Being the Body of Christ

Towards a Twenty-First Century Homosexual Theology for the Anglican Church

Chris Mounsey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317543800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Sexuality & Gender in Religion

The book explores the preoccupation of key twentieth-century English writers with theology and sexuality and how the Anglican Church has responded and continues to respond to the issue of homosexuality. Analysing the work of Oscar Wilde, E. F. Benson, Edward Carpenter, Jeanette Winterson, and Alan Hollingshurst, the book explores the literary tradition of exasperation at the church's obduracy against homosexuality.

Chapter 1

OSCAR WILDE, ‘THE FISHERMAN AND HIS SOUL’ – THE FAILURE OF ORGANIZED RELIGION

Typically, critical writing on Oscar Wilde’s religion centres upon his several unsuccessful attempts to convert to Roman Catholicism, his personal association (Jesuitical?) with Christ found in works dating from during and after his imprisonment, and a discussion about whether his deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism was conscious or whether he was in a terminal delirium. What seems wanting about the response to Wilde’s religious conviction is that it never moves far from the question of a lifetime dabbling with Roman Catholicism that tends to be read in opposition to atheism. Whereas, and a fact that is conveniently forgotten, Wilde was a nominal Anglican all his life. In terms of religious belief the adjective ‘nominal’ may seem strange, however, the designation all but defines the religious life of the majority of British Protestants, and before the 1920s, Irish Protestants as well. Church going at the local parish church was expected, unquestioned and largely unengaged.

I shall argue in this chapter that throughout his life Wilde was always inspired by spiritual concerns and worried about the fate of his soul, and in this sense, unengaged nominal Anglicanism did not suit him. However, nor was there a place for him in the Catholic church because of his sexual preference for men, something which it thought of as a sin, and moreover, a sin which the Catholic church could not bring itself to forgive. Had either the Anglican or Catholic churches been able to welcome him as a homosexual, they would have had a devoted servant. However, since each form of Christianity with which he associated himself attempted to turn him against his immutable sexuality, he rejected both for their obduracy.

The chapter will look first at certain critical studies of Wilde’s religion and argue that they tend to misread his spiritual and devotional life. Then it will briefly explore Wilde’s biography and letters to demonstrate that however hard he tried, he was unable to find a place for himself within either Anglicanism or Roman Catholicism. Finally, I will read Wilde’s story ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’, a children’s tale written in 1891 at the height of his literary output, which will show that Wilde did not want to be assimilated into mainstream Christianity because it rejected his homosexuality. Furthermore, we shall see that the story suggests that he did not believe that mainstream Christianity could ever assimilate homosexuality, and that he did not want it to try.

Critical Address to Wilde’s Religion

As though having the privilege of the last word on the subject of his father’s religious tendency, Vyvyan Holland tells us that:

All his life, my father had an intense leaning towards religious mysticism and was strongly attracted to the Catholic Church, into which he was received on his death bed in 1900.¹

Famously, Richard Ellman’s monumental biography of Wilde argues against the validity of the deathbed conversion.² But it is hard to argue from Ellman’s position that Wilde was never really interested in Christianity given the evidence of the little boy bearing stigmata in The Selfish Giant, or the subject matter of Salome.³ What is difficult to discern, however, is what Wilde himself might have thought about religion and the use of its imagery. Did he use the language of Christianity as a disguise for something else? Or was he interested in spiritual salvation through the action of a personal saviour?

On the one hand, Jack Zipes, in Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, argues that Wilde used Christian imagery for the purpose of social critique:

Wilde’s [critique of society] was stamped by a unique commitment to Christian Socialism which celebrated individualism and art.⁴

Thus, Zipes reads Wilde’s fairy stories through the lens of The Soul of Man Under Socialism, arguing that:

Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and consequently the Individualism that he preached to man could be realised only through pain or solitude. The ideals we owe to Christ are the ideals of a man who resists society absolutely. But man is naturally social … Christ is upheld as the model of anti-authoritarianism and humanism, but … he must be transcended through a common struggle of joy towards socialism … [Thus] Wilde used the figure of Christ to show the need to subvert the traditional Christian message.⁵

Zipes’ argument is tantalizing. He captures the paradoxical way in which Christian images appear in Wilde’s writing. So many important characters die, or are dead before the beginning of Wilde’s fairy tales, that it appears the world is populated by Christ-like models. But if this is so, then why has society not learned its lesson and become better? Only the purveyors of the traditional Christian message can be to blame. Thus, for Zipes, Wilde tells us that in the dyad ‘Christian Socialist’, Christianity is less important than the resultant Socialism.

On the other hand, Patrick O’Malley, writing on Wilde’s religion⁶ argues that although

Wilde’s religious yearnings … challenge religious orthodoxy … they serve as a stumbling-block to those who would read Wilde as the prophet of a gleefully aesthetic queerness.⁷

While Zipes’ Christian Socialist Wilde may not simply be equated with a gleeful aesthetic queer Wilde, O’Malley’s insistence that Wilde’s religious yearnings were significant of a genuine religious conviction, albeit unorthodox, challenges the idea that Wilde’s religion was simply a sign of, or a way towards, something else. For O’Malley, Wilde’s religion was both sexual and devout: in fact to use the term technically, it was ‘queer’.

But what is significant about these two readings is that Zipes’ religion as socialism is typical of the academic climate in which he was writing (1983), and O’Malley’s queer religion, typical of the time at which his essay appeared (2004). But was not religious conviction typical of, if unengaged, in the time in which Wilde was writing? Likewise, was not guiltily hiding homosexuality de rigeur for the late Victorian man? Reading Wilde in his own context, ought we not understand Wilde’s religious yearning as religious yearning? Ought we not read this yearning alongside and distinct from his hidden sexual yearning, and therefore as two forces in his life that might come into conflict?

