Spirit Matters

Occult Beliefs, Alternative Religions, and the Crisis of Faith in Victorian Britain

J. Jeffrey Franklin

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781501715440
• eBook ISBN: 9781501715457
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Literature

Spirit Matters explores the heterodox and unorthodox religions and spiritualities that arose in Victorian Britain as a result of the faltering of Christian faith in the face of modernity, the rise of the truth-telling authority of science, and the first full exposure of the West to non-Christian religions. J. Jeffrey Franklin investigates the diversity of ways that spiritual seekers struggled to maintain faith or to create new faiths by reconciling elements of the Judeo-Christian heritage with Spiritualism, Buddhism, occultism, and scientific naturalism. Spirit Matters covers a range of scenarios from the Victorian hearth and the state-Church altar to the frontiers of empire in Buddhist countries and Egyptian crypts. Franklin reveals how this diversity of elements provided the materials for the formation of new hybrid religions and the emergence in the 20th century of New Age spiritualities.

Franklin investigates a broad spectrum of experiences through a series of representative case studies that together trace the development of unorthodox religious and spiritual discourses. The ideas and events discussed by Franklin through these case studies were considered outside the domain of orthodox religion yet still religious or spiritual rather than atheistic or materialistic. Among the works—obscure and canonical—he analyzes are Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Zanoni and A Strange Story; Forest Life in Ceylon, by William Knighton; Anthony Trollope's The Vicar of Bullhampton; Anna Leonowens's The English Governess at the Siamese Court; Literature and Dogma, by Matthew Arnold; and Bram Stoker's Dracula.

1

Orthodox Christianity, Scientific Materialism, and Alternative Religions

Nineteenth-century Great Britain witnessed and was transformed by a confluence of world-historical trends in science, economics and industry, and empire. These in turn converged with—and in part caused—a set of historically predicated obsessions about God’s relationship to the natural world and the proper functions of religion in modern society. The resulting volatile amalgamation was especially characteristic of the Victorian period (1837–1901). This period experienced what could be considered the second wave of the Protestant Reformation, its individualization of faith, which had been building momentum in Europe since the Enlightenment. Thus Protestant individuals, driven by a widely perceived crisis of faith in orthodox Christianity, subject to modern science’s rise to dominance in truth-telling authority, and fully exposed for the first time in history to the panoply of world religions, generated an unprecedented proliferation of new and often hybrid religions and spiritualities. This book treats that diverse array of alternative beliefs, which until now have been considered largely as disparate events and discourses, as parts of a century-long, collectively experienced cultural phenomenon. That phenomenon was a culture-wide striving to reclaim a spiritual certainty that for the first time in history a critical mass of Britons suspected could be lost.

In one sense, this is a book about what William James called The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Though James (1842–1910) was American and this book focuses on England, he encountered and studied many of the same religious experiences that I analyze in the contemporaneous context of Victorian Britain. He was born into a culture rooted in New England Puritanism, haunted by the Spiritualism movement, and infused with American Transcendentalism. His father was a theologian of the mystical Christianity of Swedenborgianism, and he himself experimented with drug-induced mystical states, cofounded the American Society for Psychical Research (modelled on the London SPR), and attended séances to commune with the spirits of the departed. This variety of religious and spiritual experiences only begins to suggest the full range that existed in nineteenth-century Britain, even more so than in North America. This book investigates a broad spectrum of those experiences through a series of representative case studies that, although highly varied, tell a chronological story about the development of unorthodox religious and spiritual discourses in Britain over the course of the nineteenth century.

