Spiritual, but not Religious: The Faith of Robert Louis Stevenson
As I’ve written previously, the Scottish writer, essayist and poet Robert Louis Stevenson declared himself an atheist during his university days. It caused a rift between Stevenson and his parents – particularly his father, who was staunch in his Presbyterianism. Yet an examination of Stevenson’s life and work shows, despite his brief stint as an atheist, he retained a profound faith in God. It wasn’t a faith delineated by a church or creed, although it certainly carries the fingerprints of these. It was a faith sprung from Stevenson’s intuitive, poetic sense of God. I’d argue it was beyond words, but at times (especially in his later writings from his Samoan years) he puts it into words so wonderfully that, although I can’t describe it precisely, I feel I’m in the presence of something great: like standing at the center of a soaring cathedral.
I’ve seen Stevenson pegged as a Transcendentalist, a mystic, or as simply “spiritual.” In today’s lingo, we’d say he was “spiritual, but not religious.” He’d be in good company. According to a 2017 survey by Pew research, 27% of American adults responded they were “spiritual, but not religious”, while in a 2021 survey, around one in five adults described their faith as “nothing in particular.”
“Spiritual, but not religious” is commendable or contemptible, depending on your point of view. But what exactly does it mean? Can you truly possess “spirituality” that isn’t rooted, however shallowly, in religion? And what’s the litmus test for transitioning to “spiritual” as opposed to “religious”, anyway? Rejecting the specific tenets of a creed? If so, then which tenets and how many need to be jettisoned? Or is it as simple as giving up attending regular worship services? And if that’s the case, is religion more a matter of ritual or belief?
I decided to take a look at these questions in the context of Robert Louis Stevenson. I found his spirituality was a lot more religious, and his religiosity a lot more spiritual, than I expected. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise: the man, like all of us, was a muddle. And for that I am grateful, as that “muddledness” was the source of not only his literary genius but his beautifully complicated sense of the Divine.
The Little Preacher (and Budding Writer)
The foundation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s faith, and later aversion towards organized religion, was set in his childhood. He was born in 1850 in Edinburgh, into a long and distinguished line of lighthouse engineers. Their designs still grace the coast of Scotland and they are a sight to behold.
Stevenson didn’t have what you’d call “fun” parents. According to biographer Claire Harmon, Robert’s father, Thomas Stevenson, was a devout member of the Church of Scotland,
with a strong belief in ultimate salvation – not through any merits of his own, but through God’s infinite mercy. There was not a shred of complacency in his view of himself. In the speech he wrote to be read at his own funeral, he expressed the hope that he would not be ‘disowned by Him when the last trumpet shall sound,’ a characteristically negative construction, and among the Bible verses to be read he chose, ‘Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one.’
Now, if that sounds hardcore, old-school Calvinist to you, allow me to introduce you to Stevenson’s nanny, Alison Cunningham – affectionately known as “Cummy.” Stevenson’s mother, Margaret, was a fragile flower, prone to hypochondria and, in my estimation, a bit clueless about how to raise her exquisitely sensitive kid. As such, she handed his care off to Cummy: loving, devoted nurse and Instrument of Terror. As Harmon relates:
Cummy was a devout member of the Free Church, and far more stringent in her interpretation of doctrine than [Robert’s] Church of Scotland parents. The theatre was the mouth of hell, cards were ‘the Devil’s Books’ and novels . . . paved the road to perdition. She filled the little boy’s head with stories of the Martyrs of Religion, of the Covenanters and Presbyters and the blood-drenched religious fundamentalists of the previous two centuries that were rendered, confusingly enough, in highly dramatic style.
Being told simple pleasures are in fact portals to eternal damnation will make any kid anxious. But little Robert’s anxiety was compounded exponentially by his sickliness. Margaret recorded he suffered scarlatina, bronchitis, gastric fever, whooping cough, chickenpox, scarlet fever and countless colds before age nine, not to mention a nasty cough that hounded him into adulthood (and what modern physicians believe was hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia). Cummy, being Cummy, didn’t just nurse Robert through these illnesses; she cared for him while feverishly, incessantly praying for his salvation in the face of looming death.
