A dear friend set me on an unlikely journey last week when she told me that Oscar Wilde's work De Profundis had moved her, as no other, to understand what Christianity really meant. Oscar Wilde? Cynic and rebel against Victorian conventional thought? Famous for comments like "I can resist everything except temptation," "the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it," and "I sometimes think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability"?
I went scurrying to explore the book (I confess I had not heard of it before) and was astonished to find in it some of the most moving passages I have encountered about the power of religion as a witness to poverty. Then I read that the British press was astir with a mid-July Vatican article praising Wilde.
De Profundis is a long letter that Oscar Wilde wrote while he was in Reading Prison, convicted of homosexual acts. It was published only after Wilde's death (he died in 1900). This painfully written and anguished piece (Wilde was given only a page at a time to write on and each page was immediately taken from him) includes profound reflections about religion as well as some glimmers of Wilde's wit. A random passage caught my attention:
"With a width and wonder of imagination that fills one almost with awe, [Christ] took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain as his kingdom and made of himself its eternal mouthpiece. Those ...who are dumb under oppression and whose silence is heard only by God, he chose as his brothers. He sought to become eyes to the blind, ears to the deaf, and a cry in the lips of those whose tongues had been tied. His desire was to be to the myriads who had found no utterance a very trumpet through which they might call to heaven."
I found this passage to be a powerful statement. Its message of caring and justice combines a cry of pain with a note of hope, and speaks to our challenges today.
This backdrop made it less surprising to come upon a piece in a British newspaper about an article in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper: "Vatican Embraces Oscar Wilde" read the headline in the Guardian. It reported that an Osservatore review by Andrea Monda of a new book by Italian writer Paolo Gulisano takes a more serious and nuanced view of Wilde than the conventional wisdom, saying that he was much more than "an aesthete and a lover of the ephemeral." He was "one of the personalities of the 19th century who most lucidly analysed the modern world in its disturbing as well as its positive aspects."
Monda commented that Wilde was not "just a non-conformist who loved to shock the conservative society of Victorian England"; he was "a man who behind a mask of amorality asked himself what was just and what was mistaken, what was true and what was false. . . Wilde was a man of great, intense feelings, who behind the lightness of his writing, behind a mask of frivolity or cynicism, hid a deep knowledge of the mysterious value of life," he said.
Just before Wilde died (in self-imposed exile, in Paris), he was baptized into the Catholic Church. He had commented earlier that Catholicism was "for saints and sinners alone - for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do." This typically barbed comment is one of his delightful observations on the foibles of human nature. But Oscar Wilde's other writings demonstrate that he also offers lasting wisdom about the human condition.
