The first issue and number of the Nineteenth Century, 1877, included a searching article by J. Baldwin Brown entitled “Is the Pulpit Losing Its Power?” Looking back over the decades, Brown marked a generational decline in England's preaching, which he argued had now been eclipsed by a print market distributing “freest discussion of the most sacred truths.” Brown lamented that fewer talented men now joined the Anglican ministry, while the Church had increasingly withdrawn from the social mission which had animated mid-century preachers like Charles Kingsley (107–09). More troublingly, Brown speculated that modern Britons had become constitutionally averse to the homiletic situation. The preacher, he writes, often “seems as if he came down on the vast range of subjects which he is tempted to handle as from a superior height; and this is what the scientific mind can never endure. . . . [T]here has always been a sort of omniscient tone in the pulpit method of handling intellectual questions which stirs fierce rebellion in cultivated minds and hearts” (109–10). Brown pulls up short of blaming theology per se; for him its language of “above” and “beyond” has continuing relevance (110). Still, he broaches the possibility that by its very nature preaching risks antagonizing what current scholarship would term the “liberal subject”: one which prizes freedom of conscience, empirical exploration, and debate.

At the broadest level, Brown's musings touch on a longstanding suspicion, whether articulated from within classical liberalism or Marxism, that religious instruction – maybe religious discourse in general – is incompatible with democratic institutions and their antecedent, a mature public sphere. This sense had precedent in Enlightenment freethought, but arguably matured in Britain during the furious early to mid-century controversy that accompanied challenges to Establishment. There, however, the question was often posed the other way around, as one about whether ecclesiastical authority and community could survive the modern marketplace of ideas. Catholic Emancipation (1829), the Irish Temporalities Act (1833), Tractarianism and Newman's infamous Tract XC (1841), and finally the slow-motion train wreck that became known as the Gorham Affair (1847–50) provoked rancorous debate between competing sects, both inside and outside the Anglican communion. The last of these involved a very public battle of wills over the question of infant baptism. Denied a living on the basis of his evangelical views, George Cornelius Gorham fought the matter first before the court of arches and later before a secularly-convened judicial council. The council eventually found in his favor, thus preserving priestly liberty and the flexibility of Church formularies – but simultaneously traducing high-church notions of apostolic independence, and so touching off a chain reaction of angry petitions, resolutions, and defections to Rome (Chadwick 250–71).Footnote ¹ Such infighting, as Owen Chadwick memorably puts it, “spoilt friendliness of Christian bodies, raised barriers between denominations, and by rubbing the sore places of religious authority touched the springs of doctrine and truth” (4). That “freest discussion” which Brown would celebrate in 1877 could seem in the 1850s an abomination, since as J. C. Hare wrote, religion had “by a strange and monstrous perversion, become the main seat and focus of war” (17). Not coincidentally, this would be the moment that Victorian Britain began gradually displacing religion as the ground of national community, instead codifying authority around an abstractly legal, secular subject (Viswanathan 15).Footnote ²

Nevertheless, in light of persistent mid-Victorian dreams of religious unity, and in light of ongoing scholarly debate about religion's place in the public sphere, it is instructive to revisit an important mid-Victorian project to construct a “space of reason-giving” (Mendieta and VanAntwerpen 2) not beyond the Church or mediated through some antiseptic Kantianism, but precisely within the Anglican sanctuary and guaranteed by the homiletic situation. Here I examine Broad-church representations of preaching, particularly as they concentrate in Charles Kingsley's post-Gorham historical fiction Hypatia: New Foes with an Old Face (1852–53),Footnote ³ a perfect instance of what Tamara Wagner has called the “sermon novel” – that is, a novel that “contains or centrally features sermons, their composition, delivery, or reception,” and so functions as a “fictionalized sermon itself” (Wagner 317).Footnote ⁴ Kingsley's novel makes the surprising claim that preaching, rightly staged and apprehended, is uniquely suited to sponsor rational exchange between antagonistic cultural discourses. Of course, in the Anglican service, the sermon had always been linked to other, more obviously interactive forms of worship, including the liturgy, prayers, and sacraments. Those rituals joined parishioners in shared acts of adoration, humility, and expectation, realizing what Broad-church theologians repeatedly emphasize as the “visible church.” Preaching too invited a posture of collective attention; however, as a demonstration of interpretive reasoning, the most immediate such performance that most parishioners would witness from week to week, it could also cultivate curiosity, ratiocination, and even strategies of dissent. Kingsley's Broad-church novel Hypatia, I argue, turns preaching's dual nature into the premise for a workable public sphere harmonizing “freest discussion” with the ideal of a unified ecclesial and national body.

I use the term “Broad Church” despite the well-known peril that the label never referred to an organized sect in the way “evangelical” or “Tractarian” did. In fact, the essential bond between those identified as “Broad,” whether R. D. Hampden and Thomas Arnold (linked to the Oxford Noetics) or J. C. Hare and F. D. Maurice (linked to the Cambridge Apostles), was their categorical resistance to denominational branding.Footnote ⁵ Many of these theologians had followed Coleridge and Arnold into German waters, and so tended to hold theologically liberal views on issues like Inspiration and eternal punishment. But more defining was their insistence that true religion doesn't inhere in what Hampden pejoratively termed “speculative logical Christianity” (qtd. in Jones 84). The doctrinal baggage of centuries shouldn't be allowed to strain a catholicity wisely prepared for by Anglican ritual and the capaciousness of the Thirty-nine Articles and Book of Common Prayer. Thinkers differed on how broad was broad enough: Should fellowship be replenished only between existing Church parties? extended to Dissenters? or, should it be extended to all citizens, as William Fremantle would argue in The World as the Subject of Redemption (1885)?Footnote ⁶ But in all cases such churchmen aimed at ecumenical tolerance or (to use a Broad-church buzzword) “comprehensiveness.”

Hypatia’s peculiar strategy of comprehensiveness, as I hope to demonstrate, can best be understood in light of recent remarks by Jürgen Habermas on political theology, exploring John Rawls's stipulation that when advocates of “comprehensive doctrines” enter the space of public reason they should supply “properly public reasons” to support their views (Rawls 144). Paraphrasing (and qualifying) Rawls, Habermas refers to this process with the suggestive term “translation”: Citizens may publicly draw on religious language, he writes, but “have to accept that the potential truth contents of religious utterances must be translated into a generally accessible language before they can find their way onto the agendas of parliaments, courts, or administrative bodies” (Habermas 25).Footnote ⁷ What interests me is the way that Habermas's “translation proviso,” or something very like it, becomes hardwired into Broad-church homiletics. In a central passage in Hypatia, Augustine of Hippo will deliver a sermon in which Christian doctrine becomes variously converted into the terms of Talmudic tradition and Neo-Platonism. More essentially, the novel consciously translates Augustine's discourse into scene, inviting readers to attend to the preacher not as a disembodied mouthpiece for the sacred, but as a specifically literary figure – a character – who participates in a wider social exchange. The narrative operates mimetically, recasting the hieratic and dogmatic sermon within the more demotic and empirical structures of the novel. In this way, theological propositions achieve that “human embeddedness” characteristic of Victorian realism (Davis 376). The sermon, meanwhile, emerges in its social dimension, as a Millian ritual for coordinating rival discourses, rival epistemologies. In this scenario, social division becomes suspended but not, importantly, effaced. As I hope to show, Kingsley's sermon novel works hard to preserve assent and dissent, charismatic presentation and disinterested reception, as part of a unified homiletic economy.

With the help of Robert Ellison's The Victorian Pulpit and edited volume A New History of the Sermon: The Nineteenth Century, scholars are moving beyond a picture of the Victorian sermon as a sort of junkyard of tones and types, mainly useful to secularizing men of letters in search of spare parts.Footnote ⁸ Preaching was very much alive, as evidenced by the immense popular appetite for sermons, whether performed of a Sunday or reprinted in newspapers and retrospective volumes (The Victorian Pulpit 44–51). If a renowned dissenting preacher happened to be in town, the Anglican faithful often attended multiple services (Old 348), while great pulpiteers like Thomas Guthrie, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and Joseph Parker became national celebrities whose work was dissected in the press right alongside reviews of poetry and fiction. Meanwhile, such addresses as Keble's assize sermon on “National Apostasy” (1833) or Spurgeon's sermon on the Day of National Humiliation (1857), delivered to some 23,000 people in the Crystal Palace, became not only touchstones in contemporary debates, but vivid installments in the ongoing storylines which they addressed.

And yet we are still coming to terms with the ideological implications of the Victorian sermon. Mary Poovey's Foucauldian analysis of Thomas Chalmer's preaching, one of comparatively few theoretical engagements with the nineteenth-century pulpit, establishes a baseline understanding of preaching as authoritarian and hegemonic. As a celebrated Church of Scotland preacher, Chalmers led a vigorous, though failed, movement to extend Anglicanism into his homeland (Poovey 100). Poovey argues that his work in erecting an impersonal ecclesiastical bureaucracy complemented his charismatic preaching, through which, as observers testified, “the bodies of more than 1400 people are disciplined not merely to the bodily rhythms of a single man but also into a single body, which breathes and coughs and fidgets as one” (102). In Poovey's reading, the preacher facilitates “disciplinary individualism,” offering British congregants a specious form of liberal independence grounded in “‘voluntary’ compliance with a rationalized order” (99). If John Wolffe is right, sermons on “national events” were often even more transparently ideological. Surveying a vast body of sermons addressing crises like the Crimean War and Prince Albert's death, Wolffe notes that preachers generally insisted on “the compatibility of Christianity (and indeed Judaism) and patriotism, and of God's providential care of the British nation” (Wolffe 205–06). In this way, the pulpit interacted with print media to galvanize an imagined national community.

