by Bart Schultz
be unstable. Manuscripts are doubtful, records may be unauthentic, criticism is
feeble, historical facts must be left uncertain. Even in like manner my own personal
experience is most limited, perhaps even most delusive: what have I seen, what do
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I know? Nor is my personal judgement a thing which I feel any great satisfaction
in trusting. My reasoning powers are weak; my memory doubtful and confused;
my conscience, it may be, callous or vitiated. . . . I see not what other alternative any sane and humble-minded man can have but to throw himself upon the great
religious tradition. But I see not either how any upright and strict dealer with
himself – how any man not merely a slave to spiritual appetites, affections and
wants – any man of intellectual as well as moral honesty – and without the former
the latter is but a vain thing – I see not how anyone who will not tell lies to himself, can dare to affirm that the narrative of the four Gospels is an essential integral
part of that tradition.
Arthur Hugh Clough, The Religious Tradition
This Socratic prelude to the discussion of Sidgwick’s struggles with reli-
gious faith is important because, after all, as Sidgwick agonized over the
corrosive effects of religious doubt and skepticism in his own time, his
chief anthropological and sociological sources for thinking about the role
and meaning of religious belief were derived from his classical training.
Socrates and the fate of Athenian democracy were ever before his mind,
much more so than any other historical precedent – say, the period of
the Reformation or the Enlightenment, or even the French Revolution,
important though that undoubtedly was. And both Mill and the Apostles
would have inspired him to deploy this historical material for the cause of
reason and reform, however acute his historical sensibilities might have
been. And they were very acute.
It is very helpful to think of Sidgwick as taking his point of departure in
ethics from the (Apostolic) Socratic method, while trying to develop the
more constructive side of it, just as Plato and Aristotle had done. Unlike
Plato and Aristotle, however, Sidgwick was never able to convince himself
that philosophy could deliver ultimate and final ethical truth. Progress, yes,
but clear and certain truth, no. This led to considerable worrying on his
part, since he seemed always in danger of lapsing back into a naive Socratic
acceptance of common sense in the large, while treating it to merciless
critical dissection in the small. And science itself, the chief evidence of
intellectual progress, often seemed to threaten rather than to buttress the
claims for ethical progress. In short, he was often on the verge of doubting
the meaning of progress altogether, which was a most heretical thought
for an era so apt to confuse evolution with progress, and a most painful
one for an individual whose mission was to impart truth to the rustic
brain.
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In fact, Sidgwick’s entire classical orientation also came in for something
of a jolt during the sixties, when he both expanded his linguistic interests
considerably and developed a keen sense of the questions raised by textual
criticism. Or rather, one could say that in struggling with the historical
Socrates, he was also brought to struggle with the historical Jesus, and to
employ many of the very same scholarly techniques. After all, did not the
problem of determining just what measure of inspiration one might take
from the historically distant Socrates translate into a similar problem with
the historically distant Jesus?
In the “Autobiographical Fragment,” Sidgwick recounts how in he
was powerfully impressed by Renan’s Etudes d’Histoire Religieuse, and derived from Renan’s eloquent persuasions the conviction that it was impossible really to
understand at first hand Christianity as a historical religion without penetrating
more deeply the mind of the Hebrews and of the Semitic stock from which they
sprang. This led to a very important and engrossing employment of a great part
of my spare time in the study of Arabic and Hebrew. I may say that the provisional
conclusions I had formed with regard to Christianity are expressed in an article
on “Ecce Homo.” . . . My studies, aimed directly at a solution of the great issues between Christianity and Scepticism or Agnosticism, had not, as I knew, led to
a really decisive result, and I think it was partly from weariness of a continual
internal debate which seemed likely to be interminable that I found the relief,
which I certainly did find, in my renewal of linguistic studies. (M –)
The effort was a daunting one, for from September of , when he
“devoted every day and the whole day for five weeks in Dresden to the
study of Arabic with a private tutor,” until , he gave over the “greater
part” of his spare time “to the study of Arabic and Hebrew literature
and history” and even considered putting in for one of the Cambridge
professorships in Arabic. This latter seemed an attractive plan because,
although he was still lecturing in classics, his interests had shifted, and
the more appealing alternative seemed closed: the sole chair in moral
philosophy at Cambridge also included moral theology, and “it seemed
most probable that a layman would not be appointed to it – still less a
layman known to be unorthodox.” No such difficulty would attend an
Arabic professorship.
