II. Disraeli's Religious Fiction

The year after he was accused of atheism for Contarini Fleming, Disraeli published The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833) – a poetic romance about a Jewish Messiah figure who revolted against the reigning Islamic Caliphate in the twelfth-century Middle East. It was an odd story. The Athenaeum reported that some readers would be tempted to “read to the fortieth page of this tale, then close the work for ever and call the author a wild enthusiast who deals in extravagant legends and supernatural fictions” (qtd. in Stewart 144). The characters spoke in an amalgam of the King James Bible, attempted Shakespearian monologue, and the flamboyant vocabulary of the Byronic epic, which critics found difficult to swallow.Footnote ³ Moreover, Alroy revealed Disraeli's surprisingly deep knowledge of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish folklore. Its structure mirrored the tropes of Old Testament kingship narratives: God's call of a new and unexpected king, followed by the king's exodus and/or exile, and concluded by the king's temptation and fall. In Disraeli's plot Alroy is called by God and anointed; he attempts to lead his nation out of captivity by recapturing the Holy Land through providentially determined battles; and he eventually falls from obedience and righteousness into the temptations of hubris, disobedient intermarriage, and idolatry. The novel contained such extensive biblical material, it seemed impossible that Disraeli had crafted it without a Bible open beside him. Alroy was more than a shallow literary foray into Jewish mythology or medieval legend for Disraeli. And it certainly proved inconsistent with his alleged apathy for religion.

Disraeli continued to interrogate these religious themes in the Young England novels of the mid-1840s. The Young England trilogy has been interpreted by historians as sheer political propaganda: Disraeli's attempt to represent a small group of Eton and Cambridge educated MPs who called for a return to a feudal-like relationship between the landed gentry and the working class. In his biography of 1966, Robert Blake claimed that Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845) revealed little more than “Disraeli's Tory theory of history and the doctrine of Young England,” while Tancred (1847) should be read completely separately, as “the vehicle for Disraeli's own highly idiosyncratic views on race and religion” (194). But on close reading, it becomes obvious that Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred each re-expressed the commitment to religious faith that Disraeli articulated in his earlier works. In the final work of the trilogy, the young English nobleman Tancred – who, like Alroy, derives his name from a medieval religious figure – travels to the Holy Land on a quest to remedy the political malaise of Europe by reuniting the religious traditions of East and West. He achieves spiritual enlightenment through the dual experiences of falling in love with the enchanting Jewess Eva and receiving divine revelation from a heavenly being atop Mount Sinai. Eva convinces him of the inherent theological compatibility and dependency between Judaism and Christianity. Her argument betrays Disraeli's attempt at his own theology: “Now tell me,” she asks him, “suppose the Jews had not prevailed upon the Romans to crucify Jesus, what would have become of the Atonement?” (Tancred 3: 201; ch. 4).

Then the “Angel of Arabia” appears to the Moses-like Tancred atop Mount Sinai and imparts to him the secret to Europe's regeneration: the “sublime and solacing doctrine of theocratic equality,” or the belief that the “equality of man can only be accomplished by the sovereignty of God” (4: 300; ch. 7). The disease of Europe can only be cured by a symbolic reunion between governments and God, and the first step, Tancred learns, is for the Christian West to embrace the religious truth offered by the Jewish Levant: “It was decreed that, when [the races of Christendom] burst from their wild woods, the Arabian principles should meet them on the threshold of the old world to guide and civilise them” (4: 299; ch. 7). Tancred’s vision of political and religious harmony resembles a kind of Second Coming:

In Tancred Disraeli claimed that only religious faith begets responsible government. Tancred explicitly decries the “political atheism that is now desolating existence” (6: 434; ch. 3), and which must be healed through the adoption of Jewish wisdom.

