The Necessity of God: Modernist Writers between Faith and Disbelief

Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia D

C ORSO DI L AUREA M AGISTRALE IN

L INGUE , CULTURE E COMUNICAZIONE

The Necessity of God: Modernist Writers between Faith and Disbelief

Prova finale di:

Alice Blondi Relatore:

Chiar.mo Prof. Diego Saglia

Correlatore

Chiar.ma Prof.ssa Gioia Angeletti

Anno Accademico 2018/2019

There is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off.

In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.

– Lord Byron

Se Iddio fosse una circonferenza la chiesa ne sarebbe il centro, che è il punto più distante possibile.

– Erri De Luca

Abstract

This thesis aims to investigate the profound crisis that affects the Cristian faith and religious institutions from the second half of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century, when several writers used their art as a means to express doubt about the authority of the Church and the authenticity of the Christian religion, which were slowly fading away. Thus, the first section of this dissertation centres upon the voices of those authors, such as Leslie Stephen and Matthew Arnold, who reacted to social changes and the scientific and philosophical theories which initiated a process that would slowly undermine the traditional idea of an almighty Creator.

Subsequent chapters concentrate on the multifarious literary responses to the failure of religion of those authors – such as W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot – who, in the face of an era of crisis, did not cease their restless quest for a traditional or new object of faith. Indeed, this thesis aims to explore their religious sensibility, which on the one hand, paved the way to a desire to fill the void left by an absent God and, on the other, conveyed a fascination with the possibilities offered by that void. Furthermore, special attention will be paid to the prose and poetry of E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot, which mirror three different approaches to religion, mysticism and spirituality.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the relevance of the religious theme within British (and, with Eliot, Anglo-American) Modernisms, and to understand how the twentieth-century chaotic world shaped these eminent writers’ sets of values and their ideas of the deity, belief and disbelief.

The methodology which characterises this dissertation is based on an initial bibliographical research which aims at identifying sources coherent with the subject of the thesis. A careful analysis of these texts has been followed by the study of several critical essays, excerpts and reviews, which provide useful information about possible interpretations of the novels and poems discussed. The resulting hypotheses combined with the opinions of several critics, have enabled me to formulate personal theses or new points of view on the issues under examination.

The reason for the choice of this specific topic has been the desire to explore the relationship between Modernist literature and the Christian faith, as well as the ways in which Modernist authors tried to find a solution to the supposed “death of God” in order

to cope with an extremely chaotic era. To conclude, this thesis attempts to shed light not so much on the answers Modernists gave to religious doubt, but rather on the restless quest of these questioning minds who both embraced or emphatically rejected the Christian faith.

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Index

I. The Victorian Roots of the Crisis ... 2

II. Reacting to the Void: The Modernists’ Quest for Alternatives to Religion ... 11

III. E. M. Forster’s Journey towards Humanism ... 28

IV. Virginia Woolf’s Atheist Religion ... 47

V. T. S. Eliot’s Spiritual Odyssey from Scepticism to Faith ... 68

VI. Human Relationships and Religious “Muddle” in A Passage to India ... 93

VII. Conclusion ... 108

VIII. Bibliography ... 114

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I. The Victorian Roots of the Crisis

The Victorian Era was a period of uncertainty, rationalism and agnosticism. Yet, the rise of progress and doubt in England began much earlier, probably during the sixteenth century, with the Protestant Reformation, when human beings refused the acceptance of truths without rational proof and chose their own reason as their guide (Wagner 1949:7). In the nineteenth century, the old implicit belief in Biblical Christianity was destroyed by new scientific interpretations of life, which showed the gulf between the Catholic and scientific worlds. Although the Victorian Era was one of the high points in the practice of English Christianity, under the surface many people began to express doubt about the Bible and the basic tenets of the Christian doctrine which had been defended for centuries. On the one hand, these doubts were caused by discoveries in science and, on the other, they stemmed from the development of Biblical Criticism. As Nigel Scotland maintains, the former caused humanity to question the traditional interpretation of world origins, and the latter brought doubt regarding the traditional doctrine of the inspiration of scripture (1986:1). At that point, the struggle of science with orthodoxy was open and developed into different stages. In the first stage, combined with scientific and technological progress in the eighteenth, the new cosmology of the seventeenth century gave rise to natural religion as a competitor of revealed religion.

Then, science undermined the traditional Christian conception of nature as a stable framework made of fixed rational structures. In the last stage, the methods of natural science were applied to the study of human nature and gradually came to be regarded as the only methods which could lead to true knowledge of human beings and nature (Greene 1959:716). According to Greene, major scientific changes began before the time when scientists, such as Charles Darwin, started to think seriously about religion. A case in point is the Newtonian conception of nature as a law-bound system that conflicted with belief in Providence and miracles. In addition, the spread of humanism and optimism regarding the future of human life caused a moral revulsion against the pessimistic view of human nature expressed in traditional Christian doctrines (1959:716). In sum, these are the conditions that introduced doubt and uncertainty into the Victorians’ religious life.

The fervid intellectual temper of this period was represented by the creation of the Metaphysical Society. Perhaps nothing is more emblematic of the nature of the mid-

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Victorian élite than the foundation in 1869 of this society, where Anglicans, atheists and Catholics read papers on high speculative subjects, shattering each other’s arguments in a friendly atmosphere (Pollard 1993:27). Indeed, from 1869 to 1880 many English intellectuals met in London to discuss the problems raised by the growing antagonism between religion and the critical spirit of science (Brown 1949:10). The Society represented the criticism of what was doctrinaire and narrow, and its major aim was to diffuse Knowledge. The discussion of themes such as the immortality of the soul and the existence of God made clear the sceptical spirit of these distinguished men. It is also worth noticing that the struggles between religious orthodoxy and science in the 1860s, raised a fundamental question: ‘What must a man believe?’. While religion remained static, science constantly developed, undermining religious certainties and, as Brown remarks, the adherence of Catholic members to the Society constituted an admission that even religious fundaments were subject to a critical examination (1949:290).

This Society was characterised by a clear division between the Christian theists and the rationalists, whose purpose was to attack traditional Christianity. Among those who condemned traditional creeds, emerged the figure of James Fitzjames Stephen, brother of the famous critic Leslie Stephen. Although Stephen believed in God, he became one of the staunchest anti-Christians of his time, under the assumption that all creeds must be justified by their utility, and are fundamental elements in maintaining the distinction between human beings and beasts (Brown 1949:132). The presence of these debates revealed an intellectual turmoil which was growing gradually and testifying to the decline in belief in the supernatural among intellectuals. Moreover, the rationalists, with their academic aggressiveness, attempted to resolve the controversy with theists by persuading them that the days of theological and ecclesiastical influence were close to an end.