To his credit, Sidgwick came to see that “the study of Arabic, pur-
sued as it ought to be pursued by one who aimed at representing it in
the University, would absorb too much time” – drawing him “inevitably
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away from the central problems which constituted my deepest interest”
(M ). That those problems, religious and metaphysical, did constitute
his deepest interest had been forcibly brought home to him by another
employment opportunity, an offer of a position at Rugby. Despite
the enthusiasm of his family, and his own initially positive response to this
warm tribute from his alma mater, Sidgwick was blocked by “one plain
fact” – namely, that he knew his “vocation in life to be not teaching but
study” (M ). True, he would often deny that he was sufficiently pious
to believe that “destiny has placed me among mod
ern monkery to do in it
whatever the nineteenth century, acting through me, will” (M ). But
it was a rather Apostolic thought.
Although Sidgwick’s projected “comparison of the Hebrew develop-
ment of religion with Arabic Mohammedanism” never saw the light, the
intensive linguistic study (which also included German, the better to read
the latest biblical criticism) was clearly of great importance to his intel-
lectual growth. In the Essays and Reviews, Jowett had confidently urged
that the Bible be read in just the same way as any other book; its value
would withstand the effort. But figures such as Renan, and the even more
formidably erudite David Friedrich Strauss, had done just that, treating
scripture to textual and historical criticism that raised serious scholarly
questions about its historicity, consistency, accuracy, and coherency. The
results were extremely discomfiting to orthodox Christians.
Earnest Renan was a renowned scholar and linguist, and it is not sur-
prising that his work made a deep impression on Sidgwick, who had been
trained by both Benson and Cambridge to appreciate the minute and care-
ful study of language. Renan was born in a small village in Brittany in ,
and rose from these very humble origins to become one of the most con-
troversial and provocative of French scholars, with such productions as his
Vie de Jésus (). His early education had been at Catholic seminaries,
with the expectation that he would go into the priesthood, but as with
Sidgwick, a corrosive intelligence and love of free inquiry led him astray.
In one of his autobiographical writings, he recalled how a so-so teacher of
metaphysics turned out to be a good judge of Renan:
My argumentations in Latin, given with a firm and emphatic air, astonished
and disquieted him. . . . That evening he took me aside. He pointed out to me eloquently what was anti-Christian in the commitment to reason and the harm
that rationalism did to faith. In strange agitation, he reproached me with my
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passion for study. Research! What good was that? Everything essential for us is
known. Science saves no souls. And, his excitement rising more and more, he said
to me with a deeply felt emphasis: “You are not a Christian.”
In the end, most French Catholics would probably have agreed with
Renan’s hapless instructor, though Renan, like Sidgwick, always remained
a model of personal rectitude. He rejected all claims to the supernatural,
to the miraculous, and sought to show how the life of Jesus might inspire
even if he were regarded as no more than human. He accepted a fully
scientific worldview, in which all of nature works in accordance with causal
laws, and he regarded history and criticism as working within just such
an understanding. His own contributions were primarily linguistic. As
Blanshard has explained, Renan “was not a genius in philosophy; he was
a genius in language.” That is,
He read the book of Isaiah, and saw that there was not one Isaiah, as the church
had taught, but two. He read the book of Daniel, whose prophecies were ac-
cepted by the church as inspired, and concluded that it was too unreliable to
have a place in Scripture at all. He read the Pentateuch, which was accepted by
the church as written by Moses, though Moses could hardly have written the
account of his own death. It was thus not the metaphysical difficulties of two
worlds of truth that finally settled the balance; it was rather the drip, drip on the soil of his mind of hundreds of these incidents of contradiction, of the historically incredible, of parallels with pagan religion, that wore his creed away by their attrition.
