Pater's Religion of Sanity: "Plato and Platonism" as a Document of Victorian Unbelief

Author(s): U. C. Knoepflmacher
Source: Victorian Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Dec., 1962), pp. 151-168
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3825692
Accessed: 13/06/2010 14:37

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=iupress.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Victorian
Studies.

http://www.jstor.org
 U. C. Knoepflmacher

PATER'S RELIGION OF SANITY: "PLATO AND PLATONISM"

AS A DOCUMENT OF VICTORIAN UNBELIEF

In later years he came upon philosophies which occupied him much in the estimate
of the proportionof the sensuous and the ideal elements in human knowledge, the
relative parts they bear in it; and, in his intellectual scheme, was led to assign very
little to the abstractthought, and much to the sensible vehicle or occasion ... and he
rememberedgratefullyhow the Christianreligion, hardly less than the religion of the
ancient Greeks, translating so much of its spiritual verity into things that may be
seen, condescendsin part to sanction this infirmity,if so it be, of our human existence,
wherein the world of sense is so much with us, and welcomed this thought as a kind
of keeper and sentinel over his soul therein.
WALTER PATER, "The Child in the House" (1878)1

l UBLISHED in the year prior to his death, Plato and Platonism

', 1 (1893), is unquestionably the most public piece of criticism by
v' Walter Pater, an ambitioussynthesisof all the assumptionsthat
underliehis scatteredessaysand worksof fiction.Originallydeliveredas
a series of lectures at Oxford,carefully planned and modulated,Plato
and Platonismavowedly containsa recreationand re-assessmentof the
"environment"which produced the dialogues of Plato (P&P, p. 10).2

1 Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays, Library Edition (London, 1910), pp. 186-
187. Subsequent references are to this edition of Pater's works.
2 Just as Pater's Proustian essay, "The Child in the House," tries to recover a childhood
atmosphere from the vantage point of the matured adulthood which is a direct out-
growth of this atmosphere, so do Plato and Platonism and Marius try to isolate the
original "environment" of a tradition from the vantage point of its later developments.
"Environment" (which for Pater is almost synonymous with "atmosphere," another of

DECEMBER 1962
152 1U.C. Knoepflmacher

Judged by the strictures of modern historical scholarship, Pater's re-

production of this Hellenic "environment"seems highly fanciful. It con-
sists of an arbitrary fusion of the doctrines of Plato and of certain of his
predecessors (as "interpreted"by Pater) with the "visible" religion of
the ancient Spartans. Judged by Pater's own standards, however, his
loose application of Hegel's "historic method" is necessitated and sanc-
tioned by his own painful awareness of the "ever-changing 'Time-Spirit'
or Zeit-geist," the perennial flux which renders all things relative (p. 9) .3
Pater's fabrication of a new Platonism wholly "independent of, yet true
in spirit to, the Platonism of the Platonic dialogues" (p. 269), is thus
conditioned by the demands of his own age, an age he describes as one
of "decadence," "rich and various in special apprehensions of truth" but
"tentative and dubious in its sense of their ensemble" (pp. 282, 174).
Plato and Platonism, then, like Marius the Epicurean, is to pro-
vide a new "ensemble." As in the novel, Pater's patient reshuffling of the
Pagan philosophies of the past is conducted, with an eye fixed on the
present, through a system of oblique allusions and cross-references.
Plato and Platonism is the last expression of Walter Pater's life-long
search for a religious kernel to be found within the development of
Greek thought, Greek art, and Greek mythology: a quasi-Christian
"essence" contained within the Hellenic ideal. It is the final, most elab-

his most recurrent terms) thus becomes an indispensable source for the physical and
intellectual "influences" which it yields. "Environment" or "atmosphere" determines
the man, who like Marius the Epicurean or the personae of Pater's Imaginary Portraits,
is merely the product of its "influences": "In the intellectual as in the organic world the
given product, its normal or abnormal characteristics, are determined, as people say, by
the 'environment' " (P&P, p. 10). In Marius, for instance, the physical "atmospheres"
of "White-Nights," the young Roman's ancestral villa, or of the "church in the house
of Cecilia," provide sensory influences which are as important as the intellectual influ-
ences which affect "the house of [Marius'] thoughts" (Marius, II, 63). As Miss Jean
Sudrann has convincingly demonstrated, in "Victorian Compromise and Modern Revolu-
tion," ELH, XXVI (1959), 425-444, the search for an "environment," a "house," or a
"city," is one of the prime metaphors which pattern Pater's novel.
3 Pater's acute awareness of historical development, of an inflexible, quasi-Marxian"prin-
ciple of flamboyancy or fluidity in all things" (P&P, p. 235), underlies all of his work.
It is, as Philip Appleman has pointed out, in "Darwin, Pater, and a Crisis in Criticism,"
1859: Entering an Age of Crisis (Bloomington, 1959), pp. 81-95, the stimulus for a
critical relativism or impressionism to which it is essentially opposed. To Pater, the flux
obstructs the aims of the idealist eager for stasis and permanence, but aids the critical
relativist who regards the evolution of myths, ideas, or events of the past "with a view
rather to a total impression than to the debate of particular points" (Greek Studies, p.
82). By recovering the impressions of past "environments," the relativist can test their
present validity and applicability in an imaginative "interpretation." As Ernest Lee
Tuveson shows, in The Imagination as a Means of Grace (Berkeley, 1960), p. 87,
Pater's impressionism is a lineal "descendant of Lockian philosophy." But it is above
all an impressionism sharpened by Pater's acceptance and revulsion over the mechanics
of the Zeitgeist. See also Milton Millhauser, "Walter Pater and the Flux," Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XI (1952), 214-223, and the present writer's "Historicism
as Fiction: Motion and Rest in the Stories of Walter Pater," scheduled to appear in
Modern Fiction Studies.

VICTORIAN STUDIES
PATER S RELIGION OF SANITY 153

orate, but still characteristically hesitant and irresolute, iteration of a

question treated imperfectly twenty years earlier in Studies in the His-
tory of the Renaissance (1873), "this very question of the reconciliation
of the religion of antiquity with the religion of Christ" (p. 33).