The erosion of the cornerstones of tradition began gradually until the conflict between private judgement and authority resulted in a conflict between faith and reason (Wagner 1949:7). As Robbins argues, the spiritual roots of Victorian life were slowly shifting under the new profound truths provided by science, while the old faith seemed simply to have disappeared (1934:76). However, science was not the only threat to the Christian faith, in that assaults on traditional beliefs were also coming from the theologians themselves in the form of a new discipline known as Biblical Criticism. This critical method largely contributed to the growth of the spirit of unrest typical of the

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Victorian period. Germany was the heartland of this criticism, as well as the motherland of one of its leading scholars, namely Ferdinand Christian Baur. In 1820, inspired by Lorenz Bauer’s work Hebräische Mythologie des alten und neuen Testaments (A Hebrew Mythology of the Old and New Testaments) Baur argued that the writings of the Hebrews were mythical in that all the earliest records of all nations were legendary, and the Hebrew ones were not an exception. Such myths recorded historical events which were totally beyond the reach of verification (Scotland 1986:4) and, as a result, Biblical Criticism made further inroads into belief in the full inspiration of the Bible, that is, the belief that everything in the Bible is substantially true. This method of criticism, applied to the study of the Bible, shaped the Victorian mind and revolutionised beliefs related to the Word of God. One by one the old dogmas were rejected, the authority of the Church came under attack, and faith seemed to have yielded to reason. It was becoming clear that the religious life of the age was bound to be in a state of doubt, uncertainty, and pessimism (Wagner 1949:17).

As already noted, during the nineteenth century, the significant advance of science was responsible for most of the religious uncertainties, and the emphasis on reason and the growth of physical science resulted in agnosticism, theological doubt, and even atheism (Wagner 1949:21). This emphasis led to a request for rational explanations for every religious truth, and to Biblical literalism. As a consequence, several scholars, attempted to show the multiple authorship of the Bible by adopting the methods of modern historical scholarship. Such a textual criticism only contributed to deny many of the truths contained in the Scripture (Bradshaw 2006:20).

The literal interpretation of the book of Genesis, along with the geological discoveries of Sir Charles Lyell, constituted an example of evidence that contradicted the story of creation. It was geology that opened the way to a new perspective of the physical development of animals and human beings. In his Principles of Geology, written between 1830 and 1833, Lyell collected evidence of the gradual development of the geological strata in the earth’s crust and drew attention to the different fossils in it. It gradually became clear that the earth was infinitely older than scientists had been assumed in previous centuries, and that humanity was a recent arrival upon it (Pollard 1993:18).

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The conflict between science and religion increased in 1859, after the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. The considerations that led him to abandon the Christian faith are a clear example of the intellectual trends of that time:

I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian. […] By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported, - that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become […]

that the Gospels […] differ in many important details, far too important as it seemed to me to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eyewitnesses; - by such reflections as these, […] I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation (Darwin 2003:430).

Darwin did not suddenly lose his faith, and his disbelief in orthodox Christianity developed slowly, along with his scientific theories, so that he never doubted that his conclusion was correct. According to his theory, the origin of the species was nothing but the product of a natural selection. This evolutionary process contradicted the Christian idea that the universe had originated from a benevolent God. Even though Darwin became an eminent figure – and he is generally acclaimed as the first person to have devised a scientifically respectable theory of evolution – a widespread disbelief was in the air for years before the publication of his works (Wagner 1949:55). A number of late eighteenth- century scientists – such as Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather, and Jean Baptiste Lamarck – posited evolutionary theories that foreshadowed Darwin’s work (Scotland 1986:2). But it was the discoveries of Darwin, as well as those of his contemporaries, which posed a challenge to the traditional doctrine of creation and to the literal interpretation of Genesis. These developments in science also challenged the status of humankind: in The Descent of Man, published in 1871, Darwin gave explicit arguments in favour of believing that human beings were physically descended from more primitive animal ancestors (Pollard 1993:20). According to Darwin, it was only natural prejudice and arrogance that made our forefathers declare that they were descended from semi-gods (Scotland 1986:3). Moreover, his theory highlighted the problem of violence and suffering, for natural selection was based on the notion that only the fittest species survive:

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All that we can do is to keep steadily in mind that each organic being […] has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction. When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy and the happy survive and multiply (quoted in Scotland 1986:3).

These words posed the problem of how a benevolent God could have created a world in which there was so much violence and cruelty. Not only did Darwin’s writings pose this problem, but they also had the effect to bring Genesis into doubt suggesting that humanity’s origin had been crude and bestial (Greene 1959:716). As a consequence, things became less solid because they were set against an infinite conception of time, and human beings were now forced to ask whether all material things were transient. A further concern that rose from Darwinian theory had to do with race: the notion of the survival of the fittest was used to support and justify imperialism. Imperialists adopted this notion to describe their moral aspirations for human improvement, and this, in turn, indicated Christianity’s superior fitness, since Christian missionarism and philanthropy were seen to increase the welfare of the species (Baxter 2003:10). Hence, it can be said that Charles Darwin contributed to the disintegration of traditional views and undermined the static conception of nature which had informed Christian theology for centuries.

The responses to evolutionary biology within religious fields varied widely.

Unlike the Protestant Church, where fundamentalists rejected whatever in biology could not be reconciled with the letter of Scripture (Greene 1959:718), Catholic theologians showed a cautious but general willingness to accede to some of the findings of science.

In Britain, the publication of Lux Mundi (1889), showed some Catholic scholars’

disposition towards scientific findings. This collection of twelve essays was indeed the product of discussions between academics who were convinced of the historic Christian faith, but who, at the same time, tried to grapple with the issues raised by science and criticism (Scotland 1986:11). In the preface, Charles Gore, the editor of Lux Mundi, maintains that

The real development of theology is rather the process in which the Church, standing firm in her old truths, enters into the apprehension of the new social and intellectual movements of each age: and because the truth makes her free,

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is able to assimilate all new material, to welcome and give its place to all new knowledge (Gore 2010:ix).

