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Michael
E. Schiefelbein
THE LURE OF BABYLON: SEVEN PROTESTANT NOVELISTS AND BRITAIN'S ROMAN CATHOLIC REVIVAL Reviewed by Patrick Killough [NOTE: Citations are from the Mercer University Press 2001 hardback edition, 202 pages ISBN 0-86554-720-3] I. for barnesandnoble.com Reviewed by Patrick Killough, who is "studying the Scottish Reformation." Reviewer's Rating of THE LURE OF BABYLON: * * * * FOUR STARS TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: 'God is not with Rome' -- Charlotte Bronte THE LURE OF BABYLON looks at seven Protestant novelists as they come to terms with the revival of Roman Catholicism in England and Scotland during the early and mid-19th Century. The future Cardinal John Henry Newman called this time English Catholicism's 'Second Spring.' From 70,000 in 1780 Catholics in England grew to 900,000 by 1851. Most of the increase was due to Irish migration. Things had looked up as early as 1791 with the Catholic Relief Act. Then came the Catholic Emancipation Bill of 1829, the Oxford Movement to restore Catholic elements within the established Church of England and the 1850 re-establishment of Roman Catholic bishops, headed by Cardinal Wiseman -- a development popularly styled the 'Papal Aggression.' These trends caused massive outpourings of anti-Catholic vituperation, including what Margaret Maison in her 1961 THE VICTORIAN VISION: STUDIES IN THE RELIGIOUS NOVEL called 'some of the most angry novels ever written.' In THE LURE OF BABYLON Michael E. Schiefelbein selects eight 19th Century 'anti-Catholic' novels less notable for their anger than for their relative artistic fair-mindedness to 'the old religion' of England. The author gives by far the most space -- 40 pages -- to two novels of Sir Walter Scott. Then come treatments of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, Charles Dickens, Mrs Frances Trollope 'Anthony's mother', Charlotte Bronte, Charles Kingsley and George Eliot. Each of the seven authors is officially, personally, thoroughly and on balance opposed to Roman Catholicism and its revival in England, and say so. But each is also drawn almost reluctantly to some aspects of Catholicism and makes Catholic protagonists, elements, auras or 'sensibilities' the most lively aspects of their novels. Thus, Sir Walter Scott's embattled Catholic characters in THE MONASTERY and its sequel THE ABBOT stand out for their love of fun, revelry, dance, disguise and mystery while the Protestants are generally serious, sober-sided sticks in the mud. Highly-educated Mary Shelley's historical novel VALPERGA reflect Dante's Catholicism, especially belief in the harmony of faith and reason, which he had absorbed from Saint Thomas Aquinas. In THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP, Dickens's heroine Little Nell shows a Catholic preoccupation -- memento mori! -- with death and dying. Mrs Trollope was thoroughly anti-Catholic in FATHER EUSTACE: A TALE OF THE JESUITS. Yet the famous authoress had picked up and drew upon favorable impressions of Catholicism of the U.S.A. from her earlier travels there, contrasting its order, decorum and reasonableness with more fervid American Protestant revivalism. In Charlotte Bronte's semi-autobiographical novel set in Brussels, VILLETTE, 'God is not with Rome' 'p. 131'. But Catholicism displays a tempting fusion of reason and imagination and the school teacher heroine Lucy Snowe even enters a Catholic confessional. As was to be expected, WESTWARD HO! and its tale of the Spanish Armada glorified Charles Kingsley's article of faith that Christianity had to be masculine and muscular. But the author also expressed reluctant admiration for his chief Spanish (and Catholic) villain Don Guzman. Guzman seemed effeminate and foppish yet also brave and resourceful. Somehow a Spanish Catholic managed to reconcile male and female, austerity and pleasure- seeking. In ROMOLA George Eliot was drawn to the greatness and repelled by the fanatic ism of Savonarola, the Dominican Catholic reformer of Renaissance Florence. In Schiefelbein's opinion these eight novels played their part in reconciling, at least preliminarily and on the level of art, not polemics, Britain's Protestant Establishment to the return