The Bible and the Beekeeper's Manual: Raymond Williams and religion.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 01 January 2004
• Author: Boer, Roland

In Politics and Letters Raymond Williams comments, in a symptomatic autobiographical moment, that the only books in his parents' house in Pandy (a home town foregrounded so often in his writings) were the Bible and the Beekeeper's Manual, apart from a few children's items. (1) What is interesting here is the bifurcation that this passing note suggests, a split between the making-do of the rural working class, embodied in Williams' father, and the latent, quietly forgotten religion that the dusty family Bible marks. If the manual was his father's favourite, then the Bible was the mark of his grandmother (his mother remaining, as expected, silent). But this is not merely a neutral comment, for it functions as a signal that locates both books in Williams' childhood and later life. If the Beekeeper's Manual was the sign of all that he valued about his background, the social location that he felt was so important for other writers, then the Bible, the book both ubiquitous and forgotten, is that of a grandmother, far more conscientious about church observance than Williams' parents: a book of a generation fading away, with about as much relevance. (2) Yet this reading, one that Williams himself was keen to foreshadow, is all too easy. My suspicion is that it was not all that easy for Williams to separate the two.

The specific issue on which I focus is the role of religion in Williams' work. The initial answer is deceptively obvious: very little. For one in whom autobiography seems so close to his written work (and not only in his novels), religion had about as much importance in Williams' life as it had in his critical writing. So why bother with the question of religion and Raymond Williams? Is it merely drumming up and extending a dimension of critical work that has become somewhat fashionable at the moment--that is, the so-called 'return to religion' in contemporary philosophy, the humanities more generally and, God forbid, cultural studies itself. Perhaps a few negatives, a few demurrers, are needed at this point: I do not want to suggest that Williams was secretly religious, that he drew his inspiration from a deep but hidden spiritual source. Nor do I want to claim him as a thinker of implicit religious motivation, an anonymous Christian (and when I talk about religion in this paper I talk about Christianity, for in the same way that Williams limits most of his work to the British and Welsh context, the relevant religion is Christianity).

The reason for considering Williams and religion is that his work raises most sharply a peculiar problem, which may be stated as baldly as follows. Is Christian theology and the Bible a forgotten enabling and empowering element of Williams' thought and work, or has he realized, in dropping religion to a remote moment in the past, that which is implicit in an older and now thoroughly irrelevant religious structure? In other words, has he denied his roots, or does his work mark an internal logic of religion in the (post)modern world itself? Or, to put it in the terms of Michel de Certeau's work, was the religious content just a temporary phase in a longer life of certain forms that now show up as various disciplines, political groups, key concepts, themes and practices? Did Williams, then, suffer from a certain tone deafness, as he put it, in regard to religion, or did his consistent sidelining of religion signal an entirely appropriate post-religious development?

However, let me spend a few moments looking awry, a sideways glance that assists in seeing things more clearly, as out of the corner of my eye. What I am thinking about here is the work of some comparable figures from the British Left--Terry Eagleton and Edward Thompson--for whom religion plays a distinctly important role. Eagleton, of course, was involved with radical Catholic politics and has recently returned in some way to this past. His first book, in 1966, was The New Left Church, which was followed by The Body as Language: Outline of a 'New Left' Theology in 1970. In the meantime he was an editor of the Catholic Left journal Slant (in its final years managing editor) and collaborated on the 'Slant Manifesto': Catholics and the Left (1966). While Eagleton for long felt that he had moved beyond this kind of dirtpoor Catholic activism, I want to argue that this is one dimension of Eagleton's work where there are ghosts aplenty. Thompson also continued to be fascinated by religion until his death, perhaps because he was an avowed atheist, long-term member of the Communist Party and leader of the nuclear disarmament movement in Europe. Thus, in his early The Making of the English Working Class, religion plays a crucial role, whereas in his last book, Witness Against the Beast, he seeks to link William Blake to currents of radical religious dissent, especially the Muggletonians. Indeed, Thompson himself becomes part of the Muggletonian heritage, taking over the archives from the last Muggletonian and then declaring himself a Marxist Muggletonian.