In "Winckelmann," the essay which had formed the core of The

Renaissance, Pater had written an eloquent defense of the immutability
and universality of those feelings produced by the visual impressions of
art and ritual. Abruptly, and without much logic, Pater had then identi-
fied these feelings with a permanent aesthetic religion available to all.
Ritual, the "religious observance," he argued, was a "fixed element" and
consequently of enduring value in its adaptability to the motions of the
Zeitgeist; ritual's abstract content, on the other hand, "myth"or dogma,
was variable, ethereal, and therefore negligible (Renaissance, p. 203).
Borrowing a simile made famous by Marx and Kingsley, Pater con-
tinued: "Such Pagan worship, in spite of local variations, essentially one,
is an element in all religions. It is the anodyne which the religious
principle, like one administering opiates to the incurable, has added to
the law which makes life sombre for the vast majority of mankind"
(Renaissance, p. 202, my italics).
Pater was to change the tone of this passage. Increasingly aware
of the necessity for moral "law," he sought, in the years after The
Renaissance, to speak to those concerned with the visible world of per-
ception who, like the artist and the natural scientist, were (as he be-
lieved) inclined to accept only the laws of their senses. He regarded the
painstaking composition of Marius as nothing less than "a sort of duty."4
Pater excised the offending "Conclusion"from the second edition of The
Renaissance (1877), and did not dare to reintroduce it until 1888, three
years after the publication of Marius. He now agreed "to reprint it here,
with some slight changes which bring it closer to my original meaning,"
but pointedly referred those "young men" who might have been misled
by the "Conclusion"to the fuller treatment of "the thoughts suggested by
it" in his novel (Renaissance, p. 233). There is little doubt that the entire
controversy over The Renaissance forced Pater into a more scrupulous
appraisal of what "his original meaning" had actually been. Was the
aesthetic life, the cult of sensation "simply for those moments' sake"

4 From a letter to Violet Paget written in July 1883, quoted in A. C. Benson, Walter Pater
(London, 1906), p. 90.

DECEMBER 1962
154 U. C. Knoepflmacher

(Renaissance, p. 238), a truly valid pursuit? Was Hellenism nothing

more than "finding the end of all endeavour in the aspects of human
form" (Renaissance, p. 182)? Pater's re-appraisal led him to a partial
rejection of his earlier, somewhat facile enthusiasm for an "universal
pagan sentiment" (Renaissance, p. 201). It led him to test out his as-
sumptions in thinly veiled "imaginary portraits" of young sensation-
seekers. And it led him, at last, to the lectures of Plato and Platonism.
Marius the Epicurean, His Sensations and Ideas, sets the stage
for Plato and Platonism. The most complex of Pater's "imaginary por-
traits," it is, despite its masterly evocations of past "atmospheres," a
highly inconclusive work. The "constitutionally impressible" Marius is
subjected to a series of "sensations and ideas," which convey, on the
whole, the same philosophical systems that Pater was to re-examine
in Plato and Platonism (Marius, II, 132) .5 Marius is ultimately brought
in contact with the "environment" provided by a curiously Hellenistic
Christian community whose apostolic religion is soon to be voided by the
capricious Zeitgeist.6 Although it is clear that Pater considers the doc-
trinal content of this religion as merely one of the "many voices it would
be a moral weakness not to listen to," it is the "humanistic"impact of its
rituals and of the symbol of the Eucharist which vaguely impresses on
Marius the feeling of joyful renunciation that stimulates his almost acci-
dental act of sacrifice (I, 44; II, 123).
Marius offers no reconciliation. The book's intricate system of
analogy and juxtaposition is designed to obviate the exclusiveness of any
one "way" to truth. The novel's final effect is not derived from its struc-
tured ascent to the Hellenized Christianity which appeals to both the

5 The discrepant religious and philosonhical systems examined by Marius originate, sig-
nificantly enough, in the Platonic "environment" recreated in Plato and Platonism.
Not only are the Epicurean and Stoic doctrines directly related by Pater to those ex-
pounded by Plato's predecessors, Heraclitus and Parmenides (cf. fns. 13, 17, and 18, be-
low), but even the "impressions" that Marius derives from his encounters with the
teachers of the brotherhood of the Asclepiadae, of his Pisan instructor, of Lucian, and
of Apuleius are represented as being Platonic. Marius himself links the brotherhood's
ideal of purity to the "old Greek temperance" of Plato's Charmides and recognizes in
its inculcated "love of visible beauty" the "point of view" of the Phaedrus (Marius, I,
34, 32); the lyceum of his tutor is described as "one of the many imitations of Plato's
Academy" (I, 46); the two writers to whose work he is introduced by Flavian - "one
Lucian" and Apuleius, the author of "the book of books" (I, 51, 55) - are met in per-
son by Marius much later in the novel. The one proves to be a Socratic relativist who
conforms to the "independent" Platonic tradition that Pater establishes in Plato and
Platonism; the other is a Platonist to whom "the Ideas of Plato were no creatures of
logical abstraction" (II, 87; for my comments on Apuleius' presumed "Platonism" see
VS, IV [1961], 411-412).
6 Pater blames the loss of "the gracious spirit of the primitive church" on the persecutions
it suffered by the Romans: driven into "exclusiveness," "puritanism," and an "ascetic
gloom," Christianity will not recover its earlier "humanism" until the sixteenth-century
Renaissance ( Marius, II, 118, 125).

VICTORIAN STUDIES
PATER S RELIGION OF SANITY 155

"sensations"and the "ideas"of Marius,but rather from the blunting

oppositionsand realignmentswhich make Christianitya strong possi-
bility, but a possibility only. But if Christianitycannot yield the one
"way"to truth,it can at least endow Mariuswith the "spirit"with which
he approachesthe death he has feared for so long. This spirit is non-
doctrinal. For Marius is impressed only by the "visible":the serene
beautyof the silent young ChristianCornelius,the faces of the boys who
sing a mysteriousJewish psalmody,the symbol of the Eucharist.The
value of this "visible"Christianitylies in its continuity,the permanence
of its symbols.For continuity,the adaptationto change and death, the
flux itself, constitute the novel's main theme.7 Marius illustrates pri-
marily the similaritiesbetween presumablyantagonisticways of life:
between the materialismof Epicurusand the idealism of Aurelius,be-
tween the satiricalApuleiusof Flavian's"Euphuism"and the idealistic
Apuleius concocted by Marius,between the anthropomorphicreligion
of Numa and the ritualisticreligionof Christ,all illustrationsof the dic-
tum that "oppositeissues"are "deduciblefrom the same text" (I, 201).
The centralillustrationof this text is the Christiandeath of a Pagan.
The predicamentof Pateris identical to that of Mariusor to that
of FlorianDeleal, the characterdescribedin "The Child in the House"
(1878), in the passage quoted as an epigraphabove. Pater'sconviction
that any belief must be founded on the exclusive authority of the senses
jarred with his deep religious sentiment, inimical to the inconclusiveness
of the aesthetic life. The separation between "the sensuous and the
ideal," in a world of permanent flux, informs all of Pater's work: Sebas-
tian van Storck, Gaston de Latour, or Pater's version of Coleridge, are
defeated by this irreconcilability. Although figures like Raphael, Sir
Thomas Browne, Wordsworth, or Brother "Apollyon"may span the gap
between the empirical truth of the senses and the ideal truths of religion
and philosophy, their example cannot be followed: Browne and Raphael
are aided by their belief in archaic religions invalidated by the Zeitgeist;
Wordsworth, by a placid Pantheism that Pater refuses to accept. Brother
"Apollyon"is himself a symbol of this unattainable fusion; he is a Greek
god in disguise, a mythic embodiment of cyclical continuity.
Plato and Platonism is the culmination of Pater's search for an

