Jane Austen and Anglicanism

A certain amount of ink has been split over the years on the subject of Jane Austen's religion, and I would have to say a good deal of it has been split in vain because the authors looked at late Georgian religion through the eyes of its greatest critics, the Victorians. Jane Austen's life (1775-1817) fell entirely within the reign of George III. She was born the year before the Declaration of Independence was signed, and died two years after Waterloo, so her life time encompassed the American and French Revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812, and the end of the slave trade in the British Empire. Evangelical Anglicanism also went mainstream during her life time, especially in such watering places as Bath, whilst the old High Church movement was reinvigorated by the cultural crisis brought on by the open atheism of French Revolution. How much any of this impinged upon Jane Austen's daily life is something of a mystery, and there is little in her novels to suggest more than a superficial interest in the events of the time. Austen has also been charged with superficiality when it comes to religion; mainly by the Victorians. The twenty years between Jane Austen's death, and the accession of Victoria were ones of social upheaval in which the old Anglican confessional state in which Austen had lived was dismantled, and the Romantic movement in the arts swept over Britain. Austen had been profoundly skeptical about Romanticism holding up the Gothic novel craze to ridicule in 'Northanger Abbey' and this made her in some ways remote from the Victorians - especially on religion. She came from the stable, dutiful world of Georgian Anglicanism which the Victorians were inclined to dismiss as slothful and corrupt, and the Victorians also had trouble with the way in which she approached Christianity in her novels. She is anything but the preachy Evangelical blue stocking of popular nineteenth century Christian literature, mainly because she had internalized the old High Church outlook with its emphasis on duty, decorum, morality, and good works. Religion was to be practiced not talked about.

Jane Austen's father, the Rev. George Austen, was the rector of two small parishes in the southern England - Deane and Steventon. He was a graduate of St. John's College, Oxford, which had been Archbishop Laud's alma mater, and had remained something of a bastion of High Churchmanship throughout the eighteenth century. However, the High Churchmanship of eighteenth century Oxford is miles away from modern Anglo-Catholicism. It was first and foremost Protestant. The Bible is God's word written, and nothing is to be required for salvation but what can be proved from it. They believed firmly that humanity is justified by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, and they took the view that prayers for the dead, pilgrimages, relics, etc., were monuments to superstition. On the other hand, they were firm in teaching that good works were evidence of sanctifying grace and necessary to the Christian life; that baptism conveyed regeneration by incorporating the child into the covenant; that Holy Communion was a very real receiving of the body and blood of Christ whilst repudiating any sort of real presence that was localized in the bread and wine. They also took a high view of the visible Church, teaching that the office of bishop had been instituted by the Apostles, and they greatly appreciated the dignified, reformed liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer. It was a sober, reticent, and manly tradition which avoided outward shows of emotion, and when about the business of holiness almost secretly.

It is this undemonstrative High Church Anglicanism that forms the background to Jane Austen's religious life, and her treatment of Christianity in her novels. In all of her novels she draws a hard and fast line between those who were serious about Christian, and those who were not. She displays a certain distain for people like the Crawfords in Mansfield Park who are only religious as a matter of social duty just as she does for flawed clerics like the pompous Mr. Collins, or Dr. Grant. On the other hand, the heroes of several of her novels Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park, Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, and to some extent, Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility have clergymen who, if not exactly heroic, are certainly not the objects of Austen's wit, and in all three cases end up winning a measure of authorial approval because they are moral, conscientious and dutiful members of their profession; all qualities that Austen regards as the bedrock of true religion.

The Victorians often picked on Austen's clergyman for their lack of inward vocation, but that concept was one that would have been somewhat foreign to the Georgian era. One became a parson because either one was the son of a clergyman, a younger son who needed to make a living in a genteel profession, or saw it as a worthy calling. It ranked with the law and the military as a worthy career for a gentleman's son. The clergy were part of the polite world who could be counted on not just to make up the numbers at dances and to be pleasant companions, but to take seriously the duties of their religion. Church on Sunday, occasional sacraments, daily prayers, Bible reading, and good works were the practice of religion in Jane Austen's day, and it was something that was fully integrated into the lives of people who would otherwise have taken as not being overly devout. The warnings against trumpeting one's good works before men were more often than not heeded by Jane Austen's Anglicans.