The Victorian Novel of Adulthood. Rebecca Rainof
Lucy Snowe in Villette comes to consider purgatory a source of consolation, it is largely because of the dramatic changes that this realm of the afterlife underwent in the wake of the Oxford Movement. Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, purgatory became the center of a national controversy over defining the ideological boundaries of the Church of England. Far from resembling Dante’s vision of arduous ascent, in this new model spiritual bildung became the central process. In the Purgatorio, shades are depicted climbing Mount Purgatory, facing challenges on each terrace that are conveyed as physical torments, including starving, burning, and carrying heavy stones on one’s back.18 Newman espoused a dramatically different view in suggesting, as both an Anglican and a Catholic, that this punitive model of Judgment need not be the case. As he asserted in one of his Anglican sermons, “A great part of the Christian world, as is well known, believes that after this life the souls of Christians ordinarily go into a prison called Purgatory, where they are kept in fire or other torment, till, their sins being burned away, they are at length fitted for that glorious kingdom into which nothing defiled can enter. Now, if there were any good reason for this belief, we should certainly have a very sad and depressing prospect before us.”19 Instead, Newman presented purgatory as a kinder “Intermediate State,”20 characterized as “a time of maturing that fruit of grace, but partly formed . . . in this life,—a school-time of contemplation” during which “the sins of youth are turned to account by the profitable penance of manhood.”21 Introspection and learning, not punitive duress, came to characterize his ideal of purgation in the afterlife. In reconceiving the afterlife to be gentler, Newman was at the forefront in redefining Judgment in two crucial ways: first, as a state of existence rather than a place with tiers, echelons, and geographical features as found in Dante’s Mount Purgatory, and second, as a time centering on individual maturation, not the trial by fire, as a model of spiritually productive eventfulness.22
This story of the reinvention of purgatory in the Victorian era is one that unsettles familiar accounts of the trajectory of orthodox belief in the period. Despite the Victorian and modernist eras often being framed in terms of the decline of popular religion and a larger crisis of faith, the Victorians revived a long tradition of belief in purgatory. Historian Jacques Le Goff charts the entrance of the word purgatorium into the English lexicon in the twelfth century through the first stages of acceptance of this belief. Examining the history of Judgment four centuries later, Stephen Greenblatt gives an account of the “afterlife” of purgatory in post-Reformation England, finding literary evidence of the continued presence of Catholic eschatology in the figure of the ghost of Hamlet’s father.23 Yet in more recent times, purgatory could be found hovering long after the ghost of Hamlet’s father first strode, or floated, offstage. Amid industrial expansion and the rise of liberalism, certain pre-Reformation beliefs once again found their way into mainstream British thought in the Victorian era. Beginning with the Oxford Movement, there was a resurgence of popular belief in the concept of purgatory.24
This controversy can be said to have begun in Oxford in 1833 when a group called the Tractarians began publishing pamphlets, several of which advocated that Anglicans return to primitive church doctrines. One such doctrine, the belief in a progressive realm of Judgment, became a central point of discussion with the publication of the movement’s most provocative document in 1841, Tract 90, written by Newman. In the wake of the Catholic Emancipation and during a time of renewed anti-Catholic sentiment in England, Newman’s suggestion that all Anglicans, and not just Catholics, might espouse belief in a progressive state of Judgment was taken as a profession of Romanism, a charge only confirmed for many critics retrospectively by his conversion in 1845.25 What Newman was trying to achieve in Tract 90, however, was not proselytizing on behalf of Catholics. Instead, he used the tract to draw a distinction between the “Romish” purgatory, which he defines ominously as “the conflagration of the world,” and a gentler alternative he presents as potentially appealing to his readers: “Another doctrine, purgatorian, but not Romish, is that said to be maintained by the Greeks at Florence, in which the cleansing, though a punishment was but a poena damni, not a poena sensûs; not a positive sensible infliction, much less the torment of fire, but the absence of God’s presence. And another purgatory is that in which the cleansing is but a progressive sanctification, and has no pain at all.”26 The idea of the poena damni, which Newman characterizes as the pain of being deprived of God’s presence as opposed to sensible pain such as Dante’s penitents undergo in the Purgatorio, became integral to Newman’s model of Judgment. At first, this milder vision of purgatory met great resistance, provoking outrage on a national level, but it also increasingly became an identifiable part of popular religion in the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century.
Despite the initial controversy surrounding Newman’s eschatology, his concept of purgatory appealed to Victorians who, in their fervor for development, fused Newman’s ideas about the afterlife with emerging scientific concepts of gradualism, such as evolution. As one Victorian theologian wrote in a sermon on the subject,
“Evolution,” it has been pointedly said, “is in the air. It is the category of the age; a partus temporis; a necessary consequence of our wider field of comparison.” Evolution and Christianity have at last become partners, and although there is still some insecurity in this new alliance, yet every day, almost, seems to give to it a character and likelihood of greater permanence. Therefore it is only in agreement with the new method in the conception of things, and more especially of the essence of things, viz., life, that we pursue our inquiry about the Intermediate State in the direction of such development. For, apart from other considerations, if there be such a law of growth belonging to all life as we know it now, there is some antecedent probability in the hypothesis, that it may be the law which governs the life in other stages than those which we know at present.27
In other words, evolution could continue into the afterlife, an idea that accommodated both emerging scientific concepts of gradualism and eschatology. Theological models of development therefore provided both an important counterpoint and an often-overlooked complement to evolutionary models of change; evolutionary theory and eschatology both evoke a central “mystery” in insisting that change can be subtle enough not to appear as change at all. Nevertheless, evolution describes growth in fundamentally material terms. Changes witnessed on the time scale of eons can be observed in manifest evidence: bodies, features, mutations, markings. In Newman’s conception of purgatory, all change was rendered intangible, bodiless, and abstract. A dramatic shift in temporal thinking is also similarly required by both models, each describing transformations that exceed the humble frame of an individual life span with parousia providing the limit of time and history in theological visions of the “last things.”28 Yet once again, theological models of growth, such as those innovated by Newman, adamantly resist invoking the sensory as a measure for individual change. Belief in afterlife maturation defied even the heightened insight provided by the microscope, that iconic instrument in Eliot’s fiction, demanding a more abstract conception of “putting all the action inside,” to quote D. H. Lawrence’s praise of Eliot’s ability to capture the inner life.29
This intermediate state of Judgment was notoriously difficult to represent in narrative form, eventually coming to be labeled “the problem child of theology” by theologians.30 Victorians struggled to understand the basic storyline for purgatorial change. For example, in a piece titled When a Man Dies Where Does He Go? or, Some Things about the Intermediate State, one clergyman named John Thomas Pickering insisted, “Rest does not necessarily mean inaction. Rest of mind and soul does not imply cessation from energy and activity.”31 The idea that “rest” could equal “activity,” while preferable in some circles to trial by fire, remained conceptually difficult to grasp and, furthermore, difficult to explain. It also raised ethical questions about the proper role of acts and trials in achieving spiritual betterment. In questioning what kind of “activity” takes place in Judgment during a state of “soul sleep,” believers in the intermediate state came to be divided into two main factions: those who believed in a period of total unconsciousness while waiting for the Second Coming and those who believed in the soul’s growth through lucid dreaming in the afterlife.32