7 For an entirely different reading of the novel's meaning, see Bernard Duffey, "The
Religion of Pater's Marius," Texas Studies of Literature and Language, II (1960),
103-114. Although I agree unreservedly with Mr. Duffey's interpretation of the novel
as a redefinition of the position taken in The Renaissance, I cannot accept his concomi-
tant belief that Marius somehow reflects a "central theology" analogous to that found
in the works of F. D. Maurice (p. 106).

DECEMBER 1962
156 U. C. Knoepflmachcr

aesthetic religion of form, a search begun only semi-consciously in The

Renaissance. With the exception of Marius, a work to which it is closely
linked, it is Pater's most "prophetic"piece of writing. Yet, as such, it also
illustrates the peculiar characteristics which separate Pater from other
Victorian critics of religion and culture. Unlike these, Pater is not a
"reconciler." He cannot merge the empirical and the ideal into an ac-
ceptable "spiritual verity" such as Matthew Arnold's "power not our-
selves" or Samuel Butler's self-created "Evolutionary Personality." For
Pater, the antagonism between sense and idea can be resolved only
through a continuous act of qualification and elimination. Thus, re-
ligion and philosophy are pared down, not only to a Victorian "essence"
of their content, but to their "sensible vehicles," ritual and dialectic, and
to the vague emotions that these provoke. The sweeping historical manip-
ulations of Plato and Platonism, like the juxtapositions and alternations
in Marius are designed to arouse the reader into a moder "religion of
sanity" (P&P, p. 227), which, unlike the lost Graeco-Christian "religion
of cheerfulness" depicted in the novel (II, 114), is a curiously shrivelled
cult of moral form, a pseudo-Christianity, which conserves the belief
in "things that may be seen, hardly less than the religion of the ancient
Greeks."

II

Fundamental belief gone, in almost all of us, at least some relics of it remain -
queries, echoes, reactions, after-thoughts; and they help to make an atmosphere,
a mental atmosphere, hazy perhaps, yet with many secrets of soothing light and
shade, associating more definite objects to each other by a perspective pleasant to
the inward eye against a hopefully receding background of remoter and ever
remoter possibilities.8

Plato and Platonism is Pater's attempt to construct a "mental at-

mosphere" out of his "independent" Platonism and of the shattered
relics of its modern, Christian correlatives. The lectures are primarily
addressed to the scientifically-minded doubter of a materialistic genera-
tion, "the speculative young man of our own day" who finds solace in
the sheer observation of "organism and environment, or protoplasm
perhaps, or evolution, or the Zeit-geist and its doings," and who is unable
to enlist these pursuits in a more comprehensive search (p. 154). Pater's
"soothing" atmosphere is also directed at the opposing camp of those

8 "Prosper Merim6e," Miscellaneous Studies, p. 15.

VICTORIAN STUDIES
PATER S RELIGION OF SANITY 157

who, like Wilde, Moore, or Dowson, regard the visible world as a mere
source for pleasurable stimuli, in dangerous emulation of those decadent
Athenians who affected what was "least fortunate in the habits, the
pleasures, the sordid business of the class below them" (p. 274). Scien-
tist and aesthete, both students of the palpable, both aware of the flux,
are thus regarded as prospective converts to Pater's Hellenistic Chris-
tianity, the "religion of sanity" to be reconstructed out of the visible
remnants of the "tradition, the development," of Plato's thought and
method.
Although relying far more on the subtleties of inference and sug-
gestion than on open polemics, Plato and Platonism follows the cast of
the theological essays of Matthew Arnold, Pater's fellow-humanist and
fellow-believer in the convolutions of the Zeitgeist. In St. Paul and Prot-
estantism (1870), Arnold is concerned with the establishment of a
tradition outside the realm of doctrinal religion; in Plato and Platonism,
as we have seen, Pater attempts to set up a Platonism "independent of,
yet true in spirit to, the Platonism of the Platonic dialogues." Yet the
differences between the two men are noteworthy. While Arnold up-
holds the literary permanence of the Biblical revelation over the fluidity
of the Greek vision, it is precisely this fluidity "with no link on historic
time" which attracts Pater to Hellenism (Greek Studies, p. 101). To
Arnold, the Hellenic "banner of art and science" must yield its place to
the Hebraic "banner of righteousness."9To Pater, the Greek love of form
merely survives in the humanism of Christianity. In Plato and Plato-
nism (as in Greek Studies or in The Renaissance) the Hellenic ideal
adapts itself, because of its concreteness, to the laws of change and
mutability. Nonetheless, Pater's insistence on an all-Hellenic heritage
and his seeming disregard of the Judaeo-Christian tradition are some-
what misleading. Believing with most Victorian prophets that "a kind of
religious influence" can be drawn, not only from "theological literature"
itself, but from "profane" writers and artists, as well, Pater prefers to
exert his own "influence" in what is ostensibly a discussion of Greek
philosophy and form.10
Read correctly then, Plato and Platonism may be regarded as an
aesthetician's latter-day equivalent of St. Paul and Protestantism, Litera-
ture and Dogma (1873), and God and the Bible (1875). Searching like

9 Cf. Literature and Dogma (London, 1873), p. 354: "But conduct, plain matter as it
is, is six-eighths of life, while art and science are only two-eighths."
10 "At their best, these writers become, as we say sometimes, 'prophets,' such a charac-
ter depending on the effect not merely of their matter, but of their matter as allied to
an 'electric affinity' with peculiar form" (Appreciations, p. 26).

