Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

“I say, that as a babe, you feed awhile,
Becomes a boy and fit to feed himself,
So, minds at first must be spoon-fed with truth:
When they can eat, babes’-nurture is withdrawn.
I fed the babe whether it would or no:
I bid the boy or feed himself or starve.
I cried once, ‘That ye may believe in Christ,
Behold this blind man shall receive his sight!’
I cry now, ‘Urgest thou, for I am shrewd
And smile at stories how John’s word could cure—
Repeat that miracle and take my faith?’
I say, that miracle was duly wrought
When save for it no faith was possible.
Whether a change were wrought in the shows o’ the world,
Whether the change came from our minds which see
Of shows o’ the world so much as and no more
Than God wills for his purpose,—(what do I
See now, suppose you, there where you see rock
Round us?)—I know not; such was the effect,
So faith grew, making void more miracles,
Because too much they would compel, not help.
I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it,
And has so far advanced thee to be wise.
Wouldst thou improve this to re-prove the proved?
In life’s mere minute, with power to use the proof,
Leave knowledge and revert to how it sprung?
Thou hast it; use it and forthwith, or die!”

The important truth as seen by John’s dying eyes is that faith in a beautiful ideal has been born in the human soul. Whether the accounts of the exact means by which this faith arose were literally true is of little importance, the faith itself is no less God-given, as another passage will make clear:

“Man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expect
He could not, what he knows now, know at first;
What he considers that he knows to-day,
Come but to-morrow, he will find misknown;
Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns
Because he lives, which is to be a man,
Set to instruct himself by his past self;
First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn,
Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind,
Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law.
God’s gift was that man should conceive of truth
And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake
As midway help till he reach fact indeed.”

The defence of Christianity in this poem reminds one very strongly of the theology of Schleiermacher, a résumé of which the poet might have found in Strauss’s “Life of Jesus.” Although Schleiermacher accepted and even went beyond the negative criticism of the rationalists against the doctrines of the Church, he sought to retain the essential aspects of positive Christianity. He starts out from the consciousness of the Christian, “from that internal experience resulting to the individual from his connection with the Christian community, and he thus obtains a material which, as its basis of feeling, is more flexible and to which it is easier to give dialectically a form that satisfies science.”

Again, “If we owe to him [Jesus] the continual strengthening of the consciousness of God within us, this consciousness must have existed in him in absolute strength, so that it or God in the form of the consciousness was the only operative force within him.” In other words, in Jesus was the supreme manifestation of God in human consciousness. This truth, first grasped by means which seemed miraculous, is finally recognized in man’s developing consciousness as a consummation brought about by natural means. John’s reasoning in the poem can lead to no other conclusion than this.

Schleiermacher’s theology has, of course, been objected to on the ground that if this incarnation of God was possible in one man, there is no reason why it should not frequently be possible. This is the orthodox objection, and it is voiced in the comment added by “One” at the end of the poem showing the weakness of John’s argument from the strictly orthodox point of view.

With regard to the miracles being natural events supernaturally interpreted—that is an explanation familiar to the biblical critic, and one which the psychologist of to-day is ready to support with numberless proofs and analyses. How much this poem owes to hints derived from Strauss’s book is further illustrated by the “Glossa of Theotypas,” which is borrowed from Origen, whose theory is referred to by Strauss in his Introduction as follows: “Origen attributes a threefold meaning to the Scriptures, corresponding with his distribution of the human being into three parts, the liberal sense answering to the body, the moral to the soul, and the mystical to the spirit.”

On the whole, the poem appears to be influenced more by the actual contents of Strauss’s book than to be deliberately directed against his thought, for John’s own reasoning when his feelings are in abeyance might be deduced from more than one passage in this work wherein are passed in review the conclusions of divers critics of the naturalist and rationalist schools of thought.

The poem “An Epistle” purports to give a nearly contemporary opinion by an Arab physician upon the miracle of the raising of Lazarus. We have here, on the one hand, the Arab’s natural explanation of the miracle as an epileptic trance prolonged some three days, and Lazarus’s interpretation of his cure as a supernatural event. Though absolutely skeptical, the Arab cannot but be impressed with the beliefs of Lazarus, because of their revelation of God as a God of Love. Thus Browning brings out the power of the truth in the underlying ideas of Christianity, whatever skepticism may be felt as to the letter of it.

The effect of the trance upon the nature of Lazarus is paralleled to-day by accounts, given by various persons, of their sensations when they have sunk into unconsciousness nigh unto death. I remember reading of a case in which a man described his feeling of entire indifference as to the relations of life, his joy in a sense of freedom and ineffable beauty toward which he seemed to be flying through space, and his disinclination to be resuscitated, a process which his spirit was watching from its heights with fear lest his friends should bring him back to earth. This higher sort of consciousness seems to have evolved in some people to-day without the intervention of such an experience as that of Lazarus or one such as that of the above subject of the Society for Psychical Research.