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Dryden's Religio Laici: An Anglican Poem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Thomas H. Fujimtjra
Thomas H. Fujimtjra*
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii, Honolulu 14
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Extract

Most dryden scholars believe that Religio Laici (1682) is not a statement of the Anglican position, though the poet asserts that it is. In fact, the widely accepted view is that it is a Catholic poem in spirit. This interpretation was established by Louis I. Bredvold in a very influential book, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (1934), in which he stated, “Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther are so closely allied in their philosophy that the earlier poem might be regarded as a sort of prelude or introduction to the later.” Prior to Bredvold's pronouncement, some critics had questioned the orthodoxy of Religio Laici as an Anglican poem, and had suggested that Dryden was troubled by religious doubts and that he was halfway on the road to Catholicism in 1682. It was Bredvold, however, who crystallized these views by asserting unequivocally that the poem was fideistic, and hence Catholic in thought and temper.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 76 , Issue 3 , June 1961 , pp. 205 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961

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References

Note 1 in page 205 Louis I. Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (Ann Arbor, 1934), p. 121. For the older view that the first poem is Anglican, the second Catholic, see Arthur W. Verrall, Lectures on Dryden (Cambridge, Eng., 1914), pp. 2–3.

Note 2 in page 205 Sir Walter Scott, The Life of John Dryden, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Scott and Saintsbury, i (Edinburgh, 1882), 256, 262–263; A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, eds., The Cambridge History of English Literature (New York, 1912), viii, 47–48; Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian, A History of English Literature (New York, 1930), p. 629.

Note 3 in page 205 Bredvold, p. 121. This thesis was stated earlier, though briefly, in Bredvold's edition of Dryden's poems in 1933, The Best of Dryden (New York), p. 549; also, preface, xxxii.

Note 4 in page 205 Cf. James M. Osborn, John Dryden: Some Biographical. Facts and Problems (New York, 1940), p. 17; Bonamy Dobrée, ed., Poems of Dryden (London, 1934), xvii; David Nichol Smith, John Dryden (Cambridge, Eng., 1950), p. 62; George R. Noyes, ed., The Poetical Works of Dryden (Boston, 1950), p. xlix, n. 3; James Kinsley, ed., The Poems of John Dryden (Oxford, 1958), iv, 1933. For a rare exception to the prevailing opinion, see Douglas Grant's reference to the poem as Dryden's “great defence of the Church of England,” in Dryden: Poetry, Prose and Plays (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 17. The excesses resulting from a too uncritical acceptance of Bredvold's views are evident in Kenneth Young's John Dryden (London, 1954), pp. 134–136.

Note 5 in page 205 The edition used for Religio Laici is in Poems, ed. James Kinsley, Vol. i. Volume and page reference for the preface, and Une references for the verse, are cited in the text of the essay.

Note 6 in page 205 Bredvold, p. 120.

Note 7 in page 206 References are to the Everyman edition of Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (London, 1907). Book, chapter, and section are cited in the text of the essay.

Note 8 in page 206 Cf. Dryden:

How can the less the Greater comprehend?

Or finite Reason reach Infinity?

For what cou'd Fathom GOD were more than He. (11. 39–41).

Note 9 in page 207 Jeremy Taylor, The Whole Works (London, 1835), in, 81–91.

Note 10 in page 207 Samuel L. Bethell, The Cultural Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1951), p. 17.

Note 11 in page 210 Jeremy Taylor, The Liberty of Prophesying, in Works, ii, 325; see also, The Second Part of the Dissuasive from Popery, in Works, ii, 858.

Note 12 in page 210 Taylor, Liberty, in Works, ii, 306.

Note 13 in page 210 Ibid., ii, 320.

Note 14 in page 210 Ibid., ii, 365.

Note 18 in page 211 Ibid., ii, 334.

Note 16 in page 211 Ibid., ii, 367.

Note 17 in page 211 Bredvold, p. 126. See also, George Saintsbury, Dryden (New York, 1901), pp. 101–102; John Butt, The Augustan Age (London, 1950), p. 24.

Note 18 in page 211 John Evelyn, Diary and Correspondence (1871), pp. 677–678.

Note 19 in page 213 G. R. Cragg, Front Puritanism to the Age of Reason (Cambridge, Eng., 1950), p. 157.

Note 50 in page 213 Louis G. Locke, Tillotson: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Literature, p. 76, in Anglistica, Vol. iv (Copenhagen, 1954).

Note 21 in page 213 E. Stillingfleet, Vindication of Answer to the King's Papers; quoted in Cragg, p. 163.

Note 22 in page 213 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part iii, Ch. 39, in The English Works, ed. Sir William Molesworth (London, 1839), iii, 459.

Note 23 in page 213 Ibid., Part in, Ch. 42, in Works, iii, 540.

Note 24 in page 213 Ibid., Part m, Ch. 43, in Works, iii, 585.

Note 25 in page 213 Glanvill, Zealous, and Impartial Protestant; quoted in Jackson I. Cope, Joseph Glanvill: Anglican Apologist (St. Louis, 1956), p. 79.

Note 26 in page 214 Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, Power of the Pope in Temporal Affairs, tr. George Albert Moore (Chevy Chase, Md., 1949).

Note 27 in page 214 Taylor, Liberty, in Works, ii, 413.

Note 28 in page 214 Taylor, Works, ii, 812.

Note 29 in page 214 Ibid., ii, 91.

Note 30 in page 214 Locke, pp. 100–101.

Note 31 in page 214 Hobbes, Leviathan, Part in, Ch. 42, in Works, iii, 547, 573–574.

Note 32 in page 214 Cf. Cranmer's letter, in Hooker, Laws, ii, 543–554.

Note 33 in page 215 Cf. Hooker, Laws (ii, i; iii, viii).

Note 34 in page 215 Quoted in Locke, p. 69.

Note 35 in page 215 Herschel Baker, The Wars of Truth (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 224.

Note 36 in page 216 Taylor, Liberty, in Works, ii, 323.

Note 37 in page 216 Baker, p. 221, n. 104.

Note 38 in page 216 Cragg, p. 21; also, pp. 29, 30.

Note 39 in page 216 For a good discussion of Latitudinarianism, see Chapter iv, Cragg.

Note 40 in page 216 Thomas Wood, English Casuistical Divinity During the Seventeenth Century (London, 1952), p. 42.

Note 41 in page 216 Hooker, A Learned Discourse of Justification, in Laws, i, 26.

Note 42 in page 217 Izaac Walton, The Lives (London, 1951), pp. 137–138 166.

Note 43 in page 217 Taylor, Liberty, in Works, ii, 294.

Note 44 in page 217 Ibid., ii, 385.

Note 15 in page 217 Cf. Joseph Glanvill's religious attitude in Plus Ultra, ed. Jackson I. Cope (Gainesville, Fla., 1958), pp. 139–140: “contenting myself with a firm Assent to the few practical Fundamentals of Faith, and having fix'd that end of the Compass, I desire to preserve my Liberty as to the rest, holding the other in such a posture, as may be ready to draw those Lines, my Judgment informed by the Holy Oracles, the Articles of our Church, the Apprehensions of wise Antiquity, and my particular Reason, shall direct me to describe. And when I do that, 'tis for my self, and my own satisfaction; but am not concern'd to impose my Sentiments upon others: nor do I care to endeavour the change of their minds, though I judge them mistaken, as long as Vertue, the Interests of Religion, the Peace of the World and their own are not prejudiced by their Errours.”