SOURCE: "Sterne and the Anglican Church," in his Laurence Sterne as Satirist: A Reading of "Tristram Shandy," University of Florida Press, 1969, pp. 5-28.

That sterne was a clergyman of the Anglican church has proved, more often than not, a source of embarrassment to his critics. If the modern critic is not as apt as the Victorian critic to wax indignant over the imposture, he is, nonetheless, unwilling to give the forty-five sermons which survive a meaningful place in the Sterne canon.¹ John Traugott, for example, refuses to treat them as religious documents; they are rhetorical exercises. He concludes a cursory examination of them with a dismissal of their religious significance: "At any rate it is clear that while Sterne was not perfectly suited for the ministry he nevertheless owed the Church a great debt: it first permitted … him to express himself."² Traugott argues that the sermons are not to be taken seriously—either as religious doctrine or even as serious attempts at moral persuasion. They present instead, he says, "kittenish mocking of affections … ever on the verge of comedy," and his entire discussion is designed to show them in a Shandean light.³

Lansing V. D. H. Hammond's account of the sermons is basically a source study, but its findings have far-reaching consequences for a proper understanding of Steme's Christianity. In the first place, if we accept his well-argued conjecture that most, perhaps all, of the sermons were written prior to 1750, indeed, "in rudimentary form" between 1737 and 1745, we are faced with the interesting proposition that the sermons belong, at least in date, to the Augustan period.⁴ Even more significant is Hammond's belief that "with the single exception of Swift's Sermons, apparently first published in 1744, Sterne made no use in his own discourses of any writing which had not already appeared in print before 1733."⁵ Without discounting the incentives of fame and fortune, it can be inferred that Sterne's willingness to publish his sermons in 1760, and again in 1766, indicates a continued commitment to the religious principles he had worked out twenty years before.⁶

The sources of Sterne's religion are Latitudinarian, Tillotson and Clarke being, according to Hammond, the major sources of the sermons.⁷ For Hammond, Sterne's Latitudinarian tendencies suggest the unorthodox cast of his religion, but he is cautious in his final statement of Sterne's position. He is aware, in the first place, of the common rationalistic heritage of Latitudinarianism and deism, citing in evidence Robert Kilburn Root's comment that "except in the heat of controversy, it is not easy to distinguish between the religion of an orthodox divine such as Swift and the free-thinking deists whom he despised."⁸ Hammond is also aware, however, of the several attacks on deism in the sermons. Moreover, Sterne's attitudes toward miracles and mysteries "indicate an acceptance of certain fundamental Christian principles to which no advocate of a purely 'natural' religion would be willing to subscribe."⁹

Unfortunately, Hammond saves Sterne from heresy only to condemn him for superficiality. He notes the indifference to "doctrinal Christianity" and the concern with doctrines not necessarily "peculiar to or distinctive of the Christian religion; his precepts tend to make of Christianity a moral philosophy rather than a religion.… "Sterne's failure to marshal authorities and copious quotations and his amazing freedom from the "'contemporary language of polemics" are also seen, by Hammond, as indications of Sterne's unorthodox and lukewarm Christian commitment.¹⁰ Hammond, like Traugott, ultimately leaves us with a picture of Sterne as a nominal, Shandean Christian, much like the erstwhile projector of "An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity in England." It is, I believe, a false picture.

A true picture of Sterne's Christianity depends on an understanding of the Latitudinarianism at its roots. The label, it will be recalled, was originally a term of contempt for the Cambridge Platonists, pointing primarily at their advocacy of religious toleration. Insofar as Latitudinarianism implies tolerance, the label is apropos. When, however, it is used to suggest an indifferent sort of Christianity, one at an opposite end from Anglican orthodoxy, then it needs careful qualification. The purpose of the Cambridge Platonists and of their followers, the Latitudinarians, was not the repudiation of orthodoxy but rather its re-establishment after the Interregnum. It was a normalizing and moderating purpose, and its primary instrument was reason. Between the Calvinistic extremism of the Puritans and the politic extremism of Laud, the Cambridge Platonists sought a compromise in the reasonableness of Christianity and of Christian men, hoping to throttle forever the spirit of faction that had dominated seventeenth-century life in England. "The appeal to reason," writes G. R. Cragg, "is the most conspicuous characteristic of the Cambridge school."¹¹

The reasonableness of the Cambridge Platonists sought to unite all Christians "on the common ground of the great essentials of religion," while, at the same time, it de-emphasized the finer points of dogma and doctrine which had so disturbed contemporary English Christianity. But it was not the facile reasonableness which would later produce Christianity Not Mysterious, not the rationalism which repudiates mysteries simply because they are mysteries.¹² Seeking the middle ground, the Cambridge Platonists worked out the compromise between reason, faith, and revelation that served throughout the eighteenth century to unite varying degrees of Christian orthodoxy within the Anglican church. Debates over doctrinal issues would continue and at times would grow vituperative; but the fierce, disruptive struggles of the seventeenth century yielded to the essential governance of one Church, catholic in nature and flexible in doctrine.

On the question of moral conduct, compromise was again the primary concern of the Cambridge Platonists. Moral laws were divinely revealed, but they were also reasonable; and right conduct was based neither on the inexorable authority of the Calvinistic God nor, as in Hobbes, on obedience to a civil ruler, but rather on one's personal response to the right reason within. Eventually this restoration of free will and moral responsibility became the foundation for religious toleration and, in fact, for both deist and Methodist dissent. The essential intent of the Cambridge Platonists, however, was the re-establishment of a Christian's moral responsibility in the face of Calvinist and Hobbist authorities—and the reaffirmation of right reason, hedged by the authority of revelation, as the cornerstone of morality.

