Representations of Christ and Christ-figures were ubiquitous throughout the long nineteenth century. Turning to them now, at a time when we are witnessing ongoing and vital conversations about religion and the arts, means not only attending to some of their particularities in fresh ways and through new disciplinary lenses but also asking new questions about them in light of recent concerns with “reading … religious and theological texts as part of the world that the modern academy seeks to understand” (Branch and Knight 2018, 499). The contributors to this volume attend to the expansive means by which—taking the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins in his sonnet “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”—“Christ plays in ten thousand places” (12). They recognize that these “places” include the spaces of literature and art, and, in their attention to literary and artistic form, they explore how text and image can function in ways that highlight the interconnectedness of the sacred with the material. One of the outcomes of this project has been a greater recognition of the manner in which an engagement with the figure of Christ and with Christ’s presence in individuals, communities, and creation can challenge and destabilize perceptions of humanity and of the world.
While scholarship on nineteenth-century religion and arts has been moving beyond staid challenges to the secularization thesis with sophisticated considerations of issues, including the gendering of God (e.g. Turley Houston 2013), ecology and religion (e.g. Mason 2018), and reading communities (e.g. King 2015; Walker Heady 2016), representations of the figure of Christ have remained relatively unexplored. Despite ongoing work charting the difficulties that different religious groups encountered in depicting Christ, there has been no previous attempt to bring the variety of divergent perspectives, embedded in a variety of literature and painting, into conversation with one another. Neither has there been any attempt to offer a sustained critique of how theological, artistic, and literary responses to the question Jesus asked Peter, “But whom say ye that I am?” (Mark 8:29), involve different definitions of what it is to be human and live in—or resist—the community he calls into existence. Theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas argues that an apprehension that Jesus is not only the Christ but also the Suffering Servant who must suffer and be killed before rising again means putting the cross at the heart of Christology and recognizing the inseparability between understanding Jesus’s life and living life as a Christian (1981, 52). Although not all of the writers and artists discussed in this volume can be described as Christian, the cross nonetheless remains as either a cornerstone (Eph. 2.20) or a stumbling block (1 Cor. 1:23) that informs their paintings, novels, novellas, poems, hymns, and sermons.
This volume explores the variety of ways in which the interface between understanding the figure of Christ, the place of the cross, and the contours of lived experience were articulated through the long nineteenth century. Collectively, the chapters respond to the theological turn in postmodern thought by asking vital questions about the way in which representations of Christ shape understandings of personhood and of the divine. In the introduction to their collection, Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens (2006), Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler describe “the fall of onto-theology” and the declaration by the German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche of the “death of God” as “something of a fortunate shipwreck” (2). Their reading illustrates how, throughout the nineteenth century, narrow understandings of the divine gave way to an undelimited and more embodied and open Christology within theological, literary, artistic, and cultural spaces. This volume traces this process and, as it does so, affirms the complex model of secularization that philosopher Charles Taylor offers in A Secular Age (2007), which considers both the losses and the lively reinterpretations of religious forms through the nineteenth century (see, in particular, pp. 383–419).
I have chosen to structure the volume in loose chronological order and to organize the sixteen chapters that follow into eight thematic sections that bring the contributors into conversation and highlight the breadth of approaches that were available through the nineteenth century in articulating the person, role, and place of Christ. Reading the chapters within and across the paired sections involves abiding with—rather than resolving—the conflicts around the figure of Christ and the issues relating to identity and personhood. Throughout, paradoxes and tensions emerge in the recognition of how Christ has been defined: by William Blake both as a radical non-conformist (Christopher Rowland) and as radical and gentle (Naomi Billingsley); by Tractarian clergy as representatively masculine (Carol Engelhardt Herringer); by Christina Rossetti as a figure of ecological inclusion (Emma Mason); by Charlotte M. Yonge as a “disabled body” (Clare Walker Gore); by Chartists as the “People-Christ” (Mike Sanders); and by late nineteenth-century authors of melodramatic novels as childlike (Leanne Waters). The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century offers a space for all of these definitions to exist in tension and illuminates the openness of its subjects to finding representations of Christ and manifestations and echoes of his presence in unexpected critical, literary, and artistic spaces.
In 1948, Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth reflected on the nineteenth century as a period when the “historical in religion, the objective element” led to an understanding of “the Lord Jesus [as] a problem child (Sorgenkind)” (qtd. Keuss 2002, 10). German Higher Criticism, which sought to interpret the historical origins of biblical texts, was first practiced in the Enlightenment era by Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) and taken up in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), David Fredrich Strauss (1808–1874), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), and Ernest Renan (1823–1892). Particularly after the publication of George Eliot’s translations of Strauss’s The Life of Jesus (1846) and Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1854), these ideas—and the new understandings of Jesus as a “problem child” that came with them—took hold in Britain. As Theodore Ziolkowski explains in his study of fictional heroes who were patterned on Jesus during this era, the views of Voltaire and Thomas Paine (who described Jesus “as great ethical teacher rather than the divine Son of God”) made space for “a more critical appraisal of the reliability of the Gospels” (1972, 31). In The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1920 (Stevens 2010), Jennifer Stevens extends Ziolowski’s study as she charts the huge rise, concurrent with the dissemination of Higher Criticism, of representations of the life of Jesus in British Fiction from 1860 onward (34).
