Samuel Butler's Treatment of Christianity in Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited

Samuel Butler's Treatment of Christianity in Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited By Jan Jedrzejewski Institute of English Studies University of Lodz, Poland If there is any moral in Christianity, if there is anything to be learned from it, if the whole story is not profitless from first to last, it comes to this that a man should back his own opinion against the world's—and this is a very risky and immoral thing to do, but the Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy.1 This remark from the "Rebelliousness" section of the Notebooks seems to epitomize the characteristic attitude of Samuel Butler's approach to the numerous philosophical, religious, and scientific questions that he dealt with in his writings. As one of his early biographers observed, "there was a fundamental sanity and vigour in Butler, a strong sense of reality, a keen analytical faculty and a power of turning accepted ideas upside down and inside out in order to get a fresh view of them."2 At the same time, however, the profundity and earnestness of his often most eccentric convictions and the perseverance with which he promoted them in his works make him, for all his rebelliousness and unpredictability, essentially a Victorian—an enfant terrible, but still unmistakably an enfant of his era. Wide-rangingly amateurish as Samuel Butler's interests were—from Italian culture to biology, from classical studies to biography—it is possible to point to two areas which seem to have been closest to his mind and which found fullest expression in his writings. The first is the theory of evolution, seen basically in its non-Darwinian version following the theories of Buffon and Lamarck; the second is the wide range of problems concerning the Christian religion, particularly the question of the source and role of the miraculous, which constitutes such an important part of the doctrine and teaching of the Church. Both issues were dealt with in different ways throughout Butler's career as a writer, not only in the form of directly expository books and essays but also more indirectly under the guise of fiction, in tum so various and distinct as, on the one hand, the allegory of Erewhon or, on the other, the approximation of the typical nineteenth-century realist convention in The Way of All Flesh. Thus, for example, the question of the resurrection of Christ constitutes the main problem of works so different and so distant in time as the pamphlet on The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (1865) and Erewhon Revisited (1901). Necessarily, this temporal and formal diversity is parallelled by considerable modification of the ideas presented in the books, which reflects the author's development as a thinker. Possibly the best example of this is provided by Butler's decision to introduce substantial changes 415 Jedrzejewski: Butler's Treatment of Christianity into the 1901 edition of Erewhon. The process seems to be of particular interest when comparing Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited, written at a distance of almost thirty years from each other. Because of the essential similarity of their subject-matter, they clearly exemplify the directions in which Samuel Butler's views as well as his literary technique developed. This essay investigates the ways in which the two books reflect Butler's attitude towards Christianity, not only through the ideas they express directly, but also through the manner in which they operate as works of fiction: in their characterization, their construction of the narrative voice, and other formal procedures. The problem has so far received relatively little attention from Samuel Butler's critics—most tend to under-represent Erewhon Revisited and to treat Erewhon as what might be called a collection of satirical essays rather than as a complete, even if not very successfully unified, whole. I First published in 1872, Erewhon occupies a special position among Butler's writings, both as his first major book and as the only one, apart from the posthumously published The Way of All Flesh, to achieve lasting popularity. Although not the first work of the then 36-year-old author to appear in print, Erewhon was in a sense Butler's real literary debut, the...