AKIN TAZEGÜNEY, 1

ELCS 615 Culture and Literary Periods – FINAL PAPER

Submitted to: Assoc. Prof. Ertuğrul Koç

Submission Date: 13 January 2014

Student Name/ID: Nilüfer AKIN TAZEGÜNEY - 201173206

RELIGIOUS HYPOCRISY IN JONATHAN

SWIFT’S A TALE OF A TUB
In A Tale of a Tub, Jonathan Swift addresses to hypocrisy of Christians who abused

religion, however he affirmed that the purity of the Gospel itself remained inspite of the

hypocritical followers. Swift wrote this satire to demonstrate that corrupt doctrines and

hypocritical behavior within all major branches of the church caused a growing

disillusionment with Christianity. He exposed the faults of the church because he believed

that the church was accountable for presenting an authentic, biblical account of the Christian

faith.

Its satiric prosecution of religious enthusiasm draws on Restoration religious

polemic and patristic writings against heresy. In particular, the great
Restoration satire of the Commonwealth period... [which] satirizes hubris,
nonconformity, religious fanaticism ..., pedantry, and dullness. [He] impute[s]
a nexus between popery and Protestant nonconformity, connect occult learning,
astrology and religious enthusiasm as fanatical imposture... (Higgins, 1994, p.
102).

As a member of the Church of Ireland, Swift was a clergyman of the Anglican Church.

As such he was a staunch defender of his church both in his heart and for his attempt to secure

his own career prospects. Kelly (2002, p. 86) labels Swift as a “Liberationist Theologian.”

Swift’s portraying himself explicitly as a defender of the Established Church was one of the

most surprising developments of the 1730s. In fact, he was being ridiculed around to be a

godless Dean, but Swift had published a few anonymous pamphlets in support of the church.
 AKIN TAZEGÜNEY, 2

He defended Christianity against Roman Catholicism and the dissenters who posed as

religious and political extremes of the late l7th and early 18th centuries as they threatened not

only the Anglican Church but the English Constitution. Seemingly, Swift was a conservative

who searched for a stable religion which also ensured personal freedoms. In fact, he thought

that religion, politics, and morality were concepts not to be separated from each other. He

unremittingly stormed on theological pursuits to define and limit orthodoxy because they

eventually caused dissent and religious anarchy. He believed that Christianity split from its

original coherence, simplicity, and clarity over the centuries because of the discordant nature

of humans, which led to the general decay of religions. It was man who ill-treated and

corrupted the Truth. Swift remained “true to the principles of the Anglican Church not only

because his own career ambitions were related to it, but also because, for him, the Church was

a powerful institution offering rationality and moderation” (Kelly). This paper focuses on how

Swift creates a satirical allegory of the 17th century’s corrupt Caatholic Church in A Tale of a

Tub through Peter, Jack, and Martin while he, as a clergyman, protected and defended his own

belief in the core of Christianity.

It is difficult to recognize the value of the satire of the past particularly because we are

not always able to comprehend the identities and the circumstances being satirised in a

satirical work. The details of history are swift to slip away from grasp, and even though we

may get a glimpse of them, it is often not possible to undertake them with the same passion of

the time by which the satirist was prompted to write about them. As Rosenheim (1959)

suggests

“[w]ithin our own century, certain satiric writings have enjoyed tremendous
brief popularity only to fade forever from the public memory within a few
years. Issues evaporate, villains grow old and die or reform, the foibles of one
season yield to a new and different crop – and the wit and anger and laughter
which they have elicited disappear with them. Yet great great satire survives,
and Swift today is read, admired, and generally understood. Some of Swift’s
 AKIN TAZEGÜNEY, 3

lasting popularity is due to the element we have already noted, to the purely
comic pleasure which so much of his writing affords. Some of it is due, as well,
to those passages of strange, unforgettable insight, to the unique intellectual
power” (p. x).

