Feature
Swift Prophet
The Christian Meaning of Gulliver’s Travels
In Gulliver’s Travels, the narrator goes from being a barely nominal Christian to an atheist, yet Jonathan Swift’s masterpiece is a deeply religious meditation on the “mystery of iniquity” (Matt. 24:12) as it is worked out in the Church in Britain past, present, and future. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift defends the Church with consummate irony by using the voice of an irreligious narrator.
Swift was a high-church clergyman who took religion very seriously. A friend who knew him well reported that he used to say grace before and after meals with “an emphasis and fervor which every one around him saw, and felt,” and that he alone in Dublin (in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where he was dean) followed “the primitive practice” of giving Communion every Sunday. Before writing Gulliver’s Travels, he spent seven years (1714–1721) going through “a very voluminous course of ecclesiastical history” and a study of the church fathers.
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
Anne Barbeau Gardiner is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She has published on Dryden, Milton, and Swift, as well as on Catholics of the 17th century.
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
28.3—May/June 2015
Of Bicycles, Sex, & Natural Law
Describing Human Ends & Our Limitations Is Neither Futile Nor Unloving by R. V. Young
23.1—January/February 2010
It’s Bent on Bringing Down the House on the Family & the Church by Douglas Farrow
27.2—March/April 2014
Higher Education Should Advance the Glorious Liberty of the Sons of God by Anthony Esolen
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
