Faith, fiction, and the historical Jesus: theological revisionism and its influence on fictional representations of

Re-imagining Jesus in a scientific age
Out of Guillot de Saix’s collection of Wilde’s spoken tales ‘L’Inutile Résurrection’ and ‘Le Miracle des Stigmates’ focus most fully on the figure of Christ. ‘L’Inutile Résurrection’ is the author’s vision of the second-coming of Christ and his ultimate rejection by a people given over to a creed of scientific rationalism.³³² In some respects it resembles an increasingly popular sub-genre of fiction dealing with the return of Jesus in a modern age.³³³ Such fictions were Europe-wide and Wilde would certainly have been familiar with works such as Balzac’s short story ‘Jésus-Christ en Flandre’ (1831), which tells of a stranger (Jesus) helping fellow ferry passengers to safety when they are caught up in a violent storm; he may also have known Alphonse Louis Constant’s collection of imaginary legends La Dernière Incarnation, which place Jesus in various modern settings, witnessing the iniquities of modern society (1846).³³⁴ Closer to home, and published at the time when Wilde’s spoken tales were in circulation, was William T. Stead’s When Christ Came to Chicago (1894), which served the double purpose of raising Christian awareness and exposing the corrupt practice of certain Chicago business men and politicians.³³⁵

‘L’Inutile Résurrection’ opens with the discovery of Christ’s tomb, complete with mummified corpse, by ‘un terrassier arabe au service d’un entrepreneur de fouilles qui ne recherchait que des monnaies anciennes’. Here, Wilde is engaging with a particularly topical issue: the integrity of the relatively new discipline of archaeology and its place in Biblical scholarship.³³⁶ Having been associated with plunder and money-making in its infancy, archaeological excavations had, by the latter part of the century, taken on a much more respectable image. Thanks largely to the setting up of the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1865, with its strongly evangelical leanings, excavations of the Bible lands came to be regarded as a means by which the literal truth of the Scriptures could be revealed, promising a peaceful coalescence of science and faith. As far as the PEF was concerned, the primary purpose of excursions to the Near East was to authenticate the four-fold Gospel, mainly through the identification of sacred sites, and not to help the traveller imagine a fifth evangel. Wilde’s tale seems to mock these excavations in the Lord’s name by having the most important find imaginable, Christ’s mummified corpse, discovered quite accidentally by an Arab labourer. Wilde may also have had in mind the endeavours of the recently deceased General Gordon, whose claims of having identified the place of the crucifixion and of the Holy Sepulchre were something of a talking point in the late decades of the nineteenth century.³³⁷ While Wilde is in accord with the evangelical Gordon in placing the tomb ‘au flanc de la montagne du Calvaire’, he departs radically from the Christian message by placing within it the unrisen body of Jesus Christ in all its inanimate gruesomeness: ‘un corps momifié…encore ourlées d’un sang desséché, noirâtre et craquelant’. In circulating such an idea in the 1890s, when the energies and optimism of the PEF were in a steady decline, Wilde seems to have been playing on current fears that, for traditional Christians at least, Biblical archaeology was a double-edged sword, having the potential to affirm, but also to refute, the historical ‘facts’ of the Scriptures.