The panoramic, Judeo-Christian mélange championed by Tancred appeared an expression of Disraeli's own confessional identity: a medley of Judaism and Christianity. Disraeli advocated this religious position at length in surprising and seemingly inexpedient contexts. In December 1847, for example – later in the same year as the publication of Tancred – he spoke in the House of Commons in support of the Jewish Relief Bill that would allow Baron Lionel de Rothschild and other Jews to sit in Parliament. Rather than treading cautiously near his party's line of religious toleration, Disraeli rearticulated the theology of Tancred, arguing that there was a complete theological interconnection between Judaism and Christianity. He insisted that Jews “acknowledge the same God as the Christian people of this realm” and “acknowledge the same divine revelation as yourselves”; and moreover, that the House owed legislative power – at least – to “the authors of your religion” (HC Deb). According to this logic, to exclude Jews from public life was not only unfair, but doctrinally incorrect.Footnote ⁴ This was not the last time Disraeli would argue for the impossibility of Christian soteriology without the antecedent religious work of Judaism. In his biography of his deceased friend and colleague Lord George Bentinck, published in 1852, Disraeli's infamous Chapter 24 departed from his account of Bentinck's parliamentary character and offered a strange and detailed Jewish apologetic. To demonstrate the fundamental Jewishness of Christianity, he invoked his own, self-reasoned Trinitarian theology, arguing that “There cannot be two moralities” and to assert that Christ “could teach a different morality from that which had been already revealed by the First Person of the Holy Trinity, is a dogma so full of terror that it may perhaps be looked upon as the ineffable sin against the Holy Spirit” (Lord George Bentinck 316).

Despite Disraeli's bold engagement with religious debates in his non-fiction work and in the House of Commons, historians continue to trivialize his exploration of religious themes in the novels. As Jennifer Conary has argued, at first glance Tancred “bore greater resemblance to an Arabian Nights fantasy than to any mid-Victorian reform fiction” (75). Conary's observation epitomizes frequent reactions to Disraeli's religious fiction. Paul Smith used the same language in his biography of Disraeli, published in 1996; he pinned Disraeli's cluster of fantastical, pseudo-theological novels down to “Disraeli's Arabian nights complex” (29). And when Blake – the most widely-read twentieth-century biographer of Disraeli – discussed Contarini Fleming, Alroy, Tancred, and Lothair in his biography, he referred to “the somewhat bizarre, and, if the truth be admitted, woolly, Oriental philosophy which [Disraeli] professed from time to time – ‘the great Asian mystery’” (59). Blake thus constructed the dominant image of Disraeli in the twentieth century: a rarefied wit who indulged in the luxuries of the East to escape the occasional boredom of the Carlton Club.Footnote ⁵

Scholars continue to treat Disraeli's religious novels as psychological fantasies, unconnected to the religious politics of his time. But even these cursory outlines of Alroy and Tancred indicate something about Disraeli's nuanced confessional position. Alroy demonstrates that Disraeli read the Old Testament in the 1830s, which suggests that he engaged with debates about scriptural authority more explicitly, and was more entrenched in traditional biblical constructions of divine truth, than has been assumed. Tancred illustrates Disraeli interrogating the veracity of his utopian Judeo-Christian vision in the context of the condition-of-England question in the 1840s.Footnote ⁶ What then, might Lothair suggest about Disraeli's religious position in the 1870s? The next two sections demonstrate that like Disraeli's previous novels, Lothair was dismissed as satirical, odd, and overly political. However, far from a political manifesto warning of the dangers of Roman Catholicism, Lothair expresses Disraeli's deeper religio-political concern that the nation would lose its religious faith and adopt a hollow, amoral scientific creed.

III. The Reception of Lothair

The reviews following Lothair (1870) – a book marking the end of Disraeli's long hiatus from novel writing – reveal that contemporary critics were typically mystified by the religious content in the former prime minister's new work of fiction. Perhaps coining the “Arabian Nights” association with Disraeli's fiction, John Skelton wrote of the novel in Fraser's Magazine: “The combination of romantic adventure with the contemporary epigram of the smoking-room and ‘the impassioned tittle-tattle’ of the drawing-room, produces a curious impression . . . .Lothair is the Arabian Nights translated into modern romance” (799).