In many ways the Latitudinarians are second-generation Cambridge Platonists, although they inherit far more of the rationalism than the mysticism of their teachers. Against the two enemies of the established Church, Catholicism and Puritanism, reason proved the more effective weapon. At times the emphasis on reason was bound to suggest deism, the religion that reason could discover for itself; but the Latitudinarians had a more orthodox view of man's rational capacity: "… reason, by recognizing the limitations latent in our knowledge, is the true corrective to dogmatism. So far from making us overconfident, reason encourages diffidence and humility.… We are surrounded by such unfathomable mysteries that any form of dogmatism is intolerable arrogance."¹³ The continued respect for mystery and the desire to prove reason in accord with revealed Christianity place the Latitudinarians in the center of eighteenth-century Anglicanism.

The Latitudinarian emphasis on reason had far-reaching effects on sermon-writing throughout the eighteenth century. The rejection of "endless debate about theological niceties" freed the sermon from the interminable citation of authorities and extensive quotations of seventeenth-century discourses. The reaction against Calvinism and predestination put renewed emphasis on the Gospel and the Church as guides for moral conduct. The darkness and anger of the Calvinistic God was displaced by a God of light, a God of love and benevolence. This reaction against Calvinism made Latitudinarianism seem more unorthodox than it ever intended to be. Its true direction, however, is conservative: It aims for a reconciliation of reason and revelation, morality and religion. The sermons of the Latitudinarians are moral rather than polemical, temperate rather than fiery, simple rather than intricate. Their aim is not to "liberalize" Anglicanism, but to return it to the center of English religious life after a century of near disaster.¹⁴

It is of no slight significance to the study of Steme's Christianity that Locke agrees with the Latitudinarian divines on many major issues. Locke's The Reasonableness of Christianity must be considered a document of the Latitudinarian movement, and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, an explanation of the nature of the rationalism which made the movement possible. The rationalistic revolt against dogma, however, is carried further by Locke than by the Latitudinarians; they turned from authority only in reaction to the dogmatism of the seventeenth century, while Locke's revolt was part of his larger struggle against the entire scholastic method. In fact, Locke's revolt against authority and his insistence on an intellectual, almost mathematical, concept of God provide a good illustration of the distance between Latitudinarianism and deism, for Locke is able to find a comfortable middle ground between the two.¹⁵ Similarly Locke's reduction of Christianity to a belief in Jesus as the Messiah is more simplistic than the Latitudinarians would have wished. However, when pressed on the issue, Locke explained that a belief in Christ included a belief in all the doctrines known to come from Christ, thus returning to a fundamentally orthodox position.¹⁶

Locke also reinforced the Latitudinarian claim that morality was the subject of Christianity, maintaining both theologically and epistemologically that moral conduct is the proper study of mankind. It is on this vital issue that Locke, like the Latitudinarians, shows the essentially orthodox position of his religious views. He had already demonstrated in the Essay that reason is a limited faculty; in The Reasonableness of Christianity he stresses the weakness of men and the need, except for the relatively few, of a system of rewards and punishments to ensure moral conduct. At times this system is one of calculating prudence; at times it is the promise of immortality; and at yet other times it is a return to the authority of the Bible and tradition. Locke's insistence on the incapacity of men to follow right reason is a view he shares with the Latitudinarians. It contrasts sharply with the deistic and moralsense schools which brought morality within everyone's capacity.

One of the most significant studies of Swift in recent years, Phillip Harth, Swift and Anglican Rationalism, convincingly places the admittedly orthodox Swift within the Latitudinarian tradition. Harth attempts to dull the initial shock of this assertion by using the term "Anglican rationalists" to emphasize "the characteristic which distinguishes them as apologists of the Church of England."¹⁷ Noting first that the older view of Swift as a skeptic in religion has now been replaced by Ricardo Quintana's illustration of his orthodoxy, Harth suggests that this orthodoxy needs a more accurate definition than the fideism now being associated with Swift.¹⁸ The cause of this associationis the false dichotomy we have seen in connection with Sterne between "orthodoxy" and "rationalism," which, Harth writes, "misinterprets the religious situation in Restoration England."

I have, to some extent, already indicated that situation. The crucial struggle of Anglicanism was against Puritan and Catholic dissent; deism or freethinking was also an enemy, of course, but the dangers were less immediate. In this struggle the most important single issue was the role of reason and revelation in religion; according to Harth's simplified but valid schematization, it became a question of mediating between "revelation, no reason" dissenters and "reason, no revelation" deists. The fideist position was, of course, common to many Orthodox Anglicans, but, as the century drew to its close, exclusive revelation became more and more associated with the Puritans. The identification of the Catholics as fideists is in part polemical, but the rationalism of the Latitudinarians could well insist that scholastic logic and transubstantiation were unreasonable. At any rate, the linking of dissenters with Catholics on the supposition that they are possessed by essentially the same "unreason" persists even to Steme's sermons, for example, "On Enthusiasm."¹⁹ The Cambridge Platonists, the Latitudinarians, and Locke all joined to maintain that, in Harth's words, "reason and revelation are not incompatible in religion. On the contrary, reason and revelation together provide the grounds for religion, so that each plays its proper role in the religious sphere and neither can be ignored." Swift, according to Harth, also maintained this position, "historically … the mainstream of tradition in the Catholic and Anglican churches."²⁰

For Harth, Swift's place in the Latitudinarian tradition is of significance primarily because of the proof it offers that A Tale of a Tub makes use of a traditional set of polemical devices. Sterne, too, in his satire against Catholics may possibly be echoing rather faintly these Restoration polemics. My own primary concern, however, is with the set of norms an orthodox position in the Anglican church makes available to the satirist. Apart from its classical and traditional Christian (Catholic) sources, the moral outlook of Augustan satire (the normative values against which man was measured) was provided in large measure by the orthodox stance of Anglicanism on the nature of man and the possibilities and potentialities of his achieving a moral life. At the same time deviations from the orthodox norm provided many of the targets of Augustan satire. It is no accident, as Louis Landa points out in his introduction to Swift's sermons, that "however brief the treatment, his ideas are present extensively [in the sermons]; and we can assess the nature of his mind and define his position in the eighteenth century from the sermons as clearly as we can from his other works."²¹