Having opened on a resolutely rationalist note, the tale proceeds by pursuing the increasingly familiar notion that centuries of Christian domination could be put down to mere illusion, rising from ‘le furent les saintes femmes et les premiers disciples’.³³⁸ Yet just as the power of the doubters seems to triumph in the setting up of ‘une sorte de temple de la Vérité Scientifique où l’on exposa sous verre…le cadavre par qui le mensonge séculaire avait été assassiné’, Wilde begins to expose the inadequacies of this new age. Reflecting the ambivalence of so many turn-of-the- century Victorians at the prospect of a future dominated by science, the exhibiting of the erstwhile saviour as a museum piece brings with it ‘un triste dimanche sans cloches’, as the liturgy of hundreds of years is abandoned. And it is at this point in the narrative that, as Deirdre Toomey points out, ‘Wilde’s Joachimism can be detected’.³³⁹ Having related the passing of the religious age, and depicted the arid scientific age which ensues, Wilde’s tale offers the brief hope of a new age as Christ ‘reprit la vie, brisa les vitres de son cerceuil transparent et, devant les visiteurs et les gardiens prosternés, traversant d’un essor glorieux la Voûte Vaticane, disparut à leurs yeux’, an image already contemplated by the author in his ‘Sonnet: On the Massacre of the Christians in Bulgaria’.³⁴⁰ The tenets of this third-stage religion are firmly rooted in Wilde’s own philosophy: the resurrected Christ espouses a view of the world where ‘il n’ y aurait plus ni riches, ni pauvres, ni luttes de classes, ni guerres’, calling to mind ideas put forward in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ and, in particular, Wilde’s protestation that ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at’.³⁴¹ And, towards the close of the spoken parable, Jesus’s exhortation to the people ‘Sois toi-même’ is a dramatization of Wilde’s assertion, in the same essay, that Christ’s message to man was simply ‘Be yourself’.³⁴² While the given title of the story seems to promise a cynical rejection of the cornerstone of Christianity, it is more a play on the Gauterian notion that ‘All art is quite useless’³⁴³, preparing the way for this Third Age Christ and his ‘culte de beauté’, and for Wilde’s conception of Christ as the definitive example of the artist, explored in De Profundis. Essentially, the tale reveals the teller’s misgivings about scepticism and his unwillingness to relinquish entirely the miraculous in life. Closing on the bleak observation that ‘tout retomba dans l’apathie des jours sans croyance et sans joie’, it insists that the rejection of Christ’s ‘revélation suprême [sic]’ cannot be viewed simply as a triumph of modernity over an outdated supernaturalism, and that man’s relationship with aspects of the world which cannot be understood and quantified, is a highly complex one. Wilde’s agnostic parable resists an outright rejection of either the religious or the scientific; instead, it leaves the listener to ponder what might be in an ideal future when, as is proposed in ‘The Soul of Man’, science can make machinery serve man, leaving the individual free to pursue a life of creativity and imagination.³⁴⁴

Equally concerned with the tensions between rationalism and supernaturalism is ‘Le Miracle des Stigmates’.³⁴⁵ A resolutely heterodox story, it tells of how Jesus is taken down from the cross by Joseph of Arimathea while still alive, and nursed back to health. After living some years as a humble carpenter, the arrival of Paul shatters his peaceful existence, and he finds himself ostracized by the community, the one man who will not believe in the apostle’s creed of the resurrection. On his death, a group of early Christians come to prepare him for burial and witness for the first time the marks of the cross, concealed by the victim for so many years. On the discovery of such ‘proof’, all rejoice in the conversion of the community’s most obdurate unbeliever and in the miracle of the first stigmatic. Fictionalizing as it does the ‘swoon theory’ of rationalist theology, it demonstrates Wilde’s ability to engage his listeners in the concerns of Biblical scholarship in a spare and memorable style.³⁴⁶ Theories proposing that Christ survived crucifixion and regained his health enough to appear to his disciples were many and varied.³⁴⁷ Wilde would certainly have encountered the gist of one of the most prominent of these theories through his reading of Matthew Arnold. In Literature and Dogma, Arnold discusses Friedrich Schleiermacher’s ‘fancy of the death on the cross having been a swoon, and the resurrection of Jesus a recovery from that swoon’, and his approval of D. F Strauss’s ‘demolition of this fancy’.³⁴⁸ By the last decade of the century, while such theories were no longer regarded as academically respectable by the theological establishment, they were still employed with some abandon by those set on discrediting the Gospels.³⁴⁹ In a work of 1883, for example, one of the few female authors of Lives of Jesus, Constance Howell, took the ‘swoon theory’ as the basis of her counter-narrative of Christ’s final days on earth, building it up into a somewhat grisly scenario wherein Jesus, enfeebled by his sufferings on the cross, and abandoned by his followers, walks into the wilderness and dies ‘from exposure, want of proper food, distress of mind, and the bodily effects of all that he had gone through’.³⁵⁰ Not content with revealing the falsity of the resurrection, and with inventing a lonely and humiliating death for the failed Messiah, Howell goes on to describe how ‘vultures ate the flesh from his skeleton, and thus his remains were never found and recognized.’³⁵¹

