Christ Among the Decadents: Re-encountering Religion in Edwin Arnold’s The Light of the World

Abstract

Christ Among the Decadents: Re-encountering Religion in Edwin Arnold’s The Light of the World Joshua Brorby (bio) In 1879, Edwin Arnold completed the poem that would make him famous, his epic life of Gau ta ma Bud dha, The Light of Asia. Published in over thirty editions in the first six years of its existence, Arnold’s bestseller constitutes a model entry in two related Victorian genres: the orientalist free translation and the comparative religious primer.1 The former genre has as its most well-known representative The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1888) by Richard Francis Burton, while the latter reached its apogee with F. Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East (1879–1910). Both genres represent a re-encounter on the part of the author with an extant text in a foreign language, but for the audience they were often original reading experiences. Arnold, too, made his name by introducing unfamiliar religious traditions to English readers: in addition to epicizing the life of Buddha in The Light of Asia (1879), he enumerated the names of Allah in Pearls of the Faith (1883) and translated the Bhagavad Gita in his The Song Celestial (1885). The same cannot be said of the epic life of Christ he produced in 1891.2 Given that its readers might be expected to “know what is in the book before they open it,” as one reviewer put it at the time, The Light of the World was seen by Arnold’s contemporaries as a “missed . . . opportunity”; as Christopher Clausen has observed, it “fell dead from the press.”3 The work’s failure had to do with the fact that the epic did not adhere to either of the generic types with which Arnold had made his name, offering neither a fresh translation nor instruction in unfamiliar religious doctrine. It dwelled on the story Victorian readers knew better than any other, and in that spirit, it belongs decidedly to the realm of re-encounter. Critically reading Arnold’s epic of Christ with mid-Victorian religious controversies in mind might confirm now axiomatic observations about the period’s literary-religious culture: that it was populated by writers reimagining [End Page 143] the life of Christ for a readership acquainted with German higher criticism and Ernest Renan, the French scholar whose Vie de Jésus (1863) expunged biblical miracles to depict Christ as a historical figure.4 Likewise, reading for the specifically Buddhist presence in The Light of the World would reinforce convincing arguments identifying the Gautama Buddha as a crucial Victorian analog, and forerunner, of Christ.5 If encountered, however, alongside the emerging decadents rising to prominence as the star of Tennyson and his generation waned, The Light of the World is a much more interesting flop— one that attempts to reconcile its earnest comparative religious perspective with the hallmarks of a poetics that imagined the modern in decay. Exploring in Arnold’s “signal failure” the border between worlds seen and unseen, finite and infinite, shows how the temporal and materialist anxieties of some Victorian comparatists coincided with similar disquiet in their iconoclastic decadent contemporaries.6 I want to examine this epic not as the poet responding to his own earlier, more successful work (with the epic of Christ reduced to “recantation” and “palinode”) but as an experiment in representing the paradox of the Incarnation in a multifaith context— through the decadent aesthetics later codified by Arthur Symons.7 Arnold’s epic, I contend, combines decadent interests in the limits of the senses with the ways that writers of comparative religious texts also thought about time and materiality. In reminding us that Christianity was by far the “dominant religious tradition for the Decadents, despite their significant interest in other traditions,” Mark Knight highlights that the poetic explorations of religion by decadent artists were serious, genuine, and diverse (p. 106). My interests lie not in returning religion to the decadents but in finding indicators of decadent style in poetry about religion, and in doing so to consider more broadly how re-encountering poets not associated with the term “decadence” can show the extent to which its aesthetic tendencies were...