Thomas Hardy grew up in a religious household with old connections to the Church of England, although there is still debate around how devout his family really was. They seemed to be most connected to the church in a musical capacity, and Hardy participated in the church band and choir with his family. As a young person, Hardy was himself religious, and even wrote a sermon as a teenager. However, due to both personal tragedy and philosophical reading, Hardy came to reject the idea of personal, loving God as an adult. He believed in an indifferent universe, one which neither wishes harm to humans nor attempts to make their lives better.
Hardy struggled with this belief throughout his life, as he felt that a world without God was also a world without intrinsic meaning for human life, a world in which we are no different from animals or any other part of nature. This sense of meaninglessness pervades his tragic novels, and is also a frequent and explicit theme in poems such as “God’s Funeral” and “A Philosophical Fantasy.”
“The Convergence of the Twain” discusses religion fairly explicitly. In it, Hardy refers to both the “Immanent Will” and “The Spinner of the Years.” The “Immanent Will” does suggest a godlike figure, as the word “immanent” is most often used in a theological context. However, it denotes a god who is contained by the universe, in contrast to a “transcendent” God whose existence extends beyond the universe. Christianity firmly espouses belief in the latter understanding of God, but Hardy affirms here that no God exists beyond the boundaries of the universe itself; in a sense, the universe is God. Hardy’s “Immanent Will” is likely an expression of the philosophical idea that events in the universe are caused by the “will” of the universe itself, in a parallel to the way the individual human will works towards our own desires. Unlike human will, “Immanent Will” fills the entire universe, and as such, can enact events in a way that futile, individual wills, often at odds with one another, cannot.
Hardy thus expresses a belief not in the power of God, but rather in the existence of an indifferent fate which determines all events on earth. This fate isn’t operated by a deity with transcendent knowledge and power. Instead, it is an end in and of itself, the essence of cause which provokes the movement of history without concern for human beings. In “The Darkling Thrush,” Hardy seems to take a more Christian approach to religion than what we see in “The Convergence of the Twain.” His reference to “a blessed Hope” connects to a tradition of personifying God as hope in Christian religious thought. However, “The Darkling Thrush,” although possibly referring to a world in which some sort of God does exist, doesn’t seem convinced that the existence of that God would be a reason to have hope for earth. Instead, the “terrestrial things” of the speaker’s “desolate” world are untouched by the hopeful air which surrounds them. Furthermore, by defining God as a kind of song, or a breath of air, he once again constrains God within the boundaries of the universe. The cynical pessimism towards the future on display in "The Darkling Thrush” strongly suggests a universe indifferent to the suffering of humans, in sharp contrast to the Christian God, who redeemed humanity through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
“Afterwards” and “The Voice” are both concerned with death and loss. “The Voice” is mostly uninterested in explicit religious questions. “Afterwards,” however, by referring to the mystery of the heavens, suggests that at least the general idea of religion was on the poet’s mind. This more hopeful poem seems to suggest a way to conceive of one’s life as meaningful without belief in a God or an afterlife. Life ends with death, but the things we do when we are alive, especially our ability to exist in connection with other living things and to notice the world around us, make our lives meaningful.
