Oscar Wilde’s surprising spirituality

My first encounter with Oscar Wilde was probably much the same as yours: I was assigned The Importance of Being Earnest in high school English class. I read about half of it, then filled in the gaps with the 2002 film adaptation. I found it amusing, but not much more than that, and our brief classroom discussion of Wilde’s famous quips and epigrams (e.g., “Life is far too important a thing to ever talk seriously about”) seemed to confirm my initial judgment that Wilde was a very funny, but ultimately somewhat vain and superficial writer. And that was about it.

Many years later, I ended up reading two of Wilde’s final works—De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol—and was shocked to discover that what I initially believed to be little more than a puddle went far deeper than I had imagined. In them, the man I knew best for a series of eyeroll-inducing puns meditated on life and death, sin and guilt, and the depths of human cruelty, and he seemed to do a better job of it than many philosophers and theologians.

Some historical context from Wilde’s own life is helpful in explaining what brought a man who avoided the serious like the plague to write so solemnly for the hundred or so pages of De Profundis. You might know this story, but even if you don’t, it will probably sound unfortunately familiar—the tragedy and persecution it contains still has its resonances today.

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