It is often accepted by critics that readers can feel at home with Swift’s satire as he can

extraordinarily revive, document and present issues to the readers in a lively and rich

fashion.For instance, knowing very little about the Puritanism of the seventeenth century

would suffice to understand the forceful anti-Puritan satire of A Tale of a Tub. Though

puzzling, this document abundantly makes apparent that there seriously was something wrong

with the church of England. “Swifts topicality, unlike that found in too much of the humor of

our own day, is not of the species that that merely exploits the allusions which, at the moment,

are “good for a laugh” (Rosenheim, 1959, p. xi). Instead of counting on a bunch of readers

who would have laughed at an obvious reference to purportedly prominent ears of the close-

cropped Puritans, he goes beyond this kind of a way and makes use of his own complete

fabrication of humour, using the common jest as the point of departure.

Swift’s allegory in this great satirical work consists of The father representing Christ,

his will to his three sons representing the Bible, the coats he bequathed to them representing

Christian faith, and three brothers each of whom representing the major branches of the

Christian Church following the Reformation: Peter represents the apostle Peter, and therefore

the Catholic Church; Jack, named after John Calvin, represents Puritanism; and Martin

represents the Anglican Church and Martin Luther, who was considered to be the “Father of

the Reformation” by Jonathan Swift (Lawlor, as cited in Debaun, 2010, para. 5). The story,

told in three chapters of the Tale, starts with the three brothers’ father’s deathbed where he

inherits the coats to his sons. These coats are simple but well-made with

two [V]irtues contained in them: One is, that with good wearing, they will last
you fresh and sound as long as you live: The other is, that they will grow in the
 AKIN TAZEGÜNEY, 4

same proportion with your [B]odies, lengthning and widening of themselves,

so as to be always fit (Swift, 1965, p. 57).

The father asks his sons to enjoy their coats on the condition that they preserve them carefully

in their original shapes throughout all their lives. The will is full of rules and instructions

telling the sons what to do and what to do not, and how to care for the coats. For seven years,

the sons keep them in the best condition they can according to the will, until they fall in love

with three royal ladies named The Dutchess d’Argent (Money), Madame de Grands Titres

(Grand Titles; Reputation; Ambition), and the Countess d’Orgueil (Pride). The three brothers

begin to change who they are in order to gain the favor of the ladies. Soon they complain

about how plain the coats are and grow certain that more stylish apparels with more

ornaments would please the ladies Being aware of the strict rules against any additions to the

coats, they start to seek loopholes in the will and reinterpret the words of the will by twisting

meaning ridiculously to find allowance for the practices which their father prohibited them.

This first transgression results in a consistent negligence of the original will whenever it

stands on their way preventing their own desires.

It is notable that it is not one single brother who deviates from the original will first;

all three brothers fall into the same error together. In fact, readers are not given the individual

names of three brothers in the first chapter concerning the story of the brothers in the satire

(Section II). The three brothers were beguiled by society to a point where, “Resolved,

therefore, at all hazards to comply with the modes of the world, they concerted matters

together, and agreed unanimously to lock up their father’s will in a strong-box…and trouble

themselves no father to examine it” (Swift, pp. 66-67). Swift implies here that first deviation

from the original teachings of the Bible took place unanimously and simultaneously involving

all three parties. Humanly passions, allegorized by the three brothers love for the ladies,

Money, Ambition, and Pride, dominate their commitment to the teachings of Christ. Swift
 AKIN TAZEGÜNEY, 5

argues that the problem is not with the teachings but with people’s swerving from the

religious practices and thoughts “because of being overwhelmed by their weaknesses and the

demands of corrupt society” (Kelling, 1954, p. 203) . This leads people to prioritize worldy

pleasures over the will of God; hence the Bible cannot be held responsible for being an

inadequte basis for faith. The important message that Swift tried to convey with this satire

was that the self-interested stage priests who represented the church to the public in the late

17th and early 18th century could not carry the true message of Christianity.

As the story of the Tale goes on, Peter claims power over the kingdom assuming that

he is the eldest brother although even their mother did not know which son came first at birth.

