Tennyson's Prologue to the Strong Son of God: Faith and Doubt
Tennyson's prologue to In Memoriam is addressed to the "Strong Son of God, immortal Love" (1). As an address, it tells as as much about the doubts and weakness of Tennyson's faith as it does about his trust and hope in Christ. Tennyson wants to hold on to his faith despite his radical, empirical doubts. His opening prologue, while generally pious in tone, already reveals the doubt that will linger throughout Tennyson's long poem.
Question: How does Tennyson balance his faith and his doubt? Which does the prologue seem to focus more on?
Conceptions of Trust/Faith
- His initial address to Christ as both 'Son of God" and "immortal Love."
- We must hold to faith by faith alone.
- Christ as God is the creator of the stars and planets, as well as life and death. Lines seven and eight may be understood to suggest that Christ has conquered death.
- God will not leave us dead. He is just.
- Christ's two natures are affirmed.
- Equally, "our wills are ours" to make them Christ's.
- God is far more than our human conceptions of him.
- Trust and faith, come from God, are beams of light in the darkness.
- Tennyson prays that empirical knowledge and intuitional faith might make a music together.
- He asks forgiveness for his sin and false pride in worth.
- He also asks to be forgiven his grief for Hallam's death.
- He "trusts" (however weakly or strongly) that Hallam lives in God.
- He asks Christ to make him wise.
Conceptions of Doubt/Limits
- An admission that we have not seen Christ's face
- For it is something we cannot prove.
- Yet at the same time, lines seven and eight may also suggest that Christ/God is the bringer of death to his creatures.
- Yet we cannot understand why we were made and can only think (not know) that we were made for something other than death
- Yet Tennyson's affirmation is of one that seemest.
- Yet "we know not how" to do this.
- But that is what we have to go on--"little systems" that "are but broken lights of thee."
- Knowledge is limited to what we can see.
- God must do this, for we are but fools and "vain worlds."
- Yet again these things seemeth.
- He asks to be forgiven for his "wild and wandering cries."
- Of course, this "trust" again cannot be proven per se.
- He asks for forgiveness where he has failed in truth.
A biblical and epistemological response to Tennyson's division would offer some of the following:
- Granting that faith and trust often require us to hold to what we cannot see (Heb 12), nonetheless faith begins out of a covenantal relationship with God, one that God initiates by revealing who he is and who we are before him.
- Likewise, faith has a rational component: it has a kind of unity, coherence, and common sense realism about it. And faith forms certain basic beliefs from which we seek to understand the larger universe about us.
- As Tennyson suggests, we are finite, limited beings with often mistaken (even sinfully deceptive) notions about God, the universe, and ourselves. This includes our systems of theology, our religious traditions, and our own personal experiences with God.
- Nonetheless, we should stress that God has given us sufficient knowledge about himself and the world and ourselves in order to live, work, play, and repent. Provisional knowledge is not relative knowledge; rather, it is knowledge that seeks to act and be obedient on the basis of what we do know, even as it also remains open to reformation.