Robert Burns, an ecumenical poet
As Scotland marks Burns's 250th birthday, Gerard Carruthers points to his warm relationship to Catholicism

27 November 2009

Burns had a long-standing friendship with the Catholic Bishop John Geddes

In 2009 the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns has been celebrated. The Parliamentary Executive at Holyrood has declared a year of "homecoming" in which the iconic poet is one of a number of strands of Scottish identity promoted for international appeal. The aim is to attract visits from the historic Scottish diaspora and tourism generally. Other themes in "homecoming" such as "golf" and "whisky" are not so obviously based on the cult of personality. Burns looms like a colossus over Scotland's sense of itself, standing for successful self-striving, independent-mindedness and a clutch of other characteristics that might seem particularly apposite to the confident, modern small nation.

But problems remain with Burns's relationship to Scotland, and perhaps unsurprisingly these have to do with religion. Burns has long been venerated in parts of the Scottish consciousness as a "Protestant poet", and the truth needs disentangling here from the myth. A later Scottish poet, Edwin Muir, one of many who have excoriated the "Burns cult", opined that Burns was an alternative Christ figure for the Scots. Wittily, Muir mocked the puritanical predilections of Scottish Presbyterianism by proposing that Burns carried the burden of sin for his fellow countrymen. Notoriously, said Muir, Burns indulged the pleasures of the flesh and was not slow to write about these for the vicarious enjoyment of the Scots. They would then read with enjoyment of those things that they were too timid to do for themselves. We might take this teasing a stage further and say that for Scotland, perhaps, Burns has been the flesh made word.

The truth is even more complex. As a writer, Burns did two things with the treatment of his Presbyterian cradle-culture. First of all, he satirised its hypocritical "Holy Willies" who are to be found in all religions, keeping the faith outwardly but behind the scenes full of private avarice and vice.

Equally important, however, Burns also told Presbyterianism that it had a culture. Among many of the "better class" of Scotland a long-standing idea about the national Kirk in its austere liturgy and in its closeness to the common folk was that this was a dour, dry sect with little in the way of colour or intellectual hinterland. In one fell swoop in 1786 Burns's "The Cotter's Saturday Night" celebrated a pious small-holder (somewhat modelled on Burns's own father) gathering around him family and fellow workers for Saturday night Bible reading. These were folk of sincere piety, interpreting scripture, enjoying companionship, home-grown food, good health and simple pleasures, generally. All of this in contrast to a British-wide consumerist society identified by Burns and many others in the late 18th century plunging headlong into excessive consumerism and luxury.

For the first time, then, Scottish Presbyterianism cut a good figure in imaginative literature, and the popularity of Burns's poem, reprinted in countless newspapers, stretched to England, America and elsewhere with a welcome reception among many Protestant dissenters. In the 1790s Burns even rehabilitated those harsh, heroic 17th century Covenanters, persecuted by the government for daring to stand up for the freedom to worship according to their own principles and without state interference. Cast out of much mainstream historiography for over 100 years as backward-looking fanatics, the Covenanters were re-read for modernity by Burns as having much in common with the democrats of the early stages of the French Revolution.

We need to be aware, too, of the use of Burns after his death. Throughout the 19th century many copies of Burns poems went throughout the British Empire in the portmanteaux of numerous imperial Scots. Broadly, the story seems to have gone something like this: in the face of often less than savoury Scoto-British colonising activity, Burns could be turned to for a reassuring glimpse of a rural, idyllic, morally steadfast nation from which the coloniser had come. Burns became a safely anachronistic alternative reality to be indulged after a hard day's work, and, in the rapidly growing phenomenon of the Burns Supper, to offset somewhat the less than cosy communities and nations that the imperial Scot was now helping to create in parts of Africa, India and elsewhere.

At home, Burns was also used by Tory scholars such as the leading light of the Orange Order, William Motherwell, who was desperate for the working man not to be given the vote. In this context, celebration of Burns was recommended as a safe mass activity for the ordinary man which might keep him out of democratic mischief. The spread of Burns clubs throughout the 19th century proved the success of the idea.

It is perhaps no surprise that Burns as sincere Protestant poet and the later construction of him as imperial Protestant poet have obscured a deeper truth. For Burns was culturally ecumenical. As a product of the Enlightenment, he was the first lowland Scottish writer to have much of a good word for the highlander. The great 15th-century poet William Dunbar, for instance, said that there was no music in Hell... except for the bagpipes. In "Address of Beelzebub", perceived too fiercely satirical to be published during Burns's life-time, the poet has devil-in-chief Beelzebub commend the Earl of Breadalbane for preventing the nearly starving Gaelic-speaking tenants to emigrate to Canada. Beelzebub recommends even harsher treatment for the Macdonalds of Glengary: child-labour and prostitution for their young girls.

The Macdonalds were doubly marginalised: not only were they highlanders, but they were also Catholic, and Burns's relationship to Scottish Catholicism is often understated. This is precisely so because in the past it is a story that has not suited elements of Presbyterian British Scotland. The clergyman whom Burns tells us in his letters he regards as the finest man of God in late 18th-century Scotland is Bishop John Geddes. The Catholic prelate met Burns in 1787 as the poet was putting together his second subscription copy of poems. Out of several thousand copies, Geddes subscribed to over half a dozen of these, which he then sent to the Scottish colleges in Paris and Spain, to the Scottish Catholic community in Rome and the Scottish Benedictine houses in Franconia. Burns was thrilled by Geddes's action, not because of the negligible financial gain that the sale of these books brought him, but because the Scottish Catholic community in its semi-exiled status brought with it a whiff of romance (specifically Jacobitism) and the idea of cultured sensibility. Burns's first "international" audience, then, comprised Scottish Catholicism abroad.

Eventually tired of being lionised in Edinburgh, Burns settled down in rural Dumfriesshire as a farmer and an exciseman in 1788. Tellingly, he remained in correspondence with Geddes, writing to the bishop in confessional mode, reflecting on life and death more philosophically than elsewhere in his letters. At one point he returned to Geddes a copy of his own poems which he had borrowed from the prelate. Into this volume, the famous "Geddes Burns" wrote 13 fresh works, which often reflect on death and grief and which were clearly designed to speak to the spiritual interests of Geddes himself. In one remarkable passage, Burns imagines himself as a medieval bedesman, a rosary-reciting hermetic monk. Here again, as with the figure of the Covenanter, we see Burns re-imagining with great sympathy parts of Scotland's discarded psychological past. Burns is also in the vanguard of sympathetically re-imagining the character of Mary, Queen of Scots, someone who had nothing of the high status she enjoys today until Burns and others changed this in the late 18th century, someone who had previously been seen as a byword in dark, feminine, Stuart despotism. Burns's "Lament of Mary Queen of Scots in Spring" was set to new music by composer James MacMillan and premiered in 2009. This is one sign that the story of Burns and his very positive relationship to Catholicism is now returning.


Gerard Carruthers is director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow. Part of his ongoing research involves uncovering the extensive involvement of Robert Burns with Scottish Catholicism