Such was his scholarship, but his life of Jesus sought more. Written
mostly while he was on a tour of Palestine, and without any scholarly
apparatus, it was a sustained attempt to present a demystified Jesus who,
while he did not work miracles, was an ethical teacher of such force and
greatness that it was perfectly understandable how he could have altered
the course of the world. Jesus had founded religion just as Socrates had
founded ethical philosophy; if he was mistaken about a supernatural King-
dom of Heaven or God, he was nevertheless right about universal love as
the absolute ethical ideal. Such an expression of faith and hope was im-
mortality enough.
However, as Edward Said has emphasized, Renan’s philological mission
was fundamentally orientalizing. Renan “did not really speak as one man
to all men but rather as a reflective, specialized voice that took . . . the inequality of races and the necessary domination of the many by the
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few for granted as an antidemocratic law of nature and society.” This
vision of philology, opening the way to Nietzsche and certainly relevant for
understanding the larger dimensions of Sidgwick’s religious and linguistic
struggles, may seem puzzling:
[H]ow was it possible for Renan to hold himself and what he was saying in such a
paradoxical position? For what was philology on the one hand if not a science of all
humanity, a science premised on the unity of the human species and the worth of
every human detail, and yet what was the philologist on the other hand if not – as
Renan himself proved with his notorious race prejudice against the very Oriental
Semites whose study had made his professional name – a harsh divider of men
into superior and inferior races, a liberal critic whose work harbored the most
esoteric notions of temporality, origins, development, relationship, and human
worth. . . . Renan had a strong guild sense as a professional scholar, a professional Orientalist, in fact, a sense that put distance between himself and the masses. But
more important . . . is Renan’s own conception of his role as an Oriental philologist within philology’s larger history, development, and objectives as he saw them. In
other words, what may to us seem like paradox was the expected result of how
Renan perceived his dynastic position within philology, its history and inaugural
discoveries, and what he, Renan, did within it. Therefore Renan should be charac-
terized, not as speaking about philology, but rather as speaking philologically with all the force of an initiate using the encoded language of a new prestigious science
none of whose pronouncements about language itself could be construed either
directly or naively.
The idea of spelling out the direction of history, be it progress or decay,
through the esoteric and elite (not to mention Eurocentric) analysis of
language was scarcely a foreign one to Sidgwick and his Apostolic circle.
Naturally, his p
ositivist, Comtean tendencies – shared and stimulated by
his intimate friend Dakyns – would incline him to hunt for laws of reli-
gious and moral historical development. Interestingly, however, another
particularly close friend from this period, Noel, did a great deal to stim-
ulate his orientalist interests. The aristocratic Noel, who was the fourth
son of the earl of Gainsborough and whose godmother was none other
than Queen Victoria, was four years older than Sidgwick, though he had
joined the Apostles a year later, in . Upon graduation, as Desmond
Heath has observed, “Roden went to Egypt with another friend, Cyril
Graham – in fact they reckoned they were the first Europeans to reach
the oasis of Kur-Kur, in the Libyan desert, with its forests of petrified
palms. For two long years, he continued in the East . . . visiting Nubia and
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the Holy Land, Palmyra, then Lebanon, Greece and Turkey.” Noel’s
accounts inflamed Sidgwick’s imagination:
You take me through a number of dream-like scenes and experiences, investing
them with a reality that they did not before possess, as clustering round you,
whom I have actually seen and known and talked to and shared anchovy toast
with! . . . Your account of Palestine and Palmyra almost recalled the old feeling of half-pleasant, half-painful longing (like a hungry man’s reading about a feast)
with which I used to devour Eothen and The Crescent and the Cross. . . . Well, I wish you freedom from fevers, conquest over bronchitis, and that you may quarry
countless treasures of learning from the neglected mines of the Royal tombs. If
you throw any light on Platonic mysticism, bring out any esoteric doctrines that
our uninitiated eyes are now blind to, why, we shall be proud of you as a man and
a brother. (M )
Curiously, though, Noel tended to be less unorthodox than Sidgwick at
this time, much less in the grip of the new criticism:
I confess I know nothing of the processes of historic criticism by which all our
beliefs in any past events are so skilfully hocus-pocused away. Of course I am aware