Indifferent to the dicta of received theological wisdom, Wilde seems to have identified in this rationalist explanation of the resurrection the potential for a fiction which could be both aesthetically interesting and topical. In choosing to centre the story on the physical wounds of Christ, Wilde’s tale connects to the field of anatomy, at the time a rapidly developing area of scientific enquiry, and one which promised to unlock some of the mysteries of the Passion.³⁵² Aided by The Anatomy Act of 1831, which made corpses more readily available for experiments, questions concerning Jesus’s expiration after only six hours on the cross were investigated with all the rigour that nineteenth-century medicine could offer.³⁵³ Anatomy afforded the heterodox and orthodox alike a means of glossing the Bible text at the root of the ongoing speculation about Christ’s death on the cross: ‘one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water’ (John 19:34).³⁵⁴ Sceptics offered the blood and water as evidence that Christ had not actually died on the cross as dead bodies did not bleed; the believers, by the same means, argued that the effusion of blood and water was medically feasible.³⁵⁵ Developments in anatomy also enabled scientific enquiry into the exact nature of Roman crucifixion, the practicalities of driving nails through the hands and feet of the victims being a common area of investigation.³⁵⁶

As well as raising questions about current interactions between anatomy and theology, ‘Le Miracle des Stigmates’ also engages with the contemporary fascination with the figure of the stigmatic. With the rapid advance of science and the growing sophistication of medicine, the phenomenon of stigmata became a focus of interest for both doctors and psychologists. The Belgian stigmatic, Louise Lateau, was particularly well-known, and continued the subject of close medical scrutiny until her death in 1883.³⁵⁷ One of the physicians who undertook a close observation of Lateau was Antoine Imbert-Goubeyre who, inspired by his experience, produced the first data on stigmatics, listing all known cases century by century.³⁵⁸ The sub-title of the work, ‘Réponse aux libres-penseurs’, informs the reader that his census is by no means disinterested, and demonstrates the continuing conflict between rationalists and supernaturalists.³⁵⁹ This interest in stigmatics was shared by literary authors such as J.-K. Huysmans. As the French novelist moved closer and closer to the Church of Rome, so his fascination with the sufferings of the flesh grew more and more intense. In Là-Bas (1891), Durtal’s recollection of Grünewald’s painting of the crucified Christ provides the reader with painfully realistic details of the effects of torture on the body:

L’heure des sanies étaient venue; la plaie fluviale du flanc ruisselait plus épaisse, inondait la hanche d’un sang pareil au jus foncé des mûres; des sérosités rosâtres, des petits laits, des eaux semblables à des vins de Moselle gris, suintaient de la poitrine, trempaient le ventre au-dessous duquel ondulait le panneau bouillonné d’un linge; puis, les genoux rapprochés de force, heurtaient leurs rotules, et les jambes tordues s’évidaient jusqu’aux pieds qui, ramenés l’un sur l’autre, s’allongeaient, poussaient en pleine putréfaction, verdissaient dans des flots de sang.³⁶⁰

Clearly fascinated by the gross realities of physical suffering, Huysmans also considered such suffering capable of bringing about spiritual revelation and refinement. For him, the relationship between the spirit and the flesh is most tellingly demonstrated in the example of stigmatics such as Anna Katharina Emmerich, an early nineteenth-century visionary, who became known as ‘the living Crucifix’, and to whom he refers frequently in his fiction.³⁶¹ Huysmans pursued his interest in stigmatics in his 1901 hagiography of Saint Lydwina of Schiedam in which, recounting the history of this fourteenth-century saint, he seems to revel in descriptions of suppurating flesh:

