Secularization and the Construction of an Author–Reader Intellectual Community: A Study of Virginia Woolf’s Religious Legacies

Abstract

The secularization of religion in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Britain profoundly altered the ethical foundations of the modernist novel, challenging writers to reimagine the role of literature in the absence of religious authority. Against this backdrop, the present study investigates how modernist authors—exemplified by Virginia Woolf—both inherited and transformed the ethical ideals of religious communities. Through a comparative approach, this article traces the secularization of the Clapham Sect’s “moral covenant” and the Quaker notion of the “inner light”, revealing how these religious legacies, as mediated through the intellectual frameworks of Leslie Stephen and George Moore, contributed to Woolf’s construction of an author–reader intellectual community. The study demonstrates how this religious inheritance is reconfigured in Woolf’s theory of the ‘common reader,’ highlighting her contribution to modernist aesthetics and ethics. Through the figure of the ‘common reader,’ religion emerges not as a set of fixed doctrines, but as a foundation for constructing ethical communities in a secular age.

1. Introduction

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the process of secularization in Britain not only dismantled the institutional foundations of religion but also compelled modernists to seek new models of ethical responsibility and communal belonging. As Charles Taylor has argued, secularization should not be simplistically understood as the inevitable decline of religious belief and practice in the wake of scientific progress and the ascendancy of reason. Rather, Taylor identifies three defining characteristics of secularization in Western civilization: the “disenchantment” of the public sphere, the waning of individual religious practice and belief, and a fundamental transformation in the very conditions of belief (Taylor 2007, pp. 2–3). Within this historical framework, modernist literature did not merely abandon the ethical spirit and communal bonds once cultivated by religion; instead, it inherited and transformed them, reimagining these values as integral to its intellectual and aesthetic project. The writings of Virginia Woolf stand precisely at the intersection of Victorian religious legacy, modernist innovation, and philosophical experimentation, illustrating how modernist writers were not only heirs to the reconstruction of ethical life, but also architects of a new kind of novelistic ethical community.

Scholars generally regard Woolf as a committed atheist—an impression substantiated by her incredulity at T. S. Eliot’s conversion to Catholicism: “A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God” (Woolf 1975a, pp. 457–58). In recent years, however, scholars have increasingly uncovered Woolf’s intricate entanglements with religion, arguing that she was significantly influenced by both the Clapham Sect and Quakerism. As Anthony Domestico observes, modernists—including Woolf—frequently turned to literature and art to fulfill the role once occupied by God, responding to a cultural moment defined by the “death of God”: “High modernist engagement with religion was knotty, to say the least. Many modernists saw a tight, even causal relationship between the death of God and the birth of a new literature: modernism was the kind of literature that could be written—that had to be written—in a world emptied of God …… even committed atheists such as Woolf, looked to art to provide the ritualistic, aesthetic, and even spiritual values that religion had offered in the past” (Paulsell 2019, p. 39). Christopher J. Knight, by contrast, situates Woolf within a complex and ambivalent relationship to the Christian tradition: “[T]here resides a third possibility to consider, registering itself neither as an affirmation nor a negation, but rather as a vexation, wherein the religious convictions of the past are undercut by the doubts of the present, just as the doubts of the present are called into question by the convictions of the past” (Knight 2007, p. 43). In sum, while scholars have approached Woolf’s relationship with religion from various perspectives and acknowledged its significance, they have yet to specify which elements of Britain’s religious legacy were inherited by modernist writers such as Woolf, or to explain how these religious ideas concretely informed her aesthetic practices and ethical vision.

The dual legacy of the Clapham Sect and Quakerism—secularized through the interpretive frameworks of Leslie Stephen and G. E. Moore—can be understood as creating a foundational tension that shaped the development of Woolf’s aesthetic-ethical vision. Specifically, the Clapham tradition, transmitted through Stephen, emphasized an external moral covenant and public service. Yet in its secularized transformation, it tended to devolve into moralism and authority, often struggling to accommodate individual difference and creative freedom. In contrast, Quakerism’s emphasis on inner consciousness and sincerity, refracted through Moore’s intuitionist ethics, fostered authenticity and introspection but also resulted in a form of ethical isolation, lacking shared standards for communal life. As Charles Taylor observes, the Bloomsbury group ultimately enacted a more radical break with Victorian moralism, elevating “personal relations and the beautiful state of the soul” as the highest values, thus shifting the moral center of gravity from public obligation to inner experience and personal affection: “The alternative ethic was the one articulated by Moore, which identified the only intrinsically good things as personal relations and beautiful states of mind” (Taylor 2007, p. 405). Woolf’s aesthetic ethics, shaped in part by the intellectual milieux of Leslie Stephen and G. E. Moore, emerged against the backdrop of an early twentieth-century crisis of faith in Britain. As Woolf said, “And we have no religion. All is tumultuous and transitional” (Woolf 1932, p. 21). It is therefore methodologically warranted to explore the reader–author ethical community in Woolf by probing its possible religious genealogies in relation to these two figures. Thus, by positioning Woolf’s “common reader” as the hinge between aesthetic autonomy and an ethics of communal responsibility—a hinge forged in the crucible of Quaker inwardness and Clapham-inspired social conscience—this essay joins current efforts to reassess her legacy beyond the paradigm of strict secularism.

