This epilogue offers a concluding excursus, and looks back at a few key themes established in the collection of essays in Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity. Its aim is to tease out some further points for discussion concerning what could be described as a Janus-faced tendency within Victorian self-identity – a looking back to the religious and classical past, in the very process of charging forward. This excursus will introduce the conceptual vocabulary of simultaneity and of cultural forgetting, used respectively by Benedict Anderson and Paul Connerton, to facilitate some further reflection on Victorian experiences of time and temporality. It will contend that Victorian cultural engagements with the Bible and antiquity were always mediated via distinctly modern ways of knowing. If the book as a whole details a series of critical engagements with biblical and classical pasts through the long nineteenth century, then in this epilogue, an opportunity arises for analysing the very conditions – the material and epistemological frameworks – which shaped such engagements.

Frederick Denison Maurice’s writings on the history of philosophy, from his 1839 Encyclopaedia Metropolitana article on ‘Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy’ to the various iterations of the multi-volume book that grew out of this text, are a vital and underappreciated aspect of his life’s work. Maurice ran together an idiosyncratic reading of the Old Testament with his marginally less wilful view of ancient Greek philosophy to provide a unique answer to the question of how biblical and classical heritages might be reconciled by Christians. But his history did more than this, building on the ideas of Coleridge to trace essential connections between philosophy, morality, and politics and telling a story about the development of the family, the nation, and the church, in a way that provides distinctive insight into Maurice’s core commitments. The resulting narrative was also capacious enough to change emphasis over different editions, most obviously as Maurice’s interest in various other global religious and intellectual traditions grew, and he began to seek a history that was more about the place of Anglicanism in the world, and not simply about its place in the polity.

Victorian sculpture is less well-served by the scholarship than Victorian painting, and biblical sculpture ignored comparative to pieces inspired by Greco-Roman mythology. Rather than treat these as two separate strands, or, alternatively, assume that statues of Old Testament figures such as Eve and Rebecca were interchangeable with those of Venus and Psyche, this chapter thinks harder about how they relate. Looking first at free-standing sculpture, then at religious works in the private house, and finally at sculpture in the church, it hones in on affect to determine how the classical and biblical and the interactions and discrepancies between the two spoke to nineteenth-century British society, gender, belief and so on. As well as revisiting artists such as Thomas Woolner and John Gibson, it puts an emphasis too on women sculptors such as Emmeline Halse and on female representation, patronage and response to show that sculpture was as important in sermon-making as pictures.

In the late nineteenth century, the passion play at Oberammergau in Bavaria became a major international sensation whose decennial performances attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors from across Europe and the wider world. This chapter argues that nineteenth-century observers increasingly understood Oberammergau not only as a site for the re-enactment of the biblical past, but also as a provocative example of the open-air ritual theatre they associated with Greek antiquity. Historians often associate nineteenth-century German philhellenism with Protestant elites, but this chapter shows how an unambiguously Catholic phenomenon, the Oberammergau passion play, took on special resonance among those who were inspired by the call for Dionysian theatre associated with Friedrich Nietzsche at the fin de siècle. The analysis especially focuses on three German-speaking dramatists – Richard von Kralik, Oskar Panizza and Friedrich Lienhard – for whom the purportedly Greek qualities of Oberammergau prompted reflection on the possibilities and limitations of Dionysian drama as a tool of artistic, moral and national regeneration.

In late nineteenth-century Rome the synergies and contrasts between past and present, antiquity and the Bible, were vexed. Occasionally, the tensions spawned by these dualities erupted on to the surface of the city as material excrescence. Perhaps the most conspicuous manifestation of this was architecture. The case of St Paul’s Within-the-Walls – the spectacular High Victorian church designed for the American Episcopal Church in Rome by the famous English architect George Edmund Street – is a prime example. The church’s incumbent, the Rev. Robert Jenkins Nevin, sought to mark the building as a symbol of liberty and modernity in what he and his congregation perceived as the ancient corruptions of Papal Rome. Themes concerning history, religious politics, architecture, and the city were marshalled and mingled in an effort to make plain the distinction between conservative and progressive culture in the ‘new’ Italy. In this contested milieu the historic figure of St Paul was appealed to as a precursor to the inherent liberalism of bible-oriented Protestantism, with the religious liberty it enshrined posited as the only possible future for religious order. This essay explores these themes and their concomitant tensions and contradictions through the politics surrounding Nevin’s vision for this landmark building in the city of ‘Popes and Caesars’.

Thispiece offers a introduction and overview of thekey themes established in the collection of essays in Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity: The Shock of the Old. It opens by alluding to the Victorian pride in progress, in technology, in travel – in the newness of modernity. It proceeds to point out, however, that it was a critical engagement with the past that most challenged how Victorians understood the world and their place in it. In other words, this Victorian anxiety about progress was fed by the shock of the old. The piece then introduces thecore thesis of the volume as a whole, which is thatVictorian encounters with the past – though quintessentially modern – can only be properly understood through the nineteenth century’s passionate exploration of the interaction between religion and historicity, between the theological and the classical, between the Bible and classical antiquity.