Not so Williams. He did write a piece, entitled 'Culture and Revolution: A Comment', for the Slant collection From Culture to Revolution: The Slant Symposium 1967, edited by Terry Eagleton and Brian Wicker, but even this says little directly about religion as such. What intrigues me is how we might account for such an absence in those huge slabs of writing: why is religion consistently passed over, even when he was alerted to it by the New Left Books interviewers in 1979? There is, to begin with, the self-assessment of a certain kind of tone-deafness, specifically when he is asked why he did not consider religion in the work of a swathe of nineteenth-century British writers, especially when they would have enunciated their own positions in religious terms. Or, it may be accounted for in terms of the conventional marxist line that when people speak religiously it is in fact a code for other issues, be they social, political or economic. (3) Or again it may be that religion belongs to the residual features of a culture and a mode of production, on the way out but with a significant continuing presence. (4)

An Apparent Absence?

So far, I have inadvertently followed the general perception of Williams as one who found no time or interest to discuss religion. But all I am doing is favouring the Beekeeper's Manual, leaving the Bible to languish, as Williams would have preferred. Yet, if we look a little closer, Williams does consider religion at certain moments in his work. I will argue below that there is a deeper level at which religion works its way through his material, but first the more obvious references. Let me begin with what I find to be one of the most interesting texts, Politics and Letters. The issue of religion appears here consistently, although on most occasions its emergence is due to the questions of Perry Anderson, Anthony Barnett and Francis Mulhern. Apart from the nature of these questions, it is the mode in which Williams responds that intrigues me. One of the questions relates to the major figures dealt with in Culture and Society--Burke, Southey, Coleridge, Kingsley, Arnold, Ruskin, Hulme, Eliot, Tawney--and the absence of any consideration of religion in their lives:

... there is one other interesting silence in Culture and Society. That is the relative absence of any attention to religion. For if one looks through the figures in the book, one notices immediately how central religion was to the development of the tradition. If you had asked them what their main ideas were in their own time, probably a numerical majority--Burke, Southey, Coleridge, Kingsley, Arnold, Ruskin, Hulme, Eliot, Tawney--would have replied with a centrally religious definition. This was not just an adventitious or extrinsic phenomenon. Christian themes, whether in Anglican, dissenting, evangelical, Catholic forms--the whole gamut of possibilities of Protestant and non-Protestant variance--furnished one of the main ideological repertoires from which an industrial capitalism could be and indeed was criticized. This is very evident in the continental tradition as well ... Did you think it would clutter the book too much to refer to religion? (5) Williams responds by sliding onto other questions--how religion is replaced with literary value, especially by Matthew Arnold, how a book on religion and social thought would be an entirely different effort and not one he could write. It simply does not engage him enough to write about it sympathetically.

This is an extraordinarily curious response on Williams' part, for he does refer to religion in Culture and Society, although it is not the book's major focus. Most notably, there are the directly religious works--A. W. Pugin's Apology for the Present Revival of Christian Architecture in England, R. H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and T. S. Eliot's The Idea of a Christian Society. (6) In the case of Eliot, Williams draws out the idea that culture is a whole way of life, extracting it from Eliot's religious conservatism as a valuable concept, another side of the man. In other words, over against the conventional understanding of Eliot as a conservative, Williams attributes this tendency to his religious inclinations, pointing to a greater complexity that enables a more radical reading.

And then there is this text: 'That man was so capable, that the pursuit of perfection was indeed his overriding business in life, was of course widely affirmed elsewhere, especially by Christian writers. But for Mill it was Coleridge who first attempted to define, in terms of his changing society, the social conditions of man's perfection'. (7) Mill, notes Williams in the following pages, proposes a...