The relationship between satire and orthodoxy can be seen in the sermon "On the Trinity," Swift's "most elaborate statement on Christian doctrine" and one which "exhibits clearly the orthodoxy and conventionality of his religious views."²² The subject is the role of mystery in the Christian scheme; Swift explains why it has a rightful place:

It would be well, if People would not lay so much Weight on their own Reason in Matters of Religion, as to think every thing impossible and absurd which they cannot conceive. How often do we contradict the right Rules of Reason in the whole Course of our Lives? Reason itself is true and just, but the Reason of every particular Man is weak and wavering, perpetually swayed and turned by his Interests, his Passions, and his Vices. Let any Man but consider … how blinded he is by the Love of himself, to believe that Right is Wrong, and Wrong is Right, when it maketh for his own Advantage. Where is then the right Use of his Reason, which he so much boasteth of, and which he would blasphemously set up to controul the Commands of the Almighty?²³

That these beliefs in the limits of reason, the power of the passions and self-interest, and the inordinate pride of man operate at the core of Swift's satire is common knowledge. Moreover, Swift makes certain in this sermon on the Trinity that we understand the limits even of right reason: "But because I cannot conceive the Nature of this Union and Distinction in the Divine Nature, am I therefore to reject them as absurd and impossible; as I would, if any one told me that three Men are one, and one Man is three? … But the Apostle telleth us, We see but in part, and we know but in part; and yet we would comprehend all the secret Ways and Workings of God."²⁴ Significantly, Landa associates this skepticism with the limitations of reason demonstrated in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. And just as Locke brings skepticism to bear on the systematizing of scholastic philosophers, so Swift uses it to free his sermons from the abstruse speculations of scholastic theologians and those Anglican clergymen who had allowed the spirit of contention to lead them into complex and futile controversies.

Swift's purpose in his sermons is rather bluntly stated at the opening of "On the Trinity": "This Day being set apart to acknowledge our Belief in the Eternal TRINITY, I thought it might be proper to employ my present Discourse entirely upon that Subject; and, I hope, to handle it in such a Manner, that the most Ignorant among you may return home better informed of your Duty in this great Point, than probably you are at present."²⁵ The refusal to enter into doctrinal disputes, evident in both Swift's and Steme's sermons, has its roots in the insistence that the function of the clergy is to explain, as simply as possible, the Christian duties of their communicants. The interest in simplicity dominates the advice Swift gives in "A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately entered into Holy Orders";²⁶ the interest in duty is explained in "On the Trinity": "So, that the great Excellency of Faith, consisteth in the Consequence it hath upon our Actions.… Therefore, let no Man think that he can lead as good a moral Life without Faith, as with it; for this Reason, Because he who hath no Faith, cannot, by the Strength of his own Reason or Endeavours, so easily resist Temptations, as the other who depends upon God's Assistance in the overcoming his Frailties.… "²⁷ This fast union of morality and religion is one of the marks of Latitudinarian Anglicanism which distinguishes it from the deistic assumption of moral conduct as a possibility quite distinct from religion. Steme, I shall demonstrate, also takes this orthodox approach.

Swift's sermon "Upon the Excellence of Christianity" is also of significance to the present discussion, for here Swift defends the Christian system of rewards and punishments against the moral systems of the Greek and Roman philosophers. His discourse returns him to the limits of man as a moral creature and to the necessity of the union between religion and morality: "Now, human nature is so constituted, that we can never pursue any thing heartily but upon hopes of a reward … But some of the philosophers gave all this quite another turn, and pretended to refine so far, as to call virtue its own reward, and worthy to be followed only for itself: Whereas, if there be any thing in this more than the sound of the words, it is at least too abstracted to become an universal influencing principle in the world, and therefore could not be of general use."²⁸ Of this attack on the classical philosophers (and modern deists) Landa writes: "Swift follows the traditional line of argument in contending that for the generality of mankind, only Christianity has provided a really effective incentive to reject vice in favour of virtue—the doctrine of future rewards and punishments; effective because it is sensibly attuned to selfish human nature, its appeal being to man's higher self-interest—his eternal welfare."²⁹ In Augustan satire this union of morality and religion becomes the demand for a recognition of individual insufficiency and the need for acknowledging external controls as a curb to pride and folly. For the rational Christian as for the rational satirist, right reason informs him, above all, of the inadequacy of the very reason he seeks to re-establish.

A third sermon, "On the Testimony of Conscience," explores these problems further and is of particular interest because of Sterne's discourse on the same subject, "The Abuses of Conscience Considered."³⁰ Swift's sermon is an attack, once again, on a moral system independent of religion, and more particularly, according to Landa, on Shaftesbury's theory of the moral sense. The view that conscience functions independently of the laws of God, that man possesses a "natural sense of right and wrong which exists prior to and independently of the idea of God" was, for Swift, a false and dangerous heresy. Once again, Landa links Swift to Locke, citing Locke's statement from the Essay that "the true ground of moraliiy … can only be the will and law of a God, who sees men in the dark, has in his hand rewards and punishments, and power enough to call to account the proudest offender."³¹ The position, Landa notes, is an orthodox one.

