Austen’s faith

The following is taken from an essay by Michael Wheeler in Jane Austen in Context (Cambridge). He points out that growing up in a clergyman’s house, and with two clergyman as brothers, Austen’s life was intertwined with the church and Anglican faith. The “moderate Anglicanism” with which she was most familiar, he says, “steered a safe middle course between Enlightenment rationalism, with its attendant dangers of agnosticism and secularization, and Evangelical ‘enthusiasm,’ characterized by intense personal piety.” Though part of a middle way of the middle way, faith “certainly mattered very much to Jane Austen, whose family bonds were strengthened by private and public devotions, and whose novels reflect the teaching and the rhythms of the Authorised Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.”

Though the revivals of the early 18th century had waned by Austen’s time, there was a new burst of reforming zeal among Evangelical Anglicans of the late 18th and early 19th centuries: “Evangelicalism gradually strengthened within the Anglican fold, through the ministries of men like John Fletcher, Henry Venn and John Newton (Cowper’s friend and collaborator). At the end of the century, William Wilberforce and the ‘Clapham Sect’ gave fresh impetus to an Evangelical revival which was later to have a profound effect on the private lives and public manners of the Victorians . . . . These wealthy Anglicans believed that their faith should be reflected in good works. They led the campaign to abolish the slave trade, founded the British and Foreign Bible Society and supported missionary work at home and abroad.”

Austen’s faith was, Wheeler argues, closer to that of the late 17th century Archbishop John Tillotson than to the Evangelicals of her own day. Austen was a great reader of sermons, and Tillotson’s sermons were models for later preachers. Tillotson’s was a practically oriented Christianity: “Every man is sent by God into this World, and hath a Word given him to do in it, which he is concern’d vigorously to mind and to prosecute with all his Might. And tho every Man be not sent to save the whole World, as the Son of God was, yet every Man is sent by God into the World, to work out his own Salvation, and to take care of that in the first place, and then to promote the Salvation of others, as much as in him lies.”

For Austen and her family regular attendance at worship was “very important.” They “attended Morning Prayer, unless prevented from doing so by abominable weather. Church-going is habitual to her heroines . . . and leads naturally to social exchange after the service . . . . The sacred and the secular blend together organically in Austen’s life and work.”

Only a few books are known to have been owned by Jane Austen herself, and one of these was William Vickers’s Companion to the Altar, which a great-niece described as a “book of devotions always used by Jane Austen.” The book contains prayers and meditations in preparation for the Eucharist. One passage reads, “All the blessings which we now enjoy, and hope hereafter to receive from Almighty God, are purchased for us, and must be obtained, through the merits and intercession of the Holy Jesus, who has instituted the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, for a continual Remembrance of his Death and Passion, to our great and everlasting comfort . . . But then we must remember, that these blessings are no where promised, but on condition that we ourselves are first duly qualified for them.”

Austen was affected by the Evangelical model of Christian living: “Evangelicalism, with its emphasis upon conversion and a new life in Christ, sanctification and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, mission and acts of love (or ‘charity’) and a personal life set apart from worldly immorality, clearly influenced Jane Austen, but without recruiting her to its ranks.” Austen’s own testimony is mixed. In an 1809 letter, she says “I do not like the Evangelicals,” but five years later she says she is “by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals” and that she is “at least persuaded that they who are so from Reason & Feeling, must be the happiest & safest.” This change has led some to speculate on the possibility that Austen went through some kind of religious awakening in the early 19th century.