…en outre de ses ulcères dans lesquels vermillaient des colonies de parasites qu’on alimentait sans les détruire, une tumeur apparut sur l’épaule qui se putréfia…le menton se décolla sous la lèvre inférieure et la bouche enfla …enfin, après une esquinancie qui l’étouffa, elle perdit le sang, par la bouche, par les oreilles, par le nez, avec une telle profusion que son lit ruisselait.³⁶²
Though Wilde had claimed in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ that ‘the medieval Christ is the real Christ’, it is hard to imagine that he would have desired an image of Christ as ‘real’ as that of, say, Grünewald; and while in desiring to ‘transform into a spiritual experience’ his physical sufferings in Reading Gaol he acknowledges a connection between the spirit and the flesh, it is unlikely that the putrescent spectacle of the suffering Saint Lydwina would have touched him as it did Huysmans.³⁶³ Of course, those critics who attach great significance to Wilde’s fascination with Roman Catholicism would regard his interest in the phenomenon of stigmata as supporting evidence.³⁶⁴ However, ‘Le Miracle des Stigmates’ is singularly lacking in the kind of religious aestheticism that typified the decadent Catholicism in vogue in the 1890s. ³⁶⁵ The physicality of Jesus is barely remarked upon, let alone eroticized, save for the five scars which distinguish him as ‘Sauveur du Monde’.³⁶⁶ In ‘Le Miracle des Stigmates’ Wilde seems more interested in the symbolic resonance of divine substitution and its poetic potential, than in its physical manifestations, as in his short story, ‘The Selfish Giant’, where the marks of the Christ-like child are termed ‘the wounds of Love’, described sparingly as ‘the prints of two nails’.³⁶⁷

The tenor of ‘Le Miracle des Stigmates’ is resolutely agnostic. In the course of the story, the very word ‘stigmata’, deriving as it does from the Greek word for ‘sign’, takes on a sharply paradoxical quality. Far from being physical signs of mystical union with Christ, the marks of the cross are, instead, literal proof that the divinity of Christ is a fallacy. The revelation that there is no divine doctrine of substitution renders fraudulent, or deluded, the several hundred surrogate sufferers down the ages. Ranked first amongst this number is St Francis of Assisi: the type of divine stigmatics. Wilde’s unreserved admiration for the Italian friar followed that of Renan. For the Frenchman, St Francis was ‘a faithful mirror of Christ’³⁶⁸; for Wilde he was ‘the true Imitatio Christi’.³⁶⁹ But, for Renan, he was also a counterfeit stigmatic, whose wounds were invented by a close companion, Elias of Cortona, immediately after his death, and ‘would not have borne a close examination.’³⁷⁰ In ‘Le Miracle des Stigmates’, Wilde’s presentation of Christ, rather than St Francis, as the first false stigmatic is particularly audacious. Commencing the tale with the reassuring presence of Joseph of Arimathea - a figure who appears briefly in all four Gospels - Wilde appears to be following an uncontroversial Biblical route. However, an unorthodox trajectory is quick to develop as we are confronted with a failed Messiah, taking refuge ‘dans une ville obscure où il reprit son ancien métier de charpentier’, the teller unable to resist adding the mischievously irreverent detail that ‘nul n’était plus habile à construire des crèches et des croix.’ Christ’s life, so Wilde’s tale suggests, has gone into reverse: a man who once went from the obscurity of Nazareth to the courts of Jerusalem is now in retreat from the world. We are told that, when Paul comes preaching the Gospel of Christ crucified, ‘Jésus baissa la tête en rentrant les mains dans les manches de sa tunique’, gestures which suggest both shame, and an emotional and physical recoiling from society. While the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel displays his wounds to Thomas as proof of his divinity, the Jesus of Wilde’s version knows his marks to be proof of ‘la fausseté de la religion nouvelle’, and hides them away. And while the Gospel Christ can command Mary Magdalene not to touch him, Wilde’s sad and disillusioned figure has no such power in death. Scrutinized and touched by those who prepare him for burial, his wounds are uncovered, appearing to provide incontrovertible evidence for the miracle that has changed their lives.

