The “Supposed Fact” of Christ: Agency and Faith in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean

Abstract: This article reconsiders Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean in light of historical conversations around conversion and nineteenth-century British epistemologies. We argue that Marius participates in the project of imagining epistemic alternatives to the empiricism and positivism that shaped nineteenth-century religious discourse. Through Marius, Pater imagines an understanding of faith in which aesthetic experience supplements imperfect historical knowledge, giving probable grounds for belief. Within this epistemology, Pater constructs a responsive model of human agency, where the convert is transformed gradually through the community, circumstance, and fortuitous events.