The crux of both Swift's and Sterne's sermons is that the testimony of conscience cannot be trusted; that the conscience is abused by our other interests. Swift writes: "… whenever our Conscience accuseth us, we are certainly guilty; but we are not always innocent when it doth not accuse us: For very often, through the Hardness of our Hearts, or the Fondness and Favour we bear to our selves, or through Ignorance, or Neglect, we do not suffer our Conscience to take any Cognizance of several Sins we commit."³² Sterne's views clearly coincide:

I own … whenever a man's Conscience does accuse him … that he is guilty.…

But, the converse of the proposition will not hold true,—namely, That wherever there is guilt, the Conscience must accuse; and, if it does not, that a man is therefore innocent.… did no such thing ever happen, as that the conscience of a man, by long habits of sin, might … insensibly become hard …—Did this never happen:—or was it certain that self-love could never hang the least bias upon the judgment … could no such thing as favour and affection enter this sacred court… were we assured that INTEREST stood always unconcern'd … and that PASSION never got into the judgment seat, and pronounced sentence in the stead of reason, which is supposed always to preside and deter-mine upon the case … then, the religious and moral state of a man would be exactly what he himself esteemed it … (IV, 12[27]; Sermons, 11, 68-69).

It has long been noted that the comment in Tristram Shandy "when a man gives himself up to the government of a ruling passion,—or, in other words, when his HOBBY-HORSE grows headstrong,—farewell cool reason and fair discretion!" is an echo of Swift's famous remark in A Tale of a Tub: "But when a Man's Fancy gets astride on his Reason, when Imagination is at Cuffs with the Senses … the first Proselyte he makes, is Himself.…" That the same idea appears in the "Abuses of Conscience Considered," with its roots in Swift's "On the Testimony of Conscience," speaks to those critics who slight the echo of Tale of a Tub, insisting that Sterne's view of irrational behavior was far different from Swift's, indeed, far more "Christian" than Swift's. On the contrary, it seems evident that both men drew their views from the same source—the orthodox position of the Anglican church on the question of man's ability to find a moral life by himself. Of this morality without religion, Swift says: "… those Men who set up for Morality without regard to Religion, are generally but virtuous in part; they will be just in their Dealings between Man and Man; but if they find themselves disposed to Pride, Lust, Intemperance, or Avarice, they do not think their Morality concerned.…³³ Sterne reaches the same conclusion:

[The duties of religion and morality] are so inseparably connected together, that you cannot divide these two Tables, even in imagination (tho' the attempt is often made in practice) without breaking and mutually destroying them both.

I said the attempt is often made; and so it is;——there being nothing more common than to see a man, who has no sense at all of religion … who would yet take it as the bitterest affront, should you but hint at a suspicion of his moral character.…

Let him declaim as pompously as he can … it will be found at last to rest upon … either his interest, his pride, his ease … (Sermons, 11, 75-76).

Herbert Read was the first critic to notice that this view of the conscience is essentially a "classical doctrine"; his opinion has been further defended in Arthur H. Cash's article "The Sermon in Tristram Shandy."³⁴ Working primarily from Lockean psychology, rather than from Latitudinarian theology (whose influence he slights), Cash's conclusions are nevertheless much the same as my own: (1) Sterne's sermons consistently suggest the inability or reluctance of men to judge their own behavior because their passions interfere with their reason; (2) the ethic which results from this view of man is "at bottom … conservative," because it reaffirms the orthodox union of religion and morality; and (3) "no one who ever looked into the sermons could doubt Sterne's orthodox view of divine commands." The only serious difference of opinion between Cash and me arises from his distinction between the parson who sees the failure of self-governance as "deplorable," and the novelist who sees it as "laughable."³⁵ Cash raises the question of Sterne's apparent faith, revealed here and there in the sermons, in what seems to be a "moral sense," but he is unable to reconcile such faith with a conservative ethic. Nevertheless, he insists that the "soft view" of man is predominant in the "novels" which are free from Swiftian satire and written in "the liberal spirit"—thus questioning the significance of his whole study.³⁶ I shall suggest below that this "soft view" is part of Sterne's Latitudinarian heritage, the survival of polemical arguments against the Puritan view of man, but by no means unorthodox itself.

Cash illustrates very effectively the importance of recognizing Sterne's ethics as conservative. Stressing first Sterne's rationalism, he uses it as an argument against those who regard Sterne as a sentimentalist. He demonstrates, for example, that the famous line from Tristram Shandy, "REASON is, half of it, SENSE," is in context not at all an affirmation of sensibility, but rather "that rare instance when Tristram reveals his moral values by telling us that he and his family have been the dupes of their appetites and senses—the very point Sterne makes in The Abuses of Conscience Considered.…"³⁷ At the same time, he emphasizes Steme's allegiance to religion, noting particularly his insistence on the union of religion and morality: "By his admission that moral practice can be effected only through a fear of God's retribution, Sterne acknowledges a fundamental self-concern in man. The concession sets him apart from the more sophisticated rationalists of his own generation, who argued that true morality had to be practiced for its own sake."³⁸ In short, Steme's rationalism saves him from sensibility, while his religion saves him from "sophisticated" rationalism, that is, from deism. The intimate relationship between deism and sensibility suggests that, polemically, Sterne's position is an orthodox one, diametrically opposed to the liberalizing tendencies in eighteenth-century thought.

This orthodoxy is revealed again and again in the sermons of Steme; there can be little doubt that Sterne in his sermons not only shares with Swift an orthodox Christianity, but that this conservative position is what provides the moral background of Augustan satire. For example, the very first sermon in Volume I, "Inquiry after Happiness," is a "vanity of human wishes" discourse—a traditional meeting place of sermon and satire.³⁹ It is surely not fortuitous that the first sermon written under the nom de plume, Yorick, should take man through the stages of life, proving at each stage that all is vanity; Steme could hardly have been unaware that the serious import of Hamlet's Yorick was precisely this. Nor is it fortuitous that this first sermon should contain the following description of a young man's quest for happiness:

The moment he is got loose from tutors and governors, and is left to judge for himself, and pursue this scheme his own way—his first thoughts are generally full of the mighty happiness which he is going to enter upon.…

In consequence of this—take notice, how his imagination is caught by every glittering appearance that flatters this expectation.—Observe what impressions are made upon his senses, by diversions, music, dress and beauty—and how his spirits are upon the wing, flying in pursuit of them … (1, 1; Sermons, 1, 8).⁴⁰