To put it bluntly, it messed him up. Years later, Stevenson described the night horrors that ensued:
I would not only lie awake to weep for Jesus . . . but I would fear to trust myself to slumber lest I was not accepted and should slip, ere I awoke, into eternal ruin. I remember repeatedly … waking from a dream of Hell, clinging to the horizontal bar of the bed with my knees and chin together, my soul shaken, my body convulsed with agony . . . I piped and sniveled over the Bible, with an earnestness that had been talked into me. I would say nothing without adding ‘If I am spared,’ as though to disarm fate by a show of submission; and some of this feeling still remains upon me in my thirtieth year.
As Harmon puts it, “the same Cummy who was ready to calm the child with cuddles and blankets was just as likely to wake him up and assault him with prayers. It was, to say the least, a confusing world.” In other words, the muddling began early.
Despite Cummy’s admonitions, Robert couldn’t help himself: By around ten or so, he was furtively reading sensational plays and novels from his grandfather’s library, and constructing action-packed adventures with the help of a toy theater. Or perhaps Robert was drawn to such drama because of Cummy; it’s not such a stretch, after all, from the violent rampages of the Bible and the old Covenanters’ tales to those of cutthroat pirates, soldiers, and ne’er-do-wells. Indeed, Robert’s first published work, the privately-printed tract The Pentland Rising (1866), describes the Covenanters’ defeat with both piety and thrills:
The wind howled fiercely over the moorland; a close, thick, wetting rain descended. Chilled to the bone, worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the knees in mire, onward they marched to destruction. One by one the weary peasants fell off from their ranks to sleep, and die in the rain-soaked moor, or to seek some house by the wayside wherein to hide till daybreak.
Pretty cool writing for a fifteen-year-old, I’d say, but Thomas Stevenson worried it was too “literary” and bought up nearly all the copies after publication, fearing they’d otherwise circulate and embarrass the family.
The Infidel That Wasn’t
In 1867, Robert’s parents sent him to the University of Edinburgh to work towards an engineering degree that would presumably allow him to carry on the family business. There, in additional to middle-class kids like himself, Robert found himself among country boys who often had to hurry back to the family farm between classes to help pay for their tuition. As we’ll see below, the disparity in financial security weighed on his conscience and colored his view of Christianity.
More importantly, university is where Robert confronted and wrestled with the unavoidable fact of himself. He had no interest in engineering and began writing in earnest, perfecting his craft by mimicking the styles of literary greats. With typical self-deprecation, he called himself a “sedulous ape” for the practice, but I can’t think of a better course of discipline for a writer.
His transformation – or emergence, really – wasn’t limited to his literary ambitions. He read and accepted Darwin. He indulged in alcohol and opium, and wore a black velvet smoking jacket that became his shabby bohemian uniform. He ditched class to frequent the seedy part of Edinburgh, writing stories at a pub alongside women he classified as “the lowest order of prostitutes – three-penny whores.” Not only did he procure their services but, despite his proper upbringing, he was sentimental about them. One such stand-out was Mary, whom he described as “a robust, great-haunched, blue-eyed young woman, of admirable temper and, if you will allow me to say so of a prostitute, extraordinary modesty.” Long after his university days, Robert described their chance reunion:
. . . when I was walking sick and sorry and alone, I met Mary somewhat carefully dressed; and we recognized each other with a joy that was, I daresay, a surprise to both. I spent three or four hours with her in a public-house parlor; she was going to emigrate in a few days to America; we had much to talk about; and she cried bitterly, and so did I. We found in that interview that we had been dear friends without knowing it; I can still hear her recalling the past in her sober, Scotch voice, and I can still feel her good honest loving hand as we said goodbye.
I share this anecdote not only because it’s endearing, but because it speaks to an egalitarian bent that would also find expression in his Christianity.
In 1871, after four years of mediocrity as an engineering student, Robert came clean to his father and declared he simply wanted to write. True to form, Thomas did what every well-to-do parent who frets about his child’s ability to support himself does: He sent Robert to law school. And of course law was just as big of a bust as engineering. But law school did have the advantage of introducing Robert to fellow students and academics who shared not only his love for literature, but for intellectual questioning and dismantling shibboleths. He joined the Speculative Society and later formed the “LJR”, short for “Liberty-Justice-Reverence.” According to his notes, LJR’s concerns included “love of mankind; sense of inequality; justification of art; decline of religion.”
