It can be no surprise that Jonathan Swift wrote throughout his life on matters relating to the Anglican church, religion, worship, and discipline. He lived in a kingdom the overwhelming majority of whose inhabitants were believing, observing Christians. In England, much the greater part were baptized and practicing members of the Anglican church, the church established by law (the case in Ireland, as we shall see, was both demographically and politically rather different). Works of theology, divinity, and biblical commentary constituted, in the seventeenth century and through most of the eighteenth century, the most numerous of any class of writings published in Britain. And Swift of course, for virtually all his adult life, was an ordained member of the Anglican priesthood, engaged in its daily duties and its high political interests, and for three decades Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.
It is not easy for us now, however, to think of Swift as primarily a Christian writer. The works we most regularly read, and which have the firmest place in university syllabi, are not his most obviously Christian: Gulliver’s Travels, the Modest Proposal, such poems as “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” or “Cassinus and Peter,” or “A Description of a City Shower.” Our favorites among Swift’s religious works include A Tale of a Tub, or the Argument against Abolishing Christianity, or the Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit; writings, in fact which particularly satisfy our modern preference for uncertainty and reflexivity of voice, for the parodic and indeterminate. Many of Swift’s most significant and exemplary religious statements, however, including his eleven surviving sermons, the Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately enter’d into Holy Orders, or the Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man, use a simpler, more direct, and altogether less playful voice.
Further, Swift must appear in his religious writings, to modern readers, an awkwardly conservative and conventional thinker. Of course we cherish our image of Swift the servant of human liberty, the defender of the lower clergy, the advocate of the Irish common people, the spokesman for Irish economic, political, and ecclesiastical interests.1 Many of his attitudes fit badly or not at all, however, with a modern democratic or ecumenist or pluralist view: his impassioned resistance to the “comprehension” of dissenters or non-conformists (their admission to worship and employment within the established church); his insistence that, while thought is free, religious and political expression must be restricted, even censored; his acceptance, and indeed advocacy, of subordination in society and of episcopacy (government by the bishops) in the church; his arguments for the role of mystery in belief; his apparently almost total disinterest in matters of personal faith, and in the individual’s relationship to God. These positions need to be delineated and explained in the light of Swift’s own life and career, and of the historical circumstances and political and religious debates of his times.
Having begun his career as a protégé of the English statesman and diplomat Sir William Temple, Swift was ordained as a deacon in the Anglican church in 1694, at the age of twenty-six, and as a priest in January 1695. In 1695 he was appointed to Kilroot, in the diocese of Down and Connor in County Antrim, in the capacity of prebendary (the holder of an ecclesiastical living derived from land and property in and around the village itself). As a clergyman in the Church of Ireland – that is, the Anglican church in Ireland – he joined an embattled institution, under severe economic strain, politically dominated by England and the English church hierarchy, struggling to maintain its devotional and pastoral position as a minority group of believers amongst indigenous Roman Catholics and immigrant Presbyterians. He found at Kilroot a parish without a useable church building, almost without parishioners, much of its land alienated from the church, many of its tithes taken from the clergyman’s benefice and appropriated to lay use. Of equal concern from his own point of view, Swift found himself surrounded by a flourishing population of Presbyterians, Scottish small farmers and their descendants, who had flooded into northern Ireland in the reigns of James I and Charles I, hostile to episcopacy and the Church of England liturgy, and vigorously favored by King William and his ministers.2 These years, and this experience, no doubt strengthened if they did not originate Swift’s outspoken antipathy to dissent in all its forms, and his lifelong resistance to the repeal of the Test Act, or Sacramental Test, which excluded from public offices all but those who were prepared to take communion under Anglican forms.
