In 1997 I went to see the movie "Oscar Wilde" (starring the incomparable Stephen Fry) with my friend Rev Bill Miller anda group of
clergy and lay people from several more or less liberal churches—Methodists,
Church of Christ, and Quaker--who met every month or so to go to a movie and to
discuss it from a more or less theological standpoint. After returning from the movie, and after an intense and interesting discussion with these open-minded Christians, I wrote this review/reflection about the little known Christian side of Wilde's life.
Wilde is best known for his clever comedies, his macabre and beauitfully written novel "Portrait of Dorian Gray," and his unforgettably witty oneliners, such as "America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between," "Life is too important to be taken seriously," "Women are meant to be loved, not understood," "Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing."
The movie does
an excellent job of depicting Wilde’s quriky human complexities, but barely touches on the religious dimension of Wilde’s work and
life. The only religious reference that Wilde makes in the movie was his clever
line: “I mean to die a Catholic, but I don’t intend to live like one.” From
this remark, audiences would be hard put to realize that, while in jail, Wilde
composed one of the most moving and original religious confessions of this century,
“De Profundis.” The film describes this work
merely as a “farewell letter to [his lover] Lord Douglas.”
Wilde’s story
moved me more than I expected in part because Wilde played an important role in
my spiritual development that I had almost forgotten. In college, I wrote
poetry, fancied myself an aesthete, and was attracted to the works of French
decadent poets like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and also to the “Fin de
Siecle” artists and writers like Aubrey Beardsly and Wilde. Like Wilde and the
decadents (as well as like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles), I saw the world
of drugs as a stimulus for artistic expression. I plunged into the depths with
the enthusiasm of a convert and paid a heavy price. But at the time it seemed
worth risking all to create a poem that would dazzle with its originality and
beauty.
In my junior
year I became a student of Anne Sexton, another poet whose religious
dimension is sometimes overlooked. During that period (in which I still
considered myself an agnostic and studiously avoided church), I read “De Profundis” and was powerfully
moved by what seemed to me Wilde’s utterly original depiction of Jesus as an
artist, and the artist as Christ-like. After watching the movie, I re-read these words and imagined Wilde in
his prison cell penning them, and was moved to tears.
The movie depicts
Wilde writing fairy tales in prison, which is so far from reality as to be
almost ludicrous. In fact, while in prison, Wilde turned to the Gospels and
read them in the original Greek:
Of late I have been studying with
diligence the four prose poems about Christ. At Christmas I managed to get hold of a Greek
Testament, and every morning,
after I had cleaned my cell and polished my tins, I read a little
of the Gospels, a dozen verses taken by chance anywhere. It is a delightful way of opening the day. Every one, even in a turbulent,
ill-disciplined life, should do the same. Endless repetition, in and out of season, has
spoiled for us the freshness, the naivete,
the simple romantic charm of the Gospels. We hear them read far too often and far too
badly, and all repetition is
anti-spiritual. When one returns to the
Greek; it is like going into a garden of
lilies out of some, narrow and dark house.
As this passage
suggests, Wilde’s approach to the Gospels was aesthetic rather than theological—which
is to say, it was “felt” rather than reasoned out (or rationalized). Another
way of saying this is that Wilde read the Gospels not as a rule book or as a
historical document, but as a work of art in the profoundest sense. Wilde’s
ambition was to write a work depicting Christ as the ultimate artist, and in a
sense that is what he achieved in “De Profundis.” I heartily recommend that
serious Christians interested in art should read the whole work since it is one
of the most profound and original spiritual confessions of this century.
It is impossible
to do justice to this work in a brief essay. So much depends on the style and
tone that it is tempting simply to quote passages like the following:
If ever I write again, in the
sense of producing artistic work, there are just two subjects on
which and through which I desire to express myself: one is 'Christ as the precursor of the
romantic movement in life': the other is 'The artistic life considered in
its relation to conduct.' The first is, of course, intensely fascinating, for I see in Christ
not merely the essentials of the supreme romantic type, but all
the accidents, the wilfulnesses even, of the romantic temperament
also. He was the first person who ever said to people that they
should live 'flower-like lives.' He fixed the phrase. He took children as the type of what people should try to become. He held them up as examples to their elders, which I myself have always
thought the chief use of children, if what is perfect should have a
use. Dante describes the soul of a man as coming from the hand of
God 'weeping and laughing like a little child,' and Christ also
saw that the soul of each one should be A GUISA DI FANCIULLA CHE
PIANGENDO E RIDENDO PARGOLEGGIA.
He felt that life was changeful,
fluid, active, and that to allow it to be stereotyped into any form
was death. He saw that people should not be too serious over
material, common interests: that to be unpractical was to be a great
thing: that one should not bother too much over affairs. The birds didn't, why should man? He is charming when he says, 'Take no
thought for the morrow; is not the soul more than meat? is not the
body more than raiment?' A Greek might have used the latter
phrase. It is full of Greek
feeling. But only Christ could have said
both, and so summed up life perfectly for us.His morality is all sympathy,
just what morality should be. If the only thing that he ever said had
been, 'Her sins are forgiven her because she loved much,' it would
have been worth while dying to have said it. His justice is all poetical justice, exactly
what justice should be. The beggar goes to heaven because he has been
unhappy. I cannot conceive a better reason for his
being sent there. The people who work for an hour in the
vineyard in the cool of the evening receive just as
much reward as those who have toiled there all day long in the hot
sun. Why shouldn't they? Probably no one deserved anything. Or perhaps they were a different kind of people.
Christ had no patience with the dull lifeless
mechanical systems that treat people as if
they were things, and so treat everybody alike: for him there were no laws: there were exceptions merely, as if anybody,
or anything, for that matter, was like aught else in the world!