2. The Secularization of the Clapham Sect and Leslie Stephen: Woolf’s Inheritance and Resistance of the “Moral Covenant”

The Clapham Sect was a network of evangelical Anglicans active in Britain from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, exerting a profound influence on the moral and cultural atmosphere of the Victorian era. Prominent figures such as William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, and Hannah More were associated with the movement. The Sect’s theology emphasized the formation of a unified moral community through voluntary adherence to shared doctrinal principles, and it advocated for social betterment as a central ethical imperative: “Protestantism engendered an image of parallel readers, each searching the scriptures for themselves, moving along their own journey in the exploration of texts, and seeking their way toward a democratic vision of interpretation where unity was imagined in shared agreement of the meaning of passages of scripture” (Paulsell 2019, p. 259). Precisely because the Clapham Sect promoted a vision of Christianity closely tied to social responsibility, humanitarian reform, and the pursuit of a moral public sphere, it functioned, in essence, as an evangelical offshoot composed of a minority elite. Born from what Charles Taylor called a “strong surge of piety” that arose in Britain partly in reaction to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, evangelical movements like the Clapham Sect helped shape a view of civilization as British, Protestant, and devoted to “discipline and decency, freedom and benevolence” that would extend beyond the resurgence of Christian belief and practice (Paulsell 2019, p. 16). Accordingly, they made significant contributions to the abolition of the slave trade, the expansion of education, and the development of philanthropic institutions in Britain.

Woolf, moreover, had deep familial ties to the Clapham Sect: “Virginia Woolf had great-grandfathers who were active members of that early-nineteenth-century upper-middle-class collectivity of reforming Anglican evangelicals (Rosenbaum 1987, p. 22). What distinguished the Clapham Sect was its concept of the “moral covenant”—a shared, implicit contract among all members that rendered individuals responsible not only to God, but also to one another and to society at large. Grounded in biblical authority yet operative in public life, this covenant shaped middle-class attitudes toward charity, governance, and everyday conduct. At its core, the Clapham worldview insisted on the inseparability of religion and social engagement. Its interpretation of Christian doctrine emphasized discipline, industriousness, and, above all, a collective responsibility for the well-being of others. This communal moral covenant was not an abstract ideal, but a lived and practiced ethic. As such, it became a formative force in shaping the moral habits and ideals of the Victorian middle class. E. M. Forster even suggested that the ethos of the Clapham Sect could serve as a defining feature of the Bloomsbury Group. Although the Bloomsbury circle was not a closed community of saints—lacking initiation rites or esoteric rituals—its members shared such a wide range of interests that they formed a united and affectionate community, living in close proximity and bound by mutual engagement.

The most significant transmission of the Clapham religious tradition into Woolf’s intellectual environment came through her father, Leslie Stephen. Stephen stands as a paradigmatic figure in the secularization of the Clapham ethos during the late nineteenth century. Although he renounced orthodox religious belief, he did not repudiate the moral seriousness and communal ideals of his evangelical predecessors. Rather, he redirected the energies of the Clapham tradition toward the secular domains of literature, culture, and public reason. As a man of letters, biographer, and critic, Stephen came to regard literature as a new vehicle for ethical cultivation and collective purpose. This transformation, moreover, was deeply entwined with the broader social changes of his time.

