Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T08:16:23.289Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

BROWNING BELIEVING: “A DEATH IN THE DESERT” AND THE STATUS OF BELIEF

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2010

Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg*
Affiliation:
American University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Some John, we are told, possibly both the Evangelist and the beloved apostle, but, for reasons we will see, possibly only one, the other, or neither, reanimated so his dying words can be recorded by other early Christians, tries to tell those who will now live with no contact with anyone who had contact with Jesus Christ, how they may live with that absence. Although his reanimaters preserve and venerate his words, it's not clear that they actually follow them or even understand them. In the wake of the questions first German Higher Criticism and then more recent work in the 1860s had raised with regard to the historical accuracy of the New Testament, Robert Browning, tries to propose how his contemporaries might believe. At the same time, as a consequence of a definition of how to believe, Browning also suggests how to look at the beliefs of others as expressions of one's condition and situation rather than as assertions whose accuracy it is in our interests to measure: he tells us what a dramatic monologue may show us. With regard to either aim, either with his contemporaries or with his critics, he did no better than John did with the poem's auditors. At least with regard to the issue of how to believe, one watches an odd critical history as readers have become increasingly aware of how completely Browning seems to have accepted the conclusions of the Higher Criticism about the historicity of the gospels, but have refused to accept how completely this meant that his justification for belief wound up reproducing the Higher Critical position about the historical reality of Christianity, with the addition of an epistemologically daring and dangerous justification of willed belief in an object accepted as possibly fictional that gives his ostensible Christianity only the appearance of an orthodoxy it had in fact abandoned.

Type
Work in Progress
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , March 2010 , pp. 209 - 238
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Anger, Suzy. Victorian Interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Isobel. “Browning's Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’” Victorian Poetry 2 (1964): 1–9.Google Scholar
Browning, Robert. The Complete Poems, Vol. 1. Pettigrew, John and Collins, Thomas, eds. New York: Penguin Books, 1981.Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Carlyle. Ed. Traill, H. D.. New York: Scribner's, 1903–1904.Google Scholar
Chesterton, G. K. Robert Browning. New York: Macmillan, 1903.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. Autobiography. New York: Norton, 1958.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. 2nd ed. London: John Murray, 1890.Google Scholar
DeVane, William C. A Browning Handbook. 2nd edition. New York: Appleton, 1955.Google Scholar
Drew, Philip. The Poetry of Robert Browning: A Critical Introduction. London: Methuen, 1970.Google Scholar
Dupras, Joseph A. “The Word's Dispersion: Two Letters and a Parchment in Browning's Poetry.” Browning Institute Studies. 18 (1990): 95–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erickson, Lee. Robert Browning: His Poetry and His Audiences. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984.Google Scholar
Essays and Reviews. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1860.Google Scholar
Fairchild, Hoxie, “Browning the Simple-Hearted Casuist.” UTQ 18 (1949): 234–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. Tr. Eliot, George. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1989.Google Scholar
Fish, Thomas E. “Be ‘Whole and Sole Yourself’: the Quest for Selfhood in ‘Bishop Blougram's Apology.’” South Atlantic Review. 56 (January, 1991): 17–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gruber, William. “Temporal Perspectives in Robert Browning's ‘A Death in the Desert.’” Victorian Poetry 17 (1979): 329–42.Google Scholar
Huxley, T. H. “A Modern Symposium: The Influence of Morality on a Decline in Religious Belief.” Nineteenth Century May 1977: 536–39.Google Scholar
Hyde, Virginia. “The Fallible Parchment Structure in Robert Browning's ‘A Death in the Desert.’” Victorian Poetry 12 (1974): 125–35.Google Scholar
Hyde, Virginia. “Robert Browning's Inverted Optic Glass in ‘A Death in the Desert.’” Victorian Poetry 23 (April 1995): 91–96.Google Scholar
Inglesfield, Robert. “Two Interpolate Speeches in Robert Browning's A Death in the Desert.” Victorian Poetry 41.3 (Oct. 2003): 333–47.Google Scholar
William, Irvine, and Honan, Park. The Book, The Ring, and the Poet: A Biography of Robert Browning. New York: McGraw Hill, 1974.Google Scholar
Johnstone, Michael. “Truth Has a Human Face.” Victorian Poetry 38.3 (Oct. 2000): 365–81.Google Scholar
Langbaum, Robert. The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition. New York: Norton, 1963.Google Scholar
Lewes, George Henry. Problems of Life and Mind. 5 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, n.d.Google Scholar
Litzinger, Boyd, and Smalley, Donald, eds. Browning: the Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970.Google Scholar
Mansell, H. L. The Limits of Religious Thought. Boston: Gould & Linsoln, 1860.Google Scholar
McAleer, Edward C., ed. Dearest Isa: Robert Browning's Letters to Isabella Blagden. Austin: U of Texas P, 1951.Google Scholar
Mermin, Dorothy. The Audience in the Poem: Five Victorian Poets. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1983,CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mill, John Stuart. An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy; and of the Principle Philosophical Questions Discussed in his Writings, Vol. IX of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Ed. Robson, J. M.. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1979.Google Scholar
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Tr. Kaufmann, Walter. New York: Random House, 1974.Google Scholar
Newman, John Henry. Apologia pro Vita Sua. Ed. Svaglic, Martin J.. London: Oxford UP, 1967.Google Scholar
Hyde, Virginia. Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects. London: Longmans, Green, 1907.Google Scholar
Orr, Mrs. Sutherland. “The Religious Opinions of Robert Browning.” Contemporary Review 60 (1891): 876–91.Google Scholar
Powell, Baden. “On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity.” Essays and Reviews. 94–144.Google Scholar
Priestley, F. E. L. “Blougram's Apologetics.” UTQ 15 (1946): 139–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raymond, William O. The Infinite Moment and Other Essays in Robert Browning. Second ed. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965.Google Scholar
Ryals, Clyde de L. The Life of Robert Browning: A Critical Biography. Cambridge: Blackwells, 1993.Google Scholar
Shaffer, E. S. ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880. New York: Cambridge UP, 1975.Google Scholar
Spencer, Herbert. First Principles. New York: A. L. Burt, n.d.Google Scholar
Hyde, Virginia. The Principles of Psychology. Paginated as 2 vols., divided into 3. New York: D. Appleton, 1897.Google Scholar
Strauss, David. The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Tr. Eliot, George. London: George Allen, 1913.Google Scholar
Sullivan, Mary Rose. “Browning as ‘New Age’ Thinker in ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’ and ‘A Death in the Desert.’” Studies in Browning and His Circle 18 (1990): 53–62.Google Scholar
Temple, Frederick. “The Education of the World.” Essays and Reviews. 1–49.Google Scholar
Tucker, Herbert F. Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1980.Google Scholar