The uncontrolled and uncontrollable range of Tristram's interests, which the modern critic praises as the desire to capture the diversity of life, assumes in this sermon the far different implications of vanity and naivete. Sterne's answer to hedonism in general is the traditional answer of Ecclesiastes: fear God and keep His commandments.⁴¹ The union of religion and morality, so fundamental to the meaning of this first discourse, is the most persistent message of Sterne's sermons.⁴²

As with Swift, the source of this message is Sterne's view of the limits of man. We have already seen the outlines of this view in the "Abuses of Conscience Considered"; it receives a similar statement in "Self-Knowledge," where Sterne tells us that "we are deceived in judging of ourselves, just as we are in judging of other things, when our passions and inclinations are called in as counsellors, and we suffer ourselves to see and reason just so far and no farther than they give us leave" (I, 4; Sermons, I, 38).⁴³ Most interesting in this sermon is Sterne's analysis of the possibilities of moral teaching in the face of self-interest; he suggests the moral fable: "… as they [moral instructors] had not strength to remove this flattering passion which stood in their way and blocked up all the passages to the heart, they endeavoured by stratagem to get beyond it, and by a skilful address, if possible, to deceive it. This gave rise to the early manner of conveying their instructions in parables, fables, and such sort of indirect applications, which, tho' they could not conquer this principle of self-love, yet often laid it asleep … till a just judgment could be procured" (Sermons, I, 40). Much has been made by Hammond and others of Sterne's tendency to dramatize his sermons, the implication being that Steme was more interested in the story he told than in the doctrine he preached. Nothing could be further from the truth, for Sterne's addition of a narrative dimension to several of his sermons is a quite traditional practice in pulpit oratory. Sterne learned much about narrative in writing his sermons; but, above all else, he learned the value of a story as an agreeable vehicle for the often unpleasant task of telling men what they really are. Yorick's comment on preaching, "For my own part … I had rather direct five words point blank to the heart," has also been viewed as indicative of Steme's religious laxity, his "happy-go-lucky disposition."⁴⁴ It is clear, however, that Yorick is opposing in this passage the heart to the head as respective seats of truth and hypocrisy. That the heart for Steme is more closely connected with right reason than with moral sensibility is suggested by the phrase "till a just judgment could be procured" from "Self-Knowledge." When self-deceit is pierced by a story, the heart does not reveal the glory of the naturally moral man, but the truth of the limited man whose reason tells him he must fear God and keep the commandments.⁴⁵

The strongest attacks on self-deception, however, occur in "Pharisee and Publican in the Temple" and "Pride."⁴⁶ In the first, Sterne analyzes the character of the Pharisee as an example of the "worst of human passions;—pride—spiritual pride, the worst of all pride—hypocrisy, self-love…" His dramatization of the Pharisee's prayer in the temple is brilliantly ironic:

GOD! I thank thee that thou hast formed me of different materials from the rest of my species, whom thou hast created frail and vain by nature, but by choice and disposition utterly corrupt and wicked.

Me, thou hast fashioned in a different mould.… I am raised above the temptations and desires to which flesh and blood are subject—I thank thee that thou hast made me thus—not a frail vessel of clay, like that of other men … (1, 6; Sermons, 1, 73).

Apparent through the irony is Sterne's view of man, "frail and vain by nature." Those critics who expect from an eighteenth-century Anglican clergyman a Calvinistic commitment to unrelieved depravity will, of course, find Sterne quite liberal; but those who understand that eighteenth-century orthodoxy was molded during the Restoration, in reaction to Puritan theology, will see that Sterne's view of man is essentially conservative—man, not irrevocably corrupt, but yet "frail and vain by nature … by choice and disposition utterly corrupt and wicked." Sterne's several suggestions of the existence of the innate moral sense must be reconciled with this view and not simply accepted as a deistic glorification of man's moral capability.⁴⁷

The sermon "Pride" offers a more systemnatic attack on this vice of "little and contracted souls." On the one hand, Sterne argues with those "satyrical pens" that write "all mankind at the bottom were proud alike," for, he says, there are thousands of men of the most unaffected humility (IV, 9 [24]; Sermons, II, 33-34). On the other hand, Sterne supports these same "satyrical pens" insofar as "Pride is a vice which grows up in society so insensibly … that upon the whole, there is no one weakness into which the heart of man is more easily betray'd, or which requires greater helps of good sense and good principles to guard against" (Sermons, II, 34). Moreover, in explaining that the origin of pride is in meanness of heart, the vice of "little and contracted souls," Sterne can do no better than to quote "one of our poets … in that admirable stroke he has given of this affinity, in his description of a Pride which licks the dust." Sterne's attack on satire in this sermon is often taken out of context as indicative of his negative attitude toward the genre; no recognition is shown that in the same paragraph he gives a qualified assent to the satirists, and in the next quotes Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot to support his view.⁴⁸ The use of satire to attack pride is suggested again in "Job's Account of the Shortness and Troubles of Life Considered" (II, 10). Sterne raises the question at the end of this survey of human misery of what purpose it serves to expose the dark side of human life, and finds it of great importance, since "the holding up this glass to shew him his defects …" cures man's pride and gives him humility—"which is a dress that best becomes a short-lived and a wretched creature" (Sermons, I, 124). When Sterne criticizes satirists, as he does in "Vindication of Human Nature" (I, 7) where he takes exception to those satirists who have "desperately fallen foul upon the whole species" (Sermons, I, 83), he is not necessarily aligning himself with the general attack on satire prevalent in the middle of the century.⁴⁹ His obvious taste for the Augustans and our own understanding of them make it at least as possible that he was drawing a distinction between invective and satire; Dryden, Pope, and Swift would do no less.⁵⁰

For Steme, as for Locke, the Latitudinarians, and the Augustans, excessive pride is inextricably linked to enthusiasm and dissent. The sermon "Humility," for example, becomes strongly polemical, reminding us of the strength of Methodism among the lower classes during the 1740's.⁵¹ Sterne again turns to irony:

However backwards the world has been in former ages in the discovery of such points as GOD never meant us to know, we have been more successful in our own days: thousands can trace out now the impressions of this divine intercourse in themselves.…

It must be owned, that the present age has not altogether the honour of this discovery;—there were too many grounds given to improve on in the religious cant of the last century; … when, as they do now, the most illiterate mechanicks, who as a witty divine said of them, were much fitter to make a pulpit, than get into one,—were yet able so to frame their nonsense to the nonsense of the times, as to beget an opinion in their followers … that the most common actions of their lives were set about in the Spirit of the LORD (IV, 10 [25]; Sermons, 11, 49-50).

