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Theodicy and Society: The Crisis of the Intelligentsia

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Book cover Victorian Faith in Crisis

Abstract

The Victorian crisis of faith has been regarded conventionally as a spiritual condition endemic among bourgeois thinkers infected by religious doubt after 1859. This chapter takes for granted a broader perspective, which I have adumbrated elsewhere.1 To put this view concisely: if there was a ‘Victorian crisis’ — and I think there was — it was not merely a crisis ‘of faith’. For faith (which I take here to be synonymous with belief) was, as always, the corollary of action, and action based on faith embodied social purpose. Spiritual equipoise, moral rectitude, intellectual integrity — not merely these were at stake, but the very order and progress of society. The Victorian crisis was a crisis of legitimation.

… Is this an hour

For private sorrow’s barren song,

When more and more the people throng

The chairs and thrones of civil power?

A time to sicken and to swoon

When science reaches forth her arms

To feel from world to world, and charms

Her secret from the latest moon?

(Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam, xxi, 13–20)

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Notes

  1. The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, 1979) 12–16, 346–52; ‘Creation and the Problem of Charles Darwin’, British Journal for the History of Science, 14 (1981) 189–200; ‘1859 and All That: Remaking the Story of Evolution-and-Religion’, in Charles Darwin, 1809–1882: A Centennial Commemorative, ed. Roger G. Chapman and Cleveland T. Duval (Wellington, NZ, 1982) 167–94; ‘Geologists and Interpreters of Genesis in the Nineteenth Century’, in God and Nature: A History of the Encounter between Christianity and Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley, Calif., 1986).

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  2. Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore, Md, 1971) 30.

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Authors
  1. James R. Moore
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Toronto, Canada

    Richard J. Helmstadter (Professor of History) (Professor of History)

  2. York University, Canada

    Bernard Lightman (Associate Professor of Humanities) (Associate Professor of Humanities)

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© 1990 Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman

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Moore, J.R. (1990). Theodicy and Society: The Crisis of the Intelligentsia. In: Helmstadter, R.J., Lightman, B. (eds) Victorian Faith in Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10974-6_6

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