DECEMBER 1962
158 U. C. Knoepflmacher

Arnold for the "essence" of a contemporary faith and using Arnold's

characteristic tools of analogy, antithesis, and speculative re-arrange-
ment, Pater produces a work which is likewise anti-philosophical, anti-
abstractionist, and anti-dogmatic in its bias. But whereas Arnold and
most other Victorian reconcilers search for some time-honored and in-
variable pool of human experience, Pater, forced to rely on an exclusive
truth of the senses, "delights in tracing traditions" only to efface them
(Appreciations, p. 244).11 The "atmosphere"which he holds out to his
prospective Platonist is therefore far more tentative and disguised than
Arnold's forthright presentation of his "essence" of Christianity.12While
Arnold boldly tries to recover the "secret of Jesus" through a reinterpre-
tation of the Gospels and the Pauline epistles, Pater cautiously evades
any open friction with traditional theology and adheres to a purely
secular line of inquiry. Still, his frame of reference is unmistakably
Christian. To Pater, the "environment" of the Platonic dialogues is the
fountainhead of all subsequent systems of metaphysics and ethics;
Christianity and its modern "relics"are therefore the outgrowth (or, at
least, the analogous by-product) of the "independent" Platonism that
he intends to retrace. Thus aided by his spatial theory, Pater not only
avoids Arnold's frequently awkward attempts at biblical exegesis, but
he also manages to side-step any polemical engagements with the
established Church.
Pater's historical theories impress on Plato and Platonism a scope
far broader than that of Arnold's religious works or of Newman's Essay
on Development. In Pater's system, the Pagan gn6sis merely becomes
Christian "vision." Pater offers no "secret of Jesus," no "religion new-

11 As a fin-de-siecle spokesman of the "relative," Pater is far less positive than the
majority of Victorian reconcilers. Arnold enlists the Zeitgeist in order to build a Church
of England conformable to his cultured skepticism; Newman eventually relies on de-
velopmental theories to stress the finite authority of the Roman Catholic Church; George
Eliot employs the causal network of her novels to verify and confirm the existence of
a separable ethical truth; Butler, Pater's contemporary, endows the evolutionary world
of Darwin with a teleology of his own. Pater can follow none of these procedures. To
him, evolutionism merely accentuates his disbelief in anything other than the phe-
nomenal impression. Unlike George Eliot or Butler, he cannot bring himself to impress
a deliberate purpose on a world he regards as dominated by perpetual flux- the
vacuum of his relativism remains unfulfilled. He can accept even less the Invisible, like
Newman, or a "reasonable" substitute, like Arnold. And, yet, like all of these
"prophets," he attempts the standard fusion of feeling and thought.
12 Pater had a marked dislike for
open polemics, very likely as a result of the controversy
over The Renaissance. In his essay on "Sir Thomas Browne," for instance, he praises
Browne's suspicion of theological disputations, while in "Pascal" he deems it necessary
to point out that his subject's participation in the Jansenist controversies transcended
the bounds of partisanship, belonging instead to "disputes not of a single age but of
eternal ones" (Appreciations, pp. 131-132, 61). The same distrust of partisan "solu-
tions" in the realm of religion colors Pater's review of Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert
Elsmere, discussed in the final pages of this study.

VICTORIAN STUDIES
PATER'S RELIGION OF SANITY 159

given;"Hebraism,Aberglaube- termsintegralto the Arnoldiantype of

inquiry- are carefully shunned.'3Hellenism is a self-sufficienttradi-
tion, containingin itself both desirableand undesirableextremes.Thus,
Plato'sabstractedand thereforeundesirable"Theoryof Ideas"is meta-
morphosedby Paterinto the "rudescholasticismof the pedantic Middle
Ages"or into the "cold-bloodedtranscendentalism" of philosopherslike
MarcusAurelius,Spinoza,or Kant,whose searchfor an "ideal city"is,
like the searchfor the one "way"in Marius,destined to come to nought
(P&P, pp. 30, 164). Likewise, the "old Heracliteanism" of Plato's
predecessorsbecomesthe new Darwinianhypothesis,"theentiremodern
theoryof 'development'," encouragingthen as now, "thedestructiveness
of undisciplinedyouth"(pp. 19, 18). Conversely,however,the Platonic
"environment" also has its positive side. Plato'sskepticismand the dia-
lectical method of his master,Socrates,have allowed unbelieversfrom
Mariusthe Epicureandown to Montaigneand to Pater'scontemporary
"speculativeyoung man" to find refuge in an "endlessdialogue with
one's self," "a habit"of "tentativethinking and suspended judgment"
which balances the dogmata of theism and materialism (pp. 177, 194).
What is more, the ritual and discipline of Sparta (somehow mirrored
in The Republicas an ideal of harmoniousform) remainas a tangible
"religionof sanity"available even to those who have laboredthrough-
out the ages "withno prospectof Israel'sreward"(pp. 227, 233). To the
sympatheticobserver,they providea "soothingmental atmosphere"still
to be foundin the relics of Christianity.For the "gracefulpolytheism"of
the Greeksmerges with "the dulia of saints and angels in the catholic
church"(p. 33); the "music"of the Lacedaemoniansreverberatesstill
in the chantsof the Gregorianmonks;the "hieraticDorianarchitecture"
of the Greektemples manages to survive in the "CistercianGothic"of
the Middle Ages (pp. 278-279).14
Accordingto Pater, "the Lacedaemonianswere the hereditary

13 Although Pater avoids an Arnoldian proportioning of Hellenic and Hebraic "fourths"

and "three-fourths" of life, he regards Parmenides as the initiator of a "Hebraism" of
sorts which was to affect Socrates and Plato. Pater attacks the abstractionism of
Parmenides, but readily concedes that it made little "claim to touch the affections" as
did "the revelation to Israel"; only Cleanthes the Stoic, a Parmenidean, is able to rise
above his master in his emotional "Hymn to the One," which therefore approximates
"Israel's devout response to the announcement: 'the Lord thy God is one Lord' " (P&P,
pp. 38, 29). Similarly, in Marius, Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic, is described as "a master
in Israel," whose letters have "something in common with the old Judaic unction of
friendship" (I, 183, 226); Marius' vague formulation of a divinity, based on his read-
ings "in Plato and others, last but not least in Aurelius," is likened to that "reasonable
Ideal to which the Old Testament gives the name of Creator" (II, 68).
14 In Greek Studies and in Plato and Platonism, Pater makes it quite clear that he prefers
the "delightful," multi-colored polytheism of the Greeks to a grey and "repellent