The crisis of faith in nineteenth-century Britain was driven not, as traditional narratives often suggest, solely by the impact of Darwinism on biblical authority. Long before that, a deep cross-pressure had already taken shape among the cultural and intellectual elite. On the one hand, the rise of a notion of an “impersonal order”—informed by scientific rationalism and historical criticism—rendered traditional Christian doctrines increasingly implausible. On the other hand, there was a growing moral and aesthetic revulsion toward utilitarianism, the atomization of commercial-industrial society, and the spread of philistinism. Within this cross-pressure, thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold assumed the role of bridge-builders. They sought to discard the outdated trappings of religion—miracles, providential intervention, and supernaturalism—while preserving what they saw as the “sacred spirit” of Christianity. In doing so, they constructed a new, highly depersonalized form of “religion” centered on a belief in a transcendent moral force that propels history forward: “The doctrines of this new form were not very definite, but they seemed to involve the existence of some not purely human spiritual force, which could help humanity to move forward to higher forms of life” (Taylor 2007, p. 379).

This line of thought offered many Victorian intellectuals a path of gradual transition from orthodox belief to a kind of faith-infused atheism or pantheism. Matthew Arnold’s conception of culture stands as a paradigmatic example of this effort. It sought to fill the spiritual void left by the decline of religious faith with “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” Arnold’s ideas, as articulated in Culture and Anarchy, exemplify the turn toward a humanistic substitute for traditional theology: “Finally, perfection, —as culture, from a thorough disinterested study of human nature and human experience, learns to conceive it, is an harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature, and is not consistent with the over-development of any one power at the expense of the rest Here it goes beyond religion, as religion is generally conceived by us” (Arnold 2006, p. 36).

Subsequently, a more radical humanism of altruism and duty—represented by figures such as Leslie Stephen, J. S. Mill, and George Eliot—extended Arnold’s project. This form of humanism preserved many of the ethical core values of evangelicalism, such as rigorous self-discipline, a strong sense of responsibility, and “manliness”, yet it detached these virtues from their theological foundations and rooted them instead in a secular faith in human potential.

However, the internal tensions of this Victorian humanism—centered on duty and discipline—soon became apparent. The emphasis on discipline and “manliness” came into conflict with the modern valuation of emotion, spontaneity, and aesthetic experience. In other words, the transformation of the Clapham moral covenant into a secular ideal was far from seamless. The older model relied on divine command and communal ritual, whereas the emerging “literary covenant” was grounded in rational debate, aesthetic sensibility, and a belief in the redemptive power of culture. This shift reflects the broader Victorian crisis of faith, in which many thinkers, having lost the certainties of traditional religion, continued to seek ethical orientation and a sense of communal belonging. As Terry Eagleton puts it: “What, then, of the idea of culture? If this had always been the most plausible candidate to inherit the sceptre of religion, it was because it involves foundational values, transcendent truths, authoritative traditions, ritual practices, sensuous symbolism, spiritual inwardness, moral growth, corporate identity and a social mission” (Eagleton 2014, p. 120).

Leslie Stephen repeatedly reflected on this dilemma in his essays and memoirs. He advocated for a “secular gospel”, rejecting religious belief while asserting that literature, science, and history could serve as sources of meaning, purpose, and social cohesion. “I read Comte, too, and became convinced among other things that Noah’s flood was a fiction (or rather convinced that I had never believed in it) and that it was wrong for me to read the story as if it were a sacred truth. So I had to give up my position at Trinity Hall” (Stephen 1977, p. 6). However, Stephen also recognized the limitations of substituting culture for faith. He acknowledged that in the absence of shared belief, culture could easily lapse into moralizing and intellectual elitism. This tendency toward dogmatism and the reinforcement of patriarchal authority was precisely what Woolf herself despised. The critique closely echoes Terry Eagleton’s assessment of Arnold: “Agitating for women’s rights would not count in Matthew Arnold’s view as culture, whereas a courteous plea for patriarchy might well make the grade. All-roundedness turns out to be curiously one-sided … Because none of these resonant abstractions has much exact meaning, perhaps intentionally so, each of them can be evoked to reinforce the others, in a circular motion which anticipates the astonishingly repetitive prose of Arnold’s later Literature and Dogma” (Eagleton 2014, pp. 123–25).

For Virginia Woolf, the Clapham tradition she inherited through her father was both a resource and a constraint. She admired Leslie Stephen’s honesty, intellectual rigor, and strong sense of duty, while resisting the moral earnestness of Victorian culture, which she saw as frequently accompanied by dogmatism and authority. In her essays, memoirs, and novels, Woolf repeatedly explores the tension between inherited ethical norms and the creative freedom of the modern writer. In How Should One Read a Book?, she explicitly questions the imposition of moral or critical authority: “To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries” (Woolf 1960, p. 234). Woolf advocates for a more dialogical, imaginative, and negotiative approach to literature—a position that anticipates her later theory of the “common reader” and her vision of an ethical community of the author and the reader.

Through an analysis of Leslie Stephen’s thought, what has been demonstrated is how Woolf’s secularized inheritance of the Clapham tradition laid the groundwork for both her modernist aesthetic innovations and her conception of an ethical literary community. Although the old guarantees of religious belief had receded, the longing for meaningful connection, responsibility, and shared ethical vision persisted. In the end, Woolf moved beyond moralism toward a negotiative intellectual community—an evolution that was both a continuation of the Clapham legacy and its secular transformation.

3. The Secularization of Quakerism and G. E. Moore: Woolf’s Admiration and Skepticism of the “Inner Light”

Quakerism, which emerged during the period of religious upheaval in seventeenth-century England, is a Christian movement known for its radical simplicity, rejection of ecclesiastical hierarchy, and commitment to peace and social equality. At the heart of Quaker theology lies the doctrine of the “Inner Light”—the belief that each individual can directly apprehend divine revelation without recourse to external rituals or institutional authority. Conscience and personal spiritual experience thus become the ultimate grounds for moral judgment: “[T]he emphasis on the authority of each individual’s experience of the Inner Light; the resistance to paid ministers and to sacraments; the refusal to elevate biblical authority over the authority of religious experience” (Paulsell 2019, p. 40). This emphasis on inner experience endowed Quakerism with a distinctive ethos of introspection, sincerity, and countercultural resistance.

The legacy of Quakerism long ago transcended the boundaries of religious practice, permeating broader cultural and ethical domains within the British society. Its core values—individual conscience, spiritual equality, and social justice—left a lasting imprint on Victorian family life, of which the Stephen family was a notable beneficiary. As Jane de Gay notes, Quaker relatives such as Aunt Caroline brought to the Stephen household living examples of ethical self-regulation, anti-formalism, and compassionate concern for the vulnerable. “She preferred silence to the word-laden liturgy and loved the personal engagement with God as an alternative to the intercession of the male clergy …… In Light Arising, she wrote about a ‘sense of absolute freedom in the search for truth; freedom being, as I suppose we shall all agree, not lawlessness, but the absence of external restraint, a state of being controlled only from within’” (De Gay 2018, pp. 42–46).

Through Aunt Caroline’s interpretation of Quaker doctrine, we see a religious sensibility that values silence, introspection, and a rejection of moral didacticism, grounded in the belief that one can commune with God through personal effort. Strictly speaking, the Stephen family—including Virginia Woolf—was more directly shaped by liberal Quakerism: “For liberal-Liberal Friends, theology has become a story, God an option. Key parts of the tradition can be, and have been, questioned as new sets of individual experiences/interpretations modify collective popular belief and over time … Liberal-Liberal Quakerism is one in which belief is pluralised, privatised, but also marginalised: it is not seen as important. This kind of Quakerism is held together by an adherence to form, by the way the group is religious, not by what it believes” (Dandelion 2007, p. 134). This conception is even directly manifested in Woolf’s creative work, as in To the Lighthouse, Lily succeeds finishing the drawing of mother-and-child through artistic imagination, thereby spiritually “going to the lighthouse.” Regarding this, Emily Griesinger argues that Woolf’s novelistic creation was profoundly influenced by her aunt Caroline’s Quaker mysticism, reflecting Woolf’s ambivalent attitude toward secular society and her commitment to transcending everyday reality as a modernist (Griesinger 2019, p. 141).

In the intellectual climate of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, Quaker ideals such as truth-telling, the supremacy of conscience, simplicity of conduct, and suspicion of external ornamentation became key markers of modern moral identity. This ethos influenced not only the private ethics of families like the Stephens, but also the collective values of the Bloomsbury Group, which prized sincerity, candor, and the courage to defy tradition. Although Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, was also shaped by Quaker principles, he was more profoundly influenced by the Clapham Sect. As the previous section has shown, Stephen viewed literature primarily as a vehicle for moral instruction. Accordingly, in his contributions to The Dictionary of National Biography, he emphasized the moral character and public deeds of notable individuals, rather than their aesthetic achievements—Stephen himself had little interest in art for its own sake. Woolf’s Quaker inheritance, therefore, came primarily through the Bloomsbury Group, especially via its philosophical guide, G. E. Moore.