Disraeli's seeming playfulness in constructing a modern, romantic Arabian Nights was widely perceived as an insincere, satirical joke at the expense of his readers. In Blackwood's, for example, Sir Edward Bruce Hamley wrote what must have been one of the longest and most scathing reviews of a novel (the Examiner called it an “instance of literary outrage”), which began simply, “This is the most elaborate jest which the sportive author has ever played off upon an amiable and confiding public” (qtd. in Stewart 247). Mortimer Collins, in the British Quarterly Review, also summarized widespread uncertainty, not only about whether Disraeli merely sought to pull the nation's leg, but also about the acceptability of the strange doctrines Disraeli expressed in Lothair:

A novel about the hidden scheming of the Roman Catholic clergy in England from this unlikely of author was likely to be received as “strange,” “devious,” and “dubious.”

The Roman Catholic theme, as we have seen, aligned with contemporary anxiety surrounding the question of the Irish Church. Fears about the ideological threat of Roman Catholicism escalated even more when in December 1868, the 3^rd Marquess of Bute, heir to a huge fortune, converted to Rome. Reports following the conversion speculated whether the Marquess's new faith was likely to lead to a wave of similar conversions amongst the ritualist wing of the Anglican establishment. Recalling the conversions of several Oxford Tractarians in the 1830s and 40s, a Punch article published in January 1869 was called, “A Noble Pattern to Pusey & Co.” and satirically considered whether other high Anglicans, such as “The Rev. Mr. Going,” who was “reported to have celebrated a mimic mass at St. Paul's, Walworth, last Sunday week,” would convert to Catholicism as well: “Is it not high time, Sir, that this Going was gone?” (20). The Times predicted that Bute's conversion would cause a stir: “Some good Protestants will, perhaps, see in it another instance of the awful subtlety of the Roman Catholic priesthood, and of the rapid advance of the Pope towards supreme domination. More, perhaps, will regret the example, and anticipate injurious results” (“It is not many weeks” 6). If Lothair was a fictional expression of Disraeli's grudge against Manning, Gladstone, and the pro-Catholic Irish alliance, he certainly published it at an appropriate time.

This interpretation of Lothair as primarily anti-Catholic, for Disraeli's political purchase, has lingered in recent assessments of the novel. Thom Braun has argued that the novel “was a subtle re-interpretation of the influences which the author had felt from the secret societies and from the Roman Church through his life as a leading politician” (135). While Daniel Schwarz has discussed the novel as Disraeli's exploration of “major nineteenth-century epistemological positions,” he has also argued that “Lothair’s popularity can be attributed not only to Disraeli's status as the former Prime Minister, but to its anti-Catholicism” (127). Similarly, in his recent study of the psychological parallels that run between Disraeli's politics and fiction, Robert O'Kell has demonstrated that while Disraeli portrayed Roman Catholic characters sympathetically in Lothair, and indeed dedicated the novel to his Catholic friend Duc d'Aumale, readers nevertheless took the novel's main theme as the “threatening encroachments of the Roman Catholic Church upon England's Protestant realm” (392). But for O'Kell, Lothair was far from an anti-Roman Catholic attack: instead, it was yet another of Disraeli's “psychological romances,” in which “Disraeli's recent political life and his long-standing ambivalence about Catholicism. . .inform the fantasy structure of the plot” (394).

When situated within Disraeli's wider political and religious rhetoric in the 1860s, however, Lothair illustrates his anxiety about the impinging threats to the Church of England – and its identity as the social and spiritual fabric of England – posed by schools of scientific materialism and broad theology. On 16 March 1861, in a letter to his friend and later benefactress, the Jewish-Anglican convert and widow Sarah Brydges Willyams, Disraeli described the most pressing issues of the day. He mentioned the Sardinian invasion of the Papal States and growing uncertainty about the Pope's temporal authority, the publication of Essays and Reviews, and – facetiously – the collapse of the spire of Chichester Cathedral:

Disraeli's excitement would turn more sombre. He wrote to Brydges again in November of the same year about the dangers of new forms of religious philosophy: “The state of the Church is critical – from dissensions & heresy – among its own children. If it were to fall, philosophy would not profit: we should only be handed over to a narrow-minded and ignorant fanaticism” (Letters 8: 147). In the same letter, Disraeli reported to Brydges that he had formed an alliance with the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, “as you know, a first-rate man,” and that with Wilberforce's support, he would speak the following day at a Diocesan meeting in Aylesbury, to “try to give a lead to public opinion in the right direction.” Disraeli clearly took this role seriously, likening himself to the early eighteenth-century preacher Henry Sacheverall, some of whose explosive sermons had to be burned: “It is a nervous business, for what may be said, & done tomorrow, may produce very great effects – like Sacheverall's sermon, wh: was nothing till it was preached, & then nearly set the Thames on fire . . . .Think of me tomorrow; a very critical day, I can assure you” (Letters 8: 147).Footnote ⁷