That which is the very keynote of
romantic art was to him the proper basis of natural
life. He saw no other basis. And when they brought him one, taken in
the very act of sin and showed him her sentence written in the law,
and asked him what was to be done, he wrote with his finger on the
ground as though he did not hear them, and finally, when they
pressed him again, looked up and said, Let him of you who has never
sinned be the first to throw the stone at her.' It was worth while living to have said that.
Like all poetical natures he
loved ignorant people. He knew that in the soul of one who is
ignorant there is always room for a great idea. But he could not stand stupid people,
especially those who are made stupid by
education: people who are full of
opinions not one of which they even
understand, a peculiarly modern type, summed up by Christ when he describes it
as the type of one who has the key of knowledge, cannot use it
himself, and does not allow other people to use it, though it may
be made to open the gate of God's Kingdom.
Wilde would have understood the
“culture war” taking place between the fundamentalists and conservatives in
America today. In Wilde’s view, Jesus’ “chief war was against the
Philistines. That is the war every child
of light has to wage. Philistinism was
the note of the age and community in which he lived. In their heavy inaccessibility to ideas, their dull respectability,
their tedious orthodoxy, their worship of vulgar success, their entire
preoccupation with the gross materialistic side of life, and their ridiculous estimate of themselves and their
importance, the Jews of Jerusalem in
Christ's day were the exact counterpart of the British Philistine of our own."
Sound familiar? In Wilde’s view,
what “saves” people are not their professions of faith or their their
do-goodism, but “beautiful moments” in which they realize their true nature as
children of God. Wilde writes: “The cold
philanthropies, the ostentatious public charities, the tedious
formalisms so dear to the middle-class mind, [Christ] exposed with utter and
relentless scorn….Those whom he saved from their sins are saved simply for
beautiful moments in their lives. Mary
Magdalen, when she sees Christ, breaks the rich vase of alabaster that one of
her seven lovers had given her, and spills the odorous spices over his tired
dusty feet, and for that one moment's sake sits for ever with Ruth and
Beatrice in the tresses of the
snow-white rose of Paradise. All that
Christ says to us by the way of a little
warning is that every moment should be
beautiful, that the soul should always be ready for the coming of the bridegroom, always waiting for
the voice of the lover, Philistinism being simply that side of man's nature
that is not illumined by the
imagination. He sees all the lovely influences of life as modes of light: the imagination itself is the world of light. The world is made by it, and yet the world cannot understand it: that is because the imagination is simply
a manifestation of love, and it is love
and the capacity for it that distinguishes
one human being from another.”
Those who have been raised on the
social Gospel may find such religious aestheticism suspect, but Wilde had a
genuine love for ordinary people, and a social conscience. The Ballad of
Reading Goal is a powerful statement against capital punishment.
But Wilde was not interested in
social reform for its own sake. He was at heart an individualist. He saw Jesus
not a reformer trying to change the way we live our lives, but as a visionary
whose presence changes us at the depths of our being.
“Indeed, that is the charm about Christ, when all is
said: he is just like a work of
art. He does not really teach one
anything, but by being brought into his presence one becomes something.”
Wilde questions
the motives, and the goals, of reformers who would turn criminals into
capitalists:
“[Christ’s] primary desire was not
to reform people, any more than his primary desire was to a relieve
suffering. To turn an interesting thief
into a tedious honest man was not his aim.
He would have thought little of the Prisoners' Aid Society and other modern movements of the kind. The conversion of a publican into a Pharisee would not have
seemed to him a great achievement. But
in a manner not yet understood of the world he regarded sin and suffering as
being in themselves beautiful holy
things and modes of perfection.”
Wilde goes on to say, “It seems a
very dangerous idea. It is—all great
ideas are dangerous. That it was Christ's creed admits of no
doubt. That it is the true creed I don't
doubt myself.”
“There is something so unique about Christ. Of course just as there are false dawns before the dawn itself, and
winter days so full of sudden sunlight
that they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its gold before its time, and make some foolish
bird call to its mate to build on barren
boughs, so there were Christians before
Christ. For that we should be
grateful. The unfortunate thing is that there have been none since. I make one
exception, St. Francis of Assisi.
But then God had given him at his
birth the soul of a poet, as he himself when quite young had in mystical marriage taken poverty as his bride: and with the soul of a poet and the body of a beggar he found the
way to perfection not difficult. He understood Christ, and so he became like
him. We do not require the Liber Conformitatum to teach us that the
life of St. Francis was the true
IMITATIO CHRISTI, a poem compared to which
the book of that name is merely prose.”
The movie ends with
another clever line from Wilde: “Like St. Francis, my last days have been
wedded to poverty, but unlike St. Francis, this marriage has not been a
success.” Audiences watching “Wilde” cannot fully appreciate the irony of Wilde
unless they realize that Wilde in his latter days did in fact aspire to make
his life an Imitatio Christi. Perhaps the movie-makers had a glimmering of
this. As Wilde was led out of the court room, and faced the jeering crowds, some
of whom spat upon him, I could not help thinking of Jesus being led to the
Place of Skulls.
Today, thank God,
gays do not face the death penalty or imprisonment for trying to realize their
true nature. Wilde, like many homosexuals today, did not feel at home in the
conventional church, but he did feel a deep attraction for Christ. We may find
fault with his theology, but we cannot question his love of Christ and his
yearning for the Divine. The movie “Wilde” does a fine job of depicting Wilde’s
human side, but only when we read “De Profundis” and “Reading Goal” do we realize
that Wilde was also a spiritual seeker whose life was tragically cut short.
PS I just found Wilde's quote on war and find it very insightful, only it needs to be modernized. "As long as war it regarded as evil, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as stupid and uncool, it will cease to be popular."
