I have one word to say upon the subject of profound writers, who are grown very numerous of late; and I know very well the judicious world is resolved to list me in that number. I conceive therefore, as to the business of being profound, that it is with writers as with wells—a person with good eyes may see to the bottom of the deepest, provided any water be there: and often when there is nothing in the world at the bottom besides dryness and dirt, though it be but a yard and a-half under-ground, it shall pass, however, for wondrous deep upon no wiser reason than because it is wondrous dark.—A Tale of a Tub

So pronounces the fictional hack author of A Tale of a Tub, Jonathan Swift's most brilliant and—dare I say it? profound—work, a 1704 satire on modern abuses of religion and learning, and on all those daring to think themselves immune to such. This chaotic, digressive, function-following-form masterpiece smashes what Swift saw as the false idols of his day: nominalism and materialism, sectarianism and scientism, systematizers and "projectors," pretended wit and religious zealotry, hack writing and facile hermeneutics—to name a few.

If there were just one author I wish all thoughtful Christians would read, it would be Jonathan Swift, who lived from 1667 to 1745. Despite his secure place in the canon of great literature, Swift might be one of the most under-read and under-appreciated writers therein. Harold Bloom, whose literary and religious proclivities are the antitheses of Swift's, proclaims in his book Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds that he rereads A Tale of a Tub "twice a year, religiously, because it devastates and is so good for me." It is, Bloom writes, "the most salutary corrective for someone of visionary tendencies or Romantic enthusiasms."

It's a corrective for the rest of us, too. In particular, the allegorical portions of the work, centered on the tale of three feuding brothers—Jack (symbolizing John Calvin), Martin (Luther), and Peter (the Roman Church)—have particular resonance for the ever-fracturing subsets of contemporary Christendom. Yet this is not the simple allegory of Bunyan: Swift's is an incarnational satire. He creates personas that embody the very follies and excesses he critiques. By purposefully confusing surface with depth, inner with outer, material with spiritual, Swift inverses, reverses, and conflates all these, implicating the reader in the conflations and forcing her to do the hard work of discerning truth from error and wisdom from folly. As the hack narrator of A Tale of a Tub dubiously puts it:

[W]isdom is a fox, who, after long hunting, will at last cost you the pains to dig out. It is a cheese which, by how much the richer, has the thicker, the homelier, and the coarser coat, and whereof to a judicious palate the maggots are the best. It is a sack-posset, wherein the deeper you go you will find it the sweeter. Wisdom is a hen whose cackling we must value and consider, because it is attended with an egg. But then, lastly, it is a nut, which, unless you choose with judgment, may cost you a tooth, and pay you with nothing but a worm.

If this isn't enticing enough to send you straight to Swift, then do read Leo Damrosch's compelling biography, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World, published last year by Yale University Press and a finalist for this year's Pulitzer Prize in biography. Here is a book to delight and instruct both the general reader and the specialist. Damrosch masterfully fleshes out the fascinating and complex life of this Anglican clergyman, champion of the oppressed Irish, and brilliant satirist who lived in an age equally fascinating and complex.

The chapter on London, for example, cannot fail to interest any reader who cares a whit about history, humanity, or even basic hygiene. Much about Swift's compulsions—both literary and personal—makes greater sense when the reader has even a rudimentary understanding of how significantly the pervasiveness of human waste affected the flavor of urban life in the 18th century. Damrosch answers this need, and so many others, quite nicely, deftly placing Swift in the context of his time and offering many delicious tidbits along the way. An entry in one of Swift's account books, for instance, shows that he paid a shilling and 4 pence to see "dwarfs" in London (inspiration for the Lilliputians in Gulliver's Travels?); the OED cites Swift as the source for the first published use of the word "modernism"; a stuffed carcass of an executed prisoner was displayed in the library of Trinity College in Swift's hometown of Dublin (perhaps the source of one memorable passage in A Tale of a Tub); and Swift possessed both a hypersensitive sense of smell and the rare (at the time) ability to swim. On weightier matters, Damrosch offers some of the clearest political background I've encountered, including brief histories of the Whig and Tory parties and Swift's toggled relationship with them as he strove always for the via media (or middle way) in an age prone to extremes.

