Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 ‘Christ is not Divided’: Theologies of Toleration and the Depiction of the Catholic
- Chapter 2 ‘Serve The Lord With Fear And Rejoice With Trembling’: Gothic Theologies Of The Sublime
- Chapter 3 ‘For Satan Himself is Transformed into an Angel of Light’: The Aesthetics of Demonic Depiction
- Chapter 4 ‘Your Sons and Your Daughters Shall Prophesie’: Gothic Dreams
- Chapter 5 ‘Test the Spirits’: Ghosts and Apparitions of the Gothic
- Chapter 6 ‘If Ye Live After the Flesh, Ye Shall Die’: Embodied Immortality
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 4 - ‘Your Sons and Your Daughters Shall Prophesie’: Gothic Dreams
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 ‘Christ is not Divided’: Theologies of Toleration and the Depiction of the Catholic
- Chapter 2 ‘Serve The Lord With Fear And Rejoice With Trembling’: Gothic Theologies Of The Sublime
- Chapter 3 ‘For Satan Himself is Transformed into an Angel of Light’: The Aesthetics of Demonic Depiction
- Chapter 4 ‘Your Sons and Your Daughters Shall Prophesie’: Gothic Dreams
- Chapter 5 ‘Test the Spirits’: Ghosts and Apparitions of the Gothic
- Chapter 6 ‘If Ye Live After the Flesh, Ye Shall Die’: Embodied Immortality
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
And it shall come to pass in the last days (saith God) I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesie, and your young men shall see visions; and your old men shall dream dreams
– Acts 2:17The supernatural is a keystone of the early Gothic, from the demons of Matthew Lewis to the phantasmal shadows of Radcliffe, the prophetic dreams of Clara Reeve, and the vampiric predator of John Polidori.It has, however, become a critical commonplace that the Gothic was a reflection of wider secularisation, that the supernatural became increasingly untethered from a ‘traditional religious framework’ (Geary 1992, 16), and that its use became tied almost exclusively to the aesthetic production of fear and a theologically empty experience of the numinous. However, contemporary theological discourse and the potential for belief should not be dismissed when reviewing the Gothic deployment of the supernatural. Christianity, in many forms, continued to dominate cultural discourse in the period and, as Glen Cavaliero notes, ‘for a religious person spirit is no mere ‘aspect’; it is the primary reality, and any discussion of the supernatural which does not allow for such belief and take it seriously is self-stultifying from the start’ (1995, 15).
An increasingly common thread in Gothic criticism is the appeal to philosopher Charles Taylor's conception of secularisation not as ‘the separation of Church and state and the decline of religion’ (Miles 2014, 123), but as ‘an unheard pluralism of outlooks, religious and non- and anti-religious’ (Taylor 2007, 437). Taylor's ‘secular’ is not the absence of theological discourse but rather the awareness that there are ‘a number of construals, views which intelligent, reasonably undeluded people, of good will, can and do disagree on’ (2007, 11). In other words, secularisation is a process in which belief is broken up with multiple discourses existing simultaneously. However, Taylor's model continues to focus on a growing diminution of belief, an idea echoed in Hoeveler's claim that:
the process of secularisation that occurs in the gothic is […] an oscillation in which the transcendent and traditional religious beliefs and tropes are alternatively preserved and reanimated and then blasted and condemned by the conclusions of the works.
(2010, xvi)While acknowledging a variety of co-existent conceptions of the potentially supernatural, this suggests an ultimately rationalising bent, a ‘disenchantment’.
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- Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764-1834 , pp. 105 - 132Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2023