Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination by Sebastian LeCourt (review)

The central insight of Sebastian LeCourt's excellent monograph is that "secularity is a discourse about religion, not its lack" (1). He follows other Victorianists in moving away from the empirical question of whether religion waxed or waned in Britain to investigate instead how Victorians defined it and thus demarcated it from other areas of life (28). Undergirding his book is also a quiet but insistent politics: he follows his theoretical lodestars Charles Taylor, Tal Asad, and Saba Mahmood in emphasizing the shortcomings of secularism, or the version of it bequeathed to the present by Western history. These theorists argue that only when religion is defined narrowly as the beliefs that individuals choose for themselves is it plausible to insist that it can or should be refused entry to the public sphere. If Western secularity perhaps took a wrong turn as early as John Locke (14), then the Victorian period looks like the cul-de-sac for its "Protestant conceptions of sincerity and interiority" (3). LeCourt, though, argues that Victorian intellectuals always harboured doubts about this disembodied Protestant secularism. The "liberal writers" (2) he discusses—Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Andrew Lang—are drawn to meatier accounts of religion as a tie that binds, one that shapes individuals, nations, and races and that is inherited rather than chosen. LeCourt cycles through various labels for their rebellion against impoverished visions of religion and thus secularity: "aesthetic secularism" or "pluralistic secularism" (3) but more commonly "many-sidedness" (17), an insistence that a liberal aesthetic should confront and incorporate particularist world views. If many-sidedness had a German Romantic provenance, then its cultivation led disenchanted liberals to anthropology, which allowed them to imagine what mental worlds bounded by ethnicity might be like: to be chosen by your religion, rather than to choose it. In deft overviews of Victorian anthropology in his introduction and in his first chapter—on Friedrich Max Müller, the living link between German philology and anthropology—LeCourt recognizes that it was a fragmented discipline without a secure institutional home, whose methodological assumptions oscillated sharply over time. Although racialist approaches were sometimes in vogue, the rise of evolutionary thinking revived an enlightened stadialism which envisaged all peoples as passing up the same ladder of mental development. But all of these approaches posed a challenge to the autonomous Protestant subject who is the conventional hero of secularization narratives, because even theorists who believed in a unitary human nature maintained that people and their religions were deeply determined by their cultures.

Thanks to scholars such as George Stocking, Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay, Colin Kidd, and Timothy Larsen, the religious preoccupations of Victorian anthropology and its prolonged flirtation with racism are familiar enough. LeCourt breaks new ground in documenting how anthropology's understanding of religion as an ethnic identity marked Victorian aesthetics. The second chapter argues that Matthew Arnold valued culture for its ability to blend strident particularisms. LeCourt's Arnold views culture neither as a substitute for religion nor as a homogenous whole. Instead, religion (and religions) poses tests for culture's assimilative power, with "Hebraism" particularly fascinating him as a faith that challenged but ultimately enriched the many-sided knower. Yet although LeCourt's Arnold is drawn to racial understandings of religion, he was undecided on whether aesthetics sits above or within racial determinism. Did culture reconcile Hellenism and Hebraism, for instance, or should it not just be identified with Hellenism (96)? The third chapter presents George Eliot as still more subtle and undecided in her stance on that question. Although she rebels against the canting certainties of evangelical Christianity, the ruthless solipsism of German higher criticism and philosophy do not make for a desirable alternative because it leaves the Scriptures and religion as no more than the projection of the individual's wants. Eliot finds a worthier foil to the secular in Daniel Deronda's Judaism. Deronda does not choose it through laborious ratiocination; rather...