Swift was resident in his Antrim parishes no more than a year before going back to the household of Sir William Temple at Moor Park in Surrey. He returned to Ireland however as chaplain to Charles Berkeley, Lord Justice of Ireland, and was appointed to a prebend (a post entitling him to a share in the cathedral’s revenues) at St. Patrick’s in Dublin in 1700, his church livings including Laracor (of which he was vicar) and Meath. The diocese of Meath differed from Down and Connor in that here Swift and his small Church of Ireland congregation found themselves outnumbered not by Presbyterians but by native Catholics. It resembled Down and Connor however, and all too many other dioceses, in the dilapidation of its churches, the lack of lands and residences for the lower clergy, and the alienation of church tithes into lay hands. Swift’s years at Kilroot and Laracor made him all too aware of the weakened temporal condition of the Irish church, and more especially of the impoverished state of the lower clergy, who subsisted on inadequate stipends, had to spread their ministry over scattered pluralities, and struggled to secure payment of tithes from resentful Anglican landlords. More than two decades later he would complain that “the Maintenance of the Clergy, throughout the Kingdom, is precarious and uncertain” (PW XII: 191). In these first positions he personally felt the effects of the alienation (or “impropriation”) of tithes into the hands of the local Anglican gentry, and in writings even two and three decades later he continued to inveigh against clerical poverty and its causes, and especially the difficulties raised by the Anglican gentry, as well as by Catholics and dissenters, in the payment of tithes.3
In 1707 he was deputed by the Irish bishops to undertake in London a major political enterprise, the solicitation of the remission of two taxes which bore especially heavily on the impoverished lower clergy, the “First Fruits,” payable to the crown by every incumbent as he assumed his benefice, and the “Twentieth Parts,” a sum amounting to one-twentieth of the annual value of a benefice. Swift found the Whig ministry uncooperative, however, the Lord Treasurer Godolphin effectively refusing to agree unless the Irish bishops would accept the removal of the Test in Ireland. This was a concession which Swift, opposed throughout his life to the comprehension of dissenters, of course could not make. It was not until the Whig ministry fell, and Godolphin was succeeded by Harley as Lord Treasurer, that Swift, returning to London once more in 1711, was able to bring his mission to a successful conclusion. His political skills and prominence did not result in the English bishopric for which he had hoped, but in his appointment in 1713 as Dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin.
In this position, until the onset of incapacity in 1742, Swift exercised his most conspicuous influence as a preacher, Christian apologist, and active member of the church as an institution. The Dean of St. Patrick’s had almost a bishop’s dignities and privileges, and Swift exerted his authority in the cathedral with determination; “it is an infallible maxim,” he declared, in a letter of 1721, “that not one thing is done here without the dean’s consent” (C II: 377). Swift’s assertion of his decanal prerogatives not infrequently brought him into conflict with William King, Archbishop of Dublin, whose jurisdictions overlapped with those of the Dean.4 Beyond St. Patrick’s itself, Swift as Dean had jurisdiction over the “liberties,” an urban area of a few acres around the cathedral building. Indeed, over the years he would claim not merely a legal writ but a kind of popular leadership, describing himself as “absolute monarch in the Liberties, and King of the Mob.”5 Swift did not confine himself however to the exercise of his rule. He made every effort to secure the finances, repair and improve the building, maintain the worship, and oversee the music of the cathedral. He was particularly concerned to improve the cathedral choir, critically listening to the performance of the anthem each Sunday evening, and appointing choristers to vacant places on the basis of their musical abilities rather than their connections (C II: 339). He devoted particular attention to the writing and delivery of his sermons; though only eleven survive, they are more than enough to demonstrate the care he took over their composition, and the stress he placed on the preacher’s clear, intelligible delivery of the central beliefs and morals of Christianity (or, to put it more particularly, of Anglican Christianity).6
Throughout his years as Dean, Swift was heavily involved in both the theory and the practice of Christian charity. Like most of his contemporaries, Swift accepted at the same time that all are created equal in the sight of God, and that society is inevitably built on a system of subordination which distributes wealth and power unequally. In his two sermons on the subject, “On Mutual Subjection” and “On the Poor Man’s Contentment,” Swift warns the poor to accept their subjection, but equally insists on the rich man’s duty of charity to those less fortunate, expounding the familiar and conventional notion that a Christian may possess wealth only as a steward of God’s bounty. Swift was not, however, merely a theorist of charity. His personal charitable giving amounted to a third of his (not inconsiderable) decanal income.7 He was concerned especially with the often precarious condition of the small weavers and tradesmen, and their families, who lived in the vicinity of St. Patrick’s. In 1716 he helped to found a charity school for the poor children of the St. Patrick’s “liberties.” Nine years later he was appointed to the board of the Blue Coats charity school. But his greatest charitable act was the bequeathing of his fortune towards the founding of St. Patrick’s Hospital in Dublin, famously and ironically referred to, in the concluding lines of the Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, as “a house for fools and mad”(E III: 817–19).
Swift defended the political and temporal interests of the Anglican church, and of the Church of Ireland, throughout his career. He maintained that, though episcopacy could not be shown to be of divine right, “the Scheme established among us of Ecclesiastical Government . . . is most agreeable to primitive Institution; fittest . . . for preserving Order and Purity, and . . . best calculated for our Civil State” (PW II: 5). In Swift’s view the church had endured a long history of depredation and despoliation, initiated by Henry VIII. Going far beyond a necessary and justifiable reformation, King Henry had seized the lands of the great abbeys, and had applied them to profane uses, rather than to the enrichment of poor bishoprics, or the augmentation of the benefices of parish clergy with cultivable land. Income from tithes and other ecclesiastical dues had been taken from the monasteries, and put into lay hands, leaving parishes stripped of income, and their pastors destitute. The poverty of the lower clergy remained a scandal in the eighteenth century, made most familiar in Swift’s writing in his jibe, in the Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, that “there are . . . in this Kingdom, above Ten Thousand Parsons; whose Revenues added to those of my Lords the Bishops, would suffice to maintain, at least, two Hundred young Gentlemen of Wit and Pleasure.”8 Swift wrote especially energetically on behalf of the Irish church, whose condition had been the same and worse as a consequence of Ireland’s tumultuous and violent history: churches destroyed by the “fanatick zeal” of the Puritans, houses in disrepair, church lands constantly vulnerable to successive conquerors, parishes appropriated to the crown, impoverishment so severe that in many cases up to five or six parishes might be forced into amalgamation to provide a bare support for a single over-worked incumbent.9 Swift’s most significant and practical contribution to the cause of the church and clergy was his embassy to England to gain for the Irish establishment the remission of the First Fruits and Twentieth Parts. He argued effectively for the building of new churches to serve the expanding population of the English cities, and especially of London (PW II: 61). Amongst other significant causes, Swift was especially vocal on the subject of the Irish “interest” in the church, that is, in the cause of filling senior Irish church positions with those educated (as he had been) in Ireland, rather than with clergy sent from England. In this he had a political motive, opposing the Whig government’s attempt to gain interest on the Irish episcopal bench. Swift’s was a constant voice too for the public reputation as well as the material conditions of the lower clergy. Churchmen long before the end of the seventeenth century had deplored the “contempt of the clergy” (the phrase had been made familiar in John Eachard’s tract, The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion Enquired into [1670]), and the topic was a regular theme with Swift. His Church-of-England Man wonders “how that mighty Passion for the Church, which some Men pretend, can well consist with those Indignities, and that Contempt they bestow on the Persons of the Clergy.” He alleges that free-thinkers in general are characterized by the contempt of priests, and, more particularly, he charges Bishop Burnet with indulging the high church habit of “of railing at the Clergy, in the Number of which he disdains to be reckoned, because he is a Bishop.”10
None of Swift’s views on Christian belief, worship, and behavior are significantly at variance with orthodox thinking amongst late seventeenth-century Anglican writers. Nor do they differ in substance from the public and accepted formulations of belief of the Church of England comprised in the Book of Common Prayer (as compiled in 1549 and 1552, and revised in 1662), and particularly the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (drafted in 1571), and the three Creeds (Apostles’, Athanasian, and Nicene) which Anglicanism inherited from the early church. Throughout his life, despite his gloomy and embattled sense of the increasing wildness of the project, he stood up in defense of “real Christianity,” as opposed to the nominal Christianity endorsed by the persona through whose voice is spoken his Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (PW II: 27). His position as a Christian priest is most fully and most straightforwardly set out in Swift’s sermons, where we may find him using (in Louis Landa’s words) “the heritage of ideas – the traditional counsel, the fixed doctrinal notions, the homiletic wisdom of the ages – that any clergyman had at hand for the edification of his flock” (PW IX: 101). Swift states more briefly some of the grounding assumptions of “real” Christian belief in his Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man: “whoever professes himself a Member of the Church of England, ought to believe a God, and his Providence, together with revealed Religion, and the Divinity of Christ” (PW II: 4). Swift believed that man is fallen, and may aspire to (though he may never finally achieve) virtue only through the Christian moral law, and the promise of future rewards and punishments.11 Equally conventionally, and fundamentally, Swift believed that Christian truth was revealed to man by God, and that the Holy Scriptures were the source of that revelation, adequate and comprehensible for the communication of things necessary to belief; “uncorrupt, sufficient, clear, intire,” in John Dryden’s famous formulation, “in all things which our needfull Faith require.”12 Some of those truths are simple, and readily accessible to the exercise of any man’s reason. Some, however, are mysteries which pass understanding, and for that very reason must not be exposed to prying enquiry, or to the grubby particularities of doctrinal polemics.
One of Swift’s consequently very rare statements on doctrinal matters, his sermon “On the Trinity,” provides us with the fullest and clearest statement of his beliefs regarding the revelation afforded by Scripture, the nature of divine mystery, and the role and limits of human reason in understanding and accepting God’s revealed truth. “On the Trinity” is a sermon on a text, in this case the scriptural verse which states and communicates, as Swift would insist, this essential doctrine: “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one” (1 John 5: 7). This verse, the celebrated and notorious “Comma Johanneum,” had been for centuries the subject of anxious and often abstruse interpretative debate amongst Christian theologians and controversialists. In the later years of the seventeenth century and the opening decades of the eighteenth century it had involved Anglican divines in argument with opponents of a variety of persuasions, Socinians (who claimed that Christ was human), Arians (followers of a more ancient heresy, who claimed that Christ was not truly divine, but was created by God), and deists (who, in different ways, argued for a natural and rational religion, monotheistic and non-sectarian). A particular focus of argument was Samuel Clarke’s Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity, published in 1712, and accused by some of Clarke’s many opponents of Arianism. Like many other divines of his time, however, Swift thought such public indulgence in scholastic enquiry and disagreement, on such an issue and such a text, both unnecessary and dangerous, multiplying controversies “to such a Degree, as to beget Scruples that have perplexed the Minds of many sober Christians, who otherwise could never have maintained them” (PW IX: 160). Scripture is the only revelation that God has afforded us, and the Trinity must be understood, Swift insists, in the plain sense of the words of Scripture, even though we cannot conceptualize and rationalize what those words mean. Hence, from Scripture, “it is plain, that God commandeth us to believe that there is a Union and there is a Distinction; but what that Union, and what that Distinction is, all Mankind are equally ignorant, and must continue so, at least until the Day of Judgment, without some new Revelation.” The Trinity, in fact, is a mystery which God has commanded us to believe, but which man’s reason cannot reach. In this respect it resembles other mysteries, such as the incarnation of Christ, which Swift elsewhere characterizes as “an astonishing Mystery, impossible to be conceived by Mans Reason.”13 Swift did not discount the role of individual human reason in religion. In the Trinity sermon he allows that “every Man is bound to follow the Rules and Directions of that Measure of Reason which God hath given him,” and indeed, to follow the rules of reason is to understand that the scriptural expression must be intended as a mystery. Similarly, in his Thoughts on Religion, he insists that “I am in all opinions to believe according to my own impartial reason, which I am bound to inform and improve, as far as my capacities and opportunities will permit” (PW IX: 161, 261). Individuals, however, cannot depend entirely on their own reason. Reason itself is “true and just,” but “the Reason of every particular Man is weak and wavering.” Man after all is not a rational animal, animal rationale, but only capable of reason, rationis capax, as Swift famously wrote, with reference to Gulliver’s Travels, in a letter to Alexander Pope (C III: 103). (The Houyhnhnms, who had no mysteries, could never have understood this point.) We are driven by our interests, our passions, and our vices. Our limited reason must work together with revelation. Using a distinction which had been for decades the stock in trade of such mainstream Anglican divines as Archbishop Tillotson, Swift insists that “Things may be above our Reason, without being contrary to it,” and such things include “the Power, the Nature, and the universal Presence of God.” Those who apply mere human reason to the mystery of the Trinity “shew how impossible it is that Three can be One, and One can be Three,” but the Scripture “saith no such Thing . . . but only, that there is some kind of Unity and Distinction in the Divine Nature, which man cannot possibly comprehend: Thus the whole Doctrine is short and plain, and in itself uncapable of any Controversy; since God hath pronounced the Fact, but wholly concealed the Manner.” So the Trinity sermon, exemplifying the business of the Christian preacher, concludes by resisting the exercise of reasoning pride, and places the doctrine of the Trinity “upon a short and sure Foot, levelled to the meanest Understanding” (PW IX: 167–68).
Issues of authority as well as of reason are involved here. Swift argues in this sermon, as elsewhere, for what his age called “implicit faith.” Doctrines expressed as mysteries in Scripture are to be accepted on the authority of God himself (and, by the congregation, on the authority of the preacher, who delivers the doctrine “as the Church holds it”).14 Nothing can be more reasonable than to believe what God reveals, even if what is communicated is beyond our grasp. In making this confident assertion Swift took arms, with other orthodox believers, against the extreme rationalism of deists such as Matthew Tindal (1657–1733) and John Toland (1670–1722), who insisted rather on “explicit faith.” For the deists, all things were subject to the strict interrogation of human reason, including our understanding of Scripture, and matters of faith. Toland for instance asserted that “to be confident of any thing without conceiving it is no real Faith or Perswasion, but a rash Presumption and an obstinate Prejudice . . . reason is the only Foundation of all Certitude; and . . . nothing reveal’d, whether as to its Manner or Existence, is more exempted from its Disquisitions, than the ordinary Phenomena of Nature.”15
For Swift, however, unlike the deists, human reason on its own can never be an adequate authority. Ultimately all human claims to knowledge are self-obsessed pride: the pride of the projectors of Laputa, who imagine that all knowledge is attainable through the chance operations of a word-frame, or the pride of the hack-narrator in Swift’s Tale of a Tub, who puts himself forward as apologist for all modern projects, and whose tale itself claims to be no less than “a faithful Abstract drawn from the Universal Body of all Arts and Sciences” (PW I: 23). So far from understanding God, we cannot even understand the familiar phenomena of nature.16 Man on his own can never know the truth of belief, and must rely on God’s guidance. This conservative skepticism has very deep roots, in Greek philosophy and, more pertinently, in St. Paul, who warned the contentious Corinthians against “the wisdom of this world,” and insisted that “we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory” (I Corinthians 2: 6, 7). For Swift, and for such later writers as Sterne, this kind of Christian skepticism, which sought refuge from human uncertainty in the rock of faith, was mediated and transmitted by such key figures as Erasmus, Rabelais, and Montaigne.17
Swift shared this distrust of mortal reason, and grounding of knowledge in faith or revelation, with many contemporaries. The consequence of their belief might seem to us paradoxical. The unreliability of human knowledge is taken by Swift to point not (as a more modern radical skepticism might conclude) to an absolute relativity, an epistemological sea of shifting sands, but to the overriding need for all in society to accept existing institutions, political as well as religious. What an individual knows cannot be a basis for civil quiet or religious agreement. One man’s opinions differ from another’s, and even one man, over the course of his life, presents no more than “a Bundle of inconsistencies and Contradictions” (PW I: 244). Such variousness within a man’s own head, and from man to man, must create a dangerous confusion within the state. Dissent and its leaders, such as Swift attacked in A Tale of a Tub (particularly in the chapter on the “Aeolists”), in claiming a truer and newer, and more individual alternative to the established system of governance and belief, can only be a threat to public safety:
Schism lies on that Side which opposeth it self to the Religion of the State . . . I think it clear, that any great Separation from the established Worship, although to a new one that is more pure and perfect, may be an Occasion of endangering the publick Peace . . . For this Reason, Plato lays it down as a Maxim, that Men ought to worship the Gods, according to the Laws of the Country.
(PW II: 11–12)
Political dissent and religious schism of every kind, from this point of view, are dangerous. The ordinary man must accept government as it is, and the ordinary believer must accept the church by law established, submitting to be guided in matters of behavior and profession (though not in matters of internal belief) by the church and the preacher.
Swift’s strongly held and enduring views on these matters were the result not merely of philosophical persuasion, but of his reading of national history, and his personal experience. Swift grew up in the aftermath of the Civil War, when memories of the overthrow of monarchy and the established church, the death of a king and years of bloodshed and violence, were fresh. His first years of pastoral responsibility were passed in Presbyterian Antrim, where he had ample opportunity to develop negative views of the religious and political character of dissent. Though his first publications belong to the opening years of the eighteenth century, Swift may properly be seen as a writer whose mind was deeply and permanently influenced by the events and ideas of the seventeenth century (in all likelihood the religious allegory of A Tale of a Tub was written in the Kilroot years, and bears the fresh stamp of his Kilroot experiences).
Swift left copious written evidence of his own understanding of the bearing of dissent on English church and state history, particularly in his numerous writings against the repeal of the Test Act, and the comprehension of dissenters. The Sacramental Test originated in England in the post-Restoration politico-religious struggle between king and Commons, between Tories and Whigs. The first Test Act of 1673 (extending provisions of the Corporation Act of 1661) provided that any person holding any civil or military office must take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, subscribe to a declaration against transubstantiation, and receive the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. The Sacramental Test was extended to Ireland in 1704. By orthodox Anglicans, such as Swift, the Test was welcomed and energetically endorsed as a support of the church, guaranteeing that the holding of public posts and the making of policy could belong only to Anglican believers (and to “occasional conformists,” dissenters who were prepared to go so far as to take Anglican communion as the Test Act required). To other dissenters, and to Whig ministers, the Test was anathema, excluding large sections of the population from public responsibility and power. To Swift the Test seemed especially essential to the very survival of the church in Ireland, given how numerous the Presbyterians had become in that country. Swift and other Irish clerics had before their eyes the dreadful example (as it seemed to them) of Scotland, where Presbyterians were sufficiently numerous and powerful to persecute the adherents of the church.
The Sacramental Test and the comprehension of dissenters are major topics or central themes of several important writings written as a response to the agitation of the first decade of the eighteenth century, including the Argument against Abolishing Christianity (1708) and A Letter from a Member of the House of Commons in Ireland to a Member of the House of Commons in England concerning the Sacramental Test (1708). Provoked by a further attempt by non-conformists to move parliament to repeal the Test Act, Swift returned energetically and angrily to the subject in 1732 and 1733, in a series of pamphlets including Queries Relating to the Sacramental Test, The Advantages Propos’d by Repealing the Sacramental Test, and (an ironic text, written in the persona of a Roman Catholic) Reasons Humbly Offered to the Parliament of Ireland, for Repealing the Sacramental Test. Swift offers an extended and highly partial historical narrative in The Presbyterians Plea of Merit, In Order to take off the Test, Impartially Examined, published in Dublin in 1733. He traces Presbyterianism back to the exiles who left England in Queen Mary’s reign and “went to Geneva; which City had established the Doctrine of Calvin, and rejected the Government of Bishops.” Returning to England on Queen Mary’s death (1558), they preached their new political and theological views, and attacked the episcopal system and the rites and ceremonies of the church. Despite the discouragement of Elizabeth, “this Faction, under the Name of Puritan, became very turbulent,” and in the reign of James I and Charles I “their Numbers, as well as their Insolence and Perverseness, so far increased, that . . . many Instances of their Petulance and Scurrility, are to be seen in their Pamphlets.” At first, Puritans had written and preached as ordained members of the church, but after the beginning of the Rebellion, Swift explains, “the Term Puritan gradually dropt, and that of Presbyterian succeeded; which Sect was, in two or three Years, established in all its Forms.” The guilt and dishonesty of the Presbyterians did not end with the Civil War. Their claim to have assisted in the Restoration, in 1660, is fallacious. They colluded with the Catholic James II on his accession in 1685, petitioning for the repeal of the Sacramental Test, “with bitter Insinuations of what they had suffered” (PW XII: 264–69). Swift’s characterization in these pamphlets of the history of Puritan and Presbyterian dissent is remorselessly negative, insisting on its enduring turbulence, perversity, insolence, petulance, and scurrility. The deepest sin of the Presbyterians, however, was of course their involvement in rebellion against church and state in the years of the Civil War and Protectorate (1642–58), culminating in “the three most infernal Actions, that could possibly enter into the hearts of Men, forsaken by God; which were, the Murder of a most pious King, the Destruction of the Monarchy, and the Extirpation of the Church; and succeeded in them all” (PW XII: 255).
For Swift dissent was associated with “enthusiasm,” the reference of Christian truth to the inner voice and individual opinion, and more especially the claim by individuals to the private inspiration of the Holy Ghost. Such fanaticism, as he judged it, and its consequences are amongst the earliest targets of Swift’s satire. In Section VIII of A Tale of a Tub the Puritan preacher is transformed into a “Sacred Aeolist,” and his inner voice is transformed from spiritual afflatus to material wind, as he “delivers his oracular Belches to his panting Disciples.” The “Digression on Madness,” one of the most brilliant and characteristic parts of the Tale, satirizes self-obsessed system builders and innovators of all kinds. No sane man would attempt to “reduce the Notions of all Mankind, exactly to the same Length . . . of his own,” yet this is precisely the aim, and the danger, of projectors in philosophy, or politics, or religion. The result of the sleep of reason is the eviction of common sense, of communal understanding, in the individual, and then in his sectarian followers: “when a Man’s Fancy gets astride on his Reason . . . and common Understanding, as well as common Sense, is kickt out of Doors; the first Proselyte he makes is Himself, and when that is once compass’d, the Difficulty is not so great in bringing over others” (PW I: 108). The “Fanatick Strain, or Tincture of Enthusiasm” hence leads to revolution and conflict.18 Public safety and quiet depends upon common sense, which must be, as far as religious matters are concerned, the shared and communal bedrock of the key tenets and agreed forms of worship of the Anglican church. Against the demonstrated destructive effects of enthusiastic schism there is, all nations agree and Swift repeatedly asserted, a necessary remedy: that of making “one established form of doctrine and discipline” (PW XII: 243–44). The chaos of unbrotherly disagreement, of individual opinion and multiplying dissent, must be opposed and resolved by the authority of a legally established church. It is no accident that in his sermon “On Brotherly Love” Swift makes no approach to the wider issue of charity, but provides rather his main statement of the need for a publicly accepted national church. All varieties of genuine Christian belief are entitled, Swift insisted, to the furthest extent of toleration, but they must nonetheless be categorically excluded from comprehension, and power, within the national church and state. A genuine Church-of-England Man, Swift assures us, “is for tolerating such different Forms in religious Worship as are already admitted,” and has “a due Christian Charity to all who dissent from it out of a Principle of Conscience; the Freedom of which, he thinketh, ought to be fully allowed, as long as it is not abused.” Dissenting consciences, however, as English history all too dreadfully shows, must not be admitted to office in either church or state. Where sects are tolerated, “it is fit they should enjoy a full Liberty of Conscience, and every other Privilege of free-born Subjects, to which no Power is annexed. And to preserve their Obedience upon all Emergencies, a Government cannot give them too much ease, or too little power.”19 Hence Swift’s strenuous defense of the Sacramental Test, in his political courses and in his writings over a period of three decades, as the necessary means by which dissenters should be excluded from the rewards of a church and state whose principles they did not in his view support, and as the ultimate bulwark against dire political and ecclesiastic revolutions.
For Swift, in the most absolute sense, all men are free-thinkers. All have liberty of conscience, which, “properly speaking, is no more than the liberty of possessing our own thoughts and opinions, which every man enjoys without fear of the magistrate” (PW IX: 263). The expression of one’s thoughts, however, has consequences in the polity and in the church, and carries responsibilities. If people publish their thoughts to the world, “they ought to be answerable for the effects their thoughts produce upon others” (PW IV: 49). Freedom of expression stops short of the right to shout “fire!” in a crowded theater, and for Swift, as for so many of his contemporaries, post-Civil-War and post-Revolution Britain was just such a theater. Swift regularly represented those whom he thought to be the enemies of state and established church, more particularly the deists and rationalists, as claiming the right not only to think freely, but to publish their thoughts, at the peril of public concord and safety.20 The “friend” of Anthony Collins, who is the authorial persona of Swift’s Mr. C–ns’s Discourse of Free-Thinking, Put into plain English, by way of Abstract, for the Use of the Poor (1713), is made to insist on the right and duty of every free-thinker to disseminate his opinions, and is made too to acknowledge the probable, and historical, result: “if Ten Thousand Free thinkers thought differently from the received Doctrine, and from each other, they would all be in Duty bound to publish their Thoughts (provided they were all sure of being in the right), though it broke the Peace of the Church and State, Ten thousand times.”21 Worse, Swift repeatedly alleges, all kinds of dissenting opinion are characterized not only by an overwhelming urge to publish themselves, but by “a furious zeal for making proselytes,” a deliberate attempt “to propagate the Belief as much as they can, and to overthrow the faith which the Laws have already established.”22 Neither the state nor the church can allow such freedom, and such danger, and in a number of places Swift frankly proposes the censorship of books written in contradiction to the essential shared tenets of public Christian belief. The Church-of-England Man “thinks it a Scandal to Government, that such an unlimited Liberty should be allowed of publishing Books against those Doctrines in Religion, wherein all Christians have agreed.” In his Project for the Advancement of Religion he asks “why a Law is not made for limiting the Press; at least so far as to prevent the publishing of such pernicious Books, as under Pretence of Free-Thinking, endeavour to overthrow those Tenets in Religion, which have been held inviolable almost in all Ages by every sect that pretends to be Christian.”23 In his Remarks on Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church, he wonders “whether the Clergy have not too little Power, since a Book like his, that unsettleth Foundations, and would destroy all, goes unpunished” (PW II: 95). Swift was not alone in desiring restraint of such works, and certainly had grounds for thinking there was no adequate control. The English church had no effectual scheme for licensing publication. Legislation of 1698 “for the suppressing all pernicious books and pamphlets, which contain in them impious doctrines against the Holy Trinity” was not effective.
In an established church founded upon shared and accepted truths it is naturally the business of preaching to communicate those truths plainly to an audience of real men and women. Swift makes his views on pulpit oratory explicit in two key texts, the sermon “Upon Sleeping in Church,” and A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Enter’d into Holy Orders. For Swift, “the two principal Branches of Preaching, are first to tell the People what is their Duty; and then to convince them that it is so,” with topics drawn from Scripture and from reason. He insists that “the Doctrine delivered by all Preachers is the same.” It is precisely by repeatedly covering “old beaten Subject[s]” that a pastor inculcates the church’s doctrine. The congregation should not expect “a constant Supply of Wit and Eloquence on a Subject handled so many Times”; a sermon is concerned with truth, not entertainment. The language of the preacher should be plain and comprehensible; “Proper words in proper Places, makes the true Definition of a Style.” He warns his newly ordained gentleman against hard and obscure words, in particular the jargon of the higher theological debate, for “a Divine hath nothing to say to the wisest Congregation of any Parish in this Kingdom, which he may not express in a Manner to be understood by the meanest among them.” Swift warns too against what he calls the “moving manner of preaching,” which has been in fashion not only amongst preachers of “the Fanatick or Enthusiastick Strain,” but also amongst divines of the Church of England itself. The purpose of the preacher must be to inform and persuade his flock, and in Swift’s mind “A Plain convincing Reason may possibly operate upon the Mind both of a learned and ignorant Hearer, as long as they live; and will edify a Thousand Times more than the Art of wetting the Handkerchiefs of a whole Congregation.”24
Like so much else in his writings on Christianity, these views demonstrate Swift’s profound sense of the public functions and responsibilities of the church, combining a powerful and committed populism with an impassioned defense of shared and lasting truths. At the outset of this chapter I suggested that Swift might seem to a modern sensibility an awkwardly conventional thinker. Certainly he must be viewed as a profoundly skeptical conservative, who placed his trust more in institutions and stability than in individuals and change. Swift’s passionate endorsements of public Christianity and orthodox doctrine, and his equally forceful attacks on the individualistic, the charismatic, and the innovative, are neither reactionary nor extreme, but consistent with common positions in his own time, common and widely accepted positions which were in many ways apparently under threat, and apparently worth fighting for.25 It is not appropriate to judge him by modern standards of pluralism, ecumenism, and egalitarianism. Nor is it appropriate to judge him by modern assumptions about individual Christian spirituality and behavior. Though he says so little about his personal belief, and though he famously described himself as “not the gravest of divines” (P II: 764), the seriousness of his Christian faith, as well as his commitment to his church, are not in doubt. If Swift preferred the middle road of orthodox Anglicanism, it is clear he did so with careful consideration of where that route led, and of the enemies which had to be fought on either side. Swift’s religious writings, combative, partial, engaged with political as well as theological particularities, are the characteristic products of a warfaring as well as a wayfaring Christian.
1. These issues have been widely discussed, but see especially Louis A. Landa, “Jonathan Swift and Charity,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 44 (1945), 337–50; Carole Fabricant, “The Voice of God and the Actions of Men: Swift among the Evangelicals,” in Hermann J. Real and Helgard Stöver-Leidig (eds.) Reading Swift: Papers from the Third Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1998), pp. 141–54.
2. The fullest narratives of Swift’s church career are given in Louis A. Landa, Swift and the Church of Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954) and in Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: the Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962–83).
3. See Landa, Swift and the Church of Ireland, pp. 16–18, 151–2; E II: 158.
5. See Carole Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 234, 244–45.
6. For a fuller account, see E III: 74–81.
7. The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), vol. V, p. 13. Swift’s attitudes to charity are discussed at length in Landa’s “Jonathan Swift and Charity” (note 1 above).
8. A Preface to the B–p of S-r-m’s Introduction to the Third Volume of the History of the Reformation of the Church of England, PW IV: 64–65; Concerning that Universal Hatred, which Prevails against the Clergy, PW XIII: 123–25; An Argument against Abolishing Christianity, PW II: 30.
9. On the Bill for the Clergy’s Residing on their Livings, PW XII: 183–84; Memorial to Robert Harley Concerning the First-Fruits, PW XVI: 677, 678.
10. Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man, PW II: 8; Mr. C–ns’s Discourse of Free-Thinking, Put into plain English, PW IV: 43; Preface to the B–p of S-r-m’s Introduction, PW IV: 70.
11. See, for instance, Mr. C–ns’s Discourse of Free-Thinking, Put into plain English, PW IV: 40.
12. John Dryden, Religio Laici, lines 299–300.
13. Mr. C–ns’s Discourse of Free-Thinking, Put into plain English, PW IV: 35. The words are a quotation from Dr. South, and here put by Swift into the mouth of his persona, a friend of Collins.
14. A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Enter’d into Holy Orders, PW IX: 77.
15. Quoted by Louis Landa in the course of his extended discussion of this issue in “Swift, the Mysteries, and Deism,” in his Essays in Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 89–106, especially pp. 104–05. See also J. A. Richardson, “Swift’s Argument: Laughing us into Religion,” Eighteenth-Century Life 13: 2 (1989), 35–45, especially pp. 37, 39.
16. Landa compares Swift’s position here with John Locke’s discussion of the limits of human understanding in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (4. 6. 12); “Swift, the Mysteries, and Deism,” pp. 100–1.
17. The nature and provenance of late seventeenth-century skepticism has been richly described: see, notably, Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), and Louis I. Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956). A cogent account of Swift’s relation to the tradition is given in Tim Parnell, “Swift, Sterne, and the Skeptical Tradition,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 23 (1994), 221–42. Also see Claude Rawson’s extensive treatment of the connection between Swift and Montaigne, in particular, in God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially pp. 5–9, 17–91.
18. A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, PW I: 174.
19. The Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man, PW II: 6–7, 12; “On Brotherly Love,” PW IX: 178.
20. For an important discussion of Swift’s understanding of the liberty of conscience, and its relation to familiar thinking on the subject amongst orthodox contemporaries, see Roger Lund, “Swift’s Sermons, ‘Public Conscience,’and the Privatization of Religion,” Prose Studies 18 (1995), 150–74, especially pp. 166–70.
21. PW IV: 36. Compare the Argument against Abolishing Christianity, PW II: 29.
22. “On the Testimony of Conscience,” PW IX: 151; “A Sermon upon the Martyrdom of K. Charles I,” PW IX: 227.
23. A Project for the Advancement of Religion, and the Reformation of Manners, PW II: 60–61. Compare The Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man, PW II: 10.
24. A Letter to a Young Gentleman, PW IX: 65–66, 68–70; “On Sleeping in Church,”PW IX: 213, 214.
25. As has been shown, from a variety of different positions, by such recent commentators as Donald Greene, “The Via Media in an Age of Revolution: Anglicanism in the Eighteenth Century,” in Peter Hughes and David Williams (eds.) The Varied Pattern: Studies in the Eighteenth Century (Toronto: A. M. Hakkert, 1971), pp. 297–320; Lund, “Swift’s Sermons, ‘Public Conscience,’ and the Privatization of Religion;” and Parnell, “Swift, Sterne, and the Skeptical Tradition.”