Coda

This brief coda considers the advantages of making the aesthetic a key term in our thinking about secularism. Accounts of Victorian secularization often treat the aesthetic as a kind of fetishized shell for the vanished contents of belief. What Arnold, Eliot, and Pater show us is how aesthetic thought offered Victorian writers something more nuanced: a rubric for mapping out the different spaces and distributions of religion in the modern world. Approaching the problem in this way, we not only gain new interest in Arnold and Pater as secularist thinkers but also discover how their work informed early theorists of cultural pluralism such as Horace Kallen and John Dewey, who were steeped in Victorian social criticism and based their models of the social upon Arnoldian images of society as an aesthetic harmony of fixed differences.