¶ … 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...
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…