Yet Wilde’s parable is more than a simple inversion of the Gospel original offering a materialist reading of the resurrection. Unlike the rationalist theories which circulated throughout the nineteenth century, Wilde’s tale gives us few practical details to explain how the crucified man recovered his health and strength. Perhaps sharing the view expressed by Thomas Scott in his rationalist biography of Jesus that ‘there is something…revolting in suppositions that Jesus was only apparently dead’, Wilde spares his audience a detailed account of the post-crucifixion body and its recovery.³⁷¹ Instead, he bridges an awkward narrative gap by transforming the hyssop of John’s Gospel into ‘une essence magique qui, mêlée au sang, donnerait au condamné l’apparence de la mort’, steering a mid-course between rationalist and supernaturalist thinking. On the one hand, the detail recalls the rationalist theory recorded by D. F. Strauss that accused Jesus’s disciples of ‘a preconceived plan of producing apparent death by means of a potion’;³⁷² on the other hand, the tale’s insistence on the magical nature of the draught preserves an element of the mysterious and the inexplicable.

In The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, Hans Frei observes:

What is so striking and revealing about Schleiermacher’s inference that Jesus probably underwent a Scheintod on the cross is not his disbelief in the resurrection. Skepticism about physical miracles, especially that one, is, after all, a typically modern attitude. Far more remarkable is the fact that, no matter what he may have chosen to believe about the facts of the case, it never occurred to him that there is something unfitting, indeed ludicrous, about rendering the story of Jesus in a way that makes such a thundering anti-climax possible.³⁷³
The conclusion of ‘Le Miracle des Stigmates’ suggests that Wilde, too, had understood the inherent bathos of this rationalist theory, and had endeavoured to prevent his fictional version of it from ending on an entirely flat note, devoid of any sense of the spiritual. In the final line of the tale, the joy felt by the early Christians as they discover the wounds of Jesus is clearly expressed in their exclamation ‘C’est un miracle, un grand miracle!’ While this cry of rapture might be dismissed as naïve and foolish, inviting a purely sceptical response, Wilde’s positioning of the sentence at the very close of the story allows it to remain open to other interpretations. Here, Wilde seems to suggest that an intense spiritual or emotional experience generated by a falsehood should be considered no less genuine or valuable than one based on truth. Just as Antony’s grief at what Shakespeare’s audience knows is Cleopatra’s faked death, is not rendered less affecting by the fact that he is being deceived, so the numinous quality of the early Christians falling to their knees ‘comme devant les stigmates d’un saint’, for all the ironic anachronism of the analogy, is not made less affecting by the listener’s knowledge of the illusory nature of the oblations. Wilde wrote in his Oxford notebook that ‘To define a miracle as a violation of the Laws of Nature is absurd; Nature is all which is: it is the series of phenomena of which the alleged miracle is one.’³⁷⁴ In De Profundis, he reveals a similar approach to the miraculous, explaining how one of the most contentious of the New Testament miracles, the changing of water into wine, was achieved through the power of Jesus’s personality, so that for those who ate with him ‘the water had the taste of good wine.’³⁷⁵ So, in what is in some respects a trenchantly sceptical tale, we encounter Wilde’s openness to the miraculous. The teaching of Paul, even if based on an event which never actually took place, has the power to create joy and unity, and to exercise what, in ‘The Decay of Lying’, Vivian describes as ‘that mythopoeic faculty which is so essential for the imagination’.³⁷⁶