The Territory of Spirit

The Victorian period—often characterized as the “age of doubt,” the “age of agnosticism,” the “age of materialism,” and the “age of scientific naturalism”—was an age of the most intense private angst and public debate about the states of faith and doubt, perhaps the age of the most intense religious controversy in history not typified by widespread physical violence or religious war.¹ As the familiar story goes, the primary contestants were the “old orthodoxy” of mainstream Christianity and the “new orthodoxy of materialistic science,” especially after Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species (1859) (Turner, Between 2). My opening premise is that there was a third contestant, which some Victorians called “Spirit,” in the form of an array of esoteric and occult beliefs and practices, and that the Victorian period was the age of the proliferation of alternative religions, the beginning of New Age spiritualities, although that term was not widely adopted until the subsequent century. The story this book tells concerns the formation of that array of alternative beliefs within the context of their triangular positioning in relationship to orthodox Christianity on one side and scientific naturalism and its associated materialism on the other. Thus one thread that ties this story together is the recurrence throughout the century of the foundational, Western metaphysical opposition between the spiritual and the material. That dualism was continuously contested throughout the century and remained ever fluid and noncategorical. The boundaries between religion and science never were unequivocal, and, in fact, the faithful produced their own scientific foundations and empirical proofs and the scientists produced their own religious positions and secularized theologies. That is part of the story this books tells. Another part is the unexpected influence of the encounter with non-Western religions as a byproduct of imperialism, in particular the profound influence of Buddhism in the West. The encounter with Buddhism linked the frontiers of missionary contacts with indigenous religions to debates within the Church of England to the appropriation of elements of Hinduism and Buddhism by the syncretic or “hybrid religions” that proliferated in Great Britain at the end of the century (Franklin, Lotus 59). Yet another part of the story is the historical arc from the early century popular spiritual movements—Mesmerism and Spiritualism—to those hybrid religions late in the century.² The story ends with its culmination in Theosophy, which drew all of the influences covered in this book into a synthesis that deconstructed the dualisms of spiritualism versus materialism and Natural Theology versus scientific naturalism, thereby forging the template for twentieth-century New Age spiritualities.

Returning to the early nineteenth century for an opening example, consider the range of religious positions represented in Jane Eyre (1847). Charlotte Brontë (1816–55), who grew up in a rural parish as the daughter of an Evangelical Church of England clergyman, wrote at a time of significant religious upheaval. The end of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century saw a major evangelical revival that spanned Protestant denominations and, at the same time, the rapid encroachment upon the dominance of the established church by Nonconformist denominations such a Congregationalism, Methodism, and multiple Baptist varieties. These events conditioned the emergence, beginning in the 1830s, of the Anglo-Catholic Tractarian movement, led by Oxford divines, and the resulting schism within Anglicanism between those Rome-leaning High Churchmen and Low Church evangelicals. In that same period, a comparable burgeoning of spiritual discourses occurred at or outside the boundaries of orthodox Christianity. Starting in the 1830s, the Mesmerism movement began to spread to London from the Continent, saturating popular culture in England by the 1850s. Close upon its heels came the Spiritualism movement, having originated in 1840s New England. By the 1860s, many thousands of Europeans, including royalty, famous authors, eminent scientists, and even clergymen, had held hands around a séance table to invite communications from the Spirit World. Add to this the persistence through several millennia of pagan beliefs and practices within indigenous British Isle cultures. These had merged or syncretized with Christianity such that “it involved no inconsistency for a villager to attend the parish church on Sunday morning … and with equal conviction to … ask the permission of the ‘Old Gal’ before chopping elder wood” (Obelkevich 305–6). It should be no wonder, then, that Brontë’s writings, like those by her siblings and many others, portrayed a variety of religious and spiritual experiences, as well as syncretism among them.

Jane Eyre is a novel in which spirits abound, “spirit” having connotations more varied than the traditional Christian conceptions of the immortal soul or the Holy Spirit. The novel invokes spirit in Christian ways, pagan and other non-Christian supernatural ways, and, most tellingly, ways that blur those boundaries. It stages a contest between and, ultimately, a merging of multiple spiritualities.³ In the following exemplary excerpt, Jane is in flight across the moors from the temptations that Rochester has proffered of living with him out of wedlock:

