On 19th May 1897, Oscar Wilde was released from prison after two years' detention for acts of gross indecency. He handed a manuscript of some 50,000 words to his loyal friend and sometime lover, Robert Ross. This was to prove his last prose work before his death in Paris three years later and the only piece that he wrote during imprisonment. The text was an extended epistle to Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde's friend and lover, whose father, the Marquess of Queensbury, was the causa efficiens of Wilde's downfall. This is not the place to enter into the agonies of the relationship to Douglas, or "Bosie" as Wilde called him. Nor do I wish to discuss the extremely lengthy litany of complaints that Wilde, with much justice, levels at his former lover. Let's just say that Wilde was used and treated like a fool. Perhaps he acted like a fool as well.
An expurgated version of Wilde's letter was published in 1905 with the title, De profundis, which is the incipit of the 130th Psalm in Latin, 'From the depths I cry to thee, O Lord'. It is the religious dimension to this letter that I find so arresting, particularly Wilde's interpretation of the person of Christ. De profundis is the testimony of someone who knows that he has ruined himself and squandered the most extraordinary artistic gifts. The lesson that Wilde draws from his ruination is humility, absolute humility. Having initially longed to die when first entering prison and subsequently being resolved to commit suicide on the day of his release, the experience of incarceration teaches Wilde that, "I must learn to be cheerful and happy". Such happiness, however – and this is the key to the text - can only be achieved through suffering.
De profundis is marked by a quiet but steely audacity. Having ruined himself and losing everything – his reputation, his wealth, his wife, his mother who died while he was in prison, and access to his children, "a blow so appalling that I did not know what to do" – Wilde does not bow down before the external command of some transcendent deity. On the contrary, he sees his sufferings as the occasion for a "fresh mode of self-realization". He adds, "That is all I am concerned with". That is, Wilde's self-ruination does not lead him to look outside the self for salvation, but more deeply within himself to find some new means of self-formation, of self-artistry. As such, in the sufferings of incarceration, Wilde becomes more of an individualist than ever.
For such an act of self-realization, Wilde insists, neither religion nor morality nor reason can help. This is because each of these faculties requires the invocation of some sort of external agency. Morality, for Wilde, is about the sanction of externally imposed law and must therefore be rejected. Wilde says that he is, "One of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws". Interestingly, it is in exactly these terms that he describes the morality of Christ later in De Profundis. Christ's morality is sheer sympathy with the other and his conception of justice is poetic, 'For him there were no laws: there were exceptions merely'.
Reason enables Wilde to see that the laws under which he was convicted and the system that imposed them are wrong and unjust. But, he goes on, "I have got to make both of these things just and right to me". That is, in order grasp the nature of what has befallen him and transcend it, Wilde cannot view his misfortunes rationally as the external imposition of an injustice. On the contrary, he must internalize the wrong, which requires, he insists, an artistic process. That is, every aspect of his life in prison – the plank bed, the loathsome food, the dreadful attire, the silence, the solitude and the shame – must be artistically transformed into what Wilde calls 'a spiritual experience'. The various degradations of Wilde's body must become 'a spiritualizing of the soul', an experience of aesthetic sublimation, the transfiguration of suffering into beauty.
Everything to be true must become a religion
But it is Wilde's views on religion that are so adventurous and, to my ears, amenable. Where others might have faith in the unseen and intangible, Wilde confesses a more aesthetic fidelity to "What one can touch and look at". He then makes the extraordinary pronouncement,
When I think of religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Everything to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith.
It is the phrase, "Everything to be true must become a religion" that is most striking. What might "true" mean? Wilde is clearly not alluding to the logical truth of propositions or the empirical truths of natural science. I think that "true" is being used in a manner close to its root meaning of "being true to", namely an act of fidelity that is kept alive in the German treu, loyal or faithful. This is perhaps what Christ had in mind when he said, "I am the truth and the life". Religious truth is like troth, the experience of fidelity where one is betrothed. What is true is an experience of faith and this is as true for agnostics and atheists as it is for theists. Those who cannot believe still require religious truth and a framework of ritual in which they can believe. At the core of Wilde's remark is the seemingly contradictory idea of the faith of the faithless and the belief of the unbelievers
Yet, picking up on what was said above in connection with morality and reason, this faith of the faithless cannot have for its object anything external to the self, any external, divine command. Wilde goes on,
But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating.
We appear to be facing a paradox: one the one hand, to be true everything must become a religion otherwise belief lacks (literally) credibility or authority. Yet. On the other hand, we are and have to be the authors of that authority. The faith of the faithless must be a work of self-creation where I am the smithy of my own soul.
