Shelley After Atheism
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Colin Jager is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. His interests include secularism, religion, cognitive science, and the relations between philosophy and literature. He is the author of The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (U of Pennsylvania P, 2007). Recent articles have appeared in Public Culture, Theory and Event, Romantic Circles, and Pedagogy.
Footnotes
Thanks to David Collings, William Galperin, and audiences in North Carolina and Wisconsin for their responses to earlier versions of this essay.
1. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Resolution in France, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993) 9.
2. On The Necessity of Atheism, see Michael Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982) 42; on the hotel register, see Martin Priestman, Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 232; Timothy Webb, Shelley: A Voice not Understood (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1977) 141; and Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Harper Collins, 1974London: Harper Collins, 1995) 340, 342. Byron apparently tried to scratch out Shelley’s entry. News of the inscription reached England by way of Robert Southey. For good measure, Shelley entered “L’Enfer” (Hell) under “destination” in the register.
3. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca; Cornell UP, 1981) 102.
4. Percy Shelley, “Mont Blanc; Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni,” lines 107, 127– 29. Shelley's Poettγ and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002). Hereafter SPP.
5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (London: Penguin, 1997) 562. The poem first appeared in the Morning Post in September of 1802. On the popularity of Chamonix for religious pilgrimage, see Robert M. Ryan, The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) 196; Holmes, Shelley 340; Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005) 87–90.
6. Ryan, Romantic Reformation 197; Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Holder and Stoughton, 1989) 334–35.
7. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001). Hereafter RE.
8. Scrivener 7, 79. Also Gerald McNiece, Shelley and the Revolutionary Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1969) 7.
9. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Earl R Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971).
10. See Israel, Radical Enlightenment; and David Berman, A History of Atheism in Britain from Hobbes to Russell (London and New York: Routledge, 1988). Particularly in the early- modern period, accusations of atheism tend to travel under other names: Epicurianism, Naturalism, Hobbsianism, Spinozism. Sometimes it was simply shorthand for heresy or heterodoxy.
11. Alan Charles Kors, Atheism in France, 1650–1729: The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief (Princeton; Princeton UP, 1990) 53.
12. René Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis; Hackett, 1980) 16. Orig. pub. 1637.
13. Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990). Much of modern atheism conveniently forgets that “religion” is a cultural and historical construct; as a glance at the relevant anthropological literature suggests, it is not a natural kind. See Colin Jager, “Romanticism/Secularization/Secularism,” Blackwell Literature Compass 5 (2008), and E. N. Anderson, “Attachment and Cooperation in Religious Groups,” Current Anthropology 51.3 (June 2010): 421–23.
14. Berman 3, 110. Also Priestman, Romantic Atheism 7.
15. Talal Asad, “Thinking about Religious Belief and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, forthcoming. See also Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987).
16. See Gavin Hyman, “Atheism in Modern History,” in Michael Martin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007) 27–46 (42).
17. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007).
18. One reason, perhaps, why the “debate” initiated by the so-called “New Atheists” (Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, et. al.) is so boring.
19. Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Oxford...
