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MANY literary critics continue to cast Lord Byron as a deviant and a miscreant who was contemptuous, or at least suspicious, of all that Western culture and Western religion revere.1 Indeed, as a young man who denied nothing but doubted everything, Byron explored superstition, deism, and skepticism on the mental side of things; drinking, gambling, whoring, homosexuality, and incest on the physical side.2 The early cantos of Byron's first masterpiece, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, are pessimistic and nihilistic, depicting the poet's hopeless journey through the ruined and war-torn remnants of once proud European nations. As he journeys, the young poet declares that even when "A thousand years scarce serve to form a state" still "An hour may lay it in the dust" (II.84).3 Surely, this disillusioned and impetuous rascal would be vigorously averse to Christianity, and even more so to its strictest and most traditional branch, Catholicism?
But, in fact, Byron wrote dozens of poems and plays based upon Biblical subject matter including Hebrew Melodies (1815), Cain (1821), and Heaven and Earth (1823), all of which appropriate and reinterpret scripture, but, as Wolf Z. Hirst demonstrates, never attempt to revise or subvert it. Byron's most affirming verses on religion appear in his greatest poem, Don Juan. Like Bernard Beatty (see esp. 70-84), I see Don Juan progressing not toward despairing skepticism but toward optimistic, albeit cautionary, faithfulness. And while Byron is not explicit, he does hint in the final cantos of the poem that this faithfulness is a Catholic Christian one. The protagonist, true to his namesake, misses out on the goodness that he encounters. But the narrator, through references to Catholicism and through deployment of a prominent Catholic character named Aurora, makes clear the manifest presence in our world of genuine miracles and redemptive ideals that are available for those who trust them. In Byron's own words:
Some people would impose now with authority,
Turpin's or Monmouth Geoffry's Chronicle;
Men whose historical superiority
Is always greatest at a miracle.
But Saint Augustine has the great priority,
Who bids all men believe the impossible,
Because 'tis so. Who nibble, scribble, quibble, he
Quiets at once with `quia impossibile'.
And therefore, mortals, cavil not at all;
Believe:-if `tis improbable, you must;
And if it is impossible, you...