DECEMBER 1962
160 U. C. Knoepflmacher

and privileged guardians"of that "catholic or general centre of Greek re-

ligion" which concerned itself with the worship of Apollo, but "of Apollo
in a particular development of his deity":
In the dramaticbusiness of Lacedaemon, centering in these almost liturgical dances,
there was little comic acting. The fondness of the slaves for buffoonery and loud
laughter, was to their master, who had no taste for the like, a reassuringnote of his
superiority.He therefore indulged them in it on occasion, and you might fancy that
the religion of a people so strenuous,ever so full of their dignity, must have been a
religion of gloom. It was otherwise. The Lacedaemonians,like those monastic per-
sons of whom they so often remind one, were a very cheerful people; and the religion
of which they had so much, deeply imbued everywherewith an optimismas of hope-
ful youth, encouraged that disposition, was above all a religion of sanity. The ob-
servant Platonic visitor might have taken note that something of that purgation of
religious thought and sentiment, of its expression in literature, recommended in
Plato's Republic, had been already quietly effected here, towards the establishment
of a kind of cheerful daylight in men's tempers. (P&P, pp. 226-227)
Unlike their Athenian counterparts who worshipped Apollo "in an
orgiastic, an unintellectual, or even an immoral service," Pater's proto-
Christian Lacedaemonians have a "marked preference for the human
element in him, for the mental powers of his being over those elemental
or physical forces of production, which he also mystically represents"
(pp. 228, 227). "In furtherance then of such a religion of sanity, of that
harmony of functions," Pater's monastic Spartans embody in their wor-
ship ideals only theoretically realized in the Platonic dialogues (p. 227).
To Pater, then, it is not the "Ionian ideal" reflected in Plato's spec-
ulative flights, but the ritual and form of Lacedaemon "which constitute
the other ingredient in a true Hellenism, the saving Dorian soul in it"
(p. 24). Pater warns the reader that "the somewhat visionary towers of
Plato's Republic blend of course with those of the Civitas Dei of Augus-
tine" (p. 243). Yet he praises Plato's theoretical fusion of aesthetics and
ethics, and provides a lavish description of the concrete counterpart of
this fusion in the Apollonian festival of the Hyacynthia, only to assert
that the festival's "harmonizing" of gaiety and "significant mourning"
still survive in the Christian celebration of All Souls' Day.
It is obvious that Pater believes, with Ludwig Feuerbach, that
religion is merely the anthropomorphic formulation of man's highest
aspirations. Yet, he does not wholly share the German's Christocentric
"Religion of Suffering."15For it is the intense joyousness of the Lace-

monotheism,"and "its sterile, 'formless,colourless,impalpable,'eternalidentity with

itself' (P&P, pp. 46, 47). It is this profusionof "humanized"deities which, paradox-
ically enough,attractsPaterto the RomanCatholicChurch(see, e.g., Marius,I, 182).
15To Feuerbach,the essence of religion is simply the essence of feeling; the suffering
Christ,who lacks "the wantonnessof the Olympiangods," epitomizesthe highest of

VICTORIAN STUDIES
PATER S RELIGION OF SANITY 161

daemonian ritual which makes Pater think, in a more conciliatory mood,

"of the novices at school in some Gothic cloister, of our own English
schools, nay, of the young Lacedaemonian's cousins at Sion, singing
there the law and its praises" (p. 224). In Marius it is the visible faith of
the childish singers who entune a mysterious Jewish psalmody which so
impresses the melancholy young Roman; in Plato and Platonism it is
the "humanised" but disciplined cult of Lacedaemon which best em-
bodies the sacramental nature of all human aspirations (p. 231). It is
this "consciously human interest" which attracts Pater not only to Greek
mythology, but also to the sacramental art of Christianity, "at least in its
later though wholly legitimate developments" (pp. 216, 145).16
A ritualistic cult of form lies at the core of Pater's peculiar "re-
ligion of humanity" as the only flexible means of perpetuating an har-
monious belief which can withstand the relativity of time and change.
But Plato and Platonism is also concerned with endowing this skeletal
faith with a temper suited to its pliancy. To Pater this temper is to be
found in his "independent" Platonism, a tradition which he emphati-
cally distinguishes from that usually associated with Aristotle, the
Schoolmen, Spinoza, Hegel, and all "those mystic aspirants to 'vision'"
-"the so-called Neo-Platonists of all ages from Proclus to Schelling"
(p. 193). According to Pater, "two legitimate yet divergent streams of
influence" emanate from Plato and from the "environment" created
by three of his forerunners - Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Pythagoras -
and by Socrates, his master. Plato himself is seen as a reconciler who uni-

human emotions (The Essence of Christianity [New York, 1957], p. 149). Pater like-
wise regards religion as the expression of the higher emotions inherent in "human life
and its familiar or exceptional incidents, birth, death, marriage, youth, age, tears, joy,
rest, sleep, waking" (Miscellaneous Studies, pp. 193-194). To him the historical Jesus
is also a symbol of man's triumph over "great sorrows"; but it is the adoration of the
infant Jesus and not the "almost ghastly" image of the crucified and martyred Christ
which impresses upon Marius the meaning of the sacrifice of "a young man" who gave
up, "for the greatest of ends, the greatest of gifts" (Marius, II, 171, 138).
16 In "Winckelmann," Pater argued that the Pagan "blitheness" or "Heiterkeit" of the
Greeks was a feeling far superior to the "worship of sorrow" in Christian art (Renais-
sance, p. 225). This position is modified in "Demeter and Persephone" (1876), where
Demeter's evolution is traced from fertility goddess to mater dolorosa. Still, Pater
maintains that what has now become the Greek " 'worship of sorrow' as Goethe calls
it" was emulated primarily by the painters who produced the pensive Madonnas of the
Renaissance, and not by "the gloomy imagination of the middle ages" (Greek Studies,
p. 11o). By Plato and Platonism even the disparagement of medievalism is omitted as
Pater praises "the place occupied in Christian art by the mother and her child," and
condemns Plato's abstracted selection of marriages "after the manner of those who
breed birds or dogs" (p. 258), a remark not unlike those directed at Marcus Aurelius'
stoic indifference at the sports of the arena. It is noteworthy that in all of these judg-
ments Pater's "humanistic" standards are preserved; he has merely altered the "at-
mosphere" in which he has placed them. He has become more and more sympathetic
to Christianity and to its "humanized" symbols.

