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Lord Byron's Religion: A Journey into Despair (Mellen Studies in Literature. Romantic Reassessment, V. 160)

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In Lord Byron's Religion - A Journey into Despair, Paul Barton offers an insightful psychological portrait of the legendary Byron, whose controversial yet charismatic personality had a tremendous impact on European literature, music, art and manners.
While most Byron's biographers concentrate on the circumstances of his physical existence, Barton takes an unconventional approach to exploring the poet's life through the multi-facet prism of factors which led to emotional confusion and turmoil reflected in Byron's poetry.
The pilgrimage of soul, the drama of a life unfolds as Barton reconstructs the connection between the actual events of Byron's childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and the ways of his self-created poetic identity. Born into a family whose history could not boast either moderation, or tolerance of any vision other than their own, Byron was caught in the crossfire of Calvinist debate about man's innate depravity, original sin, and the transmission of sin from generation to generation. Catherine Gordon, Byron's mother, made numerous remarks about his deformed foot being a sign of a sinful and tainted nature, thus instilling an idea of her son's spiritual inferiority and viciousness in God's eyes. A line of mentors, teachers and preachers made their gloomy contribution to Byron's confusion about his identity. Indoctrinated in Scottish Presbyterianism and sexually molested by the same person, Byron felt he was unable to change or influence his fate. No matter how brilliant he would become in his writing, or how genuine he would be in his personal or social affiliations, his worthiness was null for the God he was taught to worship.
Barton further explores Byron's conversion to a world where God is absent. Obedience to no authority, circular, clerical, or divine, is the key element of what Barton calls "reprobate culture." It is the negative of the biblical picture of the world, the anti-universe where God's antipode, Satan, reigns. What is rejected and despised in God's world is gladly accepted and praised in Satan's. Byron's empathy with Cain of The Old Testament becomes obvious as Barton draws parallels between the documentary evidence expressed in letters and notes, and the poet's literary works. The themes of acceptance and rejection, pride and fall, man's right to argue God's decisions and ability to fight the divine determinism gain momentum as the characters of Manfred, Cain, Lucifer, and Childe Harold become more and more expressive of Byron's personal views.
Long before the methods of Gestalt were applied to analysis and correction of personality, Byron made an intuitive attempt to dissociate from his growing anger and anxiety by creating what became known as a Byronic figure - am archetypal male, sardonic, adventurous, virile, and rebellious. However, as Barton implies, Byron fails to create a world in which such a character can fit and be accepted by God and people. The manifold universes conjured to life by poetic imagination are mere reflections of the world Byron sees around him. Both Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage "reach similarly hopeless conclusions as to where Byron's pilgrimage will lead him," which is a place that God predetermined for him, the only possible destination. To paraphrase the saying about all roads leading to Rome, all roads of George Gordon Byron were roads to despair. The life-long exposure to the radical and extremist doctrine of Calvinism damaged his ability to navigate in the matters of spirit, leaving him discouraged and frustrated.
Paul Barton does his reader a great favor by avoiding savoring of the oh-so-well-known details of Byron's private life, and reserving the moral judgment for those in a position to judge. Lord Byron's Religion is a fine, solid scientific piece written in a light, clear and convincing manner which makes it an invaluable contribution to the study of the Romantic poetry, and a pleasure to read.

In Lord Byron's Religion Paul Barton explores an important but heretofore neglected link between Lord Byron's life and work, the effects of the poet's indoctrination from his early childhood in the Calvinist theology of Scots Presbyterianism. Grounding his research in a thorough knowledge of Byron scholarship and biography, Barton begins his discussion by delineating the features of Calvin's theology that have received the most attention and emphasis (to the point of distortion) by Calvin's later followers: hereditary taint, predisposition to depravity, and predestination. In the minds of Calvin's later followers these three elements are inextricably bound up in one another, creating and emotionally and psychologically destructive theological complex out of the Christian doctrines of original sin, humankind's consequent general, shared sinfulness and inclination to sin, and the need to embrace the gospel to be assured of salvation. In Scottish Calvinism (and New England Puritanism) predestination occurs at the moment of conception, meaning that humankind is generally conceived and born damned, except for a select few known as the Elect, who have been chosen mysteriously for salvation. The Elect display the outward and visible signs of God's grace: they are physically perfect, morally incorruptible, sober, parsimonious, industrious, civic minded, and rich. In Calvinist thought original sin becomes hereditary taint as its effects become particularized in family history. In Byron's case both sides of his family tree exhibit dysfunctional, profligate, pugnacious, and dissolute behavior seemingly transmitted by heredity from generation to generation to combine and culminate in the poet's tortured and agonized emotional, psychological, and spiritual life.
With clarity and perspicacity Barton describes Byron's dysfunctional childhood. Born with a club foot, Byron was frequently reminded by his neurotic mother and his two nurses that his deformity was a sign that he was predestined to damnation. Determined that her son would not follow the dissolute path of his profligate father, Byron's mother berated him for any sign of sinfulness in his behavior and later sent him to schools that would indoctrinate him in the stern principles of Scots Presbyterianism. His mother's neurotic harangues were reinforced by similar tirades by his two Scottish nurses, one of whom demonstrated his sinful nature by sexually molesting the nine year old. From his early childhood, then, the sexually precocious Byron would associate his sexuality with sinfulness. Thus, Barton argues, the seeds were sown in Byron's childhood for a lifelong belief that he was numbered among the damned, a belief confirmed by his outward hauteur, his flaunting of social conventions--especially sexual taboos--and his vilification of social, religious, and political hypocrisy.
Paul Barton's Lord Byron's Religion is a valuable original contribution to the study of Lord Byron's life and work, well-researched and closely reasoned, providing a much needed examination of heretofore neglected information vital to the understanding of Byron's complex and contradictory personality. Dr. Barton's book has my highest recommendation.
Dr. Robert Burns, Professor of English