Prayers of An Atheist?
Robert Louis Stevenson Reconciles Nature and the Divine
Confession: I purchased an antique copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Prayers Written at Vailima, not out of any particular interest in Stevenson, but for the sheer gorgeousness of the calligraphy and illumination by Alberto Sangorski. Together with his brother, Francis Sangorski of the London bookbinders Sangorski and Sutcliffe, Sangorski produced breath-takingly beautiful editions of works by Edgar Alan Poe, Tennyson, and Shakespeare, to name just a few. For frame of reference, here’s the gilt and jeweled cover to a Tennyson volume, with one of Alberto’s interior illuminations:
Sangorski’s illumination of Prayers Written at Vailima is not as lush, but I think that’s appropriate. Despite the calligraphy and scrollwork being on par with the finest of medieval prayer books, and despite Stevenson’s generous use of high-falutin’ “Thee”s and “Thou”s, the prayers are charmingly direct and down-to-earth. Take the following page, and juxtapose the first line with the intricate illumination that surrounds it. If you’re like me, you’ll get a good laugh:
It’s high artistry, employed to express our commonplace gripes — and what a fitting contrast, since the focus of this post is contradiction. Specifically: the contradiction between Stevenson’s professed atheism and the very prayers he not only wrote, but recited to his household while living in Samoa towards the end of his life.
Stevenson’s Duality and Atheism
Born in 1850, Stevenson was raised by devout Presbyterian parents who wished him to study engineering or another profession suited to supporting a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Like so many who have sensible plans for their offspring, they were soon frustrated. Stevenson pursued a degree in engineering, then law, to placate his parents. But while they assumed he was studying away at university, Stevenson was in reality skipping lectures, sporting the velvet coat of a Bohemian dandy, and visiting seedy Edinburgh brothels and taverns. More importantly, he was writing fiction. It was a kind of double life that inspired one of his best-known works, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
As it turned out, the double life could not be maintained. Around 1873, Stevenson’s father discovered Stevenson was a founding member of the student group Liberty, Justice and Reverence; its charter urged members to reject the teachings of their parents. When his father confronted him, Stevenson revealed that he no longer believed in God. A painful rift occurred between parents and son, with Stevenson’s father telling him: “You have rendered my whole life a failure.” Despite the rift (or in part because of it), Stevenson went on to become a literary star and the author of such classics as Kidnapped and Treasure Island.
In 1889, Stevenson and his wife Fanny made Samoa their home, after visiting the island while Stevenson was traveling through and conducting research for a book on Polynesia. They built a beautiful estate, Villa Vailima, and staffed it with Samoan servants. Stevenson learned the Samoan language and dubbed himself “Tulsitala” — Teller of Tales. More pertinent to this discussion, Stevenson conducted daily evening prayers for the Vailima household, using the prayers he had jotted down in his personal notes.
Many critics I’ve read maintain that Stevenson was still an atheist, but wrote and delivered the prayers for the benefit of his family and servants, who were Christian. However, when I read the Vailima prayers, they didn’t strike me as the work of a polite and accommodating atheist, but rather, that of a man not bound to any formal religious doctrine. As his biographer, Joseph Farrell, put it, Stevenson’s “mental universe was founded on an imprecise mysticism without a creed.”
Prayers Written at Vailima
On its face, Prayers Written at Vailima reflects a duality in Stevenson’s belief system: it’s a series of quiet pleas to God, for traditional Judeo-Christian aims such as forgiveness and grace, penned by someone who ostensibly doesn’t believe in God in the first instance. And to really drive the “duality” point home, Fanny Stevenson relates in the prologue of the book that the household was summoned to peaceful prayer by the sounding of the pu, or “war conch” — although she claims the Stevensons saw no “incongruity” in this.
To my mind, two prayers, in particular, hint at a specific dualism: that of Stevenson, man of science, and Stevenson, man of faith. Let’s take a look at the first, “In Time of Rain”:
We thank Thee, Lord, for the glory of the late days and the excellent face of Thy sun. We thank Thee for good news received. We thank Thee for the pleasures we have enjoyed and for those we have been able to confer. And now, when the clouds gather and the rain impends over the forest and our house, permit us not to be cast down; let us not lose the savour of past mercies and past pleasures; but, like the voice of a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memory survive in the hour of darkness. If there be in front of us any painful duty, strengthen us with the grace of courage; if any act of mercy, teach us tenderness and patience.
I really, really like that phrase, “like the voice of a bird singing in the rain.” It suggests to me Stevenson, sitting on the porch at Vailima during a Samoan rainstorm, hearing the call of a pigeon or starling amid the downpour. Perhaps he wrote the metaphor for the benefit of the Samoan participants in his prayer service, to give his words familiar context. Perhaps he wrote it because he was sensitive to and observant of his Polynesian environment, something of a naturalist. Perhaps he wrote it because it called to mind the “still small voice”, or “gentle whisper” by which God made himself known to Elijah — scripture that Stevenson would have known very well.
I happen to think Stevenson chose his words for all three reasons. And I think the metaphor represents a blurring between Stevenson’s rational understanding and his understanding of the Divine.
Further such blurring occurs in “Another In Time of Rain”:
Lord, Thou sendest down rain upon the uncounted millions of the forest, and givest the trees to drink exceedingly. We are here upon this isle a few handfuls of men, and how many myriads upon myriads of stalwart trees! Teach us the lesson of the trees. The sea around us, which this rain recruits, teems with the race of fish; teach us, Lord, the meaning of the fishes. Let us see ourselves for what we are, one out of the countless number of the clans of thy handiwork. When we would despair, let us remember that these also please and serve Thee.
This isn’t the prayer of a doctrinaire Christian who viewed man as the center of God’s creation. On the contrary: this is the prayer of someone familiar with Darwin, and with what the theory of evolution suggested about our rank in the universe.
“Let us see ourselves for what we are, one out of the countless number of the clans of thy handiwork”. Stevenson is a post-Darwinist who believes that we humans occupy a “place in the family of things” (as Mary Oliver put it in “Wild Geese”), that we are part and parcel of nature rather than — as old-school Christian teaching would have it — presiding over it. For Stevenson, the trees are full of “lessons” and the fish hold “meaning.” Yet at the same time, in a wonderfully self-contradictory fashion, he seems to posit that we can’t absorb these “lessons” and “meaning” directly, that we must call upon God to “teach us” about our kinship with the natural world — or at least help us not to forget it. In the end, Divine knowledge still surpasses our own.
As such, the “Rain” prayers don’t read like the work of an atheist, but a transcendentalist. Pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if being surrounded by that beautiful Samoan scenery, teeming with life, allowed Stevenson to intuit the Divine much in the same way Emerson described in Nature:
In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
I hope this was Stevenson’s experience. I hope Nature allowed him to return to reason and faith, and that these reconciled within him — not as separate and competing “selves”, but as warp and weft of his internal fabric.
