Science and Religion: In Memoriam

Edward Litzinger
Victorian Literature
Dr. K. D. Verma
10-22-07


Science and Religion: In Tennyson’s In Memoriam


         Alfred Lord Tennyson is the voice of mankind in a revolutionary time of spiritual crisis and grief while introducing his curious perceptions of life and a new train of philosophical thought in the lengthy poem, In Memoriam.  Tennyson’s written thought and grief about life and death relate closely to what was going on in the world in the middle of the eighteen hundreds (Buckley 108).  The Victorian Era, named after Queen Victoria’s reign, was defined by many ground-breaking, scientific and geological discoveries which invoked new and exciting, sometimes disturbing, notions to the civilized world.  Sir Charles Lyell, knighted for his huge contributions to the world of science, argued that the universally accepted geological theories at the time were biased and based on the book of Genesis (SCL 1).  He discovered that present–day geological processes (weather, sea, volcanoes, earthquakes, etc.) could be observed to explain geological history of more ancient times and, more remarkably, the true age of the Earth (SCL 1).  The unearthing of fossils and skeletons proved that the earth is actually much older than six thousand years: the originally accepted age as seen in the Bible.  One can only imagine the impact of such revelations to the Christian world.  Lyell’s friend and correspondent, Charles Darwin, quoted on Lyell’s book, Principles of Geology:
“The greatest merit of the Principles was that it altered the whole tone of one's mind, and therefore that, when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it through his eyes" (SCL 1).
In addition to Lyell’s thought-inspiring accomplishments, years later, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species.  Darwin was the first evolutionary scientist whose theory explained that, by way of natural selection, life had evolved over billions of years from single-celled organisms to complex human beings (Landry 1).  This of course completely conflicted with the Creation story of the Bible, and his controversial work was violently attacked for the sake of religion.  The degrading evidence that cut down the human race to an insignificant part of Nature’s complex workings was appalling to the Victorian people, along with the idea that humans are descendants of wild, beastly apes.  These discoveries left the entire Christian population of the Victorian age in an inescapable spiritual crisis, questioning their faith, their entire existence and purpose in life.  Some Christians abandoned their religion, while others denied any scientific truths that had come about.  Alfred Tennyson’s parents were fundamentalist Christians.  They believed the Bible to be an infallible text that could not be proven wrong by science simply because it is the Word of God.
Initially, Tennyson’s faith was not called into question with the rise of science, but due to the untimely death of his dear friend and fellow poet at Cambridge, Arthur Henry Hallam.  In Memoriam was written in intervals, as an elegy for Hallam, over a seventeen-year period of time.  This tragic event brought about Tennyson’s first nine-year period of his overwhelming sorrow (Genung 18).  This is evident in the first sections of In Memoriam.  Throughout his varying stages of his thinking in the poem, he does not totally lose his faith in God, but he adopts an agnostic view from the start:
We have but faith: we cannot know,
For Knowledge is of things we see;
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow. (lines 21-24)
         Of course Tennyson marvels over the wonders of science, but on the other hand, he is appalled at and distraught over the heartless workings of Mother Nature.  Throughout the first thirty sections of In Memoriam, the loss of Arthur Hallam is the main focus.  This loss closely correlates with other themes present in the poem, particularly the loss of God from the Victorian people and religion’s replacement by the cruel truths brought forth by Science.
My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widow’d race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me.(lines 217-220)
         He writes that the human race is a widow, as if God is dead and the people are abandoned.  The poet feels lost without his dear friend, alone in a dark and godless world, without a purposeful life and an assurance of a future afterlife.  Tennyson blames the untimely death of Arthur solely on Nature.  If Nature is a creation of God, then that must mean God is an evil force as well.  He feels outright betrayed by the fact that God takes away life just as he grants it, and writes:
Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.(lines 5-8)
         Why does God create life only for it to inevitably be put to death?  Tennyson makes “Love” and “God” synonymous with one another throughout the poem, implying that without God; the world is without immortal love, and this reinforces the eventual triumph of his faith.  He uses this relationship just as he associates science with death, and nature with sorrow in the following stanzas: 
O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me
No casual mistress, but a wife,
My bosom-friend and half of life;
As I confess it needs must be?
O Sorrow, wilt thou rule my blood,
Be sometimes lovely like a bride,
And put thy harsher moods aside,
If thou wilt have me wise and good? (lines 1129-1136)
………………………………………………………………………………………
I wage not any feud with Death
For changes wrought on form and face;
No lower life than earth’s embrace
May breed with him can fright my faith.(lines 1513-1516)
         Tennyson asks Nature to live with him peacefully, to be married to him and not to cause him such emotional and spiritual suffering.  Science has acted as death and killed God, but Tennyson does not challenge science or death, because his faith will prevail in the end.  He contemplates the conflict: whether a religious life, with its comforts, its love and hope, is more preferable than having truth and the knowledge of science, about mankind’s evolution.  Without religion, there is no hope, “nor is there hope in dust,” (lines 704) where our origin was discovered within fossils and rocks.