LJR also proved the nail in the coffin when it came to his already-strained relationship with his father. Thomas, that nosey-parker, uncovered in Robert’s papers the LJR constitution, which began with the credo, “Ignore everything our parents have taught us.” An angry confrontation ensued in which Robert confessed he no longer believed in Christianity. The impact on the family was cataclysmic, and Robert’s contemporaneous letter to a friend captures the bitterness of the fallout:
Of course, it is rougher than Hell upon my father; but can I help it? They don’t see either that my game is not the light-hearted scoffer; that I am not (as they call me) a careless infidel: I believe as much as they do, only generally in the inverse ratio: I am, I think, as honest as they can be in what I hold.
Now what is to take place? What a damned curse I am to my parents! As my father said, ‘You have rendered my whole life a failure.’ As my mother said, ‘This is the heaviest affliction that has ever befallen me.’ And, O Lord, what a pleasant thing it is to have just damned the happiness of (probably) the only two people who care a damn about you in the world.
But here’s the thing: For all his professed rejection of Christianity, Robert was still steeped in it. The papers he presented to the Speculative Society, according to Harmon, concerned “the influence of the Covenanting prosecution on the Scotch mind, John Knox, Paradise Lost, the relation (or lack of it, we can guess) of Christ’s teaching to modern Christianity.” And as Harmon relates:
The little minister vein was still running strong in him, though it would have been hard to ascertain his attitude to the Church from his behavior in public. One minute he would be mocking and provocative, as when . . . he mischievously interrupted three ministers sitting down to dinner at a hotel and forced a long, elaborate grace on them; the next he would be in deadly earnest, stopping a group of colliers on a Sunday to harangue them for Sabbath-breaking.
Cummy’s/Thomas’ influence ran deep. Stevenson wasn’t so much rejecting Christianity as (1) exploring – to Robert, at least – more authentic expressions of it, and (2) critiquing his father’s specific brand of Presbyterianism. In lieu of his father’s faith, he was seeking his own, and as he emphasized to his friend, not “carelessly”.
The Skeptical Believer
So where did Robert’s foray into “spirituality” lead him? As you’d expect, into a bit of a muddle. Despite his professed atheism, just five or so years later, in 1878, Robert seemed to embrace a cheerful view of God as mysteriously working towards the best possible ends (including, perhaps, a reconciliation with his father). As he wrote to Thomas Stevenson:
There is a fine text in the Bible, I don’t know where, to the effect that all things work together for good to those who love the Lord . . . Strange as it may seem to you, everything has been, in one way or the other, bringing me a little nearer to what I think you would like me to be. ‘Tis a strange world, indeed, but there is a manifest God for those who care to look for him.
And in Reflections and Remarks on Human Life, also written in 1878, Robert credited God with imperceptibly turning him from an idle, undisciplined young man into a purposeful one:
. . . of that great change of campaign, which divided all this part of my life, and turned me from one whose business was to shirk into one whose business was to strive and persevere, it seems as though all that had been done by some one else . . . I was never conscious of a struggle, nor registered a vow, nor seemingly had anything personal to do with the matter. I came about like a well-handled ship. There stood at the wheel that unknown steersman whom we call God.
But hold the phone: In the very same essay, Robert admits to a great unease, even outright anger at God, for allowing suffering to exist:
I cannot forgive God for the suffering of others; when I look abroad upon His world and behold its cruel destinies, I turn from Him with disaffection; nor do I conceive that He will blame me for the impulse. But when I consider my own fates, I grow conscious of His gentle dealing: I see Him chastise with helpful blows . . . and this knowledge is my comfort that reconciles me to the world.
I don’t know about you, but I get the sneaking suspicion here that Stevenson is trying to convince himself of God’s good intentions. That leeriness about selectively pronouncing what is and isn’t “God’s Will” receives forthright discussion in Lay Morals (1879). There, Stevenson lambastes the moral paucity of adhering to a narrow, legalistic definition of Old Testament law, relying on his own university days in Edinburgh for illustration:
Thou shalt not steal. Ah, that indeed! But what is to steal?
. . . [to show you] what a vast extent of frontier is left unridden by this invaluable eighth commandment, let me tell you a few pages out of a young man’s life.