He wins the respect of his people but starts to abuse his subjects soon by deceiving them. He

even takes this deception to an explicit level when he gives them crusts of bread and

unblushingly insists that they are actually expensive cuts of meat. When two of his subjects

protest this absurd inequality, he cries out saying, “…it is true, good, natural mutton as any in

Leadenhall Market; and God confound you both eternally if you offer to believe otherwise!”

(Swift, p. 86). Peter wishes to keep control over his subjects without performing his real

duties. When his subjects protest that they have not been given what was promised, Peter’s

absolute power is brought into question, and he turns to threats of divine judgment. This

allegorizes the corruption in the Catholic Church which became allied with the monarchical

power. The Catholic Church resorted to threat and torture to suppress heresy and any practice

which did not please state and/or clerical authorities during the Middle Ages and early

Renaissance. As Xu also agrees:

The target of satire in A Tale of a Tub is mainly the Roman Catholics … For
instance, in Section 4, Swift acidly derides the Roman Catholics’ greed,
corruption, rigidity and obscurant. To the infamous pardon the author’s
castigation is merciless. He exposes the Roman Catholics’ conceit attempt of
prevailing over morality and law and its pretensions to being the will of God
(2009, p.45).
 AKIN TAZEGÜNEY, 6

Whenever it happened that any rogue of Newgate was condemned to be

hanged, Peter would offer him a pardon for a certain sum of money, which
when the poor caitiff had made all shifts to scrape up and send, his lordship
would return a piece of paper in this form:
‘To all mayors, sheriffs, jailors, constables, bailiffs, hangmen, &c. whereas we
are informed that A. B. remains in the hands of you, or any of you, under the
sentence of death. We will and command you, upon sight hereof, to let the said
prisoner depart to his own habitation, whether he stands condemned for
murder, sodomy, rape, sacrilege, incest, treason, blasphemy, &c., for which
this shall be your sufficient warrant. And it you fail hereof, G--d--mn you and
yours to all eternity. And so we bid you heartily farewell.
Your most humble man’s man,
EMPEROR PETER.’
The wretches trusting to this lost their lives and money too (Swift, as
cited in Xu, pp. 45-46).

Peter’s merciless practices also remind the inquisition and the reign of Bloody Queen

Mary of England, who deserved this name well by simply executing heretics who did not

believe in the same way she did. These were the results of the excessive authority of the

Catholic Church. As Ramos et al. argues;

Although, at its outset, the Inquisition had the eradication of heresy as its
primary goal, it eventually became, at least at times, a tool by which a ruler
might destroy his enemies without fear of repercussion, since the trial, torture,
and pronouncing the verdict of heresy were all performed by the Church (2005,
p.12).

Though the third brother Martin is presented as the mildest and the most levelheaded of

the three brothers by Swift, he gets his share from an exposure of imperfections. When Martin

and Jack leave Peter, Martin procures popularity for denigrating Peter’s practice of selling his

subjects expensive yet ineffective remedies for numerous diseases. This is an allegory for

Martin’s campaign against the sale of indulgences in the 16th century, which ignited the

Protestant movement. He is soon acknowledged as a defender of Peter’s suffering subjects. As

part of this new role, Martin becomes ready to do whatever Peter would not. With this, Swift

allegorizes King Henry VIII’s demand for divorce that the Catholic Church never granted

him. For instance, in A Tale of a Tub, Martin allows second marriages for those who wish to

practice polygamy. Because such practices suit many people’s human desires that are against
 AKIN TAZEGÜNEY, 7

the doctrine of the Catholic Church, and many of Peter’s former subjects decide to follow

Martin’s rule instead. Due to the flexibility he presents, Martin gains noticeable power and a

considerable number of followers. However, Martin’s readiness to compromise is a moral

flexibility, which is his flaw as Swift suggests. The standards of Christian morality in which

monogamy is also included are damaged by Martin, who wants to satisfy his potential

constituents. Martin’s making concessions flexibly to avoid conflicts results in his sustaining

power at the expense of staying completely true to Christ’s teachings.

As the Tale continues, Jack's alienation from his father's wish grows. Right after he

and Peter learn how selfish Peter is behaving, they decide to look for their father's wisdom.