One other version of Wilde’s stigmata story is recorded in Le Chant du Cygne in a section headed ‘Le jeu des variantes’.³⁷⁷ Believed to have been told to the writer George Maurevert, about a year before Wilde’s death, this later version differs significantly from that generally assumed to be the original.³⁷⁸ The setting in ‘le quartier juif de Rome’ is more contextually specific and reflects the tendency of certain Lives of Jesus published in the last two decades of the century to emphasise how Jesus was a Jew, living amongst Jews. In the earlier version, the central character is never fully named, and the onus is put on the reader to conspire with the teller’s own blasphemy in identifying him as the Jesus of the Gospel stories. In this variant rendering, however, the hero is immediately announced by his Jewish appellation ‘Ieschou-ben-lossef’. A more realistic telling of the tale, it goes on to present a married Jesus who converses with his wife, Valéria, in colloquial tones; we are told the exact dates of key events and given the precise cause of Ieschou’s death. The effect of these quotidian details is to detract from the mystery of the Christ-figure. Ieschou lacks the withdrawn and brooding quality of the Jesus of the other version; his crucifixion wounds are not hidden from sight, but described bluntly as ‘les rouges cicatrices’. When attention is drawn to these marks by Balbus, his father-in-law and employer, he explains them away in a rational manner as ‘Un accident, jadis.’ Any attentive listener would have been puzzled, then, at Valéria’s only discovering Ieschou’s wounds while preparing him for burial. That a wife could live with her husband without being aware of the physical marks pointed out by a less intimate relative strains the listener’s credulity, especially given that the naturalistic style of the tale is more likely to invite a literal-minded response. Another noticeable change in this variant of the stigmata tale comes from the substitution of Peter for Paul. As the apostle ‘entrusted with the gospel to the circumcised’, Peter is a more suitable choice for a story with an explicitly Jewish context.³⁷⁹ Furthermore, according to extra-Biblical tradition, Peter was martyred in Rome, the setting for this version of the tale.³⁸⁰ Yet what the story gains in historical authenticity from this change, it loses in ironic effect. In the first version, the shadowy presence of Paul, for whom the death and resurrection of Jesus were even more significant than his life and ministry, creates an acute irony in a scenario which exposes the absolute falsity of such a doctrine. All in all, this revision lacks the spare and haunting qualities of the original. Its final line: ‘Et le coeur et l’esprit de Valéria sont ravis en étonnement…’ loses the impact that direct speech brings to the earlier rendering of the miraculous moment and, though the ellipsis solicits a questioning response, a glimpse into the future, the listener is limited to one viewpoint, and the symbolic force of an anonymous gathering of first-generation Christians, falling to their knees in worship, is lost.

Though immensely rich in literary potential and contemporary appeal, the majority of Wilde’s spoken tales was never fixed in writing. His two years of imprisonment would take him away from the stimulus of friends and acquaintances engaged in literary treatments of the Scriptures, and from the constantly evolving theological controversies of the day, to see him create an image of Christ far removed from that developed in his oral tales.

De Profundis and its place in Wilde’s Christology

De Profundis is one of Wilde’s most energetically debated works, proving to be all things to all men: an apologia, a confessio peccati, an autobiography, a love letter and, most significantly for this study, a secular Gospel. But if this is, indeed, the culmination of the author’s ambition to compose a fifth Gospel, it is one which differs radically from that sketched out in the oral tales. Wilde’s most sustained discussion of Christ, it reads, superficially at least, like the author at his most conventionally Christian. The reader notices frequent echoes of Gospel imagery and paradox, and encounters a Christ who is hailed as the cynosure for all ages, sometimes described in language so reverential as to be reminiscent of one of the more devout Lives of Jesus. Yet though the Christ passages in De Profundis are ostensibly less sceptical than his Biblical apologues in tone and spirit, closer reading uncovers them as the author’s most outright rejection of anything approaching traditional Christianity.

Showing little regard for the Jesus of history, Wilde gives us an entirely solipsistic vision of the man and his ministry. Countering the Victorian tendency to mould Jesus to fit neatly into one of the social categorizations of the age, such as ‘the dreadful philanthropists of the nineteenth century’, he recreates him instead in his own image as ‘the most supreme of Individualists’ whose ‘place indeed is with the poets’.³⁸¹ This identification of Christ with the figure of the poet is already evident in Wilde’s early poetry, where the ‘brawlers of the auction mart’, selling off Keats’s love letters, are likened to the Roman soldiers of the Passion narratives, casting lots ‘for the garments of a wretched man’.³⁸² Yet, whereas in this early work Wilde looks to Biblical parallels to express the sacred nature of the great artist and the callous indifference of those who fail to recognize his greatness, in De Profundis the two sides of the analogy coalesce: Jesus is not merely a fitting comparison to the poet, he is the poet himself and the author’s identification with Christ becomes at the same time an affiliation with the betrayed artist. By the same token, Lord Alfred Douglas takes on the role of Judas to Wilde’s Jesus. Described at the time of Wilde’s entering his term of imprisonment as ‘a golden-haired boy with Christ’s own heart’, he is subsequently upbraided for his ‘terrible lack of imagination’, a failing which places him in the role of the betrayer.³⁸³