On the one hand, Gore’s contribution claimed that Christ’s knowledge was limited to his physical incarnation and God’s revelation of himself was perceived as progressive, while, on the other, Genesis was regarded as poetry and parable rather than a textbook of science (Baxter 2003:12). As Baxter aptly suggests, whilst literature and poetry opened to the exploration of the possibilities inherent in the absence of God from language and narrative, the Church in Britain continued to search for proofs, particularly from the social and physical sciences (2003:12). In this respect, at the end of the nineteenth century, a new group, The Modern Churchmen, was founded. After the First World War, in 1922, this group held its conference on the topic of world religions, while its conference on science and religion took place in 1924. During these meetings religion and science were perceived as auxiliary to the Christian faith, rather than rivals to it. Evolutionary theory was therefore used to formulate a hierarchy of religions with Christianity on the top. As a result, the non-Christian creeds were seen as the less advanced forms of the more developed and sophisticated Christian religion. The Modern Churchmen’s members also believed that the evolutionary theory entailed the presence of a purposeful being, a willing God, that was necessarily present in the world. Yet, their efforts to reinstate the presence of a superior deity did little to stop the wave of doubt within and beyond the Church, and the conviction that Christianity could be ignored did not stop growing (Baxter 2003:14).

In sum, the advances in science to which Darwin had contributed, considerably undermined the belief in an almighty Creator. By discovering the secret of human beings’

low origins, science seemed to have destroyed the confidence in humanity’s answers to the ultimate questions of human existence (Greene 1959:724).

In the face of these scientific discoveries, Victorians – such as Leslie Stephen, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy – underwent a crisis of faith that led them to atheism and agnosticism (Bradshaw 2006:20). The scientific spirit of the Victorian age was therefore responsible for the attitude of doubt that undermined traditional dogmatic religion. The problem of Christianity’s credibility had become acute and a godless world seemed to loom on the horizon. Once again, contemporary scholars were aware that the role of the Christian religion in society was undergoing some serious changes, and that

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the divulgation of science made people face all sorts of doubts and questions about the Christian faith (Wall 2005:58). This popularisation provided people with the results of science through periodicals, cheap pamphlets and fiction. Novels, Wall maintains, showed details about the conflicts and scepticism generated by scientific advances, and made patent the widespread feelings of religious crisis (2005:59). Through this genre, novelists had the opportunity to give voice to their thoughts on moral and religious topics, and to contribute to the formation of public opinion. Victorian novels represented a mirror of mentalities which reflected important changes in the religious domain. Loss of faith was a central theme in these novels, along with gain, in that the attractive alternatives to fill the spiritual void seemed to offset the void itself. Any one of these alternatives, from agnosticism to atheism, was described as a relief, always associated with nostalgia for a past in which religion was so important in people’s lives (Wall 2005:62). This nostalgic feeling for the loss of a faith was described in particular by George Eliot. In the 1840s, she abandoned her religious faith and never returned to it, conveying in her works a sense of melancholy for what had been lost forever. A case in point is her 1872 novel, Middlemarch, where she used Biblical criticism as an instrument to undermine traditional belief (Wall 2005:63).

In the second half of the nineteenth century, one of the most successful novels about belief and unbelief, was written by a woman, Mary Ward. The novel, entitled Robert Elsmere, after the protagonist of the story, was published in 1888, and its author was the niece of Matthew Arnold. Robert Elsmere deals with an optimistic Anglican vicar in a small village who turns into the founder of a working-class brotherhood in London’s East End. Robert is married to a devout Evangelical woman, whose piety will be an important element in the novel, in that it will clash with her husband’s growing scepticism. As the story unfolds, the protagonist is haunted by religious doubts which lead him to conclude “that he should consider Biblical miracles as a merely natural product of the human imagination” (Wall 2005:70). Both the conflict in Elsmere’s mind, and the conflict with his wife’s Evangelical faith, are revelatory of the theological transformation of the Victorian era: an era in which the results of sciences became a formidable factor in discussions about religion, and fiction deeply impacted on Victorian minds.

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Hence, literature conveyed the sense of crisis typical of the second half of the nineteenth century: the idea that God had abandoned the Victorians led to a state of self- doubt which is reflected in the writings of the time. Probably in no poet are the effects of this religious turmoil as evident as in Matthew Arnold. It was during this time of doubt that he gave voice to uncertainty and scepticism in his poems and prose. According to Pollard, Arnold touched his age at more points than any other Victorian writer because of the concern that ran through his prose works: a concern for the quality of the civilisation around him and for the quality of English lives in an age in which most of the values, by which an earlier generation had lived, were being disconcertingly questioned (1993:53).

Often considered the expression of the intellectual ferment of his age, Arnold described industrialism, the struggle between Church and science and, in general, the spiritual confusion which deeply marked his era (Wagner 1949:56). In other words, the period of social transformation in which he lived, between 1860 and 1870, led him to write on social and religious issues. In his major religious critical work Literature and Dogma (1873), the masses, Arnold argues, should reject Church doctrines based on abstract speculations in order to transform religion and not destroy it. Here lies a different perspective on the conflict of loss of faith: the real challenge was to discover what to do after the individual has lost belief, rather than questioning about belief itself (Landow 2006).

The clearest expression of Arnold’s regret for a lost faith is expressed in “Dover Beach”. Published in 1867, this poem represents an outlet for the void left by scientific theories, such as the evolutionary one. As Miles suggests, Arnold’s questioning mind created an image of the world which clearly embodied the failure of religion (1965:4):

“[…] a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night” (Arnold 1993:58). The poet’s words depict the condition of a Victorian era characterised by social friction, the conflict of science with the Church, industrialism and by the spiritual confusion which left so deep a mark on Arnold himself (Miles 1965:5):

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

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Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world (Arnold 1993:58).

The Sea of Faith, once strong and full, has weakened, leaving humanity without hope since the world, plagued with religious questioning, now resembles a waste land without any joy or light. These lines bring out Arnold’s struggle to achieve stability and find some solution to the problem, for his disbelief never involves antagonism, leading instead to an attitude of sympathy for a faith which he had lost. Indeed, the cadence of waves which draw pebbles back and forth up the strand, seems to mirror the poet’s restless thoughts that “begin, and cease, and then again begin” (Arnold 1993:58) in search of a solution for the degrading spirituality and culture of his society. Moreover, the dreamlike scenery depicted in the incipit – “the sea is calm tonight […]. Come to the window, sweet is the night air!” (Arnold 1993:58) – clashes with “the eternal note of sadness” and the pattern of negative words which spread through the text and convey a sense of despair and melancholy for a world which “hath really neither joy […] nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain” (Arnold 1993:58). Arnold presents the reader with the image of a dreary world made of “naked shingles”, but this land is still not as melancholy as the Eliotian waste land will be, since people living in it are not completely numb and the poet still suffers and looks for relief to the pain that spiritual dullness has inflicted on him. In sum, religion lies at the heart of many of Arnold’s poems in which, Wagner remarks, “sceptical questioning often alternates with a desire for faith and peace” (1949:77).