Moore’s Quaker inheritance came through his mother, Henrietta Sturge, who was born into one of the most prominent Quaker families of nineteenth-century Britain—the Sturge family. As Paul Levy notes in G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles, the Sturges constituted a key force within what he calls Britain’s “Intellectual Aristocracy”, a cultural elite whose influence was rooted in the early nineteenth century certain when “families from three distinct groups, those with philanthropic, Quaker or evangelical traditions, began to emerge from their background and to form a recognizable and distinct intellectual élite” (Levy 1979, p. 19).

Moore was raised in an environment steeped in the rigorous moral expectations characteristic of both Quakerism and evangelicalism—expectations that placed a premium on moral purity and personal responsibility. Although Moore himself did not practice Quaker religious rituals, he undoubtedly inherited its cultural and ethical “gene”, which manifested in two primary ways.

First, in the formation of Moore’s moral character. Core Quaker values—honesty, simplicity, pacifism, and fidelity to one’s inner conscience—were transmitted through family upbringing and became internalized as some of the most salient traits of Moore’s personality: an uncompromising intellectual integrity, a moral innocence bordering on naivety, and an unrelenting pursuit of truth. For instance, in his early life, Moore underwent a brief but intense evangelical “conversion” followed by a decisive “deconversion.” Thereafter, “following this religious phase and its dissolution Moore never again tolerated, in himself or in anyone else, any but the most rigorously defended beliefs” (Levy 1979, p. 41). This attitude was, in many ways, the result of a fusion between inherited moral seriousness and Moore’s own intellectual rigor.

Second, at the philosophical level: Moore’s personality—suffused with the Quaker spirit—shaped the very method of his philosophical inquiry. His commitment to clarity, his rejection of vague or equivocal language, and his ethical appeal to unanalyzable “intuitions”, along with his emphasis on the value of personal relationships, can all be understood as expressions of a distinctive moral temperament projected into philosophical form. Thus, like other members of the Bloomsbury Group, Moore was shaped by religious influences. However, his exploration of inner consciousness and his articulation of meta-ethical principles can be seen not as an extension of Clapham doctrines, but rather as a secularized continuation of Quaker moral theology.

As discussed above, the secularization of Quaker ethics reaches its culmination in Moore’s philosophy, with his Principia Ethica (1903) becoming the “bible” of moral awakening for Edwardian intellectuals (Rosenbaum 1998, p. 165). The majority of the Bloomsbury Group, moreover, traced their intellectual lineage to the Cambridge Apostles. As Leon Edel has put it, the Apostles cultivated “a religion of the mind” and “an enduring sense of fellowship” (Paulsell 2019, p. 89). This intellectual community was profoundly shaped by Moore’s influence: “Without adumbrating the personal qualities that made Moore so admirable, it has already been implied that Moore’s followers regarded him as a sort of intellectual saint. There is a good deal of evidence that they did just that” (Paulsell 2019, p. 9).

How, then, did Moore critically appropriate the legacy of religious ethics? To begin with, Moore was an avowed atheist who vehemently rejected both traditional religious morality and utilitarian ethical models. He famously argued that “the good” is a simple and indefinable property, accessible only through moral intuition, not derivable from external authority or social convention: “If I am asked ‘What is good?’ my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter. Or if I am asked ‘How is good to be defined?’ my answer is that it cannot be defined, and that is all I have to say about it” (Moore 2000, p. 6). As a result, Moore’s ethical theory not only excluded biblical commandments and institutional dogma, but also located moral authority entirely within the individual conscience. The highest good, as Moore conceived it, was a state of refined consciousness characterized by personal relationships and aesthetic enjoyment. This, too, became the Bloomsbury Group’s sole criterion for measuring civilization and progress: “The ideals of personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments were not just ‘the rational ultimate end of human action’ but also ‘the sole criterion of social progress’” (Rosenbaum 1987, p. 235).

Precisely because the Bloomsbury Group largely embraced Moore’s conception of inner moral life as outlined in Principia Ethica, figures such as Woolf and her contemporaries, in freeing themselves from religious authority and Arnoldian moral didacticism, found themselves entangled in an elitist and idealized aesthetic circle. As Alasdair MacIntyre and later critics have pointed out, “[i]t is that the group who were to become Bloomsbury had already accepted the values of Moore’s sixth chapter but could not accept these as merely their own personal preferences. They felt the need to find objective and impersonal justification for rejecting all claims except those of personal intercourse and of the beautiful. What specifically were they rejecting? … those names as symbols of the culture of the late nineteenth century. … the whole of the past is envisaged as a burden that Moore has just helped them cast off. Keynes emphasized the rejection not only of the Benthamite version of utilitarianism and of Christianity, but of all claims on behalf of social action conceived as a worthwhile end” (MacIntyre 2007, p. 16).