Sue Zemka’s Victorian Testaments: The Bible, Christology and Literary Authority in Early-Nineteenth-Century British Culture (1997) provides a helpful context for understanding the growing influence of Higher Criticism on shifts and developments in the perceptions of the figure of Christ through the literature and art of the early nineteenth century. Her first chapter places in dialogue the very different conceptions of Christ taken by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Edward Irving, a Scottish clergyman who was accused of heresy when he announced the Second Coming of Christ. For Coleridge, Zemka suggests, the approach to Christ was metaphysical: he “shied away from the carnal body of Christ” and instead explored “metonymic figurations of the body and the book, of Christ and the word.” Christ’s body, for Coleridge, “is figured as a textual physicality, a body that is best understood as the counterpart of a literary revelation” (62). By contrast, Zemka explains how Irving’s representation of the full embodiedness of Christ in The Orthodox and Catholic Doctrine of Our Lord’s Human Nature (1830) marks an important point of transition in the overall picture between early Evangelicalism’s obsession with sinfulness and the pervasiveness later in the century of an emphasis on Christ as a noble exemplary. She also comments on the implications of this theological shift of focus more widely. Her later chapters pay particular attention to both the “manly” Christianity promoted by clergyman and author Charles Kingsley and lawyer, author, and reformer Thomas Hughes, and attends to the associations between Christ and femininity and Christ and childhood that were visible elsewhere in Victorian culture.
In A Poetics of Jesus (2002), Jeffrey F. Keuss extends Zemka’s project into the later nineteenth century. He explains how, in translating the work of both Strauss and Feuerbach, George Eliot “had established herself, along with Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as one of the ambassadors of German thinking in England” (179–80). In her novels, Eliot explores the potential of the textual embodiment as she offers a new conception of Jesus: one that “is not formed, fixed, nor exposed but is constantly forming, transient, and strangely veiled within the poetic space” (Keuss 2002, 101–02). Keuss’s vision of a “poetics of Jesus,” in terms of how the spaces of literature and art can embody or incarnate the subject and the sacred, provides an illuminating framework in which to reflect on the shaping of an embodied and open Christology with which this volume is concerned. In Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (LaPorte 2011), Charles LaPorte turns attention from Eliot’s novels to her poems and reads them alongside the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, and Alfred Tennyson to indicate how the project of “higher criticism helped to inspire a great range of poetic experiments” from the 1840s (22). While LaPorte’s study provides a valuable context for understanding the interface between Higher Criticism and artistic practice through the second half of the nineteenth century, the chronological and thematic scope of this volume will, I hope, lead the reader to a greater understanding of the development of a more open and undelimited Christology.
The present volume extends the important work of scholars including Ziolkowski, Stevens, Zemka, Keuss, and LaPorte by combining a recognition of the effect of Higher Criticism on perceptions of the figure of Christ with a recognition of the broadening influence of the discovery of eschatology (or hope for a new age on earth), the increased interest in apophaticism (which stresses God’s unknowability and transcendence), the debates about gender and childhood, and, above all, the ongoing discussions about what it means to be human. What makes The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century distinctive is the way in which a range of artists, theologians, and authors are brought into dialogue and, taken together, are shown to disrupt any straightforward understanding of the move from Atonement to Incarnation narratives in the mid-nineteenth century and to refute any dualistic separation between Christ as a historical personage of the first century and a divine figure of the present.
In editing the chapters that follow, I am aware that some of the usual suspects in discussions about the figure of Christ in the nineteenth century (e.g. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and George Eliot), who have been considered by Zemka and Keuss, occupy lesser space than might be anticipated from the title. One of the outcomes of this project has been a recognition of how the ubiquitous presence of Christ figures throughout the long nineteenth century complicates any straightforward division between the sacred and secular. This process of extending and challenging ideas and boundaries becomes clear when the chapters are brought into conversation with one another. In his introduction to The Routledge Companion to Religion and Literature (2016), Mark Knight comments on how the type of conversation that “might configure our understanding of, and approach to, literature and religion” is not only one that “tests and probes” but one that “remains open to being led in a new direction” (4, 6). This is the type of hospitable conversation that I had in mind while reflecting on the new directions this volume was taking. While the paired chapters speak to each other, there are other synergies that run through the volume, such as the concerns with broken bodies, powerful passivity, the sacramental, and the embodiment of Christ in art, literature, and culture. In what follows, I bring the chapters into further conversation and offer some reflection on the ways in which they illuminate the ubiquity and diversity of representations of the figure of Christ.
In Part I, “William Blake and Visionary Revelation,” Christopher Rowland (Chap. 2) and Naomi Billingsley (Chap. 3) attend to Blake’s imaginative engagement with the figure of Christ. Where Rowland considers Blake’s representation of Christ as a radical dissenter, Billingsley focuses on his artistic depictions of Christ “as a relatively passive figure, whose presence signifies his identity as Imagination, as a universal spiritus immanent in the world and the proper mode of being for humanity—as Imagination, he is that which allows others to be Christ-like” (49). Bringing the two chapters into dialogue accentuates Blake’s redefinition of holiness and his visi...