Wilde and Religion

Upbringing

Wilde as Anglo-Irish > brought up in William Wilde's Protestantism W. Wilde's Irish Popular Superstitions criticizes Irish Catholicism for incorporating Irish paganisms

Speranza (secretely) baptizes Oscar and his brother into Catholicism?¹

Trinity University

Wilde's Tutor John Pentland Mahaffy dissaproves of Catholicism as corrupt/corrupting —Roman Paganism tainted by Church —Greek Paganism proper / clear break with Greek Orthodoxy²

Doctrine of Papal infallibility intensifies his interest³

Oxford

Considers conversion to Catholicism on multiple occasions Possible afraid of being financiall cut off from his father

"Wilde's Oxford career singled him out as a distinguished Hellenist. It is better, thought Wilde perhaps, to stay as a Protestant and Classical Greek scholar, than a Roman Catholic faced with the worst parts of Roman pagan and Christian culture."⁴

Attraction to Ritualism as a counter-cultural movement > the embodied aesthetics sense of religion⁵

Prison

De Profundis⁶

1: The role of forgiveness in De Profundis is intimately connected to the purpose of the letter in the first place, Wilde sees it as necessary to move on from his relationship with Arthur.

2: Suffering is a necessary component of the soul’s development.

3: He must over come the shame he’s faced because of his own actions as well as society’s mistreatment of him. This means accepting his place, while not being ashamed of himself.

4: All of the aformentioned tasks undergird the success of the last one—to learn how to be happy.

Wilde’s “spirituality” as it is discerned from his image of Christ, can then, as Kelly argues, be broken down into three fundamental prerogatives: individual self-realization, suffering, and humility (or surrender/acceptance).

Post-Prison

Piety in Berneval > Decadence in Naples > Amalgamation in Rome⁷

Emblematic discontinuity between Wilde's appreciation of decadence and art and the religious ethical life.⁸

The Sphinx

Get hence, you loathsome mystery! Hideous

animal, get hence!

You wake in me each bestial sense, you make me

what I would not be.

You make my creed a barren sham, you wake

foul dreams of sensual life,

And Atys with his blood-stained knife were

better than the thing I am.

False Sphinx! False Sphinx! By reedy Styx

old Charon, leaning on his oar,

Waits for my coin. Go thou before, and leave

me to my crucifix,

Whose pallid burden, sick with pain, watches

the world with wearied eyes,

And weeps for every soul that dies, and weeps

for every soul in vain.

Christianity

Critical of religious as a rigid ethical institution like society Particularly so-called Christians who offered no mercy in his trial⁹

"[...] Wilde appraoched Christ much as Wilde approached Christianity, in the sense that he sought to appreciate aesthetic and psychological possibilities inherent in each rather than espouse religious principles or theological lessons provided by each."¹⁰

Heterodox image of the Church is primarily non-theological Christ as realised man, not as divine Christianity as power to remediate culture > or for the individual to overcome culture ills

The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)

Stresses compassion while criticizing society

Blends the physical and the spiritual

They think a murderer's heart would taint

Each simple seed they sow.

It is not true! God's kindly earth

Is kindlier than men know,

And the red rose would but blow more red,

The white rose whiter blow.

Out of his mouth a red, red rose!

Out of his heart a white!

For who can say by what strange way,

Christ brings His will to light,

Since the barren staff the pilgrim bore

Bloomed in the great Pope's sight

Wilde's aesthetic view of religion should be contextualized by the secularism of the Victorian age, and the propensity to discern anti-essentialist grounds for morality.

"Wilde’s aestheticism, especially as articulated in his critical dialogues “The Decay of Lying” (1889) and “The Critic as Artist” (1890), does in fact interrogate immanence by attacking artistic modes that reject transcendence and that treat nature and life as purely self-enclosed spheres of meaning. Wilde’s interrogation of immanence uses religious language, which signals that his aesthetic ideas also carry spiritual import. This paradoxical union of the aesthetic and the spiritual, the sensory and the transcendent, becomes most evident when the critical dialogues address Angloand Roman Catholic liturgy—a topic that both immerses Wilde in fierce Victorian debates about forms of worship and reveals again his resistance to the secular disenchantment Taylor describes. Moreover, Wilde’s aesthetic resistance to immanence and disenchantment also entails a rejection of reductive understandings of goodness and truth prominent in the nineteenth century—and in secular modernity more generally. Wilde’s Catholic proclivities contribute not only to this rejection, but also to his subtle attempt to supply an alternative, anti-essentialist account of truth that draws, paradoxically, from the performativity of Angloand Roman Catholic liturgy."¹¹

"Wilde’s aestheticism and Catholic proclivities are thoroughly enmeshed. Wilde’s aesthetic account of reality is constructivist, anti-essentialist, and textual, not in spite of his attraction to Catholicism, but in many ways because of it.54 The liturgy is a performative space wherein words construct the world: words that inculcate rather than express belief, shore up imagination rather than common sense, and transubstantiate material reality rather than imitate it.

For Wilde, therefore, words offer an escape from the stifling immanence of his utilitarian, positivist, and moralizing secular age. By remaking reality, words resist life and nature’s formlessness. Lies—beautiful words that construct the real instead of mimicking it—become an alternative to realism or to any other aesthetic or intellectual mode mired in disenchanted empiricism. But then, of course, even Catholic and classical metaphysics must face the critique of language and aesthetics. Against the stable essences and hierarchical chains of being espoused by Greek philosophers and medieval theologians, Wilde posits the truth of language—the truth of how words capture and even create sensual reality. And so, in the end, all these words about the contradiction between Wilde the aesthete and Wilde the Catholic have generated only another contradiction: a Wilde who challenges both secular immanence and metaphysical transcendence. The former Wilde wants to pull life and nature up toward aesthetic form, while the latter wants to pull metaphysics down into the daffodils and rose petals—or maybe even into bread and wine. Here Wilde inhabits a paradoxical space. Yet his own Catholic fascinations provide a word for this space—a space where words matter, where they become flesh, where they mediate transcendence and immanence. Wilde’s word is incarnation."¹²

De Profundis:

Is there a discontinuity between pre-imprisoned Wilde and the Wilde in De Profundis with regard to his spiritual or religious outlook? Or is it part of a continuous development? Compare, for example, the change in his perspective on the relationship between morbidity and art in the preface to Dorian Grey and the his reflection on sorrow and morbidity in De Profundis.¹³

What do we make of his perspective on "the mask" in De Profundis? Has it changed?¹⁴

Do we know what Wilde means when he speaks of "religion?" Is it simply organized religion? Or is he dismissing the religious sentiment of the person altogether?

What is important to Wilde about Christ is that he transcended the artist and the poet by making life into an art itself. The Church, then, becomes a drama of the mystical spectacle of life itself, and its tragedy without the actual shedding of blood.¹⁵

"Indeed, that is the charm about Christ, when all is said: he is just like a work of art. He does not really teach one anything, but by being brought into his presence one becomes something. And everybody is predestined to his presence. Once at least in his life each man walks with Christ to Emmaus."¹⁶