He was a friend of mine; a young man like others; generous, flighty, as variable as youth itself, but always with some high motions and on the search for higher thoughts of life. I should tell you at once that he thoroughly agrees with the eighth commandment. But he got hold of some unsettling works, the New Testament among others, and this loosened his views of life and led him into many perplexities. As he was the son of a man in a certain position, and well off, my friend had enjoyed from the first the advantages of education, nay, he had been kept alive through a sickly childhood by constant watchfulness, comforts, and change of air; for all of which he was indebted to his father’s wealth.
At college he met other lads more diligent than himself, who followed the plough in summer-time to pay their college fees in winter; and this inequality struck him with some force. He was at that age of a conversible temper, and insatiably curious in the aspects of life; and he spent much of his time scraping acquaintance with all classes of man- and woman-kind. In this way he came upon many depressed ambitions, and many intelligences stunted for want of opportunity; and this also struck him.
He began to perceive that life was a handicap upon strange, wrong-sided principles; and not, as he had been told, a fair and equal race. He began to tremble that he himself had been unjustly favoured, when he saw all the avenues of wealth, and power, and comfort closed against so many of his superiors and equals, and held unwearyingly open before so idle, so desultory, and so dissolute a being as himself.
. . . A religious lady, to whom he communicated these reflections, could see no force in them whatever. ‘It was God’s will,’ said she. But he knew it was by God’s will that Joan of Arc was burnt at Rouen, which cleared neither Bedford nor Bishop Cauchon; and again, by God’s will that Christ was crucified outside Jerusalem, which excused neither the rancour of the priests nor the timidity of Pilate. He knew, moreover, that although the possibility of this favour he was now enjoying issued from his circumstances, its acceptance was the act of his own will; and he had accepted it greedily . . . And hence this allegation of God’s providence did little to relieve his scruples.
. . . Is not this an unusual gloss upon the eighth commandment? And what sort of comfort, guidance, or illumination did that precept afford my friend throughout these contentions? ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ With all my heart! But am I stealing?
I don’t know whether the adult Stevenson accepted the Divinity of Christ. But whatever “spirituality” he embraced, Lay Morals shows he took Christ very seriously and at His word: And whosoever hath this world’s goods, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? His so-called “break” from Christianity was a reaction to a Church that wasn’t Christian enough. His father’s Presbyterianism skirted the “hard” demands – radically rejecting materialism, serving the poor and vulnerable – in favor of the easy piety of “respectability.” And for Robert, walking in a faith should be hard. As he put it, “It is by the hard sayings that discipleship is tested.” In Reflections, he described how relentless self-scrutiny and improvement was the linchpin of his morality:
There is but one test of good life: that man shall continue to grow more difficult about his own behaviour. That is to be good: there is no other virtue attainable. . . You, for your part, must not think you will ever be a good man, for these are born and not made. You will have your own reward, if you keep on growing better than you were – how do I say? If you do not keep on growing worse.
Reading these words, I recall Harmon’s assessment of Thomas Stevenson as having “not a shred of complacency in his view of himself.” Like father, like son – and with respect to all that “vigilance” and “difficulty” over the goodness of his behavior, like Cummy, too.
The God of Contraries
Ultimately, Stevenson arrived at a spirituality that made room for the troubling contradictions he wrestled with in Reflections and Lay Morals. It was a more mystic, expansive view of God that allowed for both His benevolence and the existence of earthly evil. Towards that end, he was helped along by one of his favorite writers, Walt Whitman. In Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882), he described the following passage, from the Preface to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as “startlingly Christian”:
This is what you shall do . . . love the earth, and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers of families, read these leaves [Whitman’s own works] in the open air every season of every year of your life; re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul.
This was in line with the “hard” Christianity Stevenson advocated in Lay Morals. But while Stevenson struggled with the idea of a loving Creator permitting His children to suffer, Whitman accepted the contradiction and Let It Be. Instead of putting a Panglossian spin on cruelty and injustice as “all for the best” (or as Cummy would have put it, “God’s Will”), Whitman recognized the cruelty and injustice, then urged his readers to get off their keisters and take real-world steps to end it – all in the optimistic spirit that action would result in improvement of the human condition. It was a “gospel” that appealed to Stevenson’s cheerful and practical side, as well as his sense of honesty:
Life, as a matter of fact, partakes largely of the nature of tragedy. The gospel according to Whitman, even if it be not so logical, has this advantage over the gospel according to Pangloss, that it does not utterly disregard the existence of temporal evil. Whitman accepts the fact of disease and wretchedness like an honest man; and instead of trying to qualify it in the interest of his optimism, sets himself to spur people up to be helpful. He expresses a conviction, indeed, that all will be made up to the victims in the end; that “what is untried and afterward” will fail no one, not even “the old man who has lived without purpose and feels it with bitterness worse than gall.” But this is not to palliate our sense of what is hard or melancholy in the present . . . [Whitman] treats evil and sorrow in a spirit almost as of welcome; as an old sea-dog might have welcomed the sight of the enemy’s topsails off the Spanish Main. There, at least, he seems to say, is something obvious to be done.
It was a gospel Stevenson did his best to live up to, particularly during his final years in the South Pacific, where he strove to put his “ink-slinging” to purposeful use. In 1888, he visited the Belgian priest Father Damien at his leper colony in Hawaii, and was so moved by the man’s charity that he wrote a scathing public response to a Presbyterian minister who criticized Damien’s reputation. When he and his family settled in Samoa in 1889/90, he developed warm relationships with the locals and his servants, earning him the moniker Tulsitala, or Teller of Tales. He was a keen observer of the havoc wrought by colonial interests, and so wrote A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892), in which he described the indigenous Samoans’ struggle for self-determination and self-government. To our 21st-Century eyes, these efforts seem plainly worthy, but at the time Stevenson’s concern for the plight of Samoans was hardly mainstream and turned off his friends back in the UK. One of these, Sidney Colvin, wrote:
Do [any of our white affairs] interest you at all? I could remark in passing that for three letters or more you have not uttered a single word about anything but your beloved blacks – or chocolates – confound them.
To which Stevenson replied:
Dear Colvin, please remember that my life passes among my ‘blacks or chocolates’ . . . you must try to exercise a trifle of imagination, and put yourself, perhaps with an effort, into some sort of sympathy with these people, or how am I to write to you?
Additionally, as I discussed here, Stevenson led his Christianized Samoan staff in weekly Sunday school lessons and daily prayer sessions using his own words as offerings. While this deference to formal ritual recalls his Presbyterian upbringing, the prayers themselves (published as Prayers Written at Vailima) are brimming with Whitman-esque spirituality. There’s little in the way of concrete Christian theology but plenty of Whitman’s appreciation of Nature as a conduit to the Divine: “Teach us the lesson of the trees . . . teach us, Lord, the meaning of the fishes.” Likewise, per Whitman, Prayers embraces duality and contradiction as part of our human condition: “We are evil, O God, and help us to see it and amend. We are good, and help us to be better.” “Accept us, correct us, guide us, Thy guilty innocents.”
But perhaps the ultimate expression of Stevenson’s late-stage spirituality is found in a poem he wrote at Vailima, Tropic Rain:
Angel of rain! You laughed and leaped on the roofs of men;
And the sleepers sprang in their beds, and joyed and feared as you fell.
You struck, and my cabin quailed; the roof of it roared like a bell.
You spoke, and at once the mountain shouted and shook with brooks.
You ceased, and the day returned, rosy, with virgin looks.
And methought that beauty and terror are only one, not two;
And the world has room for love, and death, and thunder, and dew;
And all the sinews of hell slumber in summer air;
And the face of God is a rock, but the face of the rock is fair.
Beneficent streams of tears flow at the finger of pain;
And out of the cloud that smites, beneficent rivers of rain.
Here is a God rooted in not only Whitman but Eastern faith traditions, encompassing all contradictions, large enough to contain “multitudes.” Here, also, sound echoes of William Blake’s “contraries” and the marriage between them. And here is the God depicted by the Catholic film-maker Terence Malick in The Tree of Life: a mysterious union of Law and Grace, expressed perfectly through the harshness and beauty of Nature. Roger Scruton famously warned that trying to “eff the ineffable” was doomed to fail. But I happen to think that, because his internal spiritual fabric was so blended and varied, Robert Louis Stevenson got pretty damn close.
And so praise be to muddles!
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