Book contents
- Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century
- Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 A Complete System of Atheism: Jonathan Swift
- Chapter 2 Godless Dunces: Alexander Pope
- Chapter 3 The Limits of Self: Sarah Fielding
- Chapter 4 Gender and the Orient: Phebe Gibbes
- Chapter 5 Ecumenical Poetics: William Cowper
- Coda
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 5 - Ecumenical Poetics: William Cowper
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 August 2020
- Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century
- Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 A Complete System of Atheism: Jonathan Swift
- Chapter 2 Godless Dunces: Alexander Pope
- Chapter 3 The Limits of Self: Sarah Fielding
- Chapter 4 Gender and the Orient: Phebe Gibbes
- Chapter 5 Ecumenical Poetics: William Cowper
- Coda
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter argues that William Cowper aligned various faiths against atheism and the moral degeneration that, in his mind, atheism necessarily produced. Examining poems from all phases of Cowper’s career – including his 1782 moral satires, the Olney Hymns (1779), The Task (1785), and “The Castaway” (1799; 1803) – I elucidate his belief that, unlike insensible atheists, Christians should extend their sympathy to all parts of God’s creation: to the Indians oppressed by British colonialism, to the poor inhabitants of the British countryside, even to the hares Cowper kept as pets in Olney. The only figure unworthy of such sympathy in Cowper’s thinking was the atheist. Thus, for Cowper, non-Christians from abroad were excusable, and even respectable, as long as they believed in a deity and did their best with the portion of divine light they had been granted. Cowper rejected all faiths but evangelical Christianity as false, yet he aspired to a form of sociability that was available to all theists. Although there were clear limits to Cowper’s ecumenical impulses, they reveal the imaginative multifaith alliances eighteenth-century atheism was capable of engendering.
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- Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth CenturyA Literary History of Atheism, pp. 170 - 202Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020