At the same time, feminist treatments of Dissenting and evangelical rhetoric have sometimes uncovered a more ambiguous reality. Christine Krueger, for instance, recovers a female preaching tradition that included figures like Sarah Crosby and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, whom she argues leveraged evangelical hermeneutics to “decenter[] exegetical authority” (5). Since Scripture for Low Church and Dissent was “radically accessible” (8), it authorized a form of female social prophesy that could challenge the emergent patriarchal discourse of political economy (13, 144). Likewise, Karen Dieleman recently suggests that for Congregationalists like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the sermon itself could be “construed as social and dialogic” and notes that “the Greek word homilia and the Latin word sermo signify conversation or mutual talk” (46). Indeed, the expectation that as the preacher speaks “his listeners were speaking back to him in their minds” (Dieleman 46), reflects a venerable Protestant conception that extends backwards through the extraordinarily interactive early modern service,Footnote ⁹ and ultimately to the biblical Bereans who, “received the word with readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things be so” (Acts 17.11). Richard Whately, Broad-church affiliate, was working from precedent, therefore, when in 1839 he exhorted priests not only to “leave but lead your hearers to inquire, and reflect, and judge, to the best of their power” and to warn parishioners “against that implicit and uninquiring deference for your authority” (244–45).Footnote ¹⁰

Turning to Hypatia, I am aware of the paradox of insisting on the ecumenical credentials of a novel which on one level is so blisteringly anti-Catholic.Footnote ¹¹ Set in early fifth-century Alexandria, the book presents us with a patristic Church wholly unequal to the sexual perversion, political corruption, and religious violence plaguing the city. In its broadest outlines, the text plots the spiritual odyssey of three characters whose minds have been variously darkened by the age: There is the young monk Philammon, who in the opening sequence journeys from a desert laura to test his zeal in the big city; Hypatia, defender of an austere and doomed Neo-Platonism; and the Jew Raphael Aben-Ezra, who observes political double-dealings, the plundering of the Jewish quarter, and attempts on his own life all with Wildean nonchalance. Scholars such as Robert Lee Wolff, Royal Rhodes, and Michael Wheeler,Footnote ¹² have mapped Hypatia’s specifically anti-Catholic polemic, the text condemning a host of Romish practices, including “the communion of the saints, intercessory prayer and the mediation of grace, cultic veneration, and the use of the saints, especially Ultramontanist devotions” (Rhodes 91). Further, David Anthony Downes has convincingly argued that the book can be understood as an “imagined phenomenology of religious assent” (Downes 60), in which each character's fate unfolds from a particular heresy or form of infidelity.

Nevertheless, Kingsley's point isn't to defend doctrinal purity as such, but to expose the roots of ecclesiastical and societal disintegration. In fact, it can be helpful to think about the book as a sociology rather than phenomenology of assent, since in Hypatia subjectivity always vibrates to quite specific ideological conditions (however crudely historicized), and always in tune with a complex web of public institutions and forms. Philammon and Raphael, then, tend to do their soul-searching while traversing the urban spaces of multiethnic Alexandria: alleyways, theaters, churches, and lecture halls, which are forever contested by this or that collective, whether pagan schoolmen, church Parabolani, or itinerate Visigoths. Moments of inward crisis, meanwhile, often erupt in the midst of crowds in response to the many sermons, lectures, and spectacles that structure the narrative. At different points, we are with Old Wulf's Gothic comitatus expectantly awaiting “an oration” (33; ch. 3); or with Hypatia, as she “ascended the tribune like a goddess, amid the shouts of her audience” (98; ch. 8); or with Philammon at a funeral oration delivered by the patriarch Cyril, where the young monk is inspired to “[throw] himself upon his face upon the pavement. . .and [lie] silent and motionless before the feet of the multitude” (334; ch. 26). Depictions such as these alternate with moments of private reflection, so that although Kingsley's rhetoric is often “anti-Papist,” the novel clearly pines for a corporate ritual of representation and interpretation – an institutional framework to guarantee both catholic unity and rational exchange.

Not surprisingly, the novel's central theological critique manifests on a primarily social plane. As Wolff pointed out some time ago, Hypatia reserves its fiercest barbs for Monophysitism, a rejection of Christ's basic humanity, which Kingsley took to have infected contemporary Anglo-Catholicism (281). In Kingsley's preface to the volume edition, he connects this heresy to a “Graeco-Eastern turn of mind,” that devalued “family and national life,” those “two divine roots of the Church,” without which “she is certain to wither away into that most godless and most cruel of spectres, a religious world” (Hypatia xiv).Footnote ¹³ And it is this religious world – more precisely, this sectarian world – that is on display in Hypatia’s infamous climax, where in a scene loosely based on Gibbon,Footnote ¹⁴ the titular character is stripped naked and torn to pieces by feral monks. Before I examine the novel's representation of efficacious preaching, it is worth visiting Hypatia's gruesome death in detail since it establishes what is at stake for the Broad-church homilectician.

Hypatia is herself a sort of preacher, guiding “congregants” in a deeply learned, sense-denying metaphysic based on the eternal forms of mathematics and logic. As a Platonist, she disdains Christianity's doctrine of Incarnation and expresses shock at the idea of a deity with “hands and feet, eyes and ears, who condescends to command the patterns of furniture and culinary utensils, and is made perhaps perfect by being born – disgusting thought! – as the son of a village maiden” (Hypatia 99; ch. 8). Her lecture hall offers paying students a refuge from their vulgar bodies, as well as from the vulgar religious skirmishes that boil up along Alexandria's streets. However, insofar as Hypatia discredits physical realities, her womanly self-knowledge becomes clouded and her conscience blunted. Midway through the story, she allows the governor, Orestes, to win her endorsement of new gladiatorial games (276–88; ch. 22); later then, in a bizarre twist, she's duped by a sorceress figure into expressing a long-sublimated desire, worshipping before a beautiful form she takes to be the god Apollo, but is in fact her flesh and blood admirer, Philammon (318–21; ch. 25). Given all this, when a murderous crowd finally abducts her, what we witness is an orator forcibly reinserted into both her (female) body and into the Alexandrian social body she had disowned. Significantly, Hypatia is dragged into the Cæsareium, lately converted into a Christian church, where she

Hypatia's would-be last sermon dissolves into “wail on wail, long, wild, ear-piercing, [that] rang along the vaulted roofs.”