The apparent paradox is resolved through Wilde's interpretation of the figure of Christ. In The Soul of Man under Socialism from 1891, Wilde describes Christ as a "beggar who has a marvelous soul", a "leper whose soul is divine". Christ is "God realizing his perfection through pain". Wilde's captivity might best be understood as an extended imitatio of Christ, where he becomes who he is through the experience of suffering. It is through suffering and suffering alone that one becomes the smithy of one's soul. Therefore, Wilde's suffering in Reading Gaol is the condition for his self-realization as an artist. At the core of Wilde's understanding of Christ is an almost Schopenhauerian metaphysics of suffering: "For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything". The truth of art, according to Wilde's romantic aesthetics, is the incarnation of the inwardness of suffering in outward form, the expression of deep internality in externality. It is here that Wilde finds an intimate connection between the life of the artist and the life of Christ.
Christ is the supreme romantic artist
For Wilde, Christ is the supreme romantic artist, a poet who makes the inward outward through the power of the imagination. Wilde goes even further and says that Christ makes himself into a work of art through the transfiguration of his suffering in his life and passion. Christ creates himself as a work of art by rendering articulate a voiceless world of pain. Wilde writes
To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can conceive life at all. To him what is dumb is dead. But to Christ it was not so. With a width and wonder of imagination that fills one almost with awe, he took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of himself its external mouthpiece.
In his compassion for the downtrodden and the poor, but equally in his pity for the hard hedonism of the rich, Christ is the incarnation of love as an act of imagination, not reason, an imaginative projection of compassion onto all creatures. What Christ teaches is love and Wilde writes, "When you really want love you will find it waiting for you". The decision to open oneself to love enables an experience of grace over which one has no power and which one cannot decide. As Lacan writes, "love is giving what one does not have".
Wilde's extraordinary panegyric to Christ culminates in what he calls Christ's 'dangerous idea'. This turns upon the treatment of a sinner like Wilde himself. Christ does not condemn the sinner – "Let him of you who has never sinned be the first to throw the stone" – but rather sees sin and suffering as 'being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes of perfection'. By this, Wilde does not mean that the act of sin itself is holy, but the transfiguration of this act that follows from the experience of long repentance and suffering. To this extent, and Wilde finds this a deeply un-Hellenic thought, one can transform one's past through a process of aesthetic transfiguration or sublimation. Wilde concludes,
It is difficult for most people to grasp the idea. I dare say one has to go to prison to understand it. If so, it may be worth while going to prison.
It is only in and through the experience of imprisonment that Wilde is able to become himself, to deepen what he relentlessly calls his individualism into a subjectivity defined by the transfiguration of suffering. In this, Wilde's artistic exemplar is Christ, "He is just like a work of art. He does not really teach one anything, but by being brought into his presence one becomes something".
The sordid necessity of living for others
This Wilde Christianity finds its political expression in socialism. Wilde's argument for socialism prior to his imprisonment is singular, to say the least. The chief advantage of socialism is that it would relieve us of that, 'sordid necessity of living for others'. That is, socialism would relieve us of the constant presence and pressure of the poor and the burdens of charity and the so-called altruistic virtues. In eliminating poverty at the level of the political organization of society, socialism 'will lead to individualism'. That is, it will allow individuals to flourish in a society that will permit and positively encourage self-artistry and self-formation.
But is socialism possible without the experience of pain, suffering and imprisonment, that is, without the whole imitatio of Christ that we have followed in these remarks? In his 1891 essay on The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Wilde imagines a new Hellenism where the sheer joy of life would replace painful lamentation for the suffering God. In 1897, after the experience of imprisonment and degradation, Wilde is not so sure.
And this is what gives the lie to Wilde's aesthetic individualism. In my view, it is not individualism at all, but what, in my parlance, I call a "dividualism". In the latter, the self forms itself in relation to the experience of an overwhelming ethical demand, the sort of demand that Christ made in the Sermon on the Mount or when he was asked to join in the vilification of the prostitute condemned to be stoned to death. This demand allows us to become the ethical selves of which we are capable by dividing us from ourselves, by forcing us to live in accordance with an asymmetrical and unfulfillable demand, the demand to be Christ-like while knowing that we are all-too-human.
Although we can be free of the limiting externalism of conventional morality, established law and the metaphysics of traditional religion, it seems that we will never be free of the "sordid necessity of living for others". This requires an experience of faith, a faith of the faithless that is an openness to love, of giving what one does not have and receiving that over which one has no power.