The ensuing Aylesbury speech set nothing on fire, but as Allen Warren has shown, it represented a pivotal moment in the development of Disraeli's political rhetoric in defence of the Church (105). The basis of Disraeli's “Church in danger” logic, according to the Times, was the threat of a “new school of German theology. . .which with profound learning and inexorable logic proved that Rationalism was irrational (a laugh), and successfully substituted for it a new scheme of Scriptural interpretation called the mythical” (“Mr. Disraeli” 7). The risk to the Church did not stop there. Disraeli called for the clergy to unite against not only “theological liberalism, [but]. . .Church rates, burials, amendments to the Act of Uniformity, the laws of marriage and divorce, and the integrity of the formularies of the Book of Common Prayer” (Warren 106).Footnote ⁸

Disraeli's “Church in danger” cry reached its apex in his “Apes and Angels” speech, delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford nearly three years later, on 25 November 1864. The speech came as part of Disraeli's continued political coalition with Wilberforce and the diocese of Oxford. He claimed amid loud cheers that in the debate on whether man was “an ape or an angel . . . .My Lord, I am on the side of the angels” (Letters 8: 381). The press mocked Disraeli's memorable dictum, but the editors of Disraeli's correspondence recently argued that Disraeli's statement represented more than a publicity stunt:

In Lothair Disraeli expressed this position in more detail. Rather than constructing his hero as a triumphant Protestant in order to quell anxieties over Catholicism, Disraeli put Lothair through a labyrinth of different confessional positions, each of which holds allure and promise, even after Lothair rejects them all in favour of Anglicanism at the end of the novel. Lothair's entanglement in a thorny plethora of different doctrines allowed Disraeli to interrogate the veracity and functionality of various beliefs, in order to combat the most salient threat the novel imagines: unbelief. Lothair's conclusive conviction – “there must be design” – comes to represent the core, untainted belief he holds throughout the novel as he dodges the corruption of the ecclesiastical and ideological institutions which threaten to ensnare him.

The novel, then, speaks to the necessity of faith – rather than atheism – in a context in which scientific accounts of Nature had shaken the foundational assumptions of theism, and in which conflicts of religious identity, such as the one demonstrated by the Marquess of Bute, seemed rife. In keeping with the religious inquiries in Disraeli's novels of the 1830s and 1840s, Lothair showcases Disraeli penetrating the limits and rewards of religious belief in an age of seeming doubt. As Daniel Schwarz has perceptively argued, in Lothair Disraeli “addresses many of the same contemporary intellectual issues raised by Newman's Apologia (1864) and Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869): the position of the Anglican Church in England; the respective roles of individual conscience; [and] authority and faith in determining one's religious views” (125).

Lothair brought together Disraeli's beliefs about the role of the Church of England as a bulwark of liberty, a bastion of faith, and deeply essential to the identity of the English nation, just as the Young England novels had done in the 1840s. But the novel also explicitly confronted the question of the reality or unreality of God. Indeed, in Lothair's contemplative monologues during his moments of existential questioning, he deliberates about the truth-claims of Christianity, rather than about any sectarian differences between Anglicanism and Catholicism. When viewed in this light, Lothair becomes a valuable demonstration of Disraeli's religious priorities in the 1870s. It also suggests that the prevailing notion of the unprincipled, expedient, and religiously indifferent Disraeli has been overstated.