The scene is uniquely horrific and struck many of Kingsley's readers as unconscionably lurid. Nevertheless, it echoes what may be the best known sermon in the Victorian literary canon, Jabes Branderham's message on “The Seventy Times Seven, and the First of the Seventy First,” dreamed by Lockwood in the opening sequence of Wuthering Heights (1847). There the genteel southern dreamer, a good Church of England man no doubt, finds himself prisoner to a Calvinist-inflected, Dissenting harangue. Readers will recall that toward the end of Branderham's lengthy discourse, Lockwood becomes exasperated to the pitch of “inspiration” (a suggestive word) and rises to denounce the minister. Hailing his fellow congregants as “martyrs,” he exhorts them to “Drag [the preacher] down, and crush him to atoms, that the place which knows him may know him no more.” On the instant, the service devolves into a slapstick melee, “the whole chapel resound[ing] with rappings and counter-rappings. Every man's hand was against his neighbour” (Brontë 24). Of course, mob scenes are conventional in literature of the 1830–50s, when, as John Plotz has noted, “radical demonstrations,” “mammoth ‘simultaneous meetings’ and petition processions” had opened wide a debate over the signifying potential of crowds (1–2). But Lockwood's dream and Hypatia's murder give us a specifically Anglican inflection of the pattern: in Hypatia as well as Wuthering Heights, an exclusionary, categorical sectarianism has rebounded into the worship service itself, such that preaching gives way to violence. In this literally nightmarish scenario, the legal prerogative to speak doesn't guarantee reasoned exchange, let alone spiritual fellowship; on the contrary, religious expression seems to be inherently excitable, a natural prelude to the apostolic blows and knocks that follow.

In Hypatia’s epilogue, Kingsley would sum up ancient Alexandria's degradation in phrases that hint at modern Britain. The city consisted of “a mere chaos of idolatrous sects, persecuting each other for metaphysical propositions, which, true or false, were equally heretical in their mouths, because they used them only as watchwords of division” (381). It was a problem that Broad-church commentators often described in terms of “party,” as did W. J. Conybeare in his definitive Broad-church statement “Church Parties” (1853). Party, as the Vicar of Axminster understood it, deeply compromised “Christian Brotherhood” and the Church's mission to be “a society divinely instituted for the purpose of manifesting God's presence” (143). While lauding the admirable contributions of Low Church and High Church, Conybeare cast scorn on subgroups like the evangelical “Recordites,”Footnote ¹⁵ who had erected an entire institutional universe outside the Anglican communion: “Protestant breakfasts and Jewish luncheons; lectures here, addresses there, and speechification everywhere” (95). Such alliances inevitably accumulate insular lexicons, documented by Conybeare with a mixture of amusement and contempt: “A [Recordite] preacher is said in his phraseology to be ‘owned’ when he makes many converts,” he writes in a footnote, “and his converts are called his ‘seals’” (Conybeare 92n.). Most interestingly, as in Hypatia and Wuthering Heights, such sectarian language – “speechification” – again appears to be interchangeable with violence, something we glimpse in a humorous aside where the editorial “we” recounts a visit to a Tractarian dentist:

Surely Conybeare exaggerates for comic effect! All the same, he conjures a world where even dentists readily assume the role of inquisitor, rendering discussion “henceforth impossible.” Here, the fanaticism of England's sixteenth and seventeenth centuries comes, ever so gently, to overlay the contemporary professional world. Instead of mitigating the alienated relationships of the marketplace, Church parties hypostasize them into a theocratic imperative.

It's worth pointing out that by the time he wrote Hypatia, Kingsley had experienced this stifling sectarian atmosphere in a very personal way – and from the pulpit, no less. In what became a well-publicized scandal, Kingsley was publicly rebuked by G. S. Drew after preaching a sermon to a group of workingmen at St. John's Church, Charlotte Street. Kingsley's sermon, delivered on 22 June 1851, had been in keeping with widely understood Christian Socialist principles, highlighting the “liberty, equality, and brotherhood” of the Scripture message, while approving Mosaic provisions against “the permanent sale of land and hence the accumulation of large estates” (Chitty 144).Footnote ¹⁷ But as Kingsley finished his discourse and prepared to pray, Drew, the St. John's incumbent, stood to denounce him, thereby nearly provoking, in the words of one witness, a “storm that only God could have quelled” (Letters and Memories 146).Footnote ¹⁸ News of the confrontation rippled through journals like the Record, English Churchman, and Economist, and Kingsley was briefly banned from preaching in London.Footnote ¹⁹