Moore’s inward ethical turn brought both liberation and risk. On the one hand, it emancipated the individual from external dogma and encouraged personal integrity and self-cultivation. On the other hand, it risked reducing morality to individual preference or what might be called “ethical solipsism”, where the sole criterion of moral judgment becomes whether something feels right to the individual. This raises pressing questions about how to establish communal standards or sustain moral practice.

The strength of Moore’s ethics lies in its emphasis on introspection and moral self-determination. Within the Bloomsbury Group, these qualities came to signify intellectual freedom and underpinned a culture of open discussion and radical critique. As S. P. Rosenbaum has argued, “For Forster and Bloomsbury, social cohesion lay not in patriarchies but in tolerant co-operation, personal relations and aesthetic experience” (Rosenbaum 1987, p. 28). The group’s emphasis on individual conscience and resistance to dogma made it deeply ethical in orientation, but also fundamentally apolitical, incapable of formulating a shared program for collective action. “No doctrine was taught in Bloomsbury. ‘We had no common theory, system, or principles which we wanted to convert the world to’, Leonard Woolf asserted in the clearest account of Bloomsbury that has been written by one of its members” (Rosenbaum 1987, p. 3).

Thus, Moore’s ambivalence toward war and nationalism during its outbreak revealed the practical limitations of his moral philosophy. This tension also manifested in the lives and works of many Bloomsbury members: while fiercely loyal to personal autonomy, they often struggled to translate private values into shared commitments or public action. As Rosenbaum observes: “This influence appears in the epistemological, ethical and aesthetic interconnections of their writings: Bloomsbury’s writers were commonsense realists in theory of perception, consequentialists and pluralists in ethics, formalists and eclectics in aesthetics” (Rosenbaum 1987, pp. 11–12). Thus, the inwardness of Quaker ethics—as transformed by Moore into ethical intuitionism—revealed its limitations when confronted with collective challenges. An ethics of the “Inner Light” that lacks actionable force risks ethical isolation and proves insufficient for realizing genuine community or public responsibility.

However, unlike Moore and the Clive Bells, Woolf demonstrated a heightened awareness of the ethical limitations inherent in both Quaker inwardness and Moorean intuitionism. In her diaries and correspondence, she frequently expressed admiration for Moore’s “purity” and “truthfulness” of character, yet she was acutely conscious of his inability—and that of others like him—to escape the prison of the self. Woolf argued that in times of crisis, one could not look to spiritual aristocrats such as Moore and Desmond MacCarthy for guidance; even they had to detach themselves from aesthetic sentiment and refined states of consciousness in order to confront political realities. “Do you remember what Mr. MacCarthy said about his own group at the university in 1914? ‘We were not very much interested in politics … philosophy was more interesting to us than public causes?’ That shows that his tower leant neither to the right nor to the left. But in 1930 it was impossible—if you were young, sensitive, imaginative—not to be interested in politics; not to find public causes of much more pressing interest than philosophy. In 1930 young men at college were forced to be aware of what was happening in Russia; in Germany; in Italy; in Spain. They could not go on discussing esthetic emotions and personal relations. They could not confine their reading to the poets; they had to read the politicians” (Woolf 1948, pp. 141–42).

In sum, Woolf remained skeptical of both Victorian moral dogmatism and pure ethical intuitionism—an ambivalence that led her to pursue a more balanced aesthetic and ethical practice, one that mediates between the internal and the external.

4. From Communion to Negotiation: The Construction of Woolf’s Intellectual Community

The concept of communion once formed the theological and ethical cornerstone of religious communities such as the Clapham Sect and the Quakers. In Christian theology in particular, communion is a profoundly layered and significant term. It refers not merely to a ritual practice, but to an ideal state of being—one that embodies the ultimate goal of community. The most concrete and immediate expression of communion is the sacrament of the Eucharist. In this rite, believers partake of consecrated bread and wine, which are believed to represent—or, in some denominations, literally become—the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

At the core of the Eucharist lies the theology of union: through receiving the sacrament, believers affirm a mystical union with Christ. They are no longer isolated individuals, but members of a single spiritual body in Christ. Thus, communion entails both a vertical union between the believer and Christ, and a horizontal union among believers themselves. All who partake in the Eucharist collectively constitute the Body of Christ—that is, the Church. “The eucharistic community is the Body of Christ par excellence simply because it incarnates and realizes our communion within the very life and communion of the Trinity, in a way that preserves the eschatological character of truth while making it an integral part of history” (Zizioulas 1985, p. 114).

At this moment, the boundaries of the individual are dissolved, merged into a single, organic, and sacred collective. This collective shares a common essence and source of life. Through prayer, ritual, and obedience to doctrine, believers “operate” and sustain this communal unity, aspiring ultimately to establish an earthly approximation of a sacred community. In sum, communion in the religious context is envisioned as the ultimate resolution to individual isolation and worldly fragmentation—achieved through mystical union with the divine. It aims at an inward, enclosed, essentially unified, and organically integrated ideal of community. As Alexander Schmemann has summarized, “the eucharist, by its very nature, is a closed assembly of the Church, and that in this assembly all are ordained and all serve, each in his place, in the one liturgical action of the Church” (Schmemann 1988, p. 88).

However, with the advance of secular modernity, the authority of religious communion has steadily eroded. People no longer believed that rituals and doctrine could mediate communication with the divine; indeed, God was displaced from the public sphere into the private domain, and His efficacy—if acknowledged at all—became conditional and contingent. As Jean-Luc Nancy argues in The Inoperative Community, the Western tradition’s pursuit of a model of community based on inner fusion is fraught with danger. He criticizes the idea of community as a “work” to be completed or a seamless totality to be realized. Such inwardly unified and closed conceptions of community ultimately demand that individuals sacrifice their singularity, dissolving their identities into a homogenized collective. For Nancy, the essential distinction lies here: “communication is not communion” (Nancy 1991, p. 37).

Although Quakerism rejected the dogmatism of the Clapham Sect and emphasized inner conscience and silence, it nonetheless retained belief in God as the ultimate ground of communion. This theological foundation of communion was ultimately abandoned by figures such as Stephen, Moore, and Woolf. Yet, as scholars such as Charles Taylor and Terry Eagleton have argued, the decline of institutional religion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain did not eliminate the human longing for community. Rather, it redirected this desire toward new secular forms. As J. Hillis Miller has likewise noted: “The history of modern literature is in part the history of the splitting apart of this communion. This splitting apart has been matched by a similar dispersal of the cultural unity of man, God, nature, and language” (Miller 1963, p. 3). “Though their situations are more desperate, the writers discussed here all attempt, like the romantics, to bring God back to earth as a benign power inherent in the self, in nature, and in the human community” (Miller 1963, p. 15).

Woolf’s theory of the common reader can be read as a direct response to this historical transformation. For Woolf, the foundation of community is no longer grounded in sacred covenant, but is continually reconstituted through reading, dialogue, and the mutual recognition of difference. As she wrote in a letter to the composer and close friend Ethel Smyth on 19 April 1934: “I recognise differences-always have-but I dont let them separate; in fact, so contrary are human souls, they serve to ally” (Woolf 1975b, p. 293). Thus, in her critical essays, particularly The Common Reader, Woolf sought to synthesize the strengths of the two religious legacies while simultaneously responding to their limitations. Her conception of the “common reader” epitomizes this endeavor: the writer is no longer an authoritative arbiter of standards, nor a necrophile lost in solipsistic reverence for the past, but a participant who must engage with the “common reader” in the collaborative negotiation and construction of the novelistic community.

Woolf defines the “common reader” as neither an expert nor a passive consumer of culture, but rather as an active and open participant in the literary dialogue. This self-effacing and dialogic stance positions the reader in the act of reading as both a friend and a critic. On the one hand, writers and critics are unable to grasp the ever-changing nature of life, while on the other, the once stable and homogeneous community has disappeared. “So then our contemporaries afflict us because they have ceased to believe. The most sincere of them will only tell us what it is that happens to himself. They cannot make a world, because they are not free of other human beings. They cannot tell stories because they do not believe that stories are true. They cannot generalise. They depend on their senses and emotions, whose testimony is trustworthy, rather than on their intellects whose message is obscure. And they have perforce to deny themselves the use of some of the most powerful and some of the most exquisite of the weapons of their craft” (Woolf 2002, p. 239). This collaborative endeavor, by its very nature, requires that both readers and writers participate in establishing shared standards.

