Antinomianism at the Fin-de-Siècle: The Sin Against the Holy Spirit in Arthur Symons and W.B. Yeats

This article explores the work of Arthur Symons and W.B Yeats and their engagement with antinomian ideas in the 1890s. If antinomianism promised the supersession of normative morality, the transcendence of all sins, one "sin" remained mysterious both for Yeats and Symons: the unpardonable sin against the Holy Spirit, spoken of in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and in Hebrews. In Yeats's story "The Tables of the Law" (1896), and Symons's "Seaward Lackland" in Spiritual Adventures (1905), the problem of this exceptionable sin reveals a deeper ambiguity in relation to late nineteenth-century antinomianism, and to notions of Decadence.