The presence of workingmen in this last anecdote highlights that sectarianism had implications beyond Church politics as such. Jeremy Morris astutely highlights that “Victorian arguments about the role of churches were closely bound up with arguments about order, moral worth, and participation in political life” (17–18), and this was particularly so in Broad-church discourse. Returning for a moment to Hypatia's death: part of what makes the passage so disturbing is that what could or should have been a congregation has instead congealed into a crowd. Alexandria's bloodthirsty hoard – maddened, deafened, inaccessible to Christian sympathy or reason – pointedly includes “fish-wives and dock workers,” not just monks, such that anxieties about Christian association overlap with anxieties about a wider social disintegration. As such, the scene evokes a concern we find in texts such as Thomas Arnold's Principles of Church Reform (1833), where he combats the pernicious idea of civil society as “a mere collection of individuals, looking each after his own interest; and the business of government. . .limited to that of a mere police, whose sole use is to hinder these individuals from robbing or knocking each other down” (Arnold 7). Arnold goes on to say that Establishment's public lands, buildings, and clergy are crucial in ameliorating the centrifugal tendencies of capitalism. But the solution also requires that the Church “extinguish [Dissent] by comprehension,” various sects uniting “as it were in one army, and under one command, yet should each retain the arms and manner of fighting with which habit has made them most familiar” (iv).

Where “comprehension” was at stake, preaching appears to have represented both the epicenter of the crisis and, as I hope to show, its best possible solution. But what sort of preaching, specifically, could harmonize the social body without compromising the reasoned debate necessary for an increasingly democratized national life?

In Hypatia ’s crucial scene of preaching, Augustine of Hippo will address a group of North African soldiers. It is a symbolically loaded scenario. St. Augustine, of course, holds a central place in both Catholic and Protestant visions of Church history. And here he addresses a congregation of literally muscular Christians, who have been pouring out their lifeblood in an apocalyptic campaign against invading Vandals. Importantly, Augustine's discourse comes to us focalized through Raphael, a character who has already proven himself to be a staunch skeptic, immune to the rhetorical tricks and emotional temptations of unsubstantiated faith. We first meet Raphael as Hypatia's principled, but cynical student, where he gracefully shrugs off the religious, romantic, and patriotic obsessions that torment his peers. He is, in his own words, “a philosopher, an academic, and a believer in nothing and in no man” (252; ch. 21) who at one point claims he is “no more a Jew at heart than I am a Christian” (160; ch. 13).Footnote ²⁰ His radical detachment will become important later in my analysis. However, as the text's central Jewish figure, Raphael comes to Augustine's sermon having recently developed a new sympathy for the idea of Incarnation. He has been roused to fresh theological possibilities by Victoria, the daughter of the Prefect Majoricus, and her reckless demonstration of filial love: on a Roman battlefield she risks her life (and more impressively for Raphael, her virtue) in order to lure marauding soldiers away from her wounded father. Such feminine selflessness suggests to Raphael that basic human relationships can reflect the Divine, and his growing love for Victoria eventually inspires him to reread Solomon's Song of Songs not as an allegory of soul, but as a poetic evocation of a “passage upwards from brutal polygamy to. . .monogamy” (253; ch. 21).Footnote ²¹

Thus, Raphael will experience Augustine's sermon as an important catalyst in an ongoing spiritual quest. As he looks on, the Bishop of Hippo rises to pray before an altar recently desecrated by barbarian invaders, “every furrow in his worn face lit up by a ray of moonlight which streamed in through the broken roof” (270; ch. 21). For a modern reader the staging feels absurdly Wagnerian – but Kingsley means to set up a serious test of homiletic power, for Raphael immediately wonders how the preacher's message can possibly appeal across the divide between “the refined dialectician, the ancient teacher of heathen rhetoric, the courtly and learned student” and “those coarse war-worn soldiers, Thracians and Markmen, Gauls and Belgians, who sat watching there, with those sad earnest faces” (270). Can the sermon, with all its pageantry and theological paraphernalia serve as a vehicle for rational exchange and community? At first the answer is an emphatic No:

Raphael recoils in disgust, mourning the fact that the preacher “could find nothing but spiritual allegories wherewith to pamper the private experiences of the secluded theosophist.” For our learned auditor, this is an issue of honesty: “. . .Raphael felt very much inclined to get up and go away, and still more inclined to say, with a smile, in his haste, ‘All men are liars’” (270).

All the same, Raphael marks a tension in the preacher's language. Through the allegorical fog, a more grounded narrative and authentic persona begin to emerge, so that eventually he notes

More and more, theological abstraction fades to reveal mankind's fundamental situation:

Augustine's message, turning on the principle of incarnate God, is “Strange in its utter unlikeness to any teaching, Platonist or Hebrew, which he had ever heard before” but “stranger still in its agreement with those teachings; in the instinctive ease with which it seemed to unite and justify them all by the talisman of some one idea” (272). In the end, the sermon returns the auditor to his origins. Raphael feels “more like an old Hebrew than he had done since he sat upon his nurse's knee, and heard legends about Solomon and the Queen of Sheba” (273).