If De Profundis is indeed a confessional work, it does not conform in any way to late-Victorian expectations. Rather than atoning for his violation of society’s ethical codes, Wilde confesses to his betrayal of aesthetics, telling Bosie:

While you were with me you were the absolute ruin of my art, and in allowing you to stand persistently between Art and myself I give to myself shame, and blame in the fullest degree…One half-hour with Art was always more to me than a cycle with you. Nothing really at any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance to me compared with Art.³⁸⁴

And the ideal nature of Jesus is redefined to suit his own aesthetic and agnostic creed. Christ is proclaimed as the type of the poet, a notion by no means original. Wilde would have encountered the idea of the poet-Christ in works by Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold, and less well known authors such as his friend, Edgar Saltus, whose depiction of Jesus as someone who ‘gave the world a fairer theory of aesthetics, a new conception of beauty’, predates De Profundis by almost a decade.³⁸⁵ What does stand out as original in Wilde’s Christology, however, is his insistence on Jesus as an autogenous being. Where most agnostic studies of Christ called on historical, social, and religious contexts to explain how and why he might have come to be considered divine, Wilde insists that ‘out of his own imagination entirely did Jesus of Nazareth create himself’.³⁸⁶ For him, the significance of Isaiah’s prefiguring of the Man of Sorrows inheres in its being the catalyst for Christ’s act of self-creation, rather than in its validity as Old Testament prophecy. Just as Wilde keeps in place the traditional relationship between sinner and saviour, at the same time describing Jesus in highly heterodox terms, so here he preserves the typological habit of the Christian mind whilst simultaneously denying Christ’s divinity. And if ‘The Song of Isaiah…had seemed to him to be a prefiguring of himself’, then Christ’s suffering on the cross, so Wilde suggests, shadows forth the trials of the artist ‘despised and rejected of men’.³⁸⁷

In De Profundis, Wilde holds firm to his belief that meaning can only inhere in the individual. He holds the mirror up to Jesus and sees his own self - or at least his preferred version of himself - reflected: the individualist, the antinomian, the artist, the rejected, and the betrayed. Christ provides an analogue through which Wilde can regard his own personality and experiences, illustrating Schweitzer’s contention that, in the nineteenth century, ‘each individual created Jesus in accordance with his own character.’³⁸⁸ Unsurprisingly, considering how neatly the image of Christ is made to fit Wilde’s predicament, one of the first reviewers of De Profundis, E. V. Lucas, declared it ‘a dexterously constructed counterfeit’;³⁸⁹ and three years later, on the publication of the 1908 Collected Works, Harold Hannyngton Child remarked even more caustically that ‘There is a looking-glass, it seems, even in the depths’.³⁹⁰

Yet Wilde’s invocation of Christ in De Profundis goes beyond the mere posturing and narcissism of which it has been so frequently accused. Examined in the context of his earlier fictional versions of the New Testament and his non-fiction writings about the Bible and theology, it articulates a more refined and definite vision of a potential fifth Gospel. De Profundis lifts the figure of Jesus out of the domains of theological debate, historical enquiry, and religious practice, placing it squarely in the realms of art, proving true to Gilbert’s assertion in ‘The Critic as Artist’ that ‘Aesthetics are higher than ethics’.³⁹¹ Just as Renan identified in Jesus ‘that great instinct of futurity which has animated all reformers’,³⁹² so Wilde identifies in him the ‘palpitating centre of romance’ which animates the artists of future ages.³⁹³ We are told to look for him ‘in Romeo and Juliet, in the Winter’s Tale, in Provençal poetry, in “The Ancient Mariner”, in “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, and in Chatterton’s “Ballad of Charity”’.³⁹⁴ And he is defined through predominantly literary allusions: his ‘flamelike imagination’ recalls Pater’s Marius,³⁹⁵ and the Mass spoken in his honour is likened to the Greek chorus.³⁹⁶