If religion was perceived as a dead faith, Arnold searched for answers to his scepticism in poetry. He believed in poetry, and through his verses he expressed the sense of abandonment that the Victorians felt after Darwin’s theories. In addition, this search for substitutes for religion played a central role in Modernist literature, since the most important substitute for a traditional deity was literature itself. Poets such as Arnold, concerned with the effects of secularization, often celebrated poetry as an alternative source of religion inspiration (Bradshaw 2006:20). With regards to Matthew Arnold’s poetry, Bradshaw claims that it was the expression of a troubled soul which sought to respond the scientific discoveries that were undermining belief in the literal truth of the Bible (2006:20). As an agnostic for many years, he denied the divinity of God and his

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education destroyed his faith in the Creator, an after-life, and established religion. As a consequence, Arnold questioned the possibility of a happier life after death, regretting that belief in the traditional creed was no longer for him. His work gave voice to a pervasive sense of uneasiness along with a feeling that change, both intellectual and social, leaves uncertainty everywhere (Pollard 1993:49). It is worth bearing in mind that the high moralizing tone of Arnold’s works marked him as the kind of eminent Victorians that Modernists like Lytton Strachey enjoyed demystifying.

II. Reacting to the Void: The Modernists’ Quest for Alternatives to Religion

The turn of the twentiethcentury witnessed a crisis of institutional religion and a search for new forms of religious experience. Modernists like Thomas Stearns Eliot and Edward Morgan Forster often emphasised the diminished significance of organised religion and the influence of secularisation for both writers and the general public in this period (Bradshaw 2006:19). Even so, many Modernists continued to search for answers to traditional religious questions about the human condition, death and afterlife. The development of literary Modernism was also characterised by the quest for alternatives to religion leading many writers and critics to consider literature itself as the most important substitute for religion. As a result, writers concerned with the effects of secularization chose poetry as a valid alternative to religious beliefs – a position anticipated, as seen in the previous chapter, by Matthew Arnold, who celebrated poetry as an alternative source of religious inspiration in “Dover Beach” (Bradshaw 2006:20).

“In his writings”, Bradshaw claims, “Arnold was responding to a series of scientific discoveries that had begun to undermine belief in the literal truth of the Bible” (2006:20).

In the face of these scientific discoveries the mainstream Protestant churches of Britain gradually adopted views like Arnold’s, associated with the so-called “theological liberalism”. Those who supported this doctrine embraced the Victorian faith in progress and emphasized the ethical teachings of Christ instead of traditional dogmas such as original sin (Bradshaw 2006:21).

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Against the optimism of these beliefs, the works of Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche lay the ground for the arrival of Modernism. During the nineteenth century, scientific theories and discoveries – such as the second law of thermodynamics and Darwinian evolution – challenged the Judaeo-Christian narrative of history (Baxter 2003:9). The former, with its theory of entropy, provoked fears that the sun might extinguish itself, transforming earth into a cold, dark waste-land. The threat of ever- increasing chaos implicit in the laws of entropy stoked up fears of social, cultural and moral disintegration (Baxter 2003:10). Alongside these anxieties, Darwinism challenged the Judeo-Christian narrative, in that the source, development and destiny of all species was thought to derive from an amoral necessity of survival. Therefore, neither grace nor divine Providence were needed. (Baxter 2003:10).

These scientific developments had a profound influence on philosophical thinking. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, announced the death of God through the voice of his fictional madman in The Gay Science, published in 1882. One of the most relevant passage of this work declares:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” – As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter […]. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his look. “Whither is God?” he cried. I will tell you. We have killed – you and I. All of us are murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? […] Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the godly decomposition – Gods, too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him (Nietzsche 1974:181).

The first message of the madman is that the death of God is a catastrophe and that we have killed God by pursuing the truth manifest in the modern sciences, whose discoveries determined the demise of Christian metaphysics: each advance in the knowledge of truth rendered each claim of religious cosmology more and more incredible (Leiter 2016:8). Nietzsche indeed maintained,

You see what it was that really triumphed over the Christian God: Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness that was understood even more

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rigorously, the father’s confessor refinement of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price (1974:357).

The madman of The Gay Science is such not because of his atheism, but because he is the only one who understands the meaning of the death of God in a way none of his listeners do. At this point, the belief in a Christian God seems too distant and remote for nineteenth-century academics, and Nietzsche’s words clearly illustrate the void left by the death of God, who abandons humanity to face an abyss of moral relativism (Bradshaw 2006:21).

In 1807, years before the publication of The Gay Science, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had given voice to the crumbling of the religious dimension in The Phenomenology of the Spirit. The revolutionary force of Enlightenment thought was perceived to have overwhelmed the omnipotence of God in Western culture, and rationalism, Baxter remarks, “became a means of arrogating powers that had previously been considered divine” (2003:8).

Nature, history and God were embraced in a rational system, and the whole was seen as an evolving process. Everything was given its appropriate place in the system: law, culture, literature, and art. It was the office of the State to embody and organize those elements, and the Christian State was a realization of the Kingdom of God […]. God was no longer on the throne of the universe, but human reason, and God was assigned his place by grace of human reason.

The world was regarded as an aesthetic harmony, not a battleground for moral struggle (Baxter 2003:8).

As a prelude to Nietzsche’s words, Hegel’s statement showed how new studies of Biblical texts, undertaken in the spirit of the Enlightenment, highlighted inconsistencies in the texture of God’s book. The notion of a divine language, free from the need for interpretation, was destabilised. Furthermore, the suspicions that the Bible’s narrative had been created by mortal hands to justify faith in adversity, led to the shattering of the Christian tale of salvation. These suspicions were also underpinned by archaeological studies of the ancient Near East, which stimulated a growing interest in non-Judaeo- Christian religions. As a consequence, the discovery of alternative religions led to the relativization of Judeo-Christian narratives and practices as universal pillars of human

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culture (Baxter 2003:9). Thinkers such as Hegel and Nietzsche paved the way for several decades of theological ferment and critical questioning.