This last image presents us with the Church maternal rather than the Church militant, and it is here that we get our first glimpse of the Broad-church strategy of translation. Augustine's sermon proves itself in its capacity to coordinate apparently antagonistic religions – or, we might say, to harmonize divergent “parties.” The moment figures what Broad Churchmen like Arnold or Arthur Stanley saw as Anglicanism's historic role as a “via media.” Stanley, for instance, lauded the Church's aim to synthesize “the principles of Rome and Geneva,” together with Anglican doctors like Jeremy Taylor who enshrined in their teachings a judicious pluriformity. Taylor's writings, says Stanley, “present, as in a many-sided mirror, all opinions that Christian divines ever held” (7). Under Raphael's observation, Augustine's discourse becomes a similarly diverse mirror, where Judaism, Platonism, and Christianity all find their reflection.Footnote ²²

More cynically, of course, we might read Raphael's epiphany as a moment where the representative Jew signs off on Christianity as transhistorical master-narrative, the consummation of both ancient Hebrew and pagan wisdoms (Walker 356). From this angle, preaching's synthesis appears less than magnanimous. In Newman's Loss and Gain (1845), he had lampooned the liberal preacher who belittled doctrinal disagreements as “but verbal ones” and who insisted that “there was no truth or falsehood in received dogmas in theology; that they were modes, neither good nor bad in themselves, but personal, national, or periodic” (62; ch. 9). For Newman, such ecumenical gymnastics relied on a corrosive nominalism and ultimately masked a strategy to colonize the other by convincing him he wasn't really other at all. These suspicions are not unfounded. Nevertheless, before accepting a completely cynical reading of Hypatia, the reader should attend to a more fundamental level at which “translation” goes forward in Kingsley's sermon novel.

David Anthony Downes's gloss on Hypatia’s representation of Augustine moves us in the right direction: “Kingsley seems to suggest here that the early fathers of the Church did not ‘scientifically’ expound the Scriptures, but developed apt spiritual insights roughly based on the religious spirit more or less spontaneously derived from scriptural reading. . . .It is the charisma of Augustine's sermon which is the key to Raphael's conversion” (63). This is basically right, although the critic reduces the scene's dramatic arc to a fixed idea. In the narrative itself, Raphael observes the painstaking, incremental translation of doctrinal discourse – one of “universal comprehensive form” – into another, a charismatic realism of “dog, kettle, or fish-wife” (270, 271; ch. 21). At a dully practical level, such translation may simply demonstrate the homiletic advantage of earthy, original language. (In a letter, Kingsley once traced Carlyle's power to convict to his avoidance of sterile pulpit phraseology: “the man who would be furious if Carlyle had classed him among the ‘valets,’ bears with perfect equanimity the information of. . .Dr Pusey that he has put himself beyond the pale of Xt's atonement by sin after baptism” [Klaver 96]). Considered at the level of literary form, meanwhile, Kingsley's scene performs a translation entirely appropriate to realist fiction, where ideas shouldn't parade around naked, as it were, but clothe themselves in dramatic contexts – become humanly embedded.Footnote ²³

But I want to suggest that such rhetorical and formal requirements converge with a typically Broad-church imperative that doctrine demonstrate its truth in generally rational, even secular, terms. That is to say, the scene honors the liberal “translation proviso” noted above, that “all citizens should be free to decide whether they want to use religious language in the public sphere. Were they to do so, they would, however, have to accept that the potential truth contents of religious utterances must be translated into a generally accessible language before they can find their way onto the agendas of parliaments, courts, or administrative bodies and influence their decisions” (Habermas 25–26). By “generally accessible language,” Habermas means a narrowly political discourse tied to shared principles of constitutional democracy, what Rawls designates “public reason.” Kingsley's “accessible language,” by contrast, is basically Wordsworthian and tied to daily life. That metonymic ensemble – dog, kettle, fish-wife – conjures both marketplace and hearth.Footnote ²⁴ The profane, perhaps malodorous fish-wife, in particular, appears to have suggested to Kingsley some kind of bedrock social reality. She shows up again as part of the mob that kills Hypatia.

Translation of this order is a definitive feature of period Broad-church rhetoric. Take for example Stanley's 1853 essay on the Gorham controversy, briefly cited above. There, he sidesteps the hermeneutical thicket enveloping infant baptism in favor of an entirely different epistemological vantage point. Regardless of theological differences, writes Stanley, all parishioners can

In other words, the writer asserts an affective, narrative basis for the sacrament, grounded in this case in a common feeling for childhood innocence. Such translation not only obliquely prefigures the Rawlsian/Habermasian “proviso,” but Kwame Anthony Appiah's recent (and likewise classically liberal) explication of cosmopolitan community. We do not connect across cultural barriers, writes Appiah, by identifying shared first principles, nor through a generalizable human capacity for reason (257). Rather, we connect through a mutual narrative compulsion to “construct the world to which our imaginations respond.”Footnote ²⁵ Appiah's most arresting example, like Stanley's, hinges on an image of childhood: “It isn't principle that brings the missionary doctor and the distressed mother together at the hospital bedside of a child with cholera: it is a shared concern for this particular child” (256).

Hypatia, of course, locates “shared concern” specifically among congregants, joined in contemplation of a sermon. Raphael, we are told, “could not help watching, at first with envy, and then with honest pleasure, the faces of the rough soldiers, as they gradually lightened up into fixed attention, into cheerful solemn resolve” (272). Thus, a diverse crowd of “Thracians and Markmen, Gauls and Belgians” bonds into a congregation of citizen-soldiers, literalizing Arnold's Reference Arnold1833 call for various sects to “act together as it were in one army, and under one command.”

