SOURCE: Goldweber, David E. “Byron, Catholicism, and Don Juan XVII.” Renascence 49 (spring 1997): 175-89.

In the following essay, Goldweber analyzes the Biblical overtones in Don Juan.

Many literary critics continue to cast Lord Byron as a deviant and a miscreant who was contemptuous, or at least suspicious, of all that Western culture and Western religion revere.¹ Indeed, as a young man who denied nothing but doubted everything, Byron explored superstition, deism, and skepticism on the mental side of things; drinking, gambling, whoring, homosexuality, and incest on the physical side.² The early cantos of Byron's first masterpiece, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, are pessimistic and nihilistic, depicting the poet's hopeless journey through the ruined and war-torn remnants of once proud European nations. As he journeys, the young poet declares that even when “A thousand years scarce serve to form a state” still “An hour may lay it in the dust” (II.84).³ Surely...