         Nature, which was once seen as beautiful and looked upon as a creation of God, is now made into something completely separate by science.  It stands alone terrifyingly, giving the poet “evil dreams.” (lines 1058)  “Jesus Christ bled for the salvation of humanity; but Darwin’s science of “survival of the fittest” mercilessly draws blood from all creatures of the world” (Bazemore 1).  Nature sees all life forms on the planet as equal, all designed to be apart of a mechanical process of living, procreating and dying; whereas, people are seen as higher beings through the eyes of God.  Religion, however, does not bring all life together as one but sets people apart from one another, and even causes conflict among different castes and dissimilar religions of the world.  Nature gives and takes life as well, but God, unlike the brutality of the natural world, rewards his followers with eternal love and a heavenly paradise in the afterlife.
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law--
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed… (lines 1085-1088)
         Although knowledge and religion seem to oppose each other, Tennyson valued both to a great extent.  Science, a bringer of unwanted and depressing truths, destroys the comfort and security people had once felt with Religion.  Could knowledge then be a bad thing?  Is it not true that knowledge causes grief and makes one less capable of satisfaction, as one is left to forever seek more knowledge and truth?  The Bible even says, “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he who increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow” (Ecclesiastes 1:18).  Tennyson contemplates knowledge and “comes to regard ‘knowledge’ itself, if ‘cut from love and faith’” (Buckley 118).  He examines this idea in another poem, Locksley Hall:
“Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,
Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest.” (lines 143-144)
         John Stuart Mill is a founding father of this philosophy.  He famously wrote about this subject that “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.  It is better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” (Mill 148).  This means that it is better to have sorrow and knowledge with “higher pleasures,” than it is to be satisfied without knowledge and restricted to the one-sided world of “lower-pleasures.”  A “pig” or a fool does not experience both sides of the spectrum, whereas an intellectual man does.
         Throughout In Memoriam, he does not favor nor reject any particular religion or way of thinking, but only juggles with truth and rationality.  In Ulysses, Tennyson writes how one should not live in the past or be idle in the present, but must always move forward in life through experience, knowledge and improvement (which is essentially the same big picture he comes to conclude with by the end of In Memoriam).  If this is true, then where does God play into one’s life?  Tennyson will find wisdom and happiness in the equilibrium of knowledge and faith, as the entire elegy is a slow-moving introspective progression from despair to hope.  In Ulysses, he insists that the human spirit naturally acts “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” (line 70)
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world who’s margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end, (lines 19-22)
         When a man “pauses, to make an end,” he goes no further and does not progress nor seek faith or truth, but only dies in despair.  Tennyson dives deeper into doubt of his faith in sections 50-58.  In addition to discoveries about the actual age of the Earth, Geologist Charles Lyell stated through “Uniformatism,” that the Earth’s change is always constant, and all life on earth, although perpetually evolving for each species’ own improvement, ceaselessly moves towards nothing more than inevitable extinction (SCL 1).  Tennyson speaks for Mother Nature:
“So careful of the type?” but no…
…She cries, “A thousand types are gone;
I care for nothing, all shall go.” (lines 1073-1076)
         Charles Darwin’s theory of “survival of the fittest,” which basically meant that all creatures simply exist for each other’s consumption, was also deeply disturbing to the poet.  His continually heightened emotions of insignificance intensify as he wrestles with his seemingly useless existence.  There must be more to life than living, eating, procreating and dying, or his whole life would have been good-for-nothing.  He compares his search for faith to a moth that is lost in the dark, searching for the light:
That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shriveled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another’s gain. (lines 1041-1044)
         At the end of this section, he expresses his woes and current spiritual state as “an infant crying for the light, and with no language but a cry.” (lines 1051-1052)  He is crying out for confirmation of his faith, with no language to defend it; he is as helpless as a child.  All the while, Tennyson tries to retain his firm traditional beliefs despite science through all of his strenuous speculation and theological confessions.  He is also like a child because of the fact that he stubbornly wants to believe what he was taught to believe without having to think logically about it; he wants to choose religion over science (Bazemore 1):
I wrong the grave with fears untrue.
Shall love be blamed for want of faith?
There must be wisdom with great Death;
The dead shall look me thro’ and thro’. (lines 993-996)
         He persists in trying to cope with his lost faith, wishing there is a God and believing in an afterlife.  He cries out to Arthur’s spirit to console his own tormented soul, asking him to “reach out dead hands to comfort me,” but hears from neither Arthur nor God, though he finds comfort in his memory: “the dead man touched me from the past.”
         As you read on, the tone of In Memoriam shifts to a more positive light when he realizes that his faith cannot be destroyed, because faith is more than knowledge; its source “is psychological rather than logical,” (Buckley 125) and so they are separate entities.  Tennyson stops holding everything in disdain for Arthur’s death, and realizes that life is more than just the physical world; not everything must be proven and justified in order to be of value and significance.  He forgives Death for being cruel and sees it as the beautiful workings of God and nature of life:
