The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D. — Volume 03: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church — Volume 1

Jonathan Swift, the man who imagined giants and talking horses, was also a troubled churchman who could not stop arguing with God. This volume collects his scattered writings on religion and the English Church, and what emerges is a portrait of a brilliant mind in perpetual conflict with itself. Swift defends Christianity's social necessity while privately confessing to friends that he finds its doctrines unbelievable. He performs his duties as Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral while openly mocking the clergy around him. The result is a body of work that operates on multiple levels at once: earnest argument for institutional religion coexist with devastating satire of its pretensions. The centerpiece is his famous attack on those who would abolish Christianity, a polemic that praises the faith while simultaneously demonstrating how easily it could be corrupted. These are not the comfortable devotions of a confident believer. They are the restless, witty, often bitter reflections of a man who found the questions far easier to demolish than the answers. For readers who know Swift only from Gulliver's Travels, this collection reveals the darker, more complicated intelligence behind the satire.