DECEMBER 1962
 162 U. C. Knoepftmacher

fled the ideas of his predecessorsand held them in bond before their
inevitablefragmentationby the Zeitgeist.
Pater'sPlato fuses the Heraclitean"doctrineof motion"- a doc-
trineopenlyidentifiedwith "theentiremoderntheoryof 'development'"
(p. 19) - with the Parmenidean"doctrineof rest"or "the immutable"
-a doctrineboldly likened to "the revelationto Israel" (p. 38). This
opposition,identical to that depicted in Marius,17bears a significantre-
semblanceto the standardVictorianconflict between science and re-
ligion. To effect his synthesis of these rival doctrines, Pater's Plato
relieson a thirdphilosophicalsystem,the Pythagorean"doctrineof num-
ber,"which is creatively associatedwith the ideal of Lacedaemon,al-
ready described above. The doctrine of number provides Plato with
the "harmony" requiredto unite both extremeswithout injuryto either.
This harmonyis one of matter and form;it is a synthesisof the Ionian
and the Doric, a "trueHellenism"which perceivesand embodiesin the
operationsof the visible world a symbol of the unseen. Plato's genius,
then, consists in the magnitude of his combination,in the successful
fusionof his "visualpower"with his yearningfor the absolute:"forhim,
all gifts of sense and intelligence converge in one supremefaculty of
theoretic vision, Oewpia,the imaginative reason" (pp. 142, 140).

III

But if in Pater'spre-Christian,all-Hellenic system, Plato is re-

garded as a sort of pagan St. Paul, the repositoryof the doctrinesof all
his predecessors,an Ur-visionarywho holds out the promiseof "theCity
of the Perfect, The Republic, KaXXiroXLs, Uranopolis,Utopia, Civitas
Dei, The Kingdomof Heaven"all rolled into one (p. 266),18it is Socra-
tes, Plato's teacher, who correspondsto Arnold'sconception of Jesus.
Here again, Pater managesto stay clear of controversyby adheringto
his spatialmethod.Arnoldwas forced to endow his historicalJesuswith
the vague attributesof "reason"and "sweetness,"thus placatingneither
the believing Christian,northe militantatheist.Pater,on the otherhand,
is able to producean inoffensivesecular"saint"who is equallyacceptable
to the orthodoxand to the unbeliever.His Socrates,like Arnold'sChrist,

17Cf. P&P, p. 48: "The ethical alliance of Heraclitus is with the Sophists and the
Cyrenaics or the Epicureans; that of Parmenides with Socrates, and the Cynics or the
Stoics."
18 Cf. Marius, II, 39, where Marius' readings in Plato and Aurelius arouse his yearning
for "that unseen Celestial City, Uranopolis, Callipolis, Urbs Beata."

VICTORIAN STUDIES
PATER S RELIGION OF SANITY 1 63

embodies a "peculiar religiousness" and a sense of "mission" which cul-

minate, but transcend Parmenides' more "sterile" search for the "One"
(pp. 99, 161, 9), just as, in the scheme of Literature and Dogma, the
"sweet reasonableness" of Jesus arises from, but transcends the Hebraic
belief in a "power not ourselves." But while Arnold is forced to dismiss
the theological import of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection because of
the discrepancies within the Gospels, Pater can fully exploit the "historic"
significance of Socrates' immolation for an ideal of truth. Pointing to the
detailed account of Socrates' death given in the Apology and the
Phaedo, Pater can emphasize the "purely human" aspects of the
philosopher's last hours and can disclaim any similarity to the "one
sacred scene to which they have sometimes been compared" (p. 78).
What then, is the exact meaning held by the sacrifice of Socrates?
The philosopher's death, like that of Marius the Epicurean, is by no
means to be regarded as an act of religious martyrdom. Pater is highly
critical of the "Puritan element" in Socrates' thought (p. 145). Though
accused of fabricating a "new deity" and though teaching Plato, "the
sensuous lover," to become a "lover of the invisible," Socrates brings no
"religion new-given," no promise of divine redemption through his self-
immolation. Indeed, it is only Plato's acute "impress of visible reality,"
his Paterian responsiveness to his senses, which allows him to transcend
his teacher's "philosophy of the unseen," the "somewhat sad-coloured
school of Socrates," by blending "the material and the spiritual" into
a temperate and artistic whole (pp. 128, 126, 127, 135). Like Marius,
Socrates dies as a victim of the relativity of knowledge. In Pater's scheme
of things, it is he who brings "philosophy from heaven to earth" by teach-
ing Plato (and modern man) that he was to remain "a mere seeker after
wisdom he might never attain" (pp. 81, 89). It is his earthly skepticism
and not his love of the invisible which initiates the "independent"
Platonism sought by Pater.
Pater's Socrates thus has a dual effect on his disciple. On the
negative side, his cautious morality stirs up Plato's "religious soul" and
stimulates the "mystic intellectualism" of the later neo-Platonists (p.
85); on the positive side, however, his relativism, his ironic profession of
ignorance, endow Plato with a means of balance: the dialectic.19 To

19 In Marius, both the negative and the positive "influences" of Socrates are evident. The
"too incorporeal philosophy" which Socrates leaves behind him (P&P, p. 144) finds
a new expression in the contemptus mundi of the glacial Marcus Aurelius, who reflects
the "ascetic pride which lurks under all Platonism" (Marius, I, 200). Socrates' wry
irony, on the other hand, is personified in the figure of Lucian, who demolishes the
absolutist beliefs of a would-be philosopher, Hermotimus, another of Pater's "specula-
tive" young men.