Thus, they find and start to read his will again. While doing that, they find out that the

brightness of their coats does not match their initial directions which have showed them how

they should look after the coats. They promise to remove the decorations and to live

according to what their father say in his will. Martin starts to clear away the ornaments from

his coat kindly, but Jack shouts at him, "Ah! My good brother Martin… do as I do, for the

love of God; strip, tear, pull, rend, flay off all that we may appear as unlike that rogue Peter as

possible.” He angrily removes the decorations until tearing the coat into pieces. While doing

that, Jack damages the coat, his father's heritage, thinking that he is following his father by

separating himself from his rebellious brother.

The development of Puritanism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England is

reflected by Jack's failure at obedience to his father in Swift's story. He tries to live an ascetic

life in contrast to his brothers' luxuriance because he wants to show that he is not satisfied

with the practices of the Catholic and Anglican Churches. His enthusiasm for reform and

submissiveness leads him to legalism, and this is how his focus is diverted from following

God to following rules by chasing the instructions in his father's will. During this time, he
 AKIN TAZEGÜNEY, 8

does not love his brother and correct him gently, as ordered by Christ; instead, he approaches

him with furious passion. Like Peter, Jack lets his extreme passion prevent him to fulfill the

real message of the will. In the end, there occur problems which are actually because of his

behavior and his human failures, not because of the will. When A Tale of a Tub was

published, lots of Christians who adopted Puritanical lifestyle were still living in England.

Swift has used Jack in order to show that such a lifestyle is often resulted from the legalism

and lack of charity. By doing this, he wanted to resist the alienation which ordinary people

felt toward these extremists who argued that they had a true knowledge of God.

By giving an account of the drawbacks of the Anglican Church through Martin, Swift

had to stand face to face with a major criticism from a number of powerful figures within the

church, who accused him of blasphemy. This led to Swift’s not being able to climb up the

ladders of higher positions in the church. Yet, this wouldn’t stop him from continuing to

expose the wrong doings of the church and how it abused and undermined people’s religious

feelings. Swift makes himself clear in the “Apology” he published in the 1710 edition of A

Tale of a Tub. In the “Apology,”

he declares that, “The abuses of Religion, he proposed to set forth” and states
that, “It is manifest by the reception the following discourse hath met with, that
those who approve it, are a great majority among the men of taste.” In these
lines, Swift communicates both the firmness of his mission and his respect for
his target audience, the common people among whom A Tale of a Tub was
incredibly popular (Debaun, para. 14).

As Bywaters points out, Swift’s “Apology” is the best guide to A Tale of a Tub, as “it

contains several falsehoods and distortions of fact; nonetheless these very mispresentations

provide valuable evidence of Swift’s purposes. Probably the most flagrant of them is the

claim that his lost manuscript was published without his knowledge or consent (1996, p. 583):

How the author came to be without his papers, is a story not proper to be told,
and of very little use, being a private fact of which the reader would believe as
little or as much as he thought good. He had, however, a blotted copy by him,
 AKIN TAZEGÜNEY, 9

which he intended to have writ over, with many alterations, and this the
publishers were well aware of, having put it into the bookseller's preface, that
they apprehended a surreptitious copy, which was to be altered, &c. This,
though not regarded by readers, was a real truth, only the surreptitious copy
was rather that which was printed; and they made all haste they could, which
indeed was needless; the author not being at all prepared; but he has been told
the bookseller was in much pain, having given a good sum of money for the
copy. In the author's original copy there were not so many chasms as appear in
the book; and why some of them were left, he knows not; had the publication
been trusted to him, he should have made several corrections of passages,
against which nothing hath been ever objected. He should likewise have altered
a few of those that seem with any reason to be excepted against; but to deal
freely, the greatest number he should have left untouched as never suspecting it
possible any wrong interpretations could be made of them (Swift, p. 19).

To prove his claim to have lost control of his manuscript, Swift offers his own address given

misleadingly on purpose as “The Bookseller to the Reader.” He claims that he never had the

possession of his copy after lending it to his publisher via another person, who died

afterwards. He writes these in the “Apology” to distance himself from the authorship of the

satirical work Tale, as he must have foreseen the indignation his work would bring to him.