IV. “There Must Be Design”: Faith and Doubt in Lothair

Two significant and interconnected themes in Lothair suggest that the supremacy of personal faith over atheism dominates the novel's religious politics. The first is Lothair's persistent deliberation not about discrepancies between different religious doctrines, but about the feasibility of belief in a Creator. The second, relatedly, is Lothair's separation of this personal faith from the ecclesiastical constructions in which he becomes involved throughout the novel. Lothair's circuitous search for belief ends in his wholehearted embrace of the Church of England as the sanctuary for his broadly conceived Judeo-Christian theology. While he accepts the institutional and national symbolism of Anglicanism, his personal confessional system remains the Semitically-informed, paradigmatic Christianity which typically provides the fruitful end to a Disraelian hero's search for truth. The novel distinguishes between, on the one hand, an essential belief in God as Creator and as safeguard against the emptiness of scientific materialism, and on the other hand, the problematic particularities of church institutions. This divide between institution and faith comprises the main message of Lothair, and reinforces Disraeli's priority in the novel: faith must supersede doubt, and the Church must supersede dangerous, liberal philosophical schools.

In the novel, the orphaned aristocrat Lothair becomes the desired recruit of various religio-political interest groups when he comes of age and inherits an enormous fortune. Lothair is drawn to different faith structures throughout the novel, and while he ultimately turns to Anglicanism, each alternative doctrinal system affirms his conviction that faith is indispensable. From the outset, the reader learns that Lothair's life has been caught between opposing religious allegiances. When his parents die, Lothair is left with two guardians: his uncle, a Scottish Presbyterian, and the Catholic Cardinal Grandison – a thinly veiled Cardinal Manning – who was the private tutor to Lothair's late father, and has since seceded from the Anglican Church and entered the Roman Catholic Church. During Lothair's childhood, his Scottish uncle is sceptical of “Popish plot[s]” and instils “every precaution to secure [Lothair's] Protestant principles and to guard the influence, or even personal interference, of his Roman Catholic guardian” (6; ch. 2).

When the novel begins, the Catholic clergymen, led by Grandison in England, fixate on Lothair – who is approaching his majority – as an advantageous potential convert as they design a campaign to widen their influence in Britain. Lothair becomes enchanted with the sumptuous piety of Catholicism, enamoured of the pious young Catholic, Clare Arundel. He grows close to the Catholic St Jerome family, as well as Cardinal Grandison, Monsignore Catesby, and Father Coleman, each of whom introduce him to Catholic learning. Lothair confides in Cardinal Grandison his fear that society has become faithless and that “the Church is perplexed; it is ambiguous, contradictory” (56; ch. 17). Grandison assures Lothair that “the Church of Christ. . .is never perplexed, never ambiguous, never contradictory. Why should it be? How could it be? The Divine persons are ever with it” (56; ch. 17). This doctrine of unimpeachable ecclesiastical authority attracts the anxious Lothair, who worries for the faith of England:

But youth is fickle: Lothair soon falls in love with the alluring humanist and Italian revolutionary Theodora Campion, and meets her friend, the hedonistic artist Mr Phoebus, whose character is based on Lord Frederic Leighton. Phoebus and Theodora introduce Lothair to yet another type of faith expression. Mr. Phoebus explains his neo-paganism to Lothair: he exalts the human body, and claims that Semitism and Christianity have caused the demise of art: “Semitism has destroyed art; it taught man to despise his own body, and the essence of art is to honour the human frame . . . .When Leo the Tenth was Pope, popery was pagan; popery is now Christian and art is extinct” (106; ch. 29). Phoebus's Hellenic doctrine holds that “beauty and health are the chief sources of happiness” and offers an antithesis to the stringent Catholic tenets of Grandison (107; ch. 29). Similarly, Theodora introduces Lothair to her nondenominational theism, explaining, “I worship in a church where I believe God dwells, and dwells for my guidance and my good: my conscience” (126; ch. 31). Cardinal Grandison teaches Lothair that as long as he remained outside the Roman Church, he would be “a Christian estranged. . .a Christian without the consolations of Christianity” (56; ch. 17). Theodora, on the other hand, convinces Lothair that orthodoxy is exclusive and arbitrary, and encourages him to abandon it: “So you see. . .what is called orthodoxy has very little to do with religion; and a person may be very religious without holding the same dogmas as yourself, or, as some think, without holding any”’ (125-26; ch. 31).