and assertiveness of 19th Century Catholicism. Or at least Britain's imagination began to tolerate and re-assimilate a long ignored, onetime dominant version of Christianity. The seven authors, in exploring the humanity of fictional bearers of 'Catholic sensibility' had the social effect of softening, if only slightly, English public opinion. Michael E. Schiefelbein's treatment of Walter Scott is extraordinarily insightful, even daring. Scott's ideal Christianity is from God, expressed almost perfectly and completely in the words of the Bible and is the enemy of sensuality, imagination and excess. Yet it is hard to fill two novels of the coming of the Reformation to Scotland with hang- dog, dour Protestants. And Scott is not good at conversion stories. Catholicism, to Sir Walter, is essentially superstition of the worst sort grafted on to primitive Christianity. But Scottish folk lore exhibits another, a purer kind of superstition, related to neo-platonism and rosicrucianism but also native to Scotland, that of wayward spirits of earth and water. The 'White Lady' of the Avenel family is one such spirit. She influences her favorites to better themselves and therefore points to Protestantism. At least two persons are drawn to renounce ancestral Catholicism after first becoming submissive to the White Lady. Converts are weaned away from massive, indefensible Catholic superstition to less massive semi-Catholic superstition en route to the pure heaven of Calvinism! Amazingly, Schiefelbein explains this complicated literary device rather well. THE LURE OF BABYLON, like G. K. Chesterton's similar and even shorter TWELVE TYPES, is an impressive little book of people struggling imaginatively with the issues of their time. Both books bear rereading. -OOO- Also recommended: Sir Walter Scott, OLD MORTALITY. Robert Lee Wolff, GAINS AND LOSSES: NOVELS OF FAITH AND DOUBT IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND. John Henry Newman, LOSS AND GAIN. G. K. Chesterton, TWELVE TYPES. Sinclair Lewis, THE GOD-SEEKER, ELMER GANTRY ====-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- II. for amazon.com Reviewer's rating of THE LURE OF BABYLON **** FOUR STARS Title of this review: "Some of the most angry novels ever written" -- not quite Michael E. Schiefelbein's THE LURE OF BABYLON: SEVEN PROTESTANT NOVELISTS AND BRITAIN'S ROMAN CATHOLIC REVIVAL reminds me of G. K. Chesterton's much slimmer TWELVE TYPES. Both books are mainly about writers -- for GKC's book also includes Charles II and Francis of Assisi, not remembered PRIMARILY for their scribblings. Schiefelbein writes of seven British Protestant writers and eight of their books, including Sir Walter Scott's linked THE MONASTERY and THE ABBOT. Chesterton sketches twelve figures of different religions and different countries. Schiefelbein tells of seven Protestants who disliked Roman Catholicism but managed to find some nuggets of good as well. Chesterton casts a Roman Catholic eye on the lives of twelve persons who shaped their time. Only Charlotte Bronte and Sir Walter Scott are treated by both authors, and very well treated, let me add. I read both Chesterton and Schiefelbein primarily for what they had to say about Sir Walter Scott. Professor, now Reverend, Schiefelbein's most striking insight into Scott's two novels about the coming of the Reformation to Scotland relates to what it was that Sir Walter found to like about superstitious Catholics and disliked about rational, dour Calvinists. "Scott
discovers in Catholicism's appreciation for revelry, irreverence, and
humor a remedy for the dry Calvinism of his childhood" (Conclusion,
p. 182).
Scott's technique was to condemn Catholic "superstitions" in narrator's comments while elsewhere sympathetically exploring the deeds and motives of his fictional Catholic characters "with
all their mummery and irreverent fun and games ... through the
wonderful disguises, secrecy and revelry of Catholic characters, antics
that he ostensibly condemned. THE MONASTERY and THE ABBOT allowed Scott
to imagine a religion that includes pleasure, without offending his
Protestant audience and without betraying his own Protestant
conscience" (Ch. 1 "Unguarded Gaiety": Catholicism in
Walter Scott's THE MONASTERY and THE ABBOT, p. 54f).