The turn of the twentieth century witnessed a decline in the Christian faith, but also a resurgence of attention towards the complexities and psychic underpinning of religious experience and, more generally, to the psyche itself. The early twentieth century was marked, on one hand, by a decline of the Christian orthodoxy in public life, and on the other, by the emergence of a new modern self, fractured and destabilised (Iglesias 2018:9). The notion of a coherent, rational and good self, fundamental to Victorian Christianity, had been in part destabilised by late-nineteenth-century psychology. Freud’s theories, for instance, provided an image of the self as fundamentally egoistic and irrational. In his 1951 essay “Two Cheers for Democracy”, the novelist E.M. Forster expressed an idea similar to the Freudian one, maintaining that “ Psychology has split and shattered the idea of a ‘person’, and has shown that there is something incalculable in each of us, which may at any moment rise to the surface and destroy our normal balance.

We don’t know what we are like” (quoted in Rosenbaum 1993:166). Although twentieth- century advances in psychology offered new ways of imagining the self, they also led to a sense of cultural anxiety. The emergent popularity of psychology was also linked to questions about the role of religion in public and private life, in other words, it seemed that human beings expected something from psychic life which they had not received from religion (Iglesias 2018:10). Religious life apparently no longer contained the answers which it was supposed to provide. Thinkers such as Freud, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim often dealt with religious experience and made a significant effort to explain religion objectively, describing it as a social response to inborn human needs (Iglesias 2018:11). Of these, Freud was the most sceptical about the value of religious experience, explicitly trying to replace religious ways of thinking with his own theories. In sum, the early twentieth century was far from being an age of irony or indifference towards religious experience as it witnessed a number of social, political and intellectual conflicts over the status of religion in modern life (Bradshaw 2006:21).

It was in this cultural context that emerged the Bloomsbury Group, one of the most significant groupings of writers and artists. It was an association of friends who knew and loved one another for a period of time extending over two generations (Rosenbaum 1981:332), and had its beginning at the turn of the century in the district of West Central

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London from which it took its name. Some of the male members of the Group belonged to a secret society at Cambridge University known as The Cambridge Apostles. They debated questions of religion, morality and ethical conduct and, several years later, some of these Apostles, formed the so-called Bloomsbury Group (Bradshaw 2207:35). At the centre of this group were Leslie Stephen’s daughters Vanessa, who married Clive Bell, and Virginia, who married Leonard Woolf. Lytton Strachey, along with John Maynard Keynes and Desmond McCarthy, represented Bell’s Cambridge friends. Still through the Cambridge connection, E. M. Forster, Saxon Sydney-Turner and Roger Fry joined the Group. In the 1920s the members of Bloomsbury confirmed their association by founding the Memoir Club to celebrate their friendships (Rosenbaum 1993: ix). It was friendship, rather than a shared dogma or a formal manifesto, that united the members of the group.

They perceived themselves as energetically polemical and presented themselves as at war with Victorianism and conventionality (Bradshaw 2007:35). The Group constituted a sort of civilized rebellion against the moral code of Victorianism, considering that their set of values was characterised by liberal pacifism, anti-imperialism, abstract form rather than moralising content in art and literature, feminism and agnosticism in religion (Baldick 2004:52). The Victorian patriarchies from which Bloomsbury came were puritan and their offspring reacted strongly against the Victorian family as a means of social organisation, and made their inherited puritanism compatible with atheism (Rosenbaum 1981:337). As Rosenbaum maintains, the philosophy that constitutes the intellectual foundation of the Group was central to these adaptations; and the philosophical roots of Bloomsbury lie in the Cambridge Apostles Group through which philosophy influenced the Group itself (1981:337). The importance of Cambridge philosophy for Bloomsbury’s works lies in their assumptions about the human and non-human realities of time and death, and in their criticism of discrimination, capitalism and established truths.

One of the most famous figures of the Bloomsbury Group, Lytton Strachey, defined his modernity through the staunch anti-Victorianism of his writings. Most Modernist authors, along with Strachey, had grown up in the Victorian period and were now eager to repudiate its moralism, religious dogmas, imperialism, and patriarchal forms of family life (Baldick 2004:9). In the early twentieth century, during the Edwardian reaction to Victorian culture, Strachey wrote the most influential work of anti- Victorianism: Eminent Victorians. This sequence of linked biographical essays, published

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in 1918, contained sketches of influential figures of the previous century. It focused on four people: Thomas Arnold an educator, Henry Manning a priest, Florence Nightingale a social reformer, and George Gordon a soldier. In Strachey’s mind, as well as that of many contemporaries, the Victorian era was characterised by excessive moral severity and required criticism (Sunwall 2914:101). But, as underlined by Baldick, Strachey made no overt anti-Victorian declarations in these essays, instead he inflicted more serious damage through his corrosive irony (2204:10). Furthermore, abandoning the method of scrupulous narration, Strachey proclaimed the modern biographer’s need for artistic and spiritual freedom. All he could achieve was fragmentary rather than systematic truth (Rosenbaum 1993:5), and through his sketches he tried to illustrate rather than to explain or prove a theory.

The composition of Eminent Victorians coincided with the First World War which helped to establish Strachey’s anti-heroic scepticism as the dominant mood of inter-war literature. Even among those who did not experience combat, there was a general conviction that the old world lay in ruins (Baldick 2004:10). Along with many others, Strachey was of the mind that the ideals of the earlier century such as the Queen, God, the Country and the Empire, were the main cause of the war that was afflicting Europe (Strachey 2003: viii). Eminent Victorians therefore cannot be easily detached from its historical background, which strongly influenced it.

Lytton Strachey was not a Modernist, but like those others who contributed to dismantling Victorianism, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Butler, he made Modernism possible (Strachey 2003: x). Yet, considering that he regarded himself as subversive in a conservative society, he was bound to present his ideas indirectly, especially his radical views on religion and sexuality, if they were to be published (Spurr 1990:34). In some ways, Strachey’s views were understandable reactions to the excesses of the past and he presented all four of his character as neurotics.