Mr. Phoebus's and Theodora's humanistic understandings of life, art, and the divine confuse Lothair and disrupt his growing Catholic faith. He returns from Theodora's home “agitated by many thoughts” and “considerable speculation on religion, the Churches, the solar system, the cosmical order, the purpose of Creation, and the destiny of man” (136; ch. 34). He visits her regularly and courts both her and her theology of conscience, while still appeasing the Monsignori, St Jeromes, and Cardinal Grandison with talks of plans to use his inheritance to build a Roman Catholic cathedral in Westminster. These competing theological positions pull a confounded Lothair in various directions as his majority approaches.

Within this perplexity, Lothair questions the origins of existence as they are portrayed by new scientific understandings of Nature. He wonders: “Chance, necessity, atomic theories, nebular hypotheses, development, evolution, the origin of worlds, human ancestry; here were high topics on none of which was there lack of argument; and, in a certain sense, evidence; and what then?” (152–53; ch. 38). Nevertheless Lothair remains adamant that there is a Creator and an inherent order within Creation. His conclusion – “There must be design” – becomes the singular belief that he holds, unchanged, throughout the novel; it alone remains untouched by the various doctrines he courts. Lothair's main philosophical struggle arises not from the complicated politics of the institutions that attempt to recruit him. Instead, his confusion comes from the theories of the “new philosophers” and “distinguished men of science” who seem to deny “direct relations between God and man”:

Lothair does not unpick the delicate dogmatic differences between Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Theodora's humanism. Rather, he remains preoccupied with the sheer conceivability of intelligent design as the basis of the creation of the world.Footnote ⁹ He engages with the possibility of human order not through political or ecclesiastical reorganisation, but through individual religious revelation.

Accordingly, he becomes increasingly convinced of Theodora's religion of conscience; he distances himself from the Catholic contingent and travels to Italy, becoming entangled in the fighting between the papal army and Italian nationalists alongside Theodora and her husband, Colonel Campion. Theodora dies dramatically from a battle wound and beseeches Lothair to promise that he will never enter the Roman Church. After Lothair is subsequently wounded in his continued fight against the papal army, the Vatican successfully conspires to convert him in St Peter's. They then spread the story that Lothair received a miraculous visitation from the Virgin Mary while in his bed recovering from battle. Upon reading the newspaper article in which his visitation from the Virgin is explained and his conversion to Catholicism announced, Lothair feels “as one sinking into an unfathomable abyss”; and “All his life during the last year passed rushingly across his mind” (276; ch. 67). The realisation that his Roman Catholic friends have betrayed him launches Lothair into an existential crisis. However, we must read carefully to interpret Lothair's dejection. Lothair despairs not because of any infidelity to the Anglican Church entailed in his supposed conversion to Catholicism, nor because of his now broken promise to Theodora not to convert. Rather, Lothair despairs at the loss of his own conscience, will, and personal faith at the hands of an unethical institution. This suggests that Lothair's overriding fear in the novel is not of misplaced ecclesiastical allegiance, but loss of self-identity and ultimately, loss of personal faith. He states that a genuine conversion to Rome for theological and intellectual reasons would have been painful enough, given the tension between Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism, but that losing his sense of self was far more painful:

Only when his fate threatens him with depravity and religious aimlessness does Lothair become depressed and contemplate suicide. In his desperate analysis of his misfortune, he repeatedly despairs at the notion of himself as a “renegade”: “But, now, there was not a single circumstance to sustain his involved and sinking life. A renegade, a renegade without conviction, without necessity” (281; ch. 69). Lothair's desolation comes not from his involuntary conversion to Catholicism in particular, but from suddenly finding himself without a faith structure, without a “design.”

Confused and betrayed, Lothair flees to the only place where Disraelian protagonists find elucidation: Israel. On the Mount of Olives, Lothair meets Paraclete, a mysterious Syrian gentleman whose name means Holy Spirit (or occasionally Christ) and can be translated as “comforter,” “advocate,” or “intercessor” (“Paraclete”).Footnote ¹⁰ With Paraclete, Lothair revisits his religious confusion and the growing power of scientific explanations of existence: “‘And yet there are persons at the present day who doubt, even deny, the spiritual nature of man. . .I do not, I could not. . .But there are people now who tell you that there never was any Creation, and therefore there never could have been a Creator” (314; ch. 77). Paraclete's response repeats and affirms Lothair's initial faith in the meaning and design of the universe:

