A Wilde Spirit Seeking A Home

I just happened upon an article detailing something that surprised me: Oscar Wilde was always drawn to the Catholic church, and converted to Catholicism on his deathbed ("The Long Conversion of Oscar Wilde", Andrew McCracken.) When he left Newgate Prison after two years hard labor for the crime of sodomy, Wilde's first act--before reuniting with his lover--was to write to the local Jesuit house asking permission to make a six-month retreat. Sadly, they turned him down. (A sad occurrence not so much for Oscar Wilde's soul, which I place confidently in the hands of God, but for the Jesuits, who missed the chance to make Ignatian spirituality the Victorian Kabbalah by transforming a famous public sinner.)

Oscar Wilde's one-liners define him as a hedonistic and shallow man, but much of his work points to a nuanced fascination with the spiritual, even specifically with Catholicism. Finding McCracken's article sent me gratefully back to Wilde's beautiful children's allegory The Selfish Giant. (There's a certain amount of Victorian sappiness to be gotten over here. Look again: the moral is not just that if you do nice things, Baby Jesus will love you. The way Spring returns to the giant's garden more subtly illustrates the action of grace: when it's missing, we feel it deeply, though we may not even know what's wrong. God sends a small gift to us first, when we least expect it, and our positive response helps grace flower.) The play Salome, difficult and heady-in-the-sense-of-drink, is completely different from Wilde's sparkling farces and from his neatly packaged children's tales. It could only have been written by someone who revered the liturgy's poetry and who understood the power of true saints to fascinate and to frighten.

Thanks to McCracken for reminding us that being Catholic in Wilde's England had more revolutionary connotations than we might now conjure up. Under Victoria, Catholics still had a somewhat murky social status--so Irish, dear--and, McCracken seems to imply, were perceived as somewhat embarrasingly aesthetic in worship and priorities. That's an appeal anyone can see Wilde embracing. We owe it to ourselves to explore his search for holy truth; Wilde has given us much more than perfect comedies.

P.S. Next time you're looking for something sensational to read on the train, you can point your browser right to theologienne.com. Yes, you're already here and don't need the link, but I did so enjoy typing it.