In “Apology”, the account of description he gives about the Anglican Church is a kind

that is intended to make the members of the church even angrier, as he describes them as “a

generally dreary and narrow-minded lot” (Bywaters). He says that they should have been

“angry to see the [f]ollies of [f]anaticism and [s]uperstititon exposed,” and asks whether “the

[c]lergy’s [r]esentments lay upon their [h]ands,” concluding that they “are not always very

nice in distinguishing between their [e]nemies and their [f]riends” (Swift, p.10). According to

Swift, he is victimized not by a bunch of bigots, but by the entire order of clergy, who were

not originally intended to peruse the Tale. He addresses those who attacked the Tale as the

sour, the envious, the stupid, and the tasteless. At the end of the “Apology,” he says that “[h]e

wrote only to the men of wit and taste, and he thinks he is not mistaken in his accounts, when

he says they have been all of his side, enough to give him the vanity of telling his name”

(p.21).
 AKIN TAZEGÜNEY, 10

Catholics and the dissenters get most of the satire in A Tale of a Tub, rather than the

Anglican clergy. There is now no doubt that Swift celebrates the Church of England as the

most perfect of all others in discipline and doctrine. However, he distinguishes himself from

the popular Anglican clergy who were most abundantly known as the active figures of the

ecclesiastical controversy of the time. He involves some gentle ridicule even in his treatment

of Anglican Martin in the Tale by giving him only one important speech, which is, in fact,

futile. When Jack forces Martin to tear of his jacket as he did, Martin, in the most phlegmatic

and tranquil manner he has never been before, imbues Jack to behave moderately in his

opposition to Peter. However, Martin’s lecture does not sedate Jack. “Martin, the ostensible

positive of the satire, is represented as a colour-less, choler-less figure” (Higgins, p. 131).

Swift’s doubts are not related to the truth of Martin’s words, yet to their rhetorical

effectiveness. “However improving in intention, orthodox ethical precepts are necessarily

useless: tedious to one’s readers and merely provoking to one’s opponents. Swift repeatedly

[implies] he has chosen a more effective means of attacking religious corruptions than his

fellow Anglican controversialists” (Bywaters, p. 589).

McDowell suggests that

Swift is finally more concerned in the Tale with the dissenting than the
Catholic threat precisely because of the fresh and bitter memory of the Civil
Wars: hence the creative energies he put into the invention of the Aeolist sect
and the comparatively mild and unmemorable treatment of Catholicism in the
narrative of Peter, Martin, and Jack. The narrators of the Tale and the
Mechanical Operation assert the absolute, transparent, and encyclopedic truth
of their texts in the manner of those dissenters and sectarians… while the
textual anarchy of Swift’s satires subverts any authorial claim for the perfect
concurrence of the text with divine order. But this is a dangerous game: by
demonstrating the epistemological unreliability of the text, Swift also risked
undermining the Anglican argument for the (delimited) authority of Scripture
against either the Catholic total investment of sacred authority in ecclesiastical
tradition or the deists’ outright rejection of Biblical authority (2009, p.88).

In conclusion, A Tale of a Tub is a great work of satire which must be taken very

seriously even after over three hundred years when it first published as it sheds light onto how
 AKIN TAZEGÜNEY, 11

members of clergy in any society usurp political power and undermine people’s religious

feelings. Swift saw this threat and was burdened with the responsibility to fight against the

Christian hypocrisy created by the Catholic Church and the endless zeal of the dissenters that

posed as an obstacle for the spread of the true Gospel. He risked the security of his own career

to inform Christians that human weaknesses do not annihilate Christ’s message, because he

realized that an ever growing body of English Christians was becoming estranged from the

church. Although it took quite some time for people to realize the core of Swift’s intended

message in the work, this work led to English Christians’ acceptance of their own moral

shortcomings when their practice of religion was concerned.

 AKIN TAZEGÜNEY, 12

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