Sutherland aptly remarks that “sex and Christianity are the energies driving these monsters of rectitude, virtue, public service and heroism” (Strachey 2003: xi), and, in particular, the biographer’s criticism of Florence Nightingale seems to be centred on her religious views, and the way in which her spirituality impacted her morality. He was himself an atheist, and a spokesman for the Bloomsbury Group’s religious scepticism (Sunwall 2014:101). In his biographical essay, Strachey did not criticise Nightingale’s

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ideas; instead, he rather used clever rhetoric to ridicule her and to make the readers see her in an unflattering light (Sunwall 2014:101). Indeed, much of the rhetorical power of Eminent Victorians comes from an ironical inversion of religious terms and images: the nurse is described as the angel of the Crimean War, but then she is described as a woman possessed by a demon. The substitution of “demon” for “angel” mocks religious imagery and alludes to the sinister “impetus” which lies underneath her heroic acts (Strachey2003:99). According to Sunwall, “Nightingale is portrayed as an image of God by her enthusiasm […] but Strachey subverts this image by showing up Nightingale in a bad light” (2014:104). Strachey has a highly ironic attitude towards Nightingale’s religious motivations, but here the collision is between two different world-views and not between two individuals. Moralism was what the biographer most disapproved of, and because morality and religion were his ultimate targets, he had to undermine Nightingale’s reputation, since she was an exemplar of both (Sunwall 2014:105).

Through these rhetorical means Strachey succeeded in making his Bloomsbury ideology incommensurable with Victorian doctrines. Nightingale’s religious sentiments where connected to objective theological and ethical doctrines, which were the object of the critic’s disapproval. He reserved his sarcastic attitude for her theological work and, whether he may have had respect for Nightingale the nurse and social reformer, he had no respect for Nightingale the theologian (Sunwall 2014:108). Once again it is important to bear in mind that she was a member of a class of thinkers known as moral objectivists and, that it was the Victorian consensus on moral objectivism which was the ultimate target of Strachey’s patronising attitude (Sunwall 2014:109).

The sarcastic slant was one of the main features of Strachey’s prose, along with the use of literary quotations which contributed significantly to the ironic nature of his work. Several borrowings from the Bible – the King James version – often mixed with the critic’s style underpinning his rationalistic polemic. Strachey’s use of the Bible is copious and, Spurr argues, it was “a subtle weapon in a life-long crusade against Christianity” (1990:41). His private correspondence, in particular, was characterised by this kind of borrowings: in a letter to Maynard Keynes about the difficulties of composing a dissertation, he alluded to Saint Paul’s submission to Christ. Strachey wrote: “I try to write my dissertation, and fail. I die daily, as the Scripture have it” (Spurr 1990:41), and through these words he turns the saint’s confession of blissful self-immolation into a

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dramatic heightening of his own self-regarding emotions. As a result, one of the most celebrated expressions of humility is minimised in favour of a personal conceit (Spurr 1990:42). In other words, Strachey relied significantly on the Bible as a mischievous way to elaborate its critique.

Notwithstanding Nightingale’s theological ideas, it is worth noticing that Strachey’s prose can no longer be seen as an innocent reaction to a restrictive era. The liberalism of the Bloomsbury Group, along with the questioning of religious dogmas, was rather the sign of a social breakdown (Sunwall 2014:110). His ironic slant and satiric attitude are an important hint of the cultural and intellectual turmoil that characterised the beginning of the twentieth century.

Far from being an age of indifference towards religion, the twentieth century witnessed a number of writers who expressed an interest in religious experience and the threats that were slowly undermining the Christian faith. Literary answers to the widespread unbelief were varied and several novelists and poets used literature to give voice to their doubt in Christian belief and narrative which no longer served as the supreme archetype for narrative in Western culture (Baxter 2003:22). On the one hand, scepticism and perplexity came to the fore in the works of authors such as Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot, and on the other, narrative and language were perceived as ineffective since they no longer possessed their efficacy and their purpose (Baxter 2003:17). Although narrative was not immediately affected by the challenges to Judaeo-Christian religion, Modernist writers needed to find an aesthetic that could revive language; and fiction assumed an ethical urgency during World War I, an age when divine purpose seemed incomprehensible if not completely absent (Baxter 2003:17). During the Modernist period, religion was a widespread topic which interested several writers, with widely differing religious affiliations, and even the most agnostic of Modernists, Virginia Woolf, made the issue of religion central to some of her works, as she considered modern fiction as a return to the spiritual in response to the materialism of the Edwardian period (Bradshaw 2006:25). She was also fascinated by the possibilities opened up in the void left by an absent God (Baxter 2003:22), and this interest led to attempts to reaffirm the instability that had arisen from the alleged absence of God through the relativization of the narrative voice and the fragmentation of chronology. Woolf’s purpose was to expose the reader to experience rather than understanding and rejecting any set vantage point of

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view in favour of an incomprehensible logic (Baxter 2003:25). Modernist works therefore represented the confusion created by this logic which, like God, seemed to be absent or at least far from comprehension.

The challenges to the Christian religion also affected many of the works by the novelist Edward Morgan Forster, who continued to manifest his ethical beliefs in his essays even after the Christian faith abandoned him (Baxter 2006:22). As Virginia Woolf, Forster felt the desire to fill the void left by the absence of a Creator, and provide a new narrative in order to understand life. A case in point is his famous essay on his beliefs, which was also a declaration of the Bloomsbury Group’s values. It was published in 1939 by the Hogarth Press under the title “What I Believe”, and it was later included in the 1951 collection entitled Two Cheers for Democracy. Forster’s credo was written on the verge of World War II, and, as Bradshaw suggests, it was admired by many as “a bold denunciation of totalitarianism, a courageous defence of reason, civilisation, secular morality and the individual” (2007:41). One of the most straightforward statements on his personal belief can be found in the very first part of his essay:

I do not believe in Belief. But this is an Age of Faith, and there are so many militant creeds that, in self-defence, one has to formulate a creed of one’s own […]. Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. […] My law- givers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in that Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is: Lord, I disbelieve – help thou my unbelief (quoted in Rosenbaum 1993:166).

This secularist manifesto begins with a paradox – “I do not believe in Belief” – a clear instability at its centre. As maintained by Bradshaw, “the use of paradox implies that the views and beliefs are always in danger of collapsing in on themselves and of hiding a contradiction” (2007:43). A strong pessimism, along with a sceptical attitude, can be said to represent one of the prevailing features in the essay. On the one hand, Forster stresses the failure of a crumbling religious faith, and on the other, he opts for rationalism and a world in which there is room for everyone, even for the immoral, regardless of divine judgment. Moreover, Forster’s faith seems to have left him, and his scepticism becomes more patent: “[…] no form of Christianity and no alternative to Christianity will bring peace to the world or integrity to the individual; no change of heart

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will occur” (quoted in Rosenbaum 1993:169). On the verge of World War II, the only certainty in which human beings could put any trust are personal relationships. According to the novelist, these relationships are the only solid structures in a world full of cruelty and violence – “[…] I certainly can proclaim that I believe in personal relationships.