THE LURE OF BABYLON also presents strikingly good insights into the life and selected works of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Charles Dickens (Little Nell's forebodings of death), Mrs Frances Trollope (novelist Anthony's mother, also tackled by Mark Twain in LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI), Charlotte Bronte, Charles Kingsley (WESTWARD HO!)and George Eliot (ROMOLA, novel of Renaissance Florence's Savanarola). What is common, obvious and intended among the Schiefelbein Seven is their official, public disdain for Catholicism at a time when that older form of Christianity was making a comeback in England. More subtle is how, as artists, the seven also found things to like about Catholics, if not about Catholicism. This conditional objectivity was no small artistic achievement at a time when 19th Century British Anti-Catholicism produced, in the words of Margaret Maison, "some of the most angry novels ever written" (Introduction, p. 8). A very good, easy, rewarding read. -OOO- Your tags: sir walter scott, the monastery, the abbot, michael e schiefelbein, 19th century england, religions =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= III. for epinions.com Reviewer's Rating of THE LURE OF BABYLON: * * * * (FOUR STARS) TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: It is 1850. Here Come the Monks and Nuns back to England! May 24 '07 Author's Product Rating: * * * * (FOUR STARS) Pros Seven great novelists show how to give the devil his due" in 19th Century England. Cons A few typos and miscitations. Thin bibliography. Perhaps overhighlighting of "Catholic" passages in novels studied. The Bottom Line THE LURE OF BABYLON is for all trying to understand 19th Century England and Scotland. Religious differences were taken seriously and spilled over from pulpits to Parliament and to novels. Full Review What do the following seven 19th Century British writers have in common: Sir Walter Scott Mrs Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley Charles Dickens Mrs Frances Trollope Charlotte Bronte Charles Kingsley and George Eliot? They were novelists. They enjoyed fame then and have it yet. They were expected by society to grow up Protestant and none died Catholic. Indeed they despised Roman Catholicism as a superstitious, unbiblical oppressor of conscience, freedom and the dignity of the individual. Yet in eight of their novels, at the level of what Michael E. Schiefelbein styles "meta-plot", they indirectly saluted through the "Catholic sensibilities" of their Romish characters even "Babylon the Great" herself, i. e., the Harlot of Rome. The seven's artistic honesty led them, willy nilly, to render something resembling justice to this or that aspect of their national religious enemy, the Anti-Christ. What they did, why and how is told by Schiefelbein in his slim volume, THE LURE OF BABYLON. Imagine a baby born and baptized Roman Catholic in England in 1780. From THE LURE OF BABYLON we learn that he or she had in that year fewer than 70,000 English coreligionists. Many were decaying aristocrats from pre-Reformation families. All were severely legally disadvantaged and kept prudent, low profiles. But things were changing. 1778 had already seen the first Catholic Relief Act since the days of Good Queen Bess. Then 1791 saw a second and much more generous Relief Act. Catholic civic freedoms were hugely enhanced by Parliament's need to pacify a growing electorate in Ireland as well as by the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. And in 1850 the Pope re-established Roman Catholic bishops in England, headed by Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman, first Archbishop of Westminster. If that Catholic baby of 1780 was still alive in 1851, he or she would have been one of an estimated 900,000 Romanists in England, most of them immigrants from nearby Ireland. The Protestant Establishment was terrified. Monks and nuns were coming back to Merrie England! The Oxford Movement led by Pusey, Keble and Newman was making the established Church of England High Church. Preachers were wearing surplices. There were candles on altars. Anglicans were turning to Rome as never before. Protestant dissidents denounced the return of Satan to Britain. Novelists thundered against papists, Jesuits, confessionals and Catholicism across-the-board. Scholar Margaret Maison opines that "John Bull whipped Protestant novelists up into a frenzy of rage and produced some of the most angry novels ever written" (Schiefelbein, p. 8). The seven novelists listed above disliked and despised Catholicism. But they were also artists and their art was more objective than their inherited politics, argues Michael Schiefelbein. That author also shows how autobiography spilled over into art. Dickens, for example, was haunted by the death in his arms of his wife's teen-age sister, Mary Hogarth. In THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP he made Mary the model for Little Nell. According to Schiefelbein, Little Nell's immersion in Catholic symbols associated with death and dying reflect Dickens's perhaps sub-conscious attraction to Catholicism as a way of keeping in touch with the beloved deceased. Roman rites might console him for the all too early loss of Mary. There is a similar approach to each of the other six authors. By far the longest treatment in THE LURE OF BABYLON is that of Sir Walter Scott. What spilled over from Scott's personal life into his dislike of Rome? Scott was an emotional, imaginative man. He felt that, uncontrolled, his passions and fancy would lure him into an earthly, beastly, self-indulgent life-style. He admired Stoicism and modeled his life on Cato and other Romans famous for their dignified self-control and rationality. When he grew depressed, he pretended joy in the company of others who expected it of him until he actually recovered his high spirits. Walter Scott's preferred religion was Bible-based "mere" Christianity. Its greatest enemies were over-elaboration of dogma and ritual, enthusiasm, fanaticism, sensuality and earthiness -- all features which he and the other six novelists associated with Catholicism. At his marriage Scott moved from his ultra-gloomy inherited Presbyterianism to Scottish Episcopalian, prima facie, a step in the direction of Catholic ritual, but no more than a step. For Sir Walter feared that turning Catholic would make it too easy for him to sink into a life of debauchery and excessive dreaminess. In 1820 Scott published two intertwined novels, THE MONASTERY and THE ABBOT, about the conquest of Scotland in the 1540s and 1560s by Protestantism. In the first novel a traditional Scottish earth spirit, the "White Lady," a kind of pagan guardian angel of the noble family of Avenel, was instrumental, for the good of her proteges, in detaching two youngsters from Catholicism and leading them to something better, less earthy, more upward-bound: Bible-based Protestantism. Belief in such astral spirits was, Scott admitted, a superstition but he defended it as a "pure," uplifting and noble superstition, unlike the base, downward thrusting Catholicism which encrusted Bible Christianity with barnacles of saint worship, Mariolatry, sensuality, easy contrition and the appeal to the senses of "bells and smells." Never mind that the White Lady stole back a vernacular bible from monks of Saint Mary's Monastery and enshrined it beneath the earth in undying flame in the center of a gorgeous Catholic-like cathedral. Scott, according to Schiefelbein, was under some compulsion to concoct an intermediary like the White Lady to lead souls from Protestantism to Catholicism. Unlike, say, Saint Augustine, Cardinal John Henry Newman or Graham Greene, Sir Walter had a tin ear when it came to religious conversion. So he tried out various literary stage devices to explain the movement from love of the senses, fun, mystery and conviviality associated with Catholicism to the dour Calvinism of John Knox. But his Protestant readers disliked the Catholicism-reminiscent White Lady of THE MONASTERY as a standard-bearer of Bible Christianity. She therefore reappeared in the sequel only in the novel's concluding sentence: "... the
White Lady, whose apparition had been infrequent when the house of
Avenel seemed verging to extinction, was seen to sport by her haunted
well, with a zone of gold around her bosom as broad as the baldric of
an earl" (THE ABBOT, Ch.38).
THE LURE OF BABYLON is a fine study of how seven great novelists reflected the popular prejudices of their age while yet transcending them when describing some of their Roman Catholic characters, fictional and real. Charles Kingsley, to take one example, preached muscular Christianity and disliked effeminate sissies. He might not, therefore, understand in WESTWARD HO! how a Spanish villain like Don Guzman could be both foppish and a fighter, but he allowed that "Spanish Catholic" contradiction to stand. Charlotte Bronte, in both real life as a teacher in Brussels in through Lucy Snowe in VILLETTE, might dislike the religion of Rome. But she made her English readers empathize with both her own and Lucy's impulse to confess sins to a Catholic priest. Read this little book once and you will read it again. Admittedly, you will profit more if you have first read the eight novels dissected by Schiefelbein. But should you not have, he provides plot summaries. And from those anti-Catholic plots he leads you into those more objective "meta-plots" where Catholic underdogs have their day. -OOO- Recommended: Yes -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= file: schiefelbein_lure file: http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/shiefelbein_lure.html http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/schiefelbein_lure.html Black Mountain May 24, 2007 |