“A Sort of Buoy”: Stevens, Plato, and Benjamin Jowett

Abstract

“A Sort of Buoy”: Stevens, Plato, and Benjamin Jowett Jonathan Ivry ON JULY 4, 1900, shortly after moving to New York City to begin his short-lived career as a journalist, the twenty-year-old Wallace Stevens wrote in his journal, “I am going to get a set of [Jowett’s] Plato as soon as I can afford it and use that as a sort of buoy” (L 42). In what is perhaps a telling error, however, the name Jowett was mis-transcribed both in the Letters of Wallace Stevens and Souvenirs and Prophecies as “Lowell’s Plato,” a mistake Milton Bates notes in his Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (44). If the name Jowett was already arcane enough by the 1960s and 1970s to be mis-transcribed, today Benjamin Jowett is likely even less familiar, except, perhaps, insofar as his English translations of Plato are still in publication and in use in college classrooms. In 1900, however, Jowett was more than the name on the English translation of Plato. He was a major figure in Victorian England whose fame rested on three significant, interconnected accomplishments. First, as tutor and then Master of Balliol College at Oxford University, Jowett helped promote a series of reforms that modernized university education. Second, as a liberal theologian, Jowett developed a progressive approach to Scripture and religious dogma, a position that placed him in opposition to members of the Oxford and Anglican Church establishment and that opened him up to charges of atheism. Finally, as the preeminent English translator of Plato, Jowett helped revive interest in Plato in the English-speaking world.1 Jowett’s life (1817–1893) coincided with the great technological and social upheavals that marked the nineteenth century. Though he spent most of his adult life at Oxford, his progressive views on educational reform and on theology brought him into the center of broader debates of the time, including the evolving role of social class in England, the attempt to reconcile science and rational thought with religious faith, and questions about social responsibility, freedom, and ethics. But it was as a theologian that Jowett was most controversial. His essay “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” which appeared in 1860 in the influential edited collection of theological essays Essays and Reviews, argued in favor of reading the Bible “like any other book” (143; Jowett’s emphasis). This meant, according to Peter Hinchliff, that Jowett “differed from the literalists in two particulars. [End Page 195] He did not believe that the text had been directly dictated by God: nor did it always mean what it had been traditionally understood to mean” (75). Jowett wanted a return to the text itself, with a scholar’s eye grounded in an academic appreciation of historical context, philology, and logic. “The first step,” he writes, “is to know the meaning, and this can only be done in the same careful and impartial way that we ascertain the meaning of Sophocles or of Plato.” This approach would attend to the “language and thoughts and narrations of the sacred writers,” and would discard centuries of religious dogma and interpretive tradition that had accrued to, but were unsupported by, the text (“Interpretation” 143). Jowett’s approach, like that of the other contributors to Essays and Reviews, reflected an appreciation and embrace of scientific methodology, rather than a resistance to it. A modern reader, for example, should not be troubled by the historical fact that the Bible was written by different authors across different centuries. “The indiscriminate use of parallel passages taken from one end of Scripture and applied to the other . . . is useless and uncritical,” Jowett wrote (147). Neither should the discoveries of science threaten religious faith because they might contradict certain accounts in the Bible, particularly with respect to the creation stories. “The Christian religion is in a false position when all the tendencies of knowledge are opposed to it. Such a position cannot be long maintained, or can only end in the withdrawal of the educated classes from the influences of religion” (140–41). Jowett’s theological positions reflected the Kantian emphasis on reason and independent thought, and a rejection of a church authority that insisted on...