Love and Loss

Tennyson’s doubt is in many ways very contemporary. Like us, he was stunned and exhilarated by the pace of technological change. The power of experimental and observational science to explain the natural world seemed to make God somewhat surplus to requirements. The traditional concept of God was, so it seemed, redundant. The rationalistic philosophy of the age, when applied to biblical studies and to theology more generally, did much to erode confidence in a verbal revelation of God given in a propositional form.

But this did not, then as now, lead to a decline in religious belief as such. Rather, it sought out new forms. If religious faith could not be established by reason, perhaps experience might provide an alternative channel to the divine. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, theologians began to emphasise the more mystical and experiential aspects of Christian faith. Religious dogmas were not to be taken as direct descriptions of realities but rather as metaphors for encounters with the divine. Though people like Tennyson did not feel that they could any longer accept Christian orthodoxy, they were reluctant to pursue pure atheism. There was inside them a deep conviction that there was something transcendent. Not that they could name it, or give it a face – they could only grope towards it in the dark.

And then there was the experience of love and loss. Perhaps the Victorians in their time, before the wide acceptance of Darwinian views, were more ready to sanctify these powerful feelings. They seemed to come from some extra-phenomenal source; to be an intimation of immortality. We are more ready to see the pains and joys of human fellowship as demanded of us by our biological selves than as evidence of a holiness beyond us. Nevertheless, the popular sense of the ‘spiritual’ remains in many people, and permeates these moments at which heart is most evidently exposed. It is in our most intimate relationships that we feel most connected to the truth about who we are as individuals and most certain about our steps into the world; and we have the gratifying experience of being able to provide this for others. The reciprocity of human relationships take us beyond ourselves to ourselves.

Death remained the final, impermeable barrier. Poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries like John Donne certainly feared death as the curtailment of love and the rotting of the human body. Death was a demonic, personified figure who stalked his victims. Donne needs to draw on all the resources of his Christian faith to repudiate it in ‘Death be not proud’. But the grieving of the nineteenth century wails in a different key – one that we moderns more readily recognise. The loss is not felt as the result of being tyrannised by a sinister force. It is now a brute fact in a remorseless universe which is governed only by a God who remains unmoved at the plight of the creatures who experience it. To face death or to grieve is not be part of a dramatic struggle in which Mordor has temporarily got the upper hand. It is at least possible to express anger against that force. Death for a Tennyson and for we his twenty-first century descendants is sad and bewildering. It flaps its wings in the face of our confidence in human technological mastery of the world.