Marius The Epicurean - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

In an early review in Macmillan's Magazine the novelist Mary Ward praised "the great psychological interest" of the book, but identified as a weakness its tendency to depict Christianity from an aesthetic viewpoint, rather than presenting it as life's ultimate truth and reality. T. S. Eliot, with his Stoic and Christian sympathies, concurred in his influential 1930 essay. More recently William F. Shuter has noted that "the lack of curiosity exhibited by Marius as to what was actually believed by the Christian community to which he is so strongly drawn" matched Pater's own lack of curiosity; it contrasts strongly with Marius' (and Pater's) keen interest in philosophy. Harold Bloom writes, "Pater evaded the novel's ultimate problem by killing off Marius before the young man grasps the theological and moral exclusiveness of Christianity. Marius could not remain Marius and renounce . Whether Pater earns the structural irony of the novel's concluding pages, as a still-pagan Marius dies a sanctified Christian death, is legitimately questionable." Nevertheless Bloom praises Pater's integrity in his handling of Marius's epiphany in the Sabine Hills: "The self knows that it is joined to no immortal soul, yet now believes also that its own integrity can be at one with the system of forces outside it. By de-idealising the epiphany, Pater makes it available to the coming age."