Presentation of Reason in the Work of Dryden and Swift

¶ … Reason in the faith and satire of Dryden and Swift

The neoclassical age in which both John Dryden and Jonathan Swift penned their most noteworthy prose is often also called 'The Age of Reason.' However, although this valorization of reason and rationality may be a fair characterization of much of the Age of human Enlightenment, Dryden and Swift do not deploy nor valorize reason in the same fashion. For Dryden, reason is the key to humanity's connection with the divine and political freedom. In Swift's social and religious satires, however, human confidence in its rationality is just as absurd as overconfidence in human religious political and social institutions to create just and fair societies.

Dryden's religious poem "Religio Laici" begins with a definition of reason as the most perfect mode of the ultimate human understanding of the divine. Dryden writes, "as the borrow'd beams of moon and stars./To lonely, weary, wand'ring travellers,/Is reason to the soul. As can be seen from cohesive, taunt prose at the beginning of this work poetry, Dryden used a didactic style, a straightforward and linear teaching mode of discourse to create a hymn to human being's ability to construct ration methods of accessing the divine and the ability of the human mind to create rationalist constructs of writing. For "so reason's glimmering ray/Was lent not to assure our doubtful way,/But guide us upward to a better day." Reason may not be comforting, but it is effective, writes Dryden, and ultimately the onye way to understand God.

Dryden wrote the above poem to coherently and openly defend Protestantism, a creed he regarded as best allowing the human mind unfettered, individual exercise, in contrast to Catholicism. Dryden did occasionaly deploy less obvious fashions of writing than didactic argument, such as "Absalom and Achitophel," a religious and political mode of allegory. But even though this religious allegory had contemporary political resonance for the author, its method of construction, narratively speaking, is still relatively straightforward. Its beginning with a defamation of "priest-craft" suggests that the author conflated superstition, obedience to priestly and hierarchical authority of the Catholic Church, all with a refusal to take responsibility for one's own ability to use reason in an effective and constructive manner. Again, reason is the highest and best form of creation, and the parallel political figures satirized and defamed within the poem are those who are irrational and bad, rather than irrational and good. Dryden has faith in the concrete actions of God, where, "Heav'n punishes the bad, and proves the best." (44) In the Biblical account of King David the poet dramatizes in the poem, the justice of God is rational, and thus good, as opposed to the irrational modes humans deploy on occasion to understand God, and the irrational and lustful actions of some Biblical figures. Ultimately, in the last sentence of the poem, David is restored to the throne because he is "God-like" in his goodness."

For Jonathan Swift, however, reason and rationality were ultimately absurd human attempts to make sense of a senseless world. Even the act of writing itself, as is made clear in Swift's "A Tale of a Tub" is absurd. Like Dryden's poem of religious allegory that contains parallels with contemporary English politics, Swift's tale is also allegorical in its construction and tone. But the comparison with "Absalom and Achitophel "perhaps ends there. The allegory is questioned in the poet's prologue, and there are allusions to the fact within the tale itself that a madman is narrating it.

Swift's "Tub" concerns the adventures of three brothers, Peter, Martin, and Jack, each representing one of the Christian denominations. The Catholic, Reforming Protestant, and Church of England brothers, respectively, vow to their good and true father (God) that they will never alter their coats (creeds) but continually do so, in flagrant defiance of their promise and all rational proof to the contrary. Although the coats begin whole, good, and different in their own fashions, by the end of the tale they are almost unrecognizable.

Inherent in the moral tone of the satire is not so much that religion; any (Christian) religion is bad or wrong. Rather, it suggests humanity's irrational ability to make sense of the divine. No one and perfect rational means of practice can exist for any long time within the human life or brain to encapsulate the mystery of existence. Even beginning with the dissemination the original truth, things become ever more confusing as humanity becomes more and more removed from the original divine spark that inspired different faith branches and traditions.