De Profundis is generally regarded as Wilde’s definitive statement on Christ. Filtered through the autobiographical frame of the author’s own Golgotha, its heterodoxy is of a very different type from that found in the spoken New Testament tales, suggesting that the forced introspection of imprisonment had brought about a fundamental change in perspective. This is not to say, however, that Wilde had given up his ambitions to rewrite the Scriptures. There is evidence to suggest that he still had plans to write Biblical fiction after his release from prison, and to extend his range of source material beyond the New Testament. Richard Ellmann records how he ‘continued his higher criticism of the Bible by reworking the story of Ahab and Jezebel, with the idea that it might be made into a play like Salome’.³⁹⁷ This shift of focus from the New to the Old Testament was a potentially shrewd move on Wilde’s part. In the first decade of the twentieth century, there was a growing trend for dramatic adaptations of Old Testament stories to be treated more leniently by the Examiner of Plays than those based on the Gospels, and Wilde’s choice of subject was particularly prescient, given that Gwendolen Lally’s Jezebel (1912) would become the first overtly Biblical play to be passed by the censor in England.³⁹⁸ And there is nothing to suggest that he was dissatisfied with the prose poems he had already composed. Writing in the Preface to Essays and Lectures, Robert Ross expresses the opinion that ‘Poems in Prose were to have been continued’ and that the hostile reception they received did not deter him from writing more.³⁹⁹

Yet if Wilde continued to hold his ambition to complete a fifth Gospel for the ‘Confraternity of the Fatherless’ he imagines in De Profundis, it would never be realised.⁴⁰⁰ Recording his memories of a meeting with Wilde at Dieppe in 1897, Gedeon Spilett recalls Wilde’s outlining to him ‘the scenario of a satiric play in three scenes which he planned to write but has given up, at least for the present’, and transcribes the author’s own description of the proposed drama, based largely on ‘The Doer of Good’, already much reworked.⁴⁰¹ Having once told Yeats that he considered this ‘the best short story in the world’, it is perhaps understandable that he would continue to explore its potential in other creative forms; at the same time, it is clear that, by this stage in his life, any further work on fictionalizing the Scriptures would be more a matter of reworking past ideas than inventing any new ones. Yet even the numerous oral tales he already had at his disposal would remain unwritten. Why this was so remains a matter for conjecture. There is no doubt that Wilde’s publishing prospects were substantially diminished after his release from prison and, perhaps more significantly, he no longer enjoyed the public acclaim which had once guaranteed captive audiences for his oral tales.⁴⁰² One biographer, Hesketh Pearson, explained how ‘Wilde would often repeat his stories, trying them out in various guises, testing their effect on different people, until he had achieved the form that satisfied himself’.⁴⁰³ The creative interdependence of the spoken and written elements of Wilde’s work which Pearson identifies here was inevitably damaged in his post-imprisonment years, as his social world grew ever more impoverished and narrow. Moreover, given the abrupt change in the public’s attitude towards him after his conviction, he must have found the prospect of publishing undeniably heterodox stories to an already censorious readership immensely daunting.

Looking beyond the merely practical, Wilde’s failure to record his oral tales in writing is in many ways in keeping with his often ambivalent attitude towards the Gospels.⁴⁰⁴ While admiring their ‘simple romantic charm’ and acknowledging their literary qualities in referring to them as ‘prose-poems’, he nevertheless recognized how their canonical authority brought with it the stultifying effects of repetition and literalism.⁴⁰⁵ In keeping his own stories about Jesus free of the limitations which come with a typographic form, Wilde left them open for extemporizing with each new audience, with each new theological theory, and with each new stage of the creator’s own life. In Wilde’s oeuvre, then, fictional representations of Jesus remain mainly in the oral domain, in keeping with his view of Christ as the ‘eternal mouthpiece’, whose place among the poets is earned not from what he writes, but what he says.⁴⁰⁶ Wilde’s declaration to Laurence Housman that ‘It is enough that the stories have been invented, that they actually exist; that I have been able, in my own mind, to give them the form which they demand’ suggests that the oral version of a tale was, for him, every bit as valuable as a textual version.⁴⁰⁷ For some of those who heard them, however, their attractiveness as foundations for fictional writings would prove irresistible and, several years after the death of their creator, they would re-emerge in a substantial number of literary treatments of Jesus.
CHAPTER FOUR