-- *1* ‘The Ring and the Book’, The Pope, v. 1853.
*2* ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, vv. 198, 199.
*3* ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, vv. 650-671. --
There is a remarkable passage to the same effect in ‘Paracelsus’, in which Paracelsus expatiates on the “just so much of doubt as bade him plant a surer foot upon the sun-road.”
“You must mix some uncertainty With faith, if you would have faith BE.”
And the good Pope in ‘The Ring and the Book’, alluding to the absence of true Christian soldiership, which is revealed by Pompilia’s case, says: “Is it not this ignoble CONFIDENCE, cowardly hardihood, that dulls and damps, makes the old heroism impossible? Unless. . .what whispers me of times to come? What if it be the mission of that age my death will usher into life, to SHAKE THIS TORPOR OF ASSURANCE FROM OUR CREED, reintroduce the DOUBT discarded, bring the formidable danger back we drove long ago to the distance and the dark?”
True healthy doubt means, in Browning, that the spiritual nature is sufficiently quickened not to submit to the conclusions of the insulated intellect. It WILL reach out beyond them, and assert itself, whatever be the resistance offered by the intellect. Mere doubt, without any resistance from the intuitive, non-discursive side of our nature, is the dry-rot of the soul. The spiritual functions are “smothered in surmise”. Faith is not a matter of blind belief, of slavish assent and acceptance, as many no-faith people seem to regard it. It is what Wordsworth calls it, “a passionate intuition”, and springs out of quickened and refined sentiment, out of inborn instincts which are as cultivable as are any other elements of our complex nature, and which, too, may be blunted beyond a consciousness of their possession. And when one in this latter state denies the reality of faith, he is not unlike one born blind denying the reality of sight.
A reiterated lesson in Browning’s poetry, and one that results from his spiritual theory, is, that the present life is a tabernacle-life, and that it can be truly lived only as a tabernacle-life; for only such a life is compatible with the ever-continued aspiration and endeavor which is a condition of, and inseparable from, spiritual vitality.