The witty divine is obviously Swift, and Sterne begins to sound more like him with every stroke: "When a poor disconsolated drooping creature is terrified from all enjoyment,—prays without ceasing 'till his imagination is heated, fasts and mortifies and mopes, till his body is in as bad a plight as his mind; is it a wonder, that the mechanical disturbances and conflicts of an empty belly, interpreted by an empty head, should be mistook for workings of a different kind from what they are …" (Sermons, II, 51).

It is the sermon "On Enthusiasm," however, which most clearly reveals Sterne's use of Latitudinarian arguments to reject the pride of deism and dissent. Noting the deist's tendency to ignore revelation and the dissenter's contrary tendency to "destroy the reason of the gospel itself,—and render the christian religion, which consists of sober and consistent doctrines,—the most intoxicated,—the most wild and unintelligible institution that ever was …," he defines his purpose to "reduce both the extremes … to reason [and] … to mark the safe and true doctrine of our church …" (VI, 11 [38]; Sermons, II, 187). Above all, his theme is to prove the wisdom of "our sufficiency being of God"; his text is John 15:5: "For without me, ye can do nothing." Sterne's arguments for the necessity of revelation are traditional; his arguments against enthusiasm are also traditional, including an interesting linking of enthusiasm with Catholicism: "Already it [enthusiasm] has taught us as much blasphemous language;—and … will fill us with as many legendary accounts of visions and revelations, as we have formerly had from the church of Rome.… When time shall serve, it may as effectually convert the professors of it, even into popery itself,—consistent with their own principles …" (Sermons, II, 197). Throughout his attack on the extremes, Sterne persists in arguing the rational middle way, ending with a benediction which defines, exactly and emphatically, his orthodox religious position: "… I have little left to add, but to beg of GOD by the assistance of his holy spirit, to preserve us equally from both extremes, and enable us to form such right and worthy apprehensions of our holy religion,—that it may never suffer, through the coolness of our conceptions of it, on one hand,—or the immoderate heat of them, on the other;—but that we may at all times see it, as it is … the most rational, sober and consistent institution that could have been given to the sons of men" (Sermons, II, 198).

Article IX of the Thirty-Nine Articles, "Of Original or Birth-Sin," reads in part: "Original Sin standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk), but it is the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit.… "As Anglicans, both Swift and Sterne accepted this view of man's nature; it molded their vision of the life they wrote about and the form that that vision took. Article IX, to be sure, rejects the Calvinistic extreme of total depravity, and we search in vain for this view in either Sterne or Swift. Article IX does, however, make absolutely clear that man is not only susceptible, but indeed inclined, to sin; that he possesses, as Ernest Tuveson comments, "a positive tendency to do evil, a mysterious dynamic spirit of perversity for which there is explanation in Genesis and remedy in the Gospel"⁵² Such contrariness makes the teachings of the Christian church absolutely vital to man's ethical life; thus, for Sterne and Swift, morality is never to be separated from religion, wisdom never to be divorced from revelation. The faculty of reason is, of course, essential to man, but right reason is never contradictory to revelation. Reason is our most reliable faculty, but it too is rendered imperfect by the perverse tendency to evil which makes revelation our only certain means of salvation.

It is here in the Anglican view of willful and insistent perversity that the Augustan vision of man takes its literary foothold, for in the abuse of reason can be found the root of all religious, social, political, and literary aberrations, all the targets of Augustan satire. If in the religious life the doctrines of the Anglican church provided the norms against which deviations could be measured, the ordered universe suggested that in every other sphere of human endeavor, analogous deviations could be measured by analogous standards. Man's tendency to evil operated in literature as well as in religion, in polite society as well as in the state. It is not at all fortuitous that Swift uses a literary hack to satirize religious enthusiasm, or that the epic action of Pope's Dunciad should bring "The Smithfield Muses to the Ear of Kings."⁵³ For the Augustan satirist, bad writing is a natural symbol for the moral corruption that demands and supplies it, and thus he has, ready at hand, the metaphorical and symbolic patterns which contribute so greatly to the tensions and complexities of his writings. As Geoffrey Tillotson notes, "for Pope, a bad author was to literature what a fool or a knave was to life."⁵⁴

Finally, the relation of the Augustan vision to the Anglican sense of man's perverse inclination to evil suggests the norm by which, ultimately at least, its satire operated. As in religion an acknowledgment of the limitations of man necessarily implies a dependence on the authority of the Church, so in all other realms of conduct authority of some kind is indicated. A rigid codification of that authority—whether it be ecclesiastical, critical, or political—is rarely attempted, the authority more often than not revealing itself by its expressed sensitivity to deviations from its spirit rather than by a crystalization of its law. This may, in fact, prove the ultimate virtue of Augustan authority, at its best—that it refuses to be categorical, that it resists the systematic fallacy, to which Puritans and projectors alike were so prone. Augustan authority rather tends to invite man to look for the operation of reason or common sense or nature; to look for generality, moderation, and compromise; and to acknowledge his inherent weakness, limitation, and need for discipline, tradition, and control. The authority or norm, in other words, is not so much abstractly defined as it is pragmatically revealed or exposed: In each sphere of human activity it emerges, characteristically, from the satiric consideration of deviations. In short, more important to an understanding of the moral world of Augustan satire than any precise measure of its norm is the simple fact of the norm itself. The ultimate field of that norm is Anglicanism; not, however, some specific doctrine of Anglicanism violated, say, by Puritan enthusiasm, but the acceptance by the satirist (and his audience) of an orthodox Christian position, catholic enough to include Pope, as normative.