Owen Dudley Edwards points out that Christianity was never far from Wilde’s childhood experience:

Perhaps the most neglected biographical item in Oscar Wilde’s life is that he was the nephew of three clergymen.⁸

What is not neglected in Wilde’s life and writing, however, is his self-identification with Christ, which has infected much of the critical writing about Wilde. Even Merlin Holland, his grandson, makes an easy comparison between Wilde and Christ on the first page of the Collins Complete Works:

The same public which crucified him for his lack of conformity and respect for Victorian values in 1895, today holds him up as a martyr for individuality. “I was a man,” he says in De Profundis, “who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.” The unabashed arrogance of that must have been difficult to swallow, but today we are forced to see the truth of it. Wilde’s life and his work survive side by side, in symbolic relationship with each other, and despite all attempts by his critics to prise them apart and subject each to scrutiny, they remain more closely entwined than ever.

But for Holland, as in Zipes, Wilde’s religion is equated with something else, this time art, and is not left to be what it is: religion. What Holland loses in this reading of the crucifixion of his grandfather is the fact that Wilde was fired by the idea of being an intercessor between people and that which is greater than they, in this case between people and their art and culture. Wilde explains God’s world to people as Jesus did before him. His area of intercession is paltry to be sure (the meaning of art is hardly as important as the meaning of life) but his model is Jesus, and we must not miss this fact.

O’Malley notes that the problem is common among writers on Wilde. Just as Holland loses Wilde’s religion while maintaining his use of religious language, so have many others used religious words in the titles of their works on Wilde while few have actually written about the subject itself. But then, O’Malley is writing from the perspective of a Roman Catholic with the purpose of challenging Ellman’s view that Wilde’s deathbed conversion was not sincere, and thus his project is to demonstrate to us Wilde the Roman Catholic. The task is not easy, given his own admission that Wilde’s religion was never orthodox, and so he uses the terminology of queer into which the unorthodox fits. But while this aspect of O’Malley’s essay may be limited by the literary theory current at the time he was writing, what remains of longer lasting use is that he reads Catholicism to explore Wilde’s sexuality and vice versa, even given the fact that

It is hard for us to believe that Wilde may well have had attractions simultaneously to Catholicism and to other men, both sincere and both subject to irony.⁹

If there is a difficulty here it lies in the word ‘attractions’ which elides sexual and spiritual desire. In order to shed some light on how the two can be understood to coexist more or less happily, O’Malley notes two trends in writing about Wilde, homosexuality and Catholicism. First, that the Catholic Church was attractive to Wilde since it provided a place of aesthetic excess (bells and smells) which made it easy for the homosexual in him to give vent to his emotions: the Catholic Church as a place of aesthetic identification. Second, that the Catholic church was essentially at odds with same sex desire, and presented ‘a type of orthodoxy’ …which … ‘trumps’ perversity:¹⁰ the Catholic Church as a cure for homosexuality.

Ellis Hanson offers a discussion of these ideas in Decadence and Catholicism,¹¹ where he argues that the Roman Church offered Wilde the enactment of his ‘dandyism and his aestheticism, there was beautiful ritual and passionate faith.’¹² This is, however, once again to read aestheticism as the subtext to Wilde’s religion, and as such reads religion as something other than it is. Both the excessive ritual and the substance behind the enactment of a service are reduced to dressing up and art.

To be fair, Hanson notices the problem, and argues for a productive dialectic between Wilde and Catholicism. But his argument remains one which rests on the idea that Wilde’s sexuality was external to his faith:

If Wilde were simply a pagan, why did he consider conversion so often? Why did he attend Catholic services so often? Why did he return over and over again to Christian themes in his work?¹³

Here Hanson’s dialectic disguises a mutually exclusive opposition: If Wilde is a homosexual engaging in casual homosexual sex then he cannot be Catholic, so he must be a pagan. When Wilde went to Catholic services he was attempting to slough off his homosexuality and become pure. That is, you cannot be a practising homosexual and a practising Catholic. But is this so?

Hanson’s unresolvable paradox leads us to another in the question about the sincerity of Wilde’s conversion. Could it be called sincere if he waited to convert on his deathbed when he could not have any more sexual relations? And the answer would seem to be ‘Yes’ because he felt Catholicism could only shrive him of his sins if he were sincere, and would not accommodate them without instilling him with intolerable guilt about his immutable sexuality. Thus, Hanson has to argue that Wilde was a pagan, in order that he did not have to submit himself to guilt and self-doubt.

But guilt of this type is only possible if the sin becomes known to a third party, which is the priest in the private confession of Roman Catholicism. On the other hand, the general confession of the Anglican Church would have allowed Wilde to continue to be forgiven for a sin that was otherwise unnamed and invisible. Therefore, we could argue that being a nominal Anglican allowed Wilde unhypocritically to continue to use the religious language, which was so important to him, and to attend religious service. When Wilde speaks of religion in the same language as he does beautiful things or beautiful men, it is not in opposition to his sexuality, because weekly (or daily when he was at Trinity or Magdalen) his sins were forgiven. Thus, guilt need only be seen to be the product of his sexuality in the Catholic ritual, which demanded that he alter his sexual behaviour when he confessed it to a priest.

However, this is to offer too simplistic an answer, for if Wilde was a nominal Anglican he was an unhappy one, and he was as Vyvyan Holland tells us, always attracted to the Roman Church. But even if this was so, he was wary of it too. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Homosexuality and Anglicanism
• PART I
• PART II
• Conclusion: Blindness and Insight – Some Reflections
• Select Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Author Index