Intimations of Incarnation
The Apologetic Vision of Robert Browning
by Louis A. Markos
Though many Christian readers are aware that Robert Browning was a master of the dramatic monologue form, few realize that the great Victorian poet was also a believer who incorporated into his most mature poems a uniquely Christian ethos and vision that can be illuminating and helpful to Christians of our own day.
In many of his later monologues, Browning presents us with a self-absorbed, slightly warped speaker who, in the process of unburdening his soul, either recalls or receives a redemptive vision. This vision offers him the potential for some form of salvation (theological, emotional, or aesthetic), but in the end, he fails to act on it, and his life goes on as before. Among the works that fit this dramatic pattern are “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “Caliban upon Setebos,” and “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.”
There are, however, three poems in the Browning canon in which this pattern reaches its zenith: poems whose speakers each experience a visionary moment that is at once redemptive and prophetic. The speakers are widely diverse (an Arab physician, a Greek philosopher, and a Jewish shepherd), yet their visions are strikingly similar.
In each monologue, the speaker, in the process of laying bare his doubts, his struggles, and his dreams, conceives a radical possibility: What if the God of the universe is a God of love who has taken human form and dwelt among us? That is to say, each speaker receives nothing less than an intimation of the Incarnation of Christ.
In tracing the mental and spiritual process by which each speaker arrives at his intimation, I hope to demonstrate that Browning’s poetry embodies a strong (and timeless) answer to two critiques of Christianity that beset our day: the modernist’s argument that Christ cannot be the only way to salvation because many people are prevented by their cultural conditioning or psychological make-up from receiving the gospel; and the postmodernist’s insistence that morality and theological doctrine are relative and that the claims of Christianity change their meaning (or non-meaning) from culture to culture and individual to individual.
Against these critiques, the three poems discussed below illustrate how all men of all ages and upbringings have the ability to catch a glimpse of the central truth of Christianity: the Incarnation.
A Meeting with Lazarus
“ An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician,” set in Palestine in A.D. 66, takes the form of a letter, one of many Karshish has been writing to his teacher and mentor, Abib, to tell him of his progress as he travels throughout the Middle East. A self-described “picker-up of learning’s crumbs,” Karshish has set himself the task of learning and recording the full medical secrets of the Middle East. His journey, though difficult and dangerous, has thus far been successful.
However, while resting in the town of Bethany just outside of Jerusalem, he encounters an anomaly that disturbs him.
Louis Markos , Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His 19 books include Lewis Agonistes; Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis; On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis; and From A to Z to Narnia with C. S. Lewis.
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