Similarly, I would suggest that deviations from the norm, while as various as man's contrary imagination, all spring essentially from the same source: man's prideful rebellion against his own limited nature and the authority placed over him to discipline his waywardness. I have already shown how Swift and Sterne agree in finding excessive pride at the root of both deism and dissent. If we turn to Gulliver's Travels, we note that pride is still the central concern. Edward Rosenheim, for example, writes: "I do not think the crucial concepts in Gulliver's Travels are 'man' or 'animal' or 'rational,' for all the obvious importance of these terms. In the Travels, as in the Tale, Swift's most profound intellectual commitments hinge, I believe, upon his conception of knowledge and of pride.…⁵⁵ Kathleen M. Williams recognizes the same problem: "Swift frequently comments on man's strange inability, shared with no other animal, to know his own capacities, and the form which this inability most often takes … is a refusal to realise how narrowly we are bounded by our bodies, by senses and passions and by all the accidents of our physical presence in a material world."⁵⁶ And we need not agree completely with Tuveson's reading of Book IV, to accept the validity of this view of Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms: "The dilemma and despair … [of Gulliver], in his inevitable failure to be able to emulate the patterns of perfection, in his failure to understand the whole situation, would be those of anyone who attempts to account for human nature without original sin."⁵⁷ The refusal to recognize, because of pride, one's own limited nature; the refusal to accept, because of pride, the authority of what has been: These are the essential vices of Augustan satire. And conversely, the use of the reason to control pride and acknowledge one's limitations; the use of the reason to argue against pride the necessity for authority: These are the essential virtues by which these vices are measured and condemned. In the tense interplay of authority, pride, and reason, the Augustans defined their satiric vision; it is as well, I believe, the vision Sterne accepted and upheld in his satire, Tristram Shandy.

Notes

¹ For the texts of the sermons I have used The Sermon of Mr Yorick, vols. I and II (Shakespeare Head ed., 1927), hereafter cited within the text as Sermons. I have also adopted Hammond's system of enumeration: Roman numerals indicate the volume; Arabic numerals, the number originally given to a sermon within that volume; and Arabic numerals within parentheses, the cumulative number of the sermon in the complete collection.

²Tristram Shandy's World: Sterne's Philosophical Rhetoric (Berkeley, 1954), p. 106.

³Ibid., p. 101.

⁴Laurence Sterne's Sermons of Mr. Yorick (New Haven, 1948), pp. 56-57. For a criticism of this view, see M. R. B. Shaw, Laurence Sterne: The Making of a Humorist, 1713-1762 (London, 1957), pp. 103-4.

⁵ Hammond, p. 56.

⁶ Cf. Arthur Hill Cash's similar defense for his use of the sermons in Sterne's Comedy of Moral Sentiments: The Ethical Dimension of the Journey (Pittsburgh, 1966), pp. 25-29.

⁷ Hammond, pp. 78-81.

⁸Ibid., p. 91; Hammond is quoting from Root, The Poetical Career of Alexander Pope (Princeton, 1938), p. 181. Cf. G. N. Clark, The Later Stuarts: 1660-1714 (Oxford, 1934), pp. 30-31: "This insistence on reason was characteristic of English theology from the time of Locke to that of Joseph Butler … of the orthodox as well as of the deists, and it was developed by the … latitudinarians…" That this is so only increases the importance of distinguishing between the orthodox position and the deistic heresy; cf. Sir Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 3rd ed. (New York, 1902), I, 74 ff.

⁹ Hammond, p. 92. Cf. S. L. Bethell, The Cultural Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1951), p. 17. Bethell corrects Clark's yiew that the Latitudinarians rejected revelation for reason.

¹⁰ Hammond, p. 92.

¹¹From Puritanism to the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1950), p. 42.

¹²Ibid., pp. 42 ff. That the Cambridge Platonists had a strong mystical strain need not concern us here; as forerunners of the Latitudinarians their fundamental contribution was their belief that reason could not contradict faith; that faith would only support reason; and that reason and revelation were one.

¹³Ibid., p. 67.

¹⁴ Cf. Bethell, pp. 17-18. Bethell's essay convincingly demonstrates the orthodoxy of the Latitudinarian position on reason and revelation.

¹⁵ See, especially, the discussion of revelation in Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, xviii-xix. Cf. Cragg, pp. 122-24.

¹⁶ Cf Stephen, pp. 95-97.

¹⁷ Chicago, 1961, p. 20.

¹⁸Ibid., pp. 20-21. See Quintana, The Mind and Art of Jonathan Swift (New York, 1936) and Swift: An Introduction (London, 1955). For Swift as a fideist see Kathleen Williams, Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise (Lawrence, Kan., 1958).

¹⁹ Harth, pp. 21-23. Of course, in the heat of polemics, it was just as easy to link Catholicism to deism, as Swift does in "An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity in England."

²⁰ Harth, p. 23.

²¹The Prose Works, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1948), IX, 101.

²²Ibid., p. 107.

²³Ibid., p. 166.

²⁴Ibid., pp. 161-62.

²⁵Ibid., p. 159.

²⁶Ibid., pp. 63-81. See especially his remarks on the proper language for a sermon, pp. 65-66; on the quoting of learned authorities, pp. 75-76; on the need to explore the mysteries of the Church, p. 77. Nothing in this advice is significantly different from Latitudinarian reforms in sermon-writing.

