Thomas Hardy and the Church by Jan Jedrzejewski

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS491 Thomas Hardy and the Church. By Jan Jedrzejewski. (NewYork: St. Martin's Press. 1996. Pp. Lx, 243, $49.95.) G. K. Chesterton once spoke for many when he dubbed Hardy "a sort of vUlage atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot." Few readers would deny that Hardy was "anthropomorphic out of sheer atheism," that his Victorian agnosticism pervades virtuaUy aU that he wrote.Today unlike those of so many of his contemporaries, his novels are stUl being read, not only because they are set texts on university reading-Usts and examination syllabi, but his characters, plots, settings, dramatic and picturesque scenes are clearly the stuff of good literature. This latest addition to an endless stream of books and articles on Hardy's life and works begins by noting that his attitude toward the Christian faith has received scant attention from critics and scholars.What is requisite for a proper understanding of Hardy's religious opinions, Professor Jedrzejewski posits, is a recognition that the complex nature of his responses is not only a function of the multiplicity of influences that shaped his vision, but also a consequence of the varying Intensity of those influences throughout the nearly eighty-eight years of his life. In short, Hardy could not fuUy accept Christianity nor Uve his life without it. To discuss Hardy's religious views in terms of a static system of negatives— nonconformist, nihUist, infidel, immoralist, heretic, pessimist, and so on—is about as helpful as labeling him a Christian agnostic or agnostic Christian. Is there any value in reducing him to an epigone of Victorian disbelief? Jedrzejewski thinks not, and he recommends an inquiry into the evolution, or devolution , of Hardy's religious thinking. Accordingly Jedrzejewski first considers Hardy's early acceptance of Christianity; then his rather timid refusal to accept the supernatural; and lastly, in his middle period, an expression of bitter criticism of Christian churches, especially the Roman CathoUc, for the emphasis they placed on the letter of the faith rather than on its spirit.Toward the end of his Ufe, however, Hardy came to a recognition of the ethical values of Christianity despite what he continued to consider a questionable ontological basis. Since Hardy Uved through a period pulsating with change, it is hardly surprising that his views fluctuated from year to year, from decade to decade. His fiction and his poetry are both reflective of external circumstances and psychological traumas. At the end of the century, for example, he avowed that he was a practicing communicant of the Church of England. Several years later he is reported to have said:"As a young man I was deeply interested in reUgion. Indeed I stiU am."Twenty years later he looked upon worship as a kind of ethical imperative and an exercise of the wLU."I beUeve in going to church," he wrote; "it is a moral drUl, and people must have something. If there is no church in a country viUage, there is nothing." At the same time, he hoped for the disestablishment of the AngUcan Church. He preferred a faith "modulated by degrees into an undogmatic, non-theological organization for the promotion ofvirtuous living on which all honest men agreed. . . ." 492BOOK REVIEWS Throughout his long life, Hardy was victim of a dialectic between two impulses . There was his emotional attachment to the Christian tradition on the one hand, and on the other his inclination to favor the thinking of suchVictorians as MLU and Arnold, Darwin and Huxley. As for Newman, Hardy read the Apologia pro Vita Sua and made copious notes on all he found inspirational, but he lamented that he found too many "gaps" in Newman's reasoning.Yet to realize how the two impulses operated against each other is to begin to understand how the process affected his attitude toward Christianity and influenced the creation of his best novels, short stories, and poems. In the context of aU the modifications that took place in Hardy's religious reasoning over a lifetime,it is interesting to note that he was granted burial inWestminsterAbbey , an honor denied in previous years to such agnostic luminaries as George Eliot, George Meredith, and Algernon Charles Swinburn. Posthumously...