as well as Christian pneumatology were modelled on Pauline words and narratives, so that their reality was bound up with the truth of Paul’s conversion experience.⁶ The second reason was Protestant apologetics. If Paul had seen the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, the miracle confirmed the miracle of the resurrection and therefore the truth of the gospel against cavillers.

Protestants refused to see any saint as a spiritual acrobat whose feats should be applauded but not emulated. Saints were exemplary of emotions and virtues which all Christians should emulate, even if which saints and which virtues counted was always controversial. While Paul resembled other saints in this respect, his apparently miraculous conversion and vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus (Acts 9: 1–19; 22: 1–12, 26: 12–19), his claim to have ‘seen Jesus Christ our Lord’ (1 Cor. 9: 1) and to have had the Son revealed ‘in me’ (Gal. 1: 16), his voyage to the third heaven (2 Cor. 12: 2) and his speaking in tongues stood apart, not merely because they involved direct contact with the supernatural but also because they formed part of the New Testament, which vouchsafed them but was also dependent on their truth. If it was doubtful that Paul had received a revelation, then the New Testament’s status as revelation was fragile. Yet supernatural experience had long been a hair in the mouth for Protestants. If Paul had personally communicated with the risen Jesus, why could Protestant sectaries or Catholic saints not do likewise? Enlightened divines had regarded naturalising scepticism about supernatural experience as a means of establishing that miracles ceased with the New Testament, thus preserving the latter as a unique source of revelation.⁷ Yet such scepticism spread to its pages, creating a historical puzzle and an apologetic headache. Was it possible to reduce Paul’s vision of Christ to an event in his mind rather than in the air without casting its truth into doubt? The impact of that question would be deepened by the growing insistence of biblical critics that the Acts of the Apostles, the only source for an objective vision on the road to Damascus, was a less reliable source for Paul’s life than the epistles.

While all Protestants fretted about these problems, liberal Protestant scholars and thinkers did so more than most. The high views of scriptural inspiration espoused by evangelical and High Church writers until the later nineteenth century tempered their sense of Paul as an individual wrestling to convey his experiences. For the High Churchman Christopher Wordsworth (1807–85), ‘the Divine Being Who inspired the Apostle, is a God of Order’ who ‘does every thing by counsel, measure, number and weight’. Therefore his epistles were not ‘disjointed and fugitive essays, thrown out extemporaneously on the spur of the moment’ but were ‘designed by the Holy Spirit of God’ to form ‘a glorious building, complete in all its parts and proportions, and perfectly composed, harmonized and adorned, in solidity, symmetry, and beauty’.⁸ Precisely because they could not share this complacency, were reluctant to concede a supernatural element in the New Testament and accepted that a scientific theology must be a radically historicised one, liberal Protestants developed a more sceptical, intense relationship to Paul.⁹ They wished to access what Symonds called his experience of ‘undemonstrable but irrefragable certainty of God’ while questioning his interpretation of it. The answer lay in a phenomenological approach to past experience, which recognised the ‘almost infinitely diversified forms’ it had taken, while seeking to ‘realise the states of mind in which they arose … to live them over again [and] to reproduce their movement in living imagination’.¹⁰ Experience was a ‘blessed word’ in liberal Protestant apologetics.¹¹ A range of apologists found in appeals to experience a means of shoring up Christianity as other evidential props toppled. As the aborted conversion of Symonds showed, even agnostics remained open to experiential evidence that the God of Christianity existed. The ‘careful study of psychologic fact’ promised to reconcile science and religion, showing that discredited doctrines retained their value as a ‘direct rendering in intellectual terms of religious experience’.¹² This chapter therefore concentrates on the liberal Protestant endeavour to reconcile an insistence that Paul’s experiences were exemplary for modern Christians with a scientific explanation of how they had come about.

A ‘man of quick thought’: Paul and enlightened apologetics

Most early nineteenth-century clerics and Christian apologists presented Paul as a reasonable man, the course of whose life had been changed by a supernatural revelation, which he was able to communicate lucidly to modern readers. This view was a bequest from Britain’s Protestant and clerical enlightenment. One of its cornerstones was John Locke’s Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of Paul (1705–07). Locke sought in this work to deny that the simple faith outlined in his The Reasonableness of Christianity (1696) rested on calculated neglect of Paul’s epistles. In the ‘Essay for the Understanding of St Paul’s Epistles by Consulting St Paul Himself’ that preceded the Paraphrase, Locke argued that a presuppositionless reading of the epistles would convert them from a jumbled store of Calvinist proof texts into communications from a ‘Man of quick Thought, warm Temper, mighty well vers’d in the Writings of the Old Testament, and full of the doctrine of the New’. Like an Apostolic Tristram Shandy, Paul had a genius for ‘Large Parentheses’ and for ‘Plenty and Vehemence’. Yet a careful reading of the epistles engendered admiration for a ‘Train of Reasoning, proceeding on regular and cogent Argumentation from a Man rais’d above the ordinary pitch of Humanity to an higher and brighter way of Illumination.’ That ‘Light from Heaven’ blazoned a simple message: accepting the risen Jesus as our Messiah was the way to salvation.¹³ Numerous eighteenth-century divines would imitate Locke’s method and conclusions in their studies of the epistles, especially heterodox Dissenters who were unhappy with the quotation of the epistles to support Calvinist or Trinitarian doctrine and who felt that Paul would emerge as a more liberal figure if they were instead read as idiosyncratic but reliable reports on his experience.¹⁴

The acme of this interpretation would be the translation of the epistles (1824) by the Unitarian polemicist Thomas Belsham (1750–1829), who was anxious to demonstrate that his co-religionists were not ‘Socinian’ enemies of Christ but candid investigators who simply attended to Paul’s information. Belsham claimed that in his ‘sacred interviews’ with the risen Jesus, Paul learned that his disciples should not worship him but rather live as he had done. While these disclosures must be received as of inspired authority, that did not mean that Paul was inspired. He might have gone awry in ‘his reasonings … his illustrations … his narratives of fact … his typical and figurative arguments from the Old Testament … his application of scriptural language … his application of scripture language … his interpretations of the sacred writings … his appropriation of Jewish prophecy’.¹⁵ Belsham’s list exposed him to allegations of ‘disrespect’ from orthodox critics, who viewed any qualification of Paul’s authority as an arrogant attempt to judge him by modern standards. It was though a sincere attempt to argue that Paul’s saintliness resided not in his reasoning but in his experiences. Belsham’s commentary on the epistles prese...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: thinking with saints: Gareth Atkins
• 1 Paul: Michael Ledger-Lomas
• 2 The Virgin Mary: Carol Engelhardt Herringer
• 3 Claudia Rufina: Martha Vandrei
• 4 Patrick: Andrew R. Holmes
• 5 Thomas Becket: Nicholas Vincent
• 6 Thomas More: William Sheils
• 7 Ignatius Loyola: Gareth Atkins
• 8 English Catholic martyrs: Lucy Underwood
• 9 Richard Baxter: Simon Burton
• 10 The Scottish Covenanters: James Coleman
• 11 John and Mary Fletcher: David R. Wilson
• 12 William Wilberforce and ‘the Saints’: Roshan Allpress
• 13 Elizabeth Fry and Sarah Martin: Helen Rogers
• 14 John Henry Newman’s Lives of the English Saints: Elizabeth Macfarlane
• 15 Thérèse of Lisieux: Alana Harris
• Index