Tennyson's Faith: A Re-examination

DONALD HAIR Tennyson's Faith: A Re-examination Tennyson's central beliefs are well known, and his grandson summarizes them admirably at the end of his essay on 'Tennyson's Religion': 'the guidance of the Universe by a God who is Love: 'the revelation of God's love and the divine law through Jesus Christ: 'the immortality of the human spirit: and 'thefreedom ofthe human will," Equally well known is the unsystematic way in which Tennyson held these beliefs: 'he was certainly no regular church-goer: Robert Martin says of the about-to-bemarried poet,2 and Hallam Tennyson notes his father's consistent refusal to formulate his creed: 'he thought, with Arthur Hallam, that "the essential feelings of religion subsist in the utmost diversity of forms." 'J This liberalism was neither hazy nor lazy; it was based on Tennyson's acute perception of actual human experience, particularly his own, with all its depths and heights, starts and hesitations, calms and alarms. Such experience was a fruitful source for the poetry, and accounts for the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which In Memoriam, for instance, is organized. Alan Sinfield, James Kincaid, Dwight Culler, and others have explored these complexities skilfully,4 and their analyses give fresh force to the assertion that Tennyson bases his faith on actual experience. Revelation, the Bible, miracles, and the authority of the church were (and are) conventional foundations for faith, and Tennyson does not exclude these from consideration, but his central concern is life as it is actually lived. We know a great deal about Tennyson's life as he actually lived it, thanks to Robert Martin's superb biography, but we know less about the intellectual background of Tennyson's position. Not, I hasten to add, about his faith in the context of the science of his age, for Douglas Bush, Lionel Stevenson, Georg Roppen, and others have examined such matters as Tennyson's treatment of astronomy and evolution in relation to belief.' But the view that human life itself is the basis of faith - that has a context that needs exploring. The context is provided by Tennyson's education, and I want to focus on two major thinkers with whom he came into contact at Cambridge, Locke and Coleridge. They belong to different philosophical traditions, yet both give considerable authority to actual human experience. Locke, profoundly disturbed by the religious and political upheavals of the seventeenth century, examined the human understanding in an effort to UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 55, NUMBER 2 , WINTER 1985/6 186 DONALD HAIR mark the boundaries of knowledge and opinion, so that factions and sects might be discouraged from claiming authority for assumptions that, however necessary for daily life, were matters of faith. Coleridge reacted against the Christian apologetics of the eighteenth century, with its persistent use of external evidence - the design of nature, scripture, miracles, and testimony - and based his defence of Christianity on inner experience and the make-up of the human mind. He recognized that external evidence can be evidence only ifit is of concern or interest to us in the actual conduct of our lives, and hence the acceptance of it depends upon a prior need or capacity in us. These two thinkers illuminate two major aspects of Tennyson's faith: the distinction, which he makes throughout his work, between faith and knowledge, and the affirmation that faith is the expression of a human need from which it gains its authority. The facts of Tennyson's education are well known. When he was an undergraduate, the curriculum at Cambridge was largely empiricist in its philosophical orientation. 'Moral philosophy' was 'drawn almost entirely from the works ofJohn Locke and William Paley:6and An Essayconcerning Human Understanding and Paley's three books (Evidences of Christianity, Natural Theology, and Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy) were required reading. Tennyson found the studies 'uninteresting' and 'matter of fac!.'7 His son wrote in his Memoir that 'the narrowness and dryness of the ordinary course of study at Cambridge, the lethargy there, and the absence of any teaching that grappled with the ideas of the age and stimulated and guided thought on the subjects of deepest human...