But there is more than I can see,
And what I see I leave unsaid,
Nor speak it, knowing Death has made
His darkness beautiful with thee. (lines 1389-1392)
         At the beginning of the third Christmas section, he allows himself to be released from his ill-minded state of depression and embraces science, the new and enlightening knowledge: “Ring out the old, ring in the new…Ring out the grief…Ring out the want, the care, the sin.”  Tennyson rids himself of sorrow and of the past, and he springs ahead to glance at the light of the future:
Ring out the old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace. (lines 2285-2288)
         Tennyson is set free from his wasted time grieving for the past and looks to progress toward a bright future.  He looks back over the time that is gone with its “valuable though sad experience” (Genung 20).  His suffering subsides, and he reflects on his loss to find a “gain to match.”  In section CXIII, he declares that “sorrow makes us wise.” (line 2417)  He spends the entire next section comparing knowledge and wisdom, praising them both, referring knowledge to demons that “burst all barriers in her onward race for power,” (lines 2450-2451) for “knowledge is power,” and “power corrupts” the human mind, as is universally avowed.  Tennyson speaks of Knowledge as the “younger child” walking next to the older sibling, Wisdom:
For she is earthly of the mind,
But Wisdom heavenly of the soul.
O friend, who camest to thy goal
So early, leaving me behind, (lines 2457-2500)
         He demands that knowledge “submit to the guidance of wisdom, learn that ‘reverence’ must interpret the known and the knowable” (Buckley 121). 
         Earlier in the poem, Tennyson scorns Nature and wishes it would halt, and for springtime to never come.  Later on, spring does come, and he paints joyful images to accompany his awakened state of satisfaction and ease: “Spring wakens too, and my regret Becomes an April violet…” (line 2482) 
         The poem ends happily as his sister, initially engaged to Arthur Hallam, weds to another groom.  Tennyson writes of the “doors” where his “heart used to be,” (line 2541) and finds a comfortable middle position in his religious life that unites the spiritual world and the natural world; he is blissful.  His problems are put to rest when he discovers that there is room within himself for God and knowledge both.  The world is not godless after all because things that exist are not limited to only the things we are able to see, but a spiritual world flourishes within us.  Love and faith are the tools needed to be led away from darkness. 
         Another prominent figure in Victorian literature, Robert Browning, relates to Tennyson with his similar writing dealing with spiritual crisis and truth-seeking.  Both poets were devout Christians who doubted their faith from time to time only to realize that “God is the infinite Good” (Dawson 2).  In an article by Rev. W. J. Dawson, he insists that “Tennyson is the greater artist, but Browning is the greater mind” (Dawson 3).  Tennyson’s source of doubt sprang directly from his sorrow of Arthur Hallam’s death, whereas Browning’s source originated from his own intellectual wonder and curiosity.  In Abt Vogler, Browning explores a sort of relationship between the existence of God in Heaven and the existence of the marvelous creativity and art of a German musician and priest, who this poem is named after (Christ 1303).  He writes that God lives within us, and therefore, His existence cannot be mistrusted because of or wronged by scientific laws.
But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,
Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are! (lines 49-50)
Another work of Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, shares a similar sequence of thought from despair to enduring hope.  “The Fool hath said in his heart, There is no God” (Christ 1271).
What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart (lines 181-182)
         Tennyson’s revelations in the concluding sections are not too Christian, but are similar to pantheistic beliefs when he often equates God with universal love:
With faith that comes of self-control,
The truths that never can be proved
Until we close with all we loved,
And all we flow from, soul in soul. (lines 2749-2752)
         In Tennyson’s own words of In Memoriam, he said that it is nothing more than complaining and whining “as half but idle, brawling rhymes, the sport of random sun and shade,” and he leaves it to “the reader to find out what more they are to them” (Genung 23).  He stated in the poem that his writings are only “echoes of weaker times,” where ultimately, “faith has the last word” (Johnson 50).  He comes to understand that sorrow has significance and should be cherished with the “same love which Death has invaded, but not impaired,” as it also comes with wisdom and experience. (Genung 64).  He realizes that “even grief is holy if, by outlasting time, it may prove that the heart once loyal, is loyal forever” (Genung 69). 
The enlightening end of Tennyson’s train of thought is that love and faith are eternal, and cannot be dismantled by logic because they are separate and higher than logic; they are feelings, not facts; they are eternal, inexplicable and unchanging, and not calculable like scientific data and comprehensive reasoning.  God and Love are immortal, and faith is only achieved through emotion.  Together, they are all one, “One God, one law, one element, and one far-off divine event, to which the whole creation moves” (lines 2894-2896).


Works Cited


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Christ, Carol T. and Catherine Robson. The Norton Anthology
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Dawson, W. J. “The Religion of Tennyson and Browning.” The
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Landry, Peter. “Charles Darwin.” May 1998.
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Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty and Utilitarianism. Bantam
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