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.
But why is this meaning hidden? First, Swift hated sanctimony, so he would often write about religion under an ironic mask. Second, he loved to create riddles, as in A Tale of a Tub, to make his readers think. And third, he believed that rational argument could never adequately defend the Christian mysteries, which have to be embraced by an act of will, without the “artillery of words.”
Swift leaves clues to guide us to the hidden meaning of Gulliver’s Travels—as in the names Lilliput and Laputa, for example. In French, La Pute means “the Whore,” and in Revelation 17:18 she is the city of Antichrist. So when Gulliver visits Lilliput and Laputa, he visits a smaller and larger version of the same place. Where most Protestants of his day would have identified “the Whore” with Rome, Swift follows the early Church by glimpsing her in his own time and place, for St. Paul laments that “the mystery of iniquity doth already work” (2 Thess. 2:7), and St. John that “even now are there many antichrists” (1 John 2:18).
In Gulliver’s Travels, space is a substitute for time, so that when Gulliver visits Lilliput in 1699, he visits modern Britain, a place full of spiritual midgets where the Church is desecrated. In Brobdingnag, which he reaches on his second voyage, he visits a Britain of centuries past, a place full of spiritual giants where the Church is still intact. On the third voyage, he observes the rise of atheism in politics in Laputa, scientific pursuits at the Academy of Lagado in Balnibarbi, the occult in Glubdubdrib, and commerce in Japan. On his last voyage, in the futuristic land of the Houyhnhnms, he meets Antichrist and full-blown atheism, and witnesses the great persecution of the Church.
In Gulliver’s Travels, then, we see in Brobdingnag the glory that was, and in comparison with it, the three stages of the “mystery of iniquity”: in Lilliput, we see degeneration; in Laputa, apostasy; and in Houyhnhnmland, atheism at the point of exterminating Christianity.
Lilliput: Degeneration
In his “Ode to Sancroft,” an archbishop of Canterbury, Swift lamented that the modern English were as far fallen from their ancestors as “fiends” are from “angels.” At the start of the first voyage, Gulliver praises the Lilliputians—though, perhaps revealingly, only for being “most excellent Mathematicians” and having “arrived to a great Perfection in Mechanicks”—but he later admits that they have degenerated very far from their “original Institutions.”
The small size of Lilliputians reflects their shrunken spiritual stature, due to king-worship, worldly pride, and disregard of the Church. By comparison to them, Gulliver is a giant because he grew up in an earlier age and in humble circumstances—“a Stranger to Courts, for which I was unqualified by the Meanness of my Condition.” But he soon shrinks in spiritual stature by taking pride in the petty, worldly honors of Lilliput.
In Lilliput, the Church has been desecrated. After his capture, Gulliver is chained to “an ancient Temple . . . polluted some Years before by an unnatural Murder”—a reference to the execution of Charles I, the great defender of the Anglican Church—and which later, by “the Zeal of those People”—a reference to low-church bishops who came in after the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688—“had been applied to common Use, and all the Ornaments and Furniture carried away.” This Temple is the Church of England at the start of the eighteenth century. It is powerless to avert sacrilege and is so shrunken that it now shelters only one man, and even he must “creep” in by the North Gate.
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.
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