![]() While Wilde’s written work remained popular in the decades following his death, his personal image went unrehabilitated until the 1970s-80s Gay Pride movement, which spurred a reassessment of his life and historical context. At 46 years old, he was destitute, exiled and so widely reviled that he’d resorted to living under a pseudonym, “Sebastian Melmoth”-a devastating fall from grace for a man whose elegant wit and refined sensibilities had once made him the toast of London. Oscar Wilde died in Paris on November 30, 1900, just three years after his release from prison. In these few lines, Wilde envisions a kind of mystical, agnostic spirituality a “poetic faith”, as famously defined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose communion is via artistic creation and whose godhead lies within. If I may not find its secret within myself, I shall never find it: if I have not got it already, it will never come to me. Only that is spiritual which makes its own form. It has sown its martyrs, it should reap its saints, and praise God daily for having hidden Himself from man.īut whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. But he continued:Įvery thing to be true must become a religion. Writing in the bowels of Reading Prison, Wilde understandably imagined his Confraternity of the Faithless as an austere order, whose rituals would be marked by absences. When I think about 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. His sensual materialism might be compared with that of the Epicureans of ancient Greece, who similarly evinced a deep skepticism regarding the “supernatural” and saw pleasure as the highest good. Wilde’s notion of spirituality eschewed faith in the supernatural for the sensory experiences of the natural world, in all its glory and with all its dangers. My gods dwell in temples made with hands and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also. ![]() The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. “Religion,” Wilde wrote, “does not help me”: Although he would famously fulfill his long-term pledge to die as a Roman Catholic-being received into the Church literally upon his death-bed-he had decidedly not lived as one, and there are passages in De Profundis that seem to advocate for a deeply unorthodox practice of “atheistic ritual.” ![]() Oscar Wilde’s intellectual stance on religion was complex. ![]()
5 Comments
slay wueen
9/26/2023 01:33:55 am
yassss
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Oscar Wilde, in full Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, (born October 16, 1854, Dublin, Ireland—died November 30, 1900, Paris, France), Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose reputation rests on his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray
9/26/2023 01:37:14 am
gay people should not exist
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oscar 4life!
9/26/2023 01:39:20 am
ummmm buddy! what the frick! oscar is a queer icon.
He Was Born Inside What Is Now Trinity College
9/26/2023 01:43:51 am
ummm why dont you shut the frick up dude! with ur rainbows and skittle squad........... go back to the zest fest
Oscar Wilde fan account
9/26/2023 01:36:41 am
In his SLAUY ERA
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