At the same time, Woolf insisted that her “common reader” preserve a sense of curiosity and the intrinsic pleasure of reading: “The common reader, …… reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others” (Woolf 2002, p. 1). But this advocacy should not be mistaken as a license for unrestrained subjectivism in reading. On the contrary, Woolf firmly believed that the act of reading—like ethical life itself—is inherently social and dialogical. The reader, she maintained, ought first to approach the author’s intention with care and only then offer a measured critique: “Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice” (Woolf 1960, p. 235). In other words, the author consciously diminishes narrative authority, while the reader, guided by the author’s strategies of alterity, approaches the author’s intention and joins in the collaborative construction of an ethical community that is inclusive of otherness. Woolf consistently affirmed that reading is an ethical act—one that forges a vital link between the inner world of individual conscience and the external sphere of public life. As she observed in “The Leaning Tower”: “Let us trespass at once. Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves” (Woolf 1948, p. 154).

In sum, Woolf’s literary practice vividly dramatizes the tension between personal freedom and the longing for community. The dual religious inheritances offered both a powerful and unfinished spiritual impetus for Woolf and her intellectual community—that is, the shared pursuit of inner consciousness and public responsibility between Woolf and her “common reader.” In formal terms, Woolf consciously constructs a new aesthetic community, in which the reader, through the act of reading, encounters the writer’s intention and participates in the formation of an intellectual community. The reader’s ethical engagement bridges inner conscience and external political life, thereby enacting Woolf’s vision of personal freedom and civic responsibility. As J. Ashley Foster has emphasized: “Writing, for Woolf, becomes a sacred act of illuminating the relationship between the spiritual and material, the relationships between people, and the responsibility of the individual to the community—all relationships that carry political implications” (Foster 2016, p. 57).

Woolf’s concept of the “common reader” is central to her novelistic practice, as it establishes a negotiated ethical relationship between author and reader that provides a pathway for modernism’s ethical turn. This concept ultimately enacts an aesthetic-ethical transformation: modernist ethics moves beyond both moral didacticism and intuitionism toward a balance between internal ethics embedded in aesthetic form and external ethics committed to social engagement. More specifically, Woolf’s intellectual community synthesizes the Quaker “Inner Light” of introspection with the Clapham Sect’s ideal of social responsibility. The ethical responsibility of both the reader and the author is no longer confined to the self but is realized through self-restraint in reading and writing, where personal freedom and civic spirit are mutually reinforced. In sum, the religious legacies of the Clapham Sect and Quakerism profoundly shaped the ethical aesthetics of modernists such as Woolf. Literary ethics evolved from a theology of communion into a negotiated ethics of alterity between the author and the reader. The reader, once a passive recipient of moral instruction, now becomes an active subject of reflection, reconfiguring self-understanding through the act of reading, and thereby becoming ethically attuned to social and political concerns. This modernist aesthetic ethics itself constitutes a secular integration of the Quaker inwardness and the Claphamite imperative of public duty.

5. Conclusions

This article has traced the secular trajectories of two major religious traditions—the Clapham Sect and Quakerism—in the formation of British modernism, with particular attention to their transformation in the cultural and ethical domains through Leslie Stephen and G. E. Moore. Rather than merely juxtaposing the two legacies, the study demonstrates how Virginia Woolf critically absorbed, reconfigured, and ultimately transcended both the external model of covenant and the inward tradition of conscience. Through her concept of the “common reader,” Woolf not only inherited but also creatively transformed the ethical energy of these religious legacies, culminating in a modern intellectual community grounded in negotiation, collaboration, and shared ethical responsibility between the author and the reader.

The central finding and theoretical significance of this study lies in mapping the transformation from religious communion to literary negotiation. This provides a valuable framework for understanding how modern secular communities move beyond the binary of belief and disbelief. In the context of secular modernity—where divine authority had increasingly receded—early twentieth-century secular culture and art sought, in various ways, to become “viceroys for God” filling the ideological vacuum left in its wake. Woolf’s author–reader model of negotiated community points toward a more inclusive, dynamic, and ethically engaged public sphere—especially in the face of the challenges posed by modernist aesthetics and cultural fragmentation. In this light, the legacy of religious communities continues to inform the ethical imagination of literature and culture, offering sustained ethical impetus for reconceiving community in a secular age.