God and Religion as Discussed in Victorian Literature

His parental background grew break of such dissenters and his poetry theorises the mocking of matinee idol and religion and how iodin practices related precepts. The poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson on the other hand, reflects his to a greater extent ruminative approach to the question of religious belief. Nonetheless, both(prenominal) poets reflect the questioning of the nature and role of humanity and religious belief that characterized the Victorian Period.

Until the Reformation of the sixteenth century, every side Christian was a Roman Catholic (Wolf 8). Each such Catholic worshipped in a church governed by a hierarchy of celibate priests, affair to bishops, who were in turn subject to the two Archbishops of York and Canterbury, who were in turn subject to the Pope. The services were conducted in Latin (Wolf 8). During this time, Catholics believed in the Church's authority as conveyed in the books of the early Christian writers, the "Fathers," as well as in the authority of the Bible. The Bible, however, was not in general circulation although passages excerpted from it were read to the laity in Latin at every service (Wolf 9).

The English Reformation of the sixteenth century changed everything. The Reformation was prompted by queen regnant Henry VIII's desire and determination to divorce his wife and by the Pope's inability, Peter Lee Wolf states for political reasons, to grant him such a divorce (10). However, Wolf arg

The poem, therefore, demonstrates a belief in God, but a questioning of the nature of that belief and that God. Cundiff notes that the first characteristic Caliban ascribes to God is annoyance: "He hated that He cannot changed His cold, Nor cure its ache" (lines 32-33). Cundiff finds it oddly notable that the savage Caliban does not identify himself with a God "whose irremediable coldness symbolized decrepitude, jealousy and inability to love" (Cundiff 131). The snatch characteristic Caliban ascribes to Setebos is spite. He likens Caliban's remonstrance against God's spite to Satan's "For what God after(prenominal) better worse would build" in John Milton heaven Lost (9.102) (Cundiff 131).

Cundiff argues that the God of Browning's "Caliban upon Setebos" chooses to convert his better, braver creatures into objects of spite and envy, playthings he both jealously admires and mockingly plagues (132).

Our dearest corporate trust; our ghastliest doubt;

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 advances in the natural, physical, and theoretical sciences, as discussed early (3). Whitla argues that rationalism combined with the scientific advances led to two streams of ideal: higher(prenominal) Criticism, which grew out of the scientific method, and New Science, which owed a debt to rationalistic philosophy (3). He argues that these two movements created a dichotomy, with religion on the one hand and science on the other. The area mingled with them Whitla merely label as "a conflict, but he believes that it is into this conflict that Browning threw himself against the Higher Critics of the Bible (3). Whitla argues that Browning evaluate the move from valuable biblical research to unilateral dishonour on faith in general by the Higher Critics. Consequently, Whitla reads Browning's poetry as a response to the Higher Cri
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