The translation enacted through Augustine's sermon is surprisingly complete, since the preacher's actual words have been effaced. An earlier lecture by Hypatia had appeared verbatim (Hypatia 98–106; ch. 8), as do portions of a later address by Cyril which I will discuss in a moment (Hypatia 333–34; ch. 26).Footnote ²⁶ In Augustine's case, however, the novelist doesn't supply us with so much as a spare phrase in the preacher's voice, even though he clearly has in mind the patriarch's sermon on Psalm 82 from the Expositions.Footnote ²⁷ By way of Raphael, sermon dissolves into scene – scene as processed through the impressions of an externalized observer or “reader.” In a moment, I want to turn to this reader and his or her place within the dynamics of the text. But to get a sense of the implications of omitting the preacher's discourse, consider a parallel example from Kingsley's little-read cholera novel, Two Years Ago (1857). There, after dramatically interrupting a revival preacher in mid-sermon, a certain Major Campbell addresses congregants from atop a stone block. The writer condescends to describe the Major's “grand head, like a gray granite peak,” his “tall figure,” the “gesture of his long arm, so graceful, yet so self-restrained,” and even “the tones of his voice, which poured from beneath that proud moustache, now tender as a girl's, now ringing like a trumpet over roof and sea.” Again, though, Kingsley declines to offer us a transcript of the preacher's words:

While Kingsley liberates us to construct the preacher's discourse, he suggests that such an exercise will not repay our time – not because it can't be done, but because the novelist's dramatized scene has rendered Major Campbell's precise utterance redundant. Under the novelist's direction, sermonic discourse has been suitably embodied in the presence and gesture of the preacher, and beyond that a homiletic panorama that takes in pew as well as pulpit. I don't have space to consider how the preacher becomes, in F. D. Maurice's words, “a witness of Christ's presence,” the embodiment of an “actual union between the body [Church] and its Head [Christ]” (120). For Kingsley's mentor, the model for the priest was St. Paul, who “put no veil over his face” but “used great plainness of speech” (102).Footnote ²⁸ But it is notable that like Major Campbell, Augustine becomes more “personal” as the sermon proceeds, finally appearing as “a real man, right or wrong. What he rebuked in others, he had felt in himself, and fought it to the death-grip, as the flash and quiver of that worn face proclaimed” (271). By this point, the preacher isn't just presenting in a “generally accessible language”; he himself has become presentable in such a language, apprehensible as a character participating in a wider social exchange. Ultimately, sermon novels like Two Years Ago and Hypatia retrain their readership in a new form of congregational witness, bending attention from the potentially contentious, insular language of theology and towards a more comprehensive realist evocation of physical and social bodies.

But how viably liberal is this as a narrative strategy, given that it depends on redirecting critical reason away from argumentation as such and in effect neutralizes difference? If this is the last word, Hypatia perhaps only replicates the wearisome ideology of so many industrial novels (including Kingsley's own Alton Locke), where “compassion in the public sphere works to displace or stave off conflict at least as often as it works toward the remediation of suffering and injustice” (Betensky 189; qtd in Lewis 243). Nevertheless, Hypatia takes on a more radical complexion when we zero in on Raphael's importance in the homiletic circuit Kingsley has outlined. As I have noted, it is Raphael who mediates the preacher's message. It is he who “wonders what. . . the refined dialectician, the ancient teacher of rhetoric” would have to say to “those war-worn soldiers” (270), and he who witnesses the preacher solidify into a “real man,” while his congregants join in “fixed attention.” What enables Raphael to play this crucial role, I suggest, is precisely his detachment. That is, it is Raphael's theological disinterestedness that frees him, firstly, to translate the preacher's discourse into Platonist or Judaic terms, and secondly, to “read” the sermon in its social dimension, as a problem of bridging different languages, different forms of life. True, by the end of Augustine's address Raphael feels “more like an old Hebrew” than he has since childhood. But his evolving assessment largely hinges on the epistemological perspective of one deeply alienated from the Judeo-Christian tradition.Footnote ²⁹

Here, I am partly relying on the knowledge that Kingsley elsewhere writes as though the skeptic's point of view is somehow crucial to religious understanding. He hinted as much in a letter to F. D. Maurice posted in the same year that Hypatia completed its serial run. At the time, Maurice was facing dismissal from King's College following publication of his Theological Essays (1853). Maurice's concluding chapter had stirred up fierce resistance by suggesting a universalist position that Christ's saving project would eventually redeem all mankind. Kingsley encouraged his mentor with the following reflections:

Doubters – those outside the Church – appear better positioned to appreciate Maurice's preaching than those inside it. Orthodox believers have been tainted by “dogmatic, systematised interpretations,” which is to say, by an overweening commitment to a language not just of Church, but of party. In Hypatia, Raphael's views eventually do become more fixed; he succeeds, by the end, in passing from infidelity to orthodoxy. Nevertheless, even as a Christian “catacumen,” as he will call himself in a late passage of dialogue, he retains something of his skeptical detachment. His last act is to endow a halfway house for Alexandria's fallen women – under the stipulation it be jointly managed by the Metropolitan of Egypt, Abbot Isidore, and Cyril himself as Alexandria's Bishop (377; ch. 30). Raphael admits that his notions must seem “somewhat secular” to the bishop, but adds that the bishop's stridency towards government appears “somewhat atheist” to him (380; ch. 30).