Starting from them, I get a little order into the contemporary chaos. One must be found of people and trust them” (quoted in Rosenbaum 1993:169). As a result, it is not Christian faith that can save human beings, but what is good in people, namely their belief in friendship and loyalty, and although the violence of the war remains, the salvation of humanity relies on the warmth of personal relations. It becomes patent that Forster’s words point out some sort of faith in humankind which lies behind the pessimistic attitude originated by the alleged absence of God. This very absence opens up a space for a strong humanism:

I cannot believe that Christianity will ever cope with the present world-wide mess, and I think that such influence as it retains in modern society is due to the money behind it, rather than to its spiritual appeal. […] Naturally a lot of people, and people who are not only good but able and intelligent, will disagree here; they will vehemently deny that Christianity has failed […].

They have faith with a large F. My faith is a very small one, and I only intrude it because these are strenuous and serious days, and one likes to say what one thinks while speech is comparatively free; it may not be free much longer (quoted in Rosenbaum 1993:172).

In his 1959 address to the Cambridge Humanists, “How I lost my Faith”, Forster described how he had lost faith in the purposive narrative of Christianity:

I thought first about the Trinity and found it very odd. […] The idea of a god becoming a man to help men is overwhelming to anyone possessed heart […]

I was aware that this world needs help. But I never had much sense of sin and when I realized that the main aim of the Incarnation was not to stop war or pain or poverty, but to free us from sin I became less interested and ended by scrapping it too (quoted in Baxter 2003:71).

Faith had disappeared from his thoughts and he did no longer wish to save or be saved. This was another barrier between Forster and revealed religion, whether Christian or Pagan. Notwithstanding, the failure of the Christian narrative, he did not abandon his interest in salvation, and the desire to fill the void left by an absent God was still there. In

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this respect, in his short story “The Machine Stops”, he underlines the failure of faith when it is built upon inappropriate objects of faith, and tries to provide a new narrative by which humans could understand life. In the face of this doubtful attitude towards religious faith, Forster did not stop questioning dogmatic belief and looking for an alternative. Responding to an accusation of atheism he indeed answered: “I have more sense of religion now than in the days of my Orthodox Christianity. Do you say that unless one believes in God one has no religious sense?” (quoted in Iglesias 2018:98). Thus, behind the figure of a staunch secularist there is an interest in the imaginative possibilities of a religious sensibility and a continuous questioning of the self and religiosity.

Despite their differences in religious affiliation, several poets and novelists made the theme of religion central to some of their works, and in particular one of the major poets of this age, Thomas Stearns Eliot, epitomises the Modernist fascination with religious experience. Written before his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism, The Waste Land (1922), acted as a manifesto of the role of religious crisis in Modernism. The first part of the poem, entitled “The Burial of the Dead”, is characterised by a sense of crisis created through the invocation of images taken from the Old Testament:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock (Eliot 1976:44).

This passage, rich in powerful Biblical echoes, describes the modern civilisation which is falling away from religious ideals, and suggests how the persistent problem of the quest for religious alternatives was a concern for Eliot, who often lamented the rise of atheism in a modern life characterised by alienation, and the desire for power and wealth. Christianity was in a state of collapse, it was like “a heap of broken images”, and Western culture, that had depended upon it for a long time, started to lose coherence (Bradshaw 2006:327). The crisis at the centre of The Waste Land is reflected in Eliot’s

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quotations of famous and obscure texts, and by his use of different languages to convey a sense of generalised, overwhelming crisis. Eliot, like Virginia Woolf, chose an aesthetic of fragmentation that forces the reader to make unexpected connections and refuse any favourable point of view. In addition, in his 1934 pageant-play The Rock, he complained about the rise of atheism through the Chorus which retells the Biblical story of the creation:

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before:

though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.

Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before

That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason,

And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.

(Eliot 1934:51).

For Eliot, God was the goal, and he made it clear in this passage through the sense of disappointment for the new gods such as Money and Power. Modernists like Eliot were witnessing a crisis of institutional religion which led to a search for new forms of religious experience. As Bradshaw points out, “Eliot’s conversion to Christianity and baptism in the Church of England in 1927 offer the most famous example of the modernists’ quest for religious alternatives to what Eliot himself had called “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history” (2006:19).

Among those who were concerned with the threats to revealed religion, the figure of W. H. Auden also stands out. One of the most important writers of the 1930s, he was a member of the so-called “Thirties Generation”, consisting of poets born between 1900 and 1916 – such as Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice. Thy shared the awareness of being deprived of the easy atmosphere of Georgian times and struggled, during their adolescence, with the last days of the Great War and the resulting social tensions (Skelton 1964:14). As a consequence, they were aware that it was impossible to avoid being affected by these matters. Auden’s theological orientation is emblematic of this particular historical moment, when the claims of the Christian intellectual tradition were reconsidered by secular-minded Western thinkers (McClay 2006). After a rejection

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of the Christian faith, he gradually reconciled with it as a reaction to the political realities of the late 1930s. An especially emblematic episode is his witnessing of the closing down of churches by the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War:

On arriving in Barcelona, I found as I walked through the city that all the churches were closed and there was not a priest to be seen. To my astonishment, this discovery left me profoundly shocked and disturbed. The feeling was far too intense to be the result of a mere liberal dislike of intolerance, the notion that it was wrong to stop people from doing what they like, even if it is something silly like going to church. I could not escape acknowledging that; however I had consciously ignored and rejected the Church for sixteen years, the existence of churches and what went on in them had all the time been very important to me. (quoted in VanZanten 2000:100).

