From the Gutter to the Stars

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

It is perhaps a paradox of Wildean or even Chestertonian proportions that the road to hell can sometimes lead to heaven. Had not poet Charles Baudelaire, the father of the French Decadence, proclaimed with provocative precision that only Catholics knew the devil?

Baudelaire, author of The Flowers of Evil, knew more painfully and grotesquely than most that we must know our sins in order to know ourselves. One who does not know that he is a sinner does not know himself, nor does he know the God who made him. We must know the hell within ourselves, and the hell to which it owes allegiance, before we can know the heaven that is promised us.

This “discovery” was hardly an original innovation of the French or English Decadents, the literary movement at the end of the 19th century. Six centuries earlier, Dante had discovered the same perennial truth, conveying it with unsurpassed genius in his descent into the inferno en route to purgatory and paradise.

If it is true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, it is also true that the road to heaven is sometimes paved with bad ones. Our very sins, if we repent, can be our teachers and guides. In recollecting our sins, and in recoiling from their consequences, we can be kept on the narrow path that leads purgatorially upward toward paradise.

Thus the scribes, Pharisees and hypocrites, imagining themselves on the path to heaven, might be heading for an unpleasant surprise, whereas the publicans and sinners, learning from their mistakes and amending their ways, might reach the Kingdom to which Christ has called them.

It is, therefore, a paradoxical pleasure to be able to celebrate the Decadent path to Christ taken by Oscar Wilde not as a celebration of decadence per se (heaven forbid!) but as a celebration of the path to Christ that it represents. God is always bringing good out of evil and the Catholic literary revival has reaped a wonderful harvest from the seeds planted in decadence during the 19th century.

One only needs to examine the life and work of Wilde, the godfather of the English Decadence of the 1890s, to see that the literature of death and decay can prophesy the poetry of Resurrection.

The first thing we must know about Wilde is that he was at war with himself.

Wilde the would-be saint and Wilde the woeful sinner were in deadly conflict. Throughout his life, even at those times when he was at his most “decadent,” he retained a deep love for the person of Christ and a lasting reverence for the Catholic Church. As an undergraduate at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, he began to befriend priests and appeared on the verge of conversion.

His father, horrified at the prospect of his son “poping,” sent him to Oxford in the hope that it would put him out of the reach of the Church's influence. It was an ill-conceived idea, not least because

Oxford's dreaming spires had spawned a spate of high-profile converts, the most famous of whom was John Henry Newman. Wilde already held Newman in the highest regard, even as a student in Dublin, and now, in Oxford, he would walk the streets of a city in which Newman's presence was almost palpable.

The result was that Wilde's flirtation with the Catholic faith was roused to new levels of intensity. This could be seen in the poetry he wrote after a visit to Florence in 1875. Inspired to unite his love for Fra Angelico with the artist's angelic visions of the Virgin, Wilde poured forth his desire for faith:

See, I have climbed the mountainside

Up to this holy house of God,

Where the Angelic Monk has trod

Who saw the heavens opened wide,

And throned upon the crescent moon

The Virginal white Queen of Grace, —

Mary! Could I but see thy face

Death could not come at all too soon.

Similarly, in another poem, “Rome Unvisited,” the Pope, in elevating the consecrated host, “shows his God to human eyes / Beneath the veil of bread and wine.” Wilde, quite clearly, was ripe for conversion.

A year later, in response to Anglican opposition to the Pope's promulgation of the Immaculate Conception, Wilde defended the Church's dogma with the sort of cuttingly orthodox wit more often associated with G.K. Chesterton or Ronald Knox. It was, he wrote, “very strange that they should be so anxious to believe the Blessed Virgin conceived in sin.”

In marked contrast to his lauding of the Church militant to anyone who would listen in Oxford, Wilde was careful to keep his papist sympathies a carefully concealed secret from his father in Dublin. Eventually, however, news of his flirtation with the “Scarlet Woman of Rome” leaked across the Irish Sea. His father was as outraged as ever and threatened to disinherit his son unless he desisted in his love affair with the Church. Reluctantly, Wilde bowed to parental pressure.

Years later, after the homosexual scandal that brought about his imprisonment, Wilde remarked wistfully that his decision to turn his back on Rome was ultimately disastrous.

“Much of my moral obliquity is due to the fact that my father would not allow me to become a Catholic,” he confided to a journalist. “The artistic side of the Church would have cured my degeneracies. I intend to be received before long.” He was finally received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed.

In truth, however, Wilde never completely turned his back on the Church. Throughout his life, and particularly through the medium of his art, he continued to reveal his love for Christ and his Church. His poetry either exhibits a selfless love for Christ or, at its darkest, a deep loathing of his own sinfulness.

His short stories are almost always animated by a deep Christian morality, with “The Selfish Giant” deserving a timeless accolade as one of the finest Christian fairy stories ever written. His plays are more than merely comedies or tragedies; they are morality plays in which virtue is vindicated and vice vanquished. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is a masterpiece of Victorian fiction, the overriding moral of which is that to kill the conscience is to kill the soul.

“You knew what my art was to me,” Wilde wrote plaintively to Lord Alfred Douglas, “the great primal note by which I had revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world; the real passion of my life; the love to which all other loves were as mere marsh-water to red wine.”

These words, written from prison to the man who was largely responsible for the scandal that caused his downfall, show the extent to which Wilde knew that the Christianity expressed through his art was far more important than the sinful passions of the flesh to which he had succumbed.

In the same letter to Douglas he also referred to the homosexuality that had been the bane of his life during the 1890s as his “pathology,” his sickness.

Mindful of the planks in our own eyes, we should not join the scribes, Pharisees and hypocrites who point self-righteously at the mote in Wilde's. For, as Lord Darlington says in Wilde's play Lady Windermere's Fan, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

To look for Wilde in the gutter, whether to wallow with him in the “marsh-water” of sin or to point the finger of self-righteous scorn, is to miss the point. Those wishing a deeper understanding of this most enigmatic of men should not look at him in the gutter but with him at the stars.

In the end Wilde was cured of his “pathology” by the healing hands of Christ as ministered by the priest who received him into the Church and who gave him the last rites. His sins forgiven, he was granted the saving embrace of Holy Mother Church on his deathbed, reconciled with the Bride of Christ in extremis.

One imagines that Dante, Wilde's great precursor, would have smiled with knowing benignity at the divine symmetry of the happy ending.

The final words do not belong to Dante, however, nor do they belong to Wilde; they belong to Ernest Dowson, Wilde's friend and fellow Decadent, who also was received into the Church. Writing with the beauty, eloquence and gratitude of a truly repentant sinner, Dowson rejoiced at the saving power of the last rites of the Church in his poem “Extreme Unction”:

The feet, that lately ran so fast

To meet desire, are soothly sealed;

The eyes, that were so often cast

On vanity, are touched and healed.

Joseph Pearce is author of The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde (Ignatius Press, 2004), editor of the Saint Austin Review and writer in residence at Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida.