Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

From the earliest civilizations to the present time people have looked at creation and found it, despite its wonders, an apparently purposeless exercise. If Tennyson's ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’ and, for too many, Hobbes's description of the life of man as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ are confirmed even in some degree by their personal observation, no wonder people have always asked, ‘Can this be all?’ Religions are imaginative ways of dealing with this question. In Britain, the answer for many centuries seemed to be found in some form of Christianity. This attempt throughout the ages to make sense of what may be a senseless universe may seem to many now to be mere escapism, but it is not the only source of religious belief. There also seems to be built into human nature a sense, perhaps illusory but obstinate too, of something greater than humankind or the material world, with which mystics believe direct contact may be possible. Both these impulses appear to be particularly strong in poets, even when overtly they are anti-religious. Writers of the Romantic period were familiar with the concept of a spiritual world and the immortality of the soul in the work of Greek philosophers, particularly Plato and the neo-Platonists, whom Lamb reported to have heard Coleridge expounding in the cloisters of Christ's Hospital when they were schoolboys and whom Shelley translated ... log in or subscribe to read full text