Even though Auden abhorred the Christian religion in his young age, there was now some sort of religious attitude in his words. His return to Christianity was not sudden, and his faith was balanced by doubts, in that being a Christian, according to Auden, was something one could pray to become, while Christianity was not a set of intellectual propositions, but a way of being in the world (McClay 2006). The poet’s version of Christianity was far from moral prohibitions and formal institutions or any other conventional aspect of organised religion. His religious belief shaped the tone and contents of his poems, but he valued the doctrines of the Anglican Church only insofar as they helped him to strengthen love and solidarity (Mendelson 2007:1). After a first period in which the poet was fascinated by the theories of Freud, and then by Marxism, he realised, as Gareth Reeves points out, that “Psychoanalysis, Freudianism, Marxism all are partial and monistic explanations, whereas Christianity is complete” (quoted in Smith 2004:189). As soon as Auden began to consider Christianity as a whole system which replaced Psychology and Marxism, religious belief gradually figured in his poetry in a predominant way, and a great amount of the poetry written after his migration in the U.S.

became dominated by this theme (Mabooo 2012:98). Other important topics in his poetry were the failure of humanity, along with the quest for religious values. As in the case with T.S. Eliot’s, most of Auden’s later poetry is characterised by a strong religious feeling, he indeed returned to Christianity in his search for a system which would have replaced the world and its chaotic condition. The quest for faith and spiritual values in the Modern world was revealed also in the poem entitled “The Shield of Achilles”. First published in

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1952, this composition explored the collapse of religious, moral and spiritual values in modern society through a contrast between the ancient Greek civilisation and Auden’s alienated era:

She looked over his shoulder For vines and olive trees, Marble well-governed cities And ships upon untamed seas […]

She looked over his shoulder For athletes at their games, Men and women in a dance Moving their sweet limbs

Quick, quick, to music (Auden 1969:294).

The repetition of “but” – “but there on the shining shield” – introduces the juxtaposition of the Modern and the Greek world, emphasising the contrast between the miserable present and the heroic past. The reminiscence of the ancient world, characterised by order, art and religious rituals, clashes with violent scenes from modern life:

A plain without a feature, bare and brown, No blade of grass, no sign of neighbourhood, Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down, Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood An unintelligible multitude,

A million eyes, a million boots in line,

Without expression, waiting for a sign (Auden 1969:294).

The twentieth-century world is presented as a waste land where military operations and violence prevail. The personal pronoun “she” refers to Thetis, the mother of Achilles, who was seeking art, organisation and religious rituals, namely the fundaments of classical life. Instead she finds cruelty, concentration camps and barbed wire. The violence of contemporary life is stressed by the image of “three pale figures

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(who) were led forth and bound / To three posts driven upright in the ground”, which seems to allude to the crucifixion of Christ (Maboo 2012:114). Thetis’ anguish in front of the desolation of such a world is not discrepant with Auden’s pessimistic view, who wrote in the same poem: “[…] Column by column in a cloud of dust/They marched away enduring a belief/Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief” (Auden 1969:294). Moreover, his 1948 poem “In Praise of Limestone”, deals with the idyllic world of limestone in order to talk about religion, and good and evil as present in the life of human beings. Auden’s land of limestone is similar to the Eliotian waste land, as he describes the contemporary world as follows: “[…] dilapidated province, connected / To the big world by a tunnel, with a certain / Seedy appeal […] (Auden 1969:239). Yet, towards the end, Auden evokes “the life to come”, emphasising once again the importance of spirituality and his strengthening belief in Christianity and God (Maboo 2012:116).

Although the Modernists were concerned by, or interested in, the alleged absence of God in narrative and language, their reactions differed widely. On the other and of the spectrum, stands Ezra Pound, one of the most influential and controversial poets of the twentieth century. His attitude towards religion was rather complicated and it has never been clarified by his critics. In one of his letters, written in 1916, he expressed his atheistic or agnostic opinion stating that “religion is the root of all evil […]” and then

Say that I consider the Writings of Confucius, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the only safe guides in religion […] Christ can very well stands as an heroic figure. The hero need not be of wisdom all compounded. Also he’s not wholly the to blame for the religion that’s been foisted on to him […]. I consider the Metamorphoses a scared book, and the Hebrew scriptures the record of a barbarian tribe, full of evil (quoted in D’Agostino 1960: 136).

This passage makes clear Pound’s anti-Christian and anti-religious attitude, as well as his fascist belief, which could be considered as an alternative object of faith originating from God’s absence (Baxter 2003:202). The poet was a declared anti-Semite who often spoke favourably of pogroms against the Jews, and in favour of the Mussolini regime. History was perceived by Pound as an endless struggle between the pure European values of Catholicism and the rootless monopolistic values that he attributed to Hebraism (Nicholls 1984:156). His reading of history was increasingly aggressive since he began to perceive Jewish and Protestant intellectualism as a menace to Catholic

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mysteries: “But faith is weakened by debates, which are more or less rabbinical and if not rabbinical at least anti-totalitarian. […] Faith is totalitarian. The mystery is totalitarian.

The sacred symbols are totalitarian” (Nicholls 1984:158). As remarked by Nicholls, it is clear from this statement that Pound subscribed to anti-intellectualism and that he perceived all forms of thought as enemies of faith, moreover the poet’s words revealed the prevailing ideology of the time according to which faith was something that could not be questioned (1984:157).

The horror of Fascism and Nazism, as well as the World Wars, created a crisis of conscience among many writers and intellectuals. The nineteenth-century faith in the possibility of a world united in a state of peace was swept away by the violence of dictatorships, and post-war Europeans found themselves in a waste land where traditional values seemed incapable of coping with such destruction. In the face of this situation, faith in God was inevitably crushed, since people started to believe that either God did not care about them or that he did not exist at all (Shobeiri 2011:290). This dark century left a mark both on literature and theatre, which represented another outlet for the widespread anguish and pessimism. A case in point is the famous playwright Samuel Beckett, whose works, such as Waiting for Godot, provided a metaphor for the restless search for answers to scepticism. Waiting for Godot, staged in 1952, is composed by two acts and has a typical absurdist plot: two tramps, the hopeful Vladimir and the earthbound Estragon, are waiting for the arrival of another character, Godot, who never appears. The main characters are not sure that they actually know Godot, but keep waiting by a barren tree on a desolate road: the play finishes without reaching a conclusion. This is an emblematic absurdist play, in that it lacks teleology and portrays the futility of man’s struggle in a cruel world (Lövgren 2016:1). According to Martin Esslin, absurdist drama was born after the World Wars when beliefs shattered, and man was deprived of something to believe in (Esslin 1988:23). That divine silence turned existence into something absurd and desolate, and for Beckett, this silence was always coupled with an inability to give up the search for an alternative deity. This was made clear especially by Vladimir and Estragon who, unable to dismiss the idea of a possible Creator, never discard the actual existence of God (Lövgren 2016:4).

Human beings and God in Beckett’s plays are linked by a complex relationship which gives rise to different and contradictory interpretations. The playwright’s attitude