Damrosch puts finally to rest recurring accusations against Swift of misogyny, a slander that has lingered since his own day, mainly because of his harshly anti-romantic poetry. The fact is that Swift held remarkably progressive attitudes toward women—both in the universal and the particular—which Damrosch details amply. Swift had strong, lifelong bonds with several women (including, possibly, a secret marriage), and he stubbornly insisted that women were capable of and obliged to meet the same robust standards of intellect and character generally expected of men. Damrosch is quite correct in portraying Swift's views as prefiguring those of the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

Damrosch's chapter "Swift and God" is particularly noteworthy. Swift's conservative, orthodox brand of Christianity, out of fashion even in his own lifetime, fueled his dogged insistence on correcting human pride and pretension, corrections no more popular then than they would be now. Damrosch's own heritage as the son and grandson of Episcopalian priests is evident in the understanding—rare in Swift biographies—he brings to Swift's unconventional but deeply committed Christian faith. Despite a lifetime of service to the Church of England, Swift was routinely suspected of irreverence, irreligion, and unbelief, in large part because of what Damrosch characterizes as his avoidance of "any conventional display of piety." (The bawd and bite of his satire surely accounts for much of the misguided skepticism about the sincerity of his faith.) Damrosch shows, however, that those closest to Swift "never doubted" the authenticity of his Christian belief. One clergyman resided in Swift's household for some months before realizing that the servants assembled quietly with Swift each evening for prayers. Swift said grace at each meal, fervently, with clasped hands "lifted up to his breast." Damrosch notes, too, a poignant fact recorded by a servant but overlooked by previous biographers: in later years when Swift's mind was lost to dementia, he continued his personal devotions "till at last he could only repeat the Lord's Prayer."

Nevertheless, Swift possessed, Damrosch writes, the "temptation to skepticism." In addressing Swift's statements about his doubts, Damrosch seems more uncomfortable with doubt than Swift, who proclaimed, "I am not answerable to God for the doubts that arise in my own breast, since they are the consequence of that reason which he hath planted in me." Damrosch characterizes Swift's relationship with God as "distant and impersonal," citing his animosity toward "enthusiasm," which Samuel Johnson defined in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language as "vain belief of private revelation," a definition with which Swift would have heartily agreed. Damrosch's modern (and false) dichotomy of the faith experience as necessarily being either "enthusiastic" or "distant and impersonal" is perhaps the only quibble I have with an otherwise outstanding work of biographical, historical, and literary analysis.

Seldom—if ever—has anyone who loved the church so fiercely exposed its follies and excesses as relentlessly as Swift did. Those who love the church and seek to correct and improve it—or who love humanity and seek the same—could do no better than to study this master of language and wit. Damrosch's introductions and brief analyses of many of Swift's works will be helpful to readers who are exploring this often disorienting terrain for the first time.

For the more seasoned student of Swift, Cambridge University Press's scholarly edition of Gulliver's Travels is a treasure. Edited by David Womersley, professor of English literature at Oxford University, this weighty (in both senses of the word) edition was issued in 2012 as volume 16 in what will be a 17-volume set when the series is completed. At 806 pages, this is the most thoroughly annotated edition yet of Swift's most famous and engaging work. The lengthy introduction would itself be worthwhile reading even for a beginning student. Copious footnotes, essay-length endnotes, illustrations, appendices, an index, and a select bibliography make this volume a veritable encyclopedia of Swift scholarship, one I will surely rely on the next time I teach a course in Swift. In light of these two exciting new books, I can hardly wait—mostly because of the vexing sense that I myself am ever in need of Swift's correctives, ad infinitum.

Karen Swallow Prior is professor of English at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. She is the author of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (T.S. Poetry Press, 2012) and Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (Thomas Nelson, 2014).

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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