DECEMBER 1962
164 U. C. Knoepflmacher

Pater, Socrates is the initiator of the "dialogue of the mind with itself"
which he, like Arnold, regards as an essential requirement for the
formulation of modern thought (p. 183):
The Platonic Dialogue is the literarytransformation,in a word, of what was the inti-
mately home-grown method of Socrates, not only of conveying truth to others, but
of coming by it for himself. The essence of that method, of "dialectic" in all its
forms, as its very name denotes, is dialogue, the habit of seeking truth by means of
questions and answer, primarilywith one's self. Just there, lies the validity of the
method - in a dialogue, and endless dialogue, with one's self. (p. 177)
To Pater, the Socratic dialectic of Plato is indispensable for the modern
thinker who can believe in neither "the metaphysical reassertions" of
religion or philosophy, nor in that "sort of certainty which is afforded by
empirical science" (p. 194). The abstractions of philosophy and theology,
"even under the direction of Plato," are bound to be as faulty as "the
promise of 'ontological' science"; "with our modern temperament as it
is," neither can offer intellectual "security"to Pater's "speculative young
man." It is here, then, that "that other sort of Platonism," a Socratic
relativism, comes into play (p. 195). As used by Montaigne, "a mind for
which truth itself is but a possibility," the modern shape taken by the
dialectic is that of the essay, which "came into use at what was really
the invention of the relative, or 'modern' spirit, in the Renaissance of the
sixteenth century" (p. 175).20
The "true philosophic temper" must reside, according to Pater,
in a continuous act of balance and compromise, "a habit, namely of
tentative thinking and suspended judgment" (p. 194). Pater's pre-
sumptive reader, "the speculative young man of our own time," must
learn to question the assertions of both science and metaphysics. Like
Marius the Epicurean, he must somehow convert this doubt into a per-
sonal creed and thus practice a faith fit for "an age which thirsts for
intellectual security, but cannot make up its mind. Que scais-je? it cries
in the words of Montaigne; but in the spirit also of the Platonic Socra-
tes, with whom such dubitation had been nothing else than a religious
duty or service" (p. 195).
Negative as this exhortation may seem, Pater does not conclude
Plato and Platonism with a cult of doubt. The Socratic dialectic merely

20 "If Platonism from age to age has meant, for some, ontology, a doctrine of 'being,' or
the nearest attainable approach to or substitute for that; for others, Platonism has been
in fact only another name for scepticism, in a recognizable philosophic tradition"
(P&P, p. 194). This new "spirit" and its "environment" are depicted not only in the
essays which make up The Renaissance, but also in the incompleted Gaston de Latour
(first published in Macmillan's in 1888), where Montaigne, a "two-sided thinker" (p.
113), impresses his relativism on a more modern Marius, Gaston, in the role taken up
by Lucian in Marius.

VICTORIAN STUDIES
PATER S RELIGION OF SANITY 165

yields the "temper"for a faith, and to Pater any such faith must be
founded on the visible and the tangible. Unlike Marius,where Pater
directs his protagonistto the "atmosphere"of a lost primitivechurch,
and unlike Gaston de Latour where he conducts his hero to the
pantheism of GiordanoBruno, the "speculativeyoung man" of Plato
and Platonismmust look aroundhim in an immediateVictorianpres-
ent.21He must feed on the sensationsapprovedand tested by the past.
It is with this dilemmain mind, that Paterturnsagain to The Republic
and hopes to find in Plato'sintense awarenessof "therealityof beauty,"
a correlativeof the "poetic religious system"of the Lacedaemonians
(pp. 268, 226).

IV

In "Plato'sAesthetics,"the final chapterof Plato and Platonism,

Pater finds a corroborationfor his own sensationalismin Plato's view
that "men'ssouls are . . . the creaturesof what men see and hear" (p.
271). In a world conditionedby environment,heredity, and the ever-
changingflux,the only harmonythat is possibleamongindividualsmust
arise from the harmony of their sensations. In such a world, totally
determinedby phenomenalexperience,the standardexpressionsof Vic-
torianunbelief- an Arnoldianreinterpretationof the Bible as literature
or a Positivistinvocationof bodiless "Saintsof Humanity"- are clearly
impossible.It is thus in Plato'saesthetics,or ratherin his subordination
of aestheticsto morality,that Paterhopes to find a way to create a cor-
respondingSpartan"atmosphere" for his "speculativeyoung man."
With a canniness that almost seems Darwinian, Pater's Plato
understoodthe extent to which men are dependent on their environ-
ment: "Men,children, are susceptiblebeings, in great measure condi-
tioned by the mere look of their 'medium.'Like those insects,we might
fancy, of which naturaliststell us, taking colour from the plants they
lodge on, they will come to match with much servility the aspects of

21 The finished Gaston de Latour would presumably also have ended in the
"atmosphere"
of a church, in this case, the Cathedral of Chartres. The book opens with Gaston in
"Our Lady's Church"; it is safe to assume that it would have ended with the protagonist's
return to this "edifice" and with his weary death: Marius must return to "White-
Nights," the ancestral villa full of funerary urns, before he can succumb in an isolated
hut owned by Christian peasants; Emerald Uthwart comes back to Chase Lodge in
order to die in the "religious" atmosphere of his childhood; Florian Deleal returns to
his father's manor-house, weary of life; Sebastian van Storck drowns in a family lodg-
ing, among the "sweet relics" of his mother's faith; the Prior Saint-Jean perishes in the
cell in which he has been incarcerated by his order.

DECEMBER 1962
166 C. Knoepfinacher
[TU.

the world about them" (p. 272). Fully aware of man's mimetic nature,
Plato realized the importance of art as a guide to the perception of the
ideal. Yet art, like nature, was basically immoral, an imperfect vehicle for
Plato's idealism, knowing "no purpose but itself" (p. 275). Plato thus
imposed a "simplification of human nature" on the founders of his Re-
public: he demanded that the art of the City of the Perfect create
"strictly moral effects" (pp. 273, 272). He introduced a Spartan "art of
discipline" into his Utopia.
To recreate this Platonic harmony, Pater's "young man," already
armed with the perpetual skepticism of Socrates, is now directed to the
"atmospheres" created by a disciplined past. Pater is fully aware that
this harmony is artificial. But he argues that it is precisely this artifice
which allowed the inhabitants of Plato's imaginary community to
escape, like the Lacedaemonians, from "a certain vicious centrifugal
tendency in life, in Greek and especially in Athenian life," a hedonist
sort of Hellenism, permitting them instead to follow "some sacred
liturgy," the discipline of Pater's "true"pre-Christian Hellenism, but the
discipline also of its later Christian offshoots (p. 273). Having conducted
his reader through an imaginative excursion through time and space,
Pater returns to his original point of departure. Symbolic analogues fade
away and the present again comes into focus. In his conclusion, Pater's
"religion of sanity" is finally given its contemporary, physical locality.
Its "atmosphere" becomes visible as Pater examines the disciplined art
of medieval Christianity with a far greater sympathy than that shown
in The Renaissance, twenty years before. Although the great Cathedrals
of the Middle Ages still seem to him "a long way from the Parthenon,"
Pater reasons that they are after all the evolutionary end-product of "the
Platonic aesthetics" (p. 279). It is Lacedaemon and not Athens, Doria
rather than Ionia, moral artifice rather than unbridled sensationalism,
which must be held up as ideals:
Those churches of the Middle Ages have, as we all feel, their loveliness, yet of a
stern sort, which fascinates while perhaps it repels us. We may try hard to like as well
or better architecture of a more or less different kind, but coming back to them
again we find that the secret of final success is theirs. The rigid logic of their charm
controls our taste, as logic proper binds the intelligence; we would have something
of that quality, if we might, for ourselves, in what we do or make; feel, under its
influence, very diffident of our own loose, or gaudy, or literally insignificant, decora-
tions. "Stay then," says the Platonist, too sanguine perhaps, - "Abide," he says to
youth, "in these places, and the like of them, and mechanically, irresistibly, the soul
of them will impregnate yours." (pp. 279-280)
This then is Pater's exhortation to "youth," to the young doubter who
wanders throughout his essays and "imaginary portraits": allow yourself
to come under the influence of the moral environment expressly created

