Vyacheslav Ivanov and C.M. Bowra: a ... - UCL Discovery

which art approaches the sphere of religious feeling through its association with inspiration and
prophecy, his view of the relationship between humanism and Christianity remained rather fluid
and undefined. Isaiah Berlin found that Bowra’s attitude to religion was ‘complicated and
obscure: he had a feeling for religious experience; he had no sympathy for positivist or
materialist creeds.’ 72 To many of his contemporaries he appeared ‘disturbingly frank and non-
conformist’; he was generally seen as ‘a free-thinker, an epicure and an uninhibited advocate of
pleasure’. 73 Hugh Lloyd-Jones called him ‘an open rebel’ and noted: ‘He had a kind of religion,
like that of the early Greeks, but he did not believe in Christianity.’ 74 In a similar vein Noel
Annan observed that he ‘led the vanguard of the Immoral Front’ before the war and that
‘dogmatic Christianity was beyond him. But so was rationalist interpretation of being. As
a classical scholar he drew his religion from ancient Greece and Rome.’ 75
Bowra’s strong belief in the need to develop the ‘inner life’ through literature did not
extend to embracing religion as a value in itself. In a letter to Cyril Connolly about his
reaction to reading T.S. Eliot he made a revealing comment on this very issue: ‘Eliot hit me
very hard inside, but I resisted it, I resisted the Christian part. But now I see that he was
on the whole right, and that the Christian part is in fact hardly Christian at all, but really a
plea for the inner life.’ 76 Bowra clearly preferred to treat Christian elements in art as
manifestations of an undefined ‘inner life’. Ivanov was sensitive to this area of resistance in
Bowra’s response to the religious dimension of literature and tried to shift him in the
direction of a more explicitly Christian approach to the humanist tradition. Apart from his
possible interest in Bowra’s own spiritual welfare, he was also doubtlessly concerned about
72 Berlin, ‘Memorial Address in St Mary’s’, 21.
73 The Times, ‘A Brilliant Oxford Figure’, 14.
74 Lloyd-Jones, ‘British Academy Memoir’, 35.
75 Noel Annan, ‘A Man I Loved’, in Lloyd-Jones (ed.), Maurice Bowra: A Celebration, 55, 84.
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