She broke forth as never moon yet burst from cloud: a hand first penetrated the sable folds and waved them away; then, not a moon, but a white human form shone in the azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward. It gazed and gazed and gazed on me. It spoke to my spirit: immeasurably distant was the tone, yet so near, it whispered in my heart—“My daughter, flee temptation!” … We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us… . I had risen to my knees to pray for Mr. Rochester. Looking up, I, with tear-dimmed eyes, saw the mighty Milky Way. Remembering what it was—what countless systems there swept space like a soft trace of light— I felt the might and strength of God. Sure was I of His efficiency to save what He had made: convinced I grew that neither earth should perish nor one of the souls it treasured. I turned prayer to thanksgiving: the Source of Life was also the Saviour of spirits. (281, 285)

In certain ways this reads as a Christian reconversion experience. Brontë was a devout Christian, as nearly all early Victorian readers would have professed to be. Her readership exerted tremendous pressure upon heroines to exemplify Christian faith and morals. Jane Eyre represents Christian discourse especially through four characters, two Anglican clergymen, Mr. Brocklehurst and St. John Rivers, and two female characters, Helen Burns and Jane herself. Brocklehurst and Rivers are both evangelicals, though of two significantly different strains within Anglicanism, and the novel ultimately shows them and their brands of Christianity to be unworthy of Jane’s powerful, female spirituality. This could not but trouble many of Brontë’s readers, as it did a well-known reviewer who famously tarred the novel as “eminently an anti-Christian composition” (Rigby in Brontë 442). Helen Burns, frail and dying of tuberculosis, is the figure of Christlike sacrifice in the novel, but Jane’s spirit is too vital to embrace such self-abnegation. Although Helen is a Christian paragon, her devotion itself incorporates beliefs outside of orthodox Christianity, as when she says: “Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere; and those spirits watch us, for they are commissioned to guard us” (60). Jane is the remaining spokesperson for Christian faith in the novel, yet she more than anyone is figured throughout in terms of pagan spirituality, and she directly experiences the reality of a natural supernatural event. Thus the above passage, rather than casting off the pagan in order to herald the Christian, merges God the Father with Mother Nature. The “Source of Life” is both divine and the natural universe (explained to Jane by the science of astronomy), whether worshiped directly in paganism and pantheism or taken as proof of God’s design as in Natural Theology. The “Saviour of Spirits” signals at once both the redeemer of souls, Jesus Christ, and the Spirit World, a state or location outside of traditional heaven and Christian orthodoxy.

William James and Charlotte Brontë, representative of a large number in the nineteenth century, explored beliefs beyond the boundaries of orthodox Christianity, but they did so necessarily in reference to and using terms drawn from that dominant cultural register. A comprehensive consideration of religious and spiritual positions during that period would have to focus largely on those within Christian orthodoxy. That in itself would entail consideration of a very broad variety, given that “the foremost characteristic of Victorian religion was its unabashed, unapologetic denominationalism” and “religious controversy [was] the ‘spectator sport of Victorian England’ ” (Turner, Contesting 23; Schlossbert 286). A wide range of contested positions existed just within the Church of England, as well as within non-Anglican Protestantism, and then there was Catholicism. But, none of these many religious positions is of primary concern here. This book is not about Christianity, not directly, but cannot help being indirectly about it. The focus here is on heterodox, non-Christian or borderline-Christian religious and spiritual positions in nineteenth- century Britain. In order to locate those positions, however, one must be able to identify the boundary of orthodoxy against which heterodoxies defined themselves.

For the purposes of this study, “orthodox Christianity” designates an immensely complex, grossly generalized amalgamation of nineteenth- century British Christianities. Despite the hotly contested schism within the state church, both High Church and Low Church “espoused the quest for holiness of living … , both agreed on the divine inspiration of scripture, both agreed on the essentiality of the doctrines of divine judgment and eternal punishment, both held uncompromisingly supernatural views of Christianity, and both firmly believed in miracles, revelation and the literal fulfillment of prophecy” (Parsons 34). The more evangelical congregations, both Anglican and Nonconformist, emphasized biblical literalism, individualism of faith, human fallenness through sin, and God’s judgment. All denominations, including the minority Catholics, experienced the common threat to truth-telling authority posed by scientific naturalism, signaled especially by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, as a crisis within the faith as a whole. It is this whole—the historical and doctrinal consensus of Christianity concerning the birth and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth and some version of sin, redemption, and heavenly reward—which I refer to as “orthodox Christianity” or “Victorian Christianity.” The territory of this study is largely outside that domain. Even the chapters on Matthew Arnold and Anthony Trollope find unorthodox religious positions tied to paganism and Buddhism.

