God and Religion in Victorian Literature

Hilary Fraser believes that one of the most prominent and characteristic features of Victorian thought was "a proliferation of religio-aesthetic theories designed to reconcile the claims of Christianity and beauty, morality and art" (Fraser 1). She argues that this tendency to relate religious experience to aesthetic experience was particularly pronounced in the nineteenth century. For example, she notes that in the visual arts, painters used biblical scenes for their subject-matter. She believes that this resulted in a "peculiarly Victorian religious mysticism," which many people came to accept as the particular domain of Victorian poetry (Fraser 2). Thus, she argues, Victorian poetry became a way of expressing religious truths and interpreting Scriptural meaning. She notes that the Bible was for the first time criticized as a work of literature during the nineteenth century (Fraser 2).

The Victorian Period, however, was also a time of great religious turmoil. The Roman Catholic Church went into decline following the Reformation due to the monarchy's turning away from it. However, the church established in its place, the Church of England, was no less subject to dissension than had the Catholic Church been. By the time of the Victorians, the Church of England was subject to as many dissenters and as much corruption as the Catholic Church was at the time of the Reformation. For Robert Browning, the single mos

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hat the Victorians were convinced they were living in an age of transition (14). He believes that in an age that feels itself losing its grip on the traditional and groping hesitantly into the unknown, apathy about basic human concerns is impossible. Like Wolf, he argues that the Victorian period was more an age of doubt, than an age of faith (Lawson 15). Robert Browning Lawson argues that the most important aspect of the nineteenth-century religious scene as far as Robert Browning is concerned was the insidious and powerful threat to evangelical Christianity posed by rationalistic liberalism (16). He argues that this philosophy rather than the evangelicism of his youth, is where the mature Browning belongs. Although Browning may have argued against several of its leaders in his poems and differed substantially from some of their premises due to his retention of several evangelical convictions, Lawson argues that he followed more closely the tenets of rationalistic liberalism than any other philosophy (16). William Whitla argues that the crisis of faith that characterized the Victorian period came partially out of the nineteenth-century inheritance of eighteenth-century "rationalism" and partly from the tremendous advance
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Approximate Word count = 2667
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)