²⁷Ibid., p. 164.

²⁸Ibid., p. 244.

²⁹Ibid., p. 113.

³⁰ Hammond lists the parallel passages (pp. 151-52), but considers them insignificant (p. 83). Another of Sterne's sermons, "Self-Knowledge" (I, 4), borrows extensively from "The Difficulty of Knowing One's Self," published with Swift's sermons in 1744 or 1745, although considered today of questionable authorship. See Swift, The Prose Works, IX, 103-6, 349-62.

³¹The Prose Works, IX, 115. Landa is quoting from Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I, ii, 6.

³²The Prose Works, IX, 150.

³³Ibid., pp. 152-53.

³⁴The Sense of Glory (Cambridge, 1929), pp. 144-45; ELH, XXXI (1964), 395-417.

³⁵ Cash, pp. 400-404.

³⁶Ibid., pp. 414-17.

³⁷Ibid., p. 410.

³⁸Ibid., p. 411.

³⁹ In searching for a metaphor for the vanities of dignity, honor, and title, Sterne suggests the "Satyrist's comparison of the chariot wheels,—haste as they will, they must for ever keep the same distance" (I, 1; Sermons, I, 10). The satirist is Persius (V, 71-72).

⁴⁰ Cf. "Pride" (IV, 9[24]; Sermons, II, 36); Sterne, in discussing the effects of pride on a weak brain, seems again to describe Tristram: The weak mind filled with pride is sure "to become the very fool of the comedy."

⁴¹ Five of the fifteen sermons of Volumes I and II deal in a central way with the vanity of this world: in addition to I, 1, see I, 2; II, 8; II, 10; II, 15.

⁴² See, for example, the strong statements in III, 6 (21); IV, 11 (26); V, 2 (29); V, 3 (30); V, 5 (32); V, 6 (33); VI, 7 (34); VII, 16 (43). V, 5 (32) is of especial interest in that it is a "30th of January" sermon, long an index of political views. Steme's attack on both "the guilt of our forefathers in staining their hands in blood," and the rebellion of 1745, suggests an essentially conservative position.

⁴³ Cf. "The Character of Herod" (II, 9), where Steme suggests that although we are made in God's image, innocent and upright, we are creatures all too easily swayed by our passions, particularly our ruling passion (Sermons, I, 101-11).

⁴⁴ Hammond, pp. 99-101.

⁴⁵ Cf. "The Prodigal Son" (III, 5 [20]; Sermons, I, 227): "I know not whether the remark is to our honour or otherwise, that lessons of wisdom have never such power over us, as when they are wrought into the heart, through … a story which engages the passions.… Is the heart so in love with deceit, that where a true report will not reach it, we must cheat it with a fable, in order to come at truth?"

⁴⁶ I, 6, and IV, 9 (24). See also, "Self-Examination" (II, 14; Sermons, I, 160-68).

⁴⁷ Cf. "Vindication of Human Nature" (I, 7). This sermon, often cited as an example of Sterne's "soft view" of man, is no more than an orthodox argument against Hobbes' doctrine of universal selfishness. Sterne argues that although the brightness of God's image has been "sullied greatly" by the fall, and by our "own depraved appetites," yet it is a "laudable pride … to cherish a belief, that there is so much of that glorious image still left upon it, as shall restrain him from base and disgraceful actions …" (Sermons, I, 82-83). The orthodoxy of this "divine residue" and its distance from any sort of deistic or Shaftesburian moral sense should be apparent.

⁴⁸ "Beauty that shocks you, Parts that none will trust,! Wit that can creep, and Pride that licks the dust." An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 11. 332-33; the lines describe Sporus.

⁴⁹ See Bertrand A. Goldgar, "Satires on Man and 'The Dignity of Human Nature,"' PMLA, LXXX (1965), 535-41.

⁵⁰ Cf. "Evil-Speaking" (II, 11), and "The Levite and his Concubine" (III, 3 [18]). In the latter the attack on satire is actually an attack on the false wits of the age who set up as libelers.

⁵¹ The satiric reaction to Methodism is surveyed in Albert M. Lyles, Methodism Mocked (London, 1960). The Jacobite scare in 1745 suggests one reason for the anti-Catholicism of the sermons; in short, Sterne's Anglicanism was facing essentially the same challenges Swift's faced a quarter century before.

⁵² "Swift: The Dean as Satirist," UTQ [University of Toronto Quarterly], XXII (1952-53), 370. See also, Donald Greene, "Augustinianism and Empiricism: A Note on Eighteenth-Century English Intellectual History," ECS [Eighteenth Century Studies], 1 (1967), 39-51.

⁵³ See Aubrey L. Williams, Pope's Dunciad: A Study of Its Meaning (Baton Rouge, 1955). Of this "analogy," Williams writes: "The inundation of England by purveyors of bad art, and the untutored or degenerate taste which hailed their literary efforts, was a 'conjuncture' of events suggesting a general slackening in the moral and social fibre of the nation." Artistic deterioration, he adds, is the "metaphor by which bigger deteriorations are revealed" (p. 14).

⁵⁴On the Poetry of Pope (Oxford, 1938), p. 35.

⁵⁵Swift and the Satirist's Art (Chicago, 1963), p. 220.

⁵⁶ "'Animal Rationis Capax.' A Study of Certain Aspects of Swift's Imagery," ELH, XXI (1954), 196.

⁵⁷ Tuveson, p. 369. See also Samuel H. Monk, "The Pride of Lemuel Gulliver," Sewanee Review, LXIII (1955), 48-71; Edward Wasiolek, "Relativity in Gulliver's Travels," PQ [Philological Quarterly], XXXVII (1958), 110-16; James Brown, "Swift as Moralist," PQ, XXXIII (1954), 368-87. Brown comments at one point: "… the fault is that of pride, the condition ignored is Original Sin, the final result is vicious action—moral chaos" (p. 381).