Materialism and Scientific Naturalism

The territory of this study is bounded on the side opposite orthodox Christianity by atheism and what was called “materialism,” one of the master terms underlying debate about religion in the nineteenth century. The following chapters are no more concerned directly with atheism and materialism than they are with orthodox Christianity, but it is similarly necessary for understanding the religious and spiritual discourses analyzed in this book to locate them in relationship to the beliefs that marked the outer boundary against which they were defined.

Both atheism and materialism were as much theoretical foes—boogeymen to frighten those with wavering faith or freethought leanings—as actual foes on the ground in England. The number of Britons who publicly professed atheism was very much smaller than the number of Christian apologists who cited the dangers of atheism. Though after midcentury there were infamous self-proclaimed atheists, such as Charles Bradlaugh, the founder of the Secular Society in 1866, most cited examples of atheists were not Englishmen at all but rather were the classical progenitors— Epicurus, Democritus, and Lucretius—or modern Continental philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza or Denis Diderot, on the basis of whom Britons thereafter linked atheism to revolutionary politics. Similarly, “during the nineteenth century … European materialism was limited almost exclusively to Germany in the form of the scientific materialism of men such as Vogt, Büchner, Moleschott and the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels” (Lightman, Origins 25). Self-proclaimed materialists were few and far between in Britain. Despite that fact, “materialism was widely perceived as the archvillain of the age” and “an expression of support for materialism of any sort was still not tolerated in Britain in the 1870s” and subsequent decades (Oppenheim 61; Lightman, “On Tyndall’s” n.p.).

Materialism is of particular relevance here because it was a linchpin concept that locked religion and science in dialogue within one of the most significant cultural contests of the nineteenth century and, indeed, throughout “Western Civilization.” In the second half of the century, those most accused of materialism were the “scientific naturalists,” especially Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, and T. H. Huxley, but also W. K. Clifford, Francis Galton, Frederic Harrison, G. H. Lewes, Edward Tylor, and Leslie Stephen, among others. Huxley, the great polemicist on behalf of science, “coined ‘scientific naturalism’ as an antithetical term to ‘supernaturalism’ ” because it was “preferable to the considerably more contentious term scientific materialism coined by his close friend John Tyndall” (quoted in Dawson and Lightman 1).⁴ Tyndall, the prominent Irish physicist, had inflamed the Christian opponents of Darwinism and science generally in his “Belfast Address” of 1874 and handed them an advantage by using the term “materialism” in defense of scientific method. The scientific naturalists placed themselves in the position of defending a precarious distinction between science as a method of “observation and experiment which explains phenomena only through natural laws and processes, without direct appeal to supernatural or divine agency” and science as a metaphysics that eschews or dismisses the divine in claiming to explain absolutely everything from the conscience to the cosmos in purely materialistic terms (Fuller 8).

Huxley strove to maintain this distinction in his “two-spheres position”—that the domains of religion and science are separate and so need not be in conflict—as well as in the word he coined for a religious position suitable to scientific naturalists: agnosticism (Lightman, “Victorian Sciences” 347). He strategically distanced agnosticism from atheism and materialism by defining it on the basis of the limited scope of human knowledge, which excused adherents from any and all knowledge claims about the divine. Thus, as Frank Miller Turner summarizes, “in their metaphysics despite their rather loose and continuously misunderstood polemical vocabulary Spencer, Tyndall, Hux...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Orthodox Christianity, Scientific Materialism, and Alternative Religions
• Part I: Challenges to Christianity and the Orthodox/Heterodox Boundary
• Part II: The Interpenetration of Christianity and Buddhism
• Part III: The Turn to Occultism
• Part IV: The Origins of Alternative Religion in Victorian Britain
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index