Paraclete's private faith, unmediated by church institution, provides the model for Lothair's similar newfound religious identity. Paraclete speaks of his ancient ties to Galilee and his ability to forge a direct connection with Christ without the intervention of religious authorities. As in Tancred, through Paraclete Disraeli emphasises that the Holy Land, rather than subsequent religious institutions, provides the origin of true religion:

During Paraclete's tutelage of Lothair, the question of church allegiance remains notably absent. Instead, he encourages Lothair to adopt a strong personal faith with direct connection to religious truth. Paraclete rescues Lothair from unbelief, not from Roman Catholicism in particular.

At the end of the novel, Lothair marries the Anglican daughter of an English duke. His return to England from the battlegrounds of Italy, his embrace of his duties as master of his estate, Muriel Towers, and his marriage to Lady Corisande, all fulfil his destiny as an English aristocrat and reinforce Disraeli's promotion of the Church of England as the vital protector and guarantor of the British Constitution. But as we have seen, in the novel's portrayal of contending faith positions, the categories of Catholicism, nationalism, humanism, and Anglicanism evade monolithic definitions. Lothair's journey takes him through the darker caverns of institutional corruption and he discovers the dangerous hunger for power that can belie religious proclamations. Even after he adopts Paraclete's Judeo-Christian theism and realises that belief in God can exist outside the perplexing folds of extremist ideology, his faith remains coloured by the plethora of philosophies he entertains throughout the novel. He remains friends with the St Jerome family, Clare Arundel, and even Cardinal Grandison, and retains elements of his fascination with Catholicism. Indeed, even after they betray him and use him as their pawn, Lothair could not “passively submit to an estrangement from those who had conferred on him so much kindness, and whose ill-considered and injurious courses, as he now esteemed them, were perhaps, and probably, influenced and inspired by exalted, even sacred motives” (328; ch. 81).

By the end of the novel, then, Lothair understands Roman Catholic motives to stem from sincere moral principles, even if their actions become discreditable. Moreover, the persistent piety of Cardinal Grandison, Clare Arundel, and the St Jerome family renders them sympathetic in the novel's religious system, in which unbelief poses the true threat to self and society.Footnote ¹¹ Lothair's multifarious faith – informed by the traditions of the Holy Land, the doctrines of Judaism, the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church, and a renewed spiritual connection between East and West – overshadows and defeats scientific systems which would have him question the design of the universe. As Lothair's faith becomes stronger, he distances himself from the religious institutions that seek him, until individual faith supersedes institutional affiliation as the main priority of the novel. Lothair's entanglement with various sympathetically-portrayed religious institutions illustrates that for Disraeli, the ultimate danger facing the Church was the lack of belief, the hollowness, and the moral relativism that, as Lothair discovers, results from an un-designed existence.Footnote ¹²

This cry for belief, as we have seen, echoes Disraeli's own arguments during the Catholic issues of the 1860s. In a letter to Lord Campden written in April of 1863, Disraeli wrote that he would vote for the pro-Catholic Prison Ministers Bill, even though it was unpopular among his pro-Protestant party. What bothered him, he wrote, was “the systematic hostility always shown by the Catholic members of the House of Commons to the Church of England. This is most unwise. We live in times when Churches should act together” (Letters 8: 266). The institutional and sectarian discrepancies between varying churches and church parties were less important to Disraeli than his desire for them to uphold religiosity and faith – in whatever form it may take – in the face of scientific materialism and doubt.

From his fictional representation of the dangers of unbelief emerges a new understanding of Disraeli in the 1870s. Lothair demonstrates Disraeli's survey of varying faith models, ecclesiastical structures, and the evidence and intellectual process behind belief in the Creator and created. Of course the novel satirised elements of religious devotion, and it certainly should not be read as a proselytising tract on the advantages of total religious pluralism. But at the very least, it disrupts the narrative of Disraeli as a modern pragmatist and proto-atheist, who somehow transcended the religious controversies of his time. Instead, Lothair demonstrates that its author – while cunning in politics and often enigmatic in personality – was nevertheless entrenched in Victorian paradigms of the necessity of religious truth, even in his time of fast-paced intellectual change.