Raphael's experience of Augustinian preaching powerfully contrasts to a later sermon featuring Philammon as primary auditor. There, Cyril delivers a message to a packed house at the Cæsareium following the state crucifixion of one of his monks. Philammon is not drawn by the particulars of this occasion, but instead seeks Cyril out as a confessor, tormented by the realization that all Hypatia's high doctrines haven't protected him (or her) from the degradations of sexual desire. In contrast to Raphael's detachment, Philammon enthusiastically merges with the “endless stream” of the faithful, joining “the dense crush upon the steps” (332–33; ch. 26). More importantly, although we enter the sanctuary alongside Philammon, the monk's consciousness does not buffer the scene in the way Raphael's did. In this case we get little of Philammon's perceptions at all, only vehement, undigested discourse: “Nay, such are in king's palaces, and in the palaces of prefects who would needs be emperors, and cast away the Lord's bonds from them, – of whom it is written, that He that sitteth in the heavens laugheth them to scorn, and taketh the wicked in their own snare, and maketh the devices of princes to none effect” (333). As we listen, Cyril spews the sectarian speechification so detested by Conybeare, blasting outsiders for denying “their covenant” and defiling “their baptismal robes” (a subtle reference to the Gorham controversy?). But it is the absence of interior monologue that points to the real horror: that Philammon has utterly surrendered to Cyril's discourse, failing to maintain a critical distance or to “read” the wider scene that gives both preacher and discourse their meaning.

As readers, we know that Cyril has cynical motives for publicly sanctifying his fallen acolyte, hoping in this way to solidify political resistance against Orestes. However, Philammon perceives none of this, and so when Cyril refers to Christ's redemption of the “defiled, the despised” harlot, the suggestible auditor “burst forward through the crowd, towards the steps which led to the choir, and above which, in front of the altar, stood the corpse of Ammonius, enclosed in a coffin of glass, beneath a gorgeous canopy.” This is the moment where Philammon lies down in the shape of a cross, “silent and motionless before the feet of the multitude” (334; ch. 26). Such melodrama echoes Orestes’ earlier gladiatorial pageant, which had climaxed with the murder of a child and an erotic dance by a woman costumed as Aphrodite.Footnote ³⁰ With his glass coffin and invocation of the harlot – images of physical and spiritual degradation – Cyril has assembled a comparable Theater of Cruelty. This, for Kingsley, is the horror of sectarian homiletics, which may indeed temporarily unite congregants, but only by enclosing worshippers in an insular, vituperative discourse, and forcibly replicating its rhetoric in their bodies, inviting not reasoned engagement but a state “silent and motionless.” Some pages later, Hypatia meets her gory end on this same spot of ground.

Clearly the supremely aware, yet detached spectator whom Kingsley's sermon novel favors overlaps with J. Baldwin Brown's “cultivated” congregant, as well as with the “liberal subject” that has received so much attention of late in Victorian studies. Amanda Anderson's influential The Powers of Distance places Jewishness at the center of nineteenth-century liberalism, particularly liberalism's effort to reconcile a disinterested, cosmopolitan imperative and a concomitant insistence, expressed in pieces such as George Eliot's “The Natural History of German Life,” that knowledge be lived, rooted, and particularized – the provenance of the “participant observer.” In her analysis of Daniel Deronda (1876), Anderson discusses Eliot's sophisticated exploration of a particularized cosmopolitan subjectivity (123ff.). There, she sharply distinguishes, as many critics have not, between Mordecai's racially-tinted, organicist vision of Judiasm, ultimately grounded in German Romanticism, and Deronda's dialogical engagement with his Jewish heritage (123). As she puts it, Eliot's “model for one's relation to history, culture, and nationality becomes passionate argumentation, not simple embrace. To achieve reflective distance, one must be capable of disengagement from cultural norms and givens. But such achieved distance should in turn promote not a sustained or absolute disengagement. . . but rather a cultivated partiality” (120–21). One way to sum up Hypatia’s significance would be to say that it embraces this secular economy, making it the foundation of an inclusive, but heterogeneous spiritual community. Both Kingsley and Eliot understand the tenuous dialectic between rooted, particularized community, and disinterested, individualized ratiocination. But whereas Eliot maps the dialectic primarily within the individual, Kingsley distributes it into a wider homiletic scene, organized through predetermined clerical roles and along a predictable realist vector. Now inside the congregation; now outside it. By means of Hypatia’s layered translations, two modes of knowledge are allowed to exist in unadulterated form, and yet qualify one another as part of a self-confirming, epistemological circuit.

It would be perverse to suggest that Kingsley's novel, or Broad-church homiletics generally, successfully theorized a non-coercive, ecumenical public sphere. Central features of the novel clearly vindicate an imperial vision of Church and nation.Footnote ³¹ Nevertheless, sandwiched as it is between Samuel Taylor Coleridge's On the Constitution of Church and State (1828) and Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1867), Hypatia illustrates an intriguing moment in an ongoing debate concerning the place of religious discourse in Britain's increasingly diverse public sphere. At the same time it suggests how the sermon novel might be used not just to document preaching as an important social practice, but to reimagine how such preaching could be performed and apprehended.