VICTORIAN STUDIES
PATER S RELIGION OF SANITY 167

for you by ecclesiastical art and ritual; if in sympathy with its "soul,"you
may, like Marius, at least succumb to "its saving salt, even in ages of
decadence" (p. 282). The Ruskinian bias of this exhortation is deliber-
ately faint-hearted, coming as it does from a disillusioned sensationalist,
yearning for a wider range of experience, but distrustful of the aestheti-
cism of a Whistler or a Wilde.22
Pater thus directs his prospective Platonist to the surviving rites
of the Catholic church, the only remnant of a lost "Hellenic lineage" (p.
282), offering an atmosphere full of "the positive imageries of a faith, so
richly beset with persons, things, historical incidents."23Again the tone is
mildly apologetic: "The diamond, we are told, if it be a fine one, may
gain in value by what is cut away. It was after such a fashion that the
manly youth of Lacedaemon had been cut and carved. Lenten or monas-
tic colours, brown and black, white and grey, give their utmost value for
the eye (so much it is obvious) to the scarlet flower, the lighted candle,
the cloth of gold" (p. 282). It is in these residual acts of faith, in a faint
worship of form, that Pater's young man may hope to find "even in ages
of decadence" some of the substance of Plato's fusion and thus to get
"something of that irrepressible conscience of art, that spirit of control"
(p. 282). Plato's reconciliation, however, remains out of reach. For his
"vision," like that of the church, depends on his belief in the Immutable,
a belief invalidated for Pater by the destructive Zeitgeist.
In his important review of Mrs. Humphrey Ward's Robert
Elsmere,24 Pater deplored the clergyman's abrupt decision to abandon
institutional Christianity in order to found a Church of his own. Sup-
ported by a relativism which made him quite willing to recognize Chris-
tianity as a perpetual "possibility," Pater professed surprise at the ease
with which Elsmere's faith was shattered by his sudden confrontation
with the historical Jesus of the "Higher Criticism." Pater's comments
have been attacked as being both shallow and insincere in the light of
his own, quite pronounced agnosticism.25 A reading of Plato and Plato-
nism will confirm, however, that there is no reason to question Pater's
sincerity. In his review, reprinted in Essays from "The Guardian," Pater
declared Elsmere's unbelief to be as dogmatic and unbending as ortho-

22 With an eye on the aesthetic movement, Pater warns that Plato anticipated but rejected
"the modern notion" of "art for art's sake" (P&P, p. 268). Pater's admonishment was
truly "prophetic": he died one year before the two trials of Oscar Wilde.
23 "Sebastian van Storck," Imaginary Portraits, p. 98. The last published work during
Pater's lifetime was his study of the "atmosphere" offered by the two great French
Cathedrals, "Notre-Dame d'Amiens" and Vezelay (1894).
24 The Guardian, 28 Mar. 1888.
25 Cf.
Geoffrey Faber, Jowett (London, 1957), pp. 382-383.

DECEMBER 1962
168 U. C. Knoepflmacher

dox belief: "had he possessed a perfectly philosophic or scientific temper

he would have hesitated" (p. 67). Plato and Platonism represents
Pater's own hesitant endeavor to provide such a temper for the young
"Elsmeres" of his time. By convincing these doubters to stay within the
physical confines of a traditional church, Pater hoped to preserve a more
flexible faith than the drab Socialist Christianity preached by Robert
Elsmere: "it is the infinite nature of Christ which has led to such diversi-
ties of genius in preaching as St. Francis, and Taylor, and Wesley" ("The
Guardian," p. 69).
In the final lines of Plato and Platonism Pater casts a longing look
at the "Greek clay" safely stored in the British Museum as a still visible
"correlative"of Plato's unattainable fusion (P&P, p. 283). Wearily, he
prescribes "patience, 'infinite patience,'" for all those who are tempera-
mentally unable to accept the philosopher's invisible world of ideas or
the equivalent "promises"of Christianity (pp. 283, 264). The same air
of fatigue and satiety which prevails in the conclusion of Marius perme-
ates the end of Pater's last work, as his "speculative" young pupil, like
Marius, is forced to seek shelter in a compound of ritual and skepticism.
As Pater possibly realized, it is on his deliberate avoidance of meta-
physics that this compound and the supporting framework of Plato and
Platonism rest and ultimately fall. His "religion of sanity" is the product
of a reduction. Pater's refusal to consider the validity of Plato's "vision,"
his adroit circumscription of the foundations of Christian belief, and his
non-theological line of inquiry give him the desired flexibility to endow
his young doubter with a cult of feeling, approved and confirmed by the
convolutions of the Zeitgeist. Yet, despite his imaginative enlistment of
the historical method for the redefinition of a humanist tradition, Pater
rebuilds only in order to eliminate and to exclude.
Plato and Platonism is above all an exercise in tasteful selection,
that "faculty of choosing and rejecting" so vividly described in the essay
on "Style" as an artistic act of arriving at a preconceived unity of design
(Appreciations, p. 26). Paradoxically enough, Pater's most "public"
utterance is ultimately confounded by its preciosity. The creed it tries to
formulate becomes far more frail and exclusive than the humanist
"faiths" of other Victorian thinkers. Forever dependent on the impres-
sions of the individual, Pater's "religion of sanity" is perhaps the least
comprehensive, but also the most intimate of all the personal cults of
Victorian unbelief.

University of California, Berkeley

VICTORIAN STUDIES