George Eliot's Religious Imagination: A Theopoetical Evolution - Softcover

Marilyn Orr (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810135884 ISBN 13: 9780810135888

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2018

Synopsis

George Eliot's Religious Imagination addresses the much-discussed question of Eliot’s relation to Christianity in the wake of the sociocultural revolution triggered by the spread of theories of evolution. The standard view is that the author of Middlemarch and Silas Marner “lost her faith” at this time of religious crisis. Orr argues for a more nuanced understanding of the continuity of Eliot’s work, as one not shattered by science, but shaped by its influence.

Orr’s wide-ranging and fascinating analysis situates George Eliot in the fertile intellectual landscape of the nineteenth century, among thinkers as diverse as Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, and Søren Kierkegaard. She also argues for a connection between George Eliot and the twentieth-century evolutionary Christian thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Her analysis draws on the work of contemporary philosopher Richard Kearney as well as writers on mysticism, particularly Karl Rahner.

The book takes an original look at questions many believe settled, encouraging readers to revisit George Eliot’s work. Orr illuminates the creative tension that still exists between science and religion, a tension made fruitful through the exercise of the imagination. Through close readings of Eliot's writings, Orr demonstrates how deeply the novelist's religious imagination continued to operate in her fiction and poetry.

About this title

About the Author

MARILYN ORR is professor emerita of English at Laurentian University in Ontario.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

George Eliot's Religious Imagination

A Theopoetics of Evolution

By Marilyn Orr

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2018 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-3588-8

Contents

Preface, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
Chapter 1 Incarnation and Inwardness: George Eliot's Early Works in the Context of Contemporary Religious Debates, 
Chapter 2 "Even Our Failures Are a Prophecy": Toward a Post-Evangelical Aesthetic, 
Chapter 3 Religion in a Secular World: Middlemarch and the Mysticism of the Everyday, 
Chapter 4 "The Religion of the Future": Daniel Deronda and the Mystical Imagination, 
Chapter 5 Evolutionary Spirituality and the Theopoetical Imagination: George Eliot and Teilhard de Chardin, 
Conclusion The Word Continuously Incarnated, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Incarnation and Inwardness

George Eliot's Early Works in the Context of Contemporary Religious Debates

The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past: no wonder the secret escapes the unsympathising observer, who might as well put on spectacles to discern odours.

— George Eliot, Adam Bede, 2:18, 180

Is there not a spiritual existence that belongs to individuals?

— Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition

In the great age of religious questioning, which U. C. Knoepflmacher says was "obsessed with epistemology," George Eliot's importance was such that an early reviewer could call her "the emblem of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of belief." In the "conflict of interpretations" that David Carroll rightly sees as central to her narrative situations, George Eliot's fiction reveals, I will argue, her own exploration of faith and imagination and her discovery of their inseparable connection as hermeneutical mind-sets.

It is impossible to read George Eliot's novels without thinking about religion, one would think, since, even when they do not directly concern religious clerics, they focus on characters engaged in deeply religious struggles. George Eliot's work is rich enough that astute readers can find material for almost any sophisticated reading, and it is perhaps not surprising that while critics in a secular culture have tended to follow the standard view that Marian Evans "lost her faith" as a young woman, there is increasing interest in the necessary complexities of any such trajectory. While there have always been critics and readers speaking against the tide, the pervasive tendency has been to acknowledge her early piety and reiterate the "conventional wisdom" that after her encounter with Higher Criticism, firstly through Charles Hennell and then Strauss and Feuerbach, and with the Comte school, her Christian beliefs were replaced by a Feuerbachian version of the religion of humanity. While the crucial influence of all of these is undeniable, I agree with Peter Hodgson when he argues that George Eliot never became a disciple of any system or ideology. Instead, I will argue, her views were deeply evolutionary. Rather like one of the mollusks which were the subject of her husband's study, she accreted these beliefs like so many layers, with each new level of knowledge adding to and adapting, rather than displacing, her earlier views. While it is easy enough to find comments in her letters declaring her rejection of conventional forms of Christianity, it is not much harder to find as many comments that modify and complicate these declarations of unbelief.

In his book, Hodgson briefly analyzes each of George Eliot's novels for their Christian content, and extrapolates from this the principles of what he calls George Eliot's "future religion," a form of "revisionist postmodern" theology that he aligns with various theologians from Schleiermacher to Ricoeur. Hodgson's idea that George Eliot practiced a "faith, which kept the reality of God in suspense" echoes ideas of the philosopher Richard Kearney, himself a student of Ricoeur. Kearney's recent work, as suggested by the title of his book The God Who May Be, analyzes the ways that modernist writers such as Joyce and Woolf invoke sacramental language that shadows forth a "possible" God. Kearney's work on "narrative imagination" as the basis for the "narrative identity" that is acquired "in large part by receiving others' narratives and renarrating itself in turn to others" informs my whole argument. It seems to me that we might put George Eliot in the company of Kearney's modernists of sacred possibility, for George Eliot's religious imagination took her beyond Feuerbachian humanism toward a far more complex understanding of religious experience. The first stage of this development is enacted in her early fiction, in which she constructs an aesthetic that is deeply rooted in two fundamental elements of her early experience among Evangelical Christians, incarnation and inwardness.

A brief sketch of her religious history is in order. Mary Anne Evans (as she was christened) grew up in a middle-of-the road Anglican household but as a schoolgirl came under the powerful influence of intense Evangelicalism with a Calvinist/Puritan streak in the persons of a teacher and fellow students. Her youthful letters, which sound cringingly pious to most modern ears, reflect what one biographer calls an "unforgiving, damnation-conscious form of religion" and are a convenient source for any who are on a quest for evidence of the pathologies of adolescent faith. For my purposes, they point to the way in which faith and imagination were already at odds in her thinking, for in them she records a suspicion of "imaginative literature, particularly fiction," which she overcomes out of a conviction of the necessity to be familiar with common references, and of musical settings of biblical passages, which she at once revels in and deplores.

The next landmark on her intellectual journey was her meeting with a warm and intelligent family of free-thinking Unitarians. While the Hennell sisters became Mary Anne's close and lifelong friends, their brother Charles Hennell's Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838) began what became the sea change in her thinking, as he carefully explained Christianity in entirely natural terms. The result was a temporary but hugely significant rift with her beloved father, whose housekeeper she was, when she refused to accompany him to church. Mary Anne relented after several weeks because, characteristically, her relationship with her father was more important to her than the principle of truth, once she had made sure to demonstrate it to him. But the break was made, and not the least important development was her determination to become financially independent from her father and brother.

In 1851 she moved to London and became Marian Evans, writer of reviews and essays, the shadow editor of the Westminster Review, reading and writing prodigiously. The two most famous landmarks in her religious life bracket this move: her translations of Strauss's Life of Jesus, published after almost two years of painstaking labor in 1846, and of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity in 1854. For now, I will just say in a sentence that Strauss's work demythologized Christianity, taking earnest, sympathetic pains to do so, and Feuerbach's work situated the origin of God-ideas in the human mind: "All religious cosmogonies," writes Feuerbach, "are products of the imagination."

Before moving away from biography, it is important to note the most important presence in Marian Evans's adult life, the man she would call her husband, George Henry Lewes, whom she met between the translating of these two tomes. And it is important to say as well that in the case of George Eliot, the intimate personal relations of her life as Mary Anne and then Marian Evans must be seen as the ground of her intellectual life. In other words, her ideas were always inseparable from her feelings, and from her body in the world: there were no words without flesh. This sense of the necessