1 - In the Street: The Thought of God

Summary

FAST

Why should I say I see the things I see not,

Why be and be not?

Show love for that I love not, and fear for what I fear not?

And dance about to music that I hear not?

Who standeth still i’ the street

Shall be hustled and jostled about.

To doubt when all around appear to believe is to be still when everyone else is moving, the only one not dancing - or at least so it seems to Clough writing in 1845. It is a vision that has been with him since at least 1839, when he writes of a ‘doubting soul [that], from day to day,/ Uneasy paralytic lay’. This paralytic doubter, or stock-still agnostic is Clough himself; this is Clough in Oxford at a time when the university was overwhelmed by religious movement, in particular a movement called the Oxford Movement - that dramatic burst of High Church energy which, from 1833 to 1845, sought to recall the Church of England to the ancient rites and traditions of Catholicism. For Clough, the Oxford Movement is, indeed, movement: writing to a friend in 1841, he declares, ‘you have no idea how fast things here are going Rome-wards'.

Clough refers, in part, to those at Oxford who were in the process of converting from Anglicanism to Catholicism; Clough himself, though, was undergoing a process of deconversion, or unconversion. Or perhaps we should say an inverted conversion, since in 1848 Clough writes, intriguingly, of ‘an inverse Saul’. The Saul that Clough has in mind is King Saul of the Old Testament, but by 1848 Clough is very obviously an inverse of the New Testament Saul, the Saul who famously becomes Paul after a dramatic and sudden conversion. Clough's unconversion is, though, far from sudden. When he arrived at Oxford in 1837 he was very much a product of the Low Church evangelicalism of his mother and the Broad Church orthodoxy of Thomas Arnold, Clough's headmaster at Rugby; these influences are everywhere in Clough's undergraduate Oxford diaries, and it is not until the early 1840s, with the new theology or ‘Higher Criticism’ which was coming from Germany, that Clough began to question the historical validity of the Bible. This was a questioning which finally led him, in 1848, to abandon Oxford.