The Religious Writer 1665–87

Abstract

‘The Poet an Atheist exceeding Lucretius’ commented one reader in the margin of his copy of Absalom and Achitophel.¹ It was a common charge to toss at one’s political opponents, but in the case of Dryden it may also have reflected the interest in varieties of religious belief which he had shown as a dramatist. The changes in Dryden’s own religious views and ecclesiastical allegiance, particularly his conversion to Rome, also prompted charges that he was merely an irreligious opportunist. Dryden’s sceptical play of mind, and his delight in the exploration of diversity within what he believed to be a fundamentally unchanging human nature, led him to examine several forms of religion in his plays, while in two major poems, Religio Laici (1682) and The Hind and the Panther (1687) he explored the foundations of Christian belief. One might look almost in vain among Dryden’s poems for the inner voice of the believer, or for evidence of private spiritual experience. Dryden’s religious texts do not dramatise the struggles of a soul, as Donne’s do, or use spiritual autobiography as a pastoral aid to teach the people, as Herbert’s do. The public representation of such an interiority is not Dryden’s mode. Instead he employs several kinds of dramatic and discursive rhetoric to explore the relationship of the individual believer to ecclesiastical and political authority, and to reflect upon the place which private reason and personal judgment have in matters of religious faith. These public texts scrutinise the very division between ‘public’ and ‘private’, and use rational argument to test and define the proper limits of human reason.