Unspeakable Truths, Unutterable Sincerity: Godwin’s The Genius of Christianity Unveiled

Abstract

Still incomplete at the time of Godwin’s death in 1836, The Genius of Christianity stands as his epitaph, his final contribution to the intellectual debates of his era. Serving as a companion piece to Political Justice, Genius would complete Godwin’s labor of freeing the human mind from enslavement to prejudice, accomplishing the same task with respect to religion as Political Justice had done – or had sought to do – for politics. Genius gives us a window on to a persistent tensions of Godwin’s life, his intermittent awareness of the ways in which truth and sincerity do not perfectly coincide. Having parted company with the Enlightenment, Genius pauses at the threshold to Romanticism, caught between both, party to neither, prey still to a skepticism that unsettles both. It is not only a meditation upon, but itself a demonstration of, the mind’s capacity to resist truth.