tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7091756463128804432.post8946475280890089804..comments2024-03-27T02:55:10.109-07:00Comments on Irish Papist: Why didn't Ireland Have a Victorian Crisis of Faith?Maolsheachlannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09406722311993627528noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7091756463128804432.post-7948855598794856302012-07-14T13:26:41.652-07:002012-07-14T13:26:41.652-07:00Those are good points. I remember Synge's acco...Those are good points. I remember Synge's account of being thrown into mental turmoil, as a child, by reading a passage that compared a bat's wing to a human hand. All the same the intellectual world of late-nineteenth and early twentieth Irish Catholicism seems bullish and confident compared to the anxieties of English Christians at the time. It's more an atmosphere than anything I can specifically point to.Maolsheachlannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09406722311993627528noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7091756463128804432.post-15660870402314102352012-07-14T13:19:16.916-07:002012-07-14T13:19:16.916-07:00Many (not all)Irish PROTESTANTS did have a similar...Many (not all)Irish PROTESTANTS did have a similar Victorian crisis of faith - quite a few of the Irish Revival writers such as Yeats and Synge came from clerical dynasties and/or reacted against Evangelical upbringings. (There was a fairly significant Evangelical revival among the major Irish Protestant denominations in the early nineteenth century; this I think was the backwash.)<br /> There was I think a certain amount of slippage among mid to late-Victorian upper and middle-class Catholics; partly for social reasons, partly from the same intellectual tensions that affected Protestants - but it's harder to chart because religious allegiance was bound up with so many other loyalties that they reinforced one another (at least in public) and because the proportion of the Catholic population who were upper and upper-middle class was smaller. Quite a few of Joyce's Catholic University contemporaries ended up as agnostics or atheists. (Francis Sheehy Skeffington and JF Byrne, the "Cranly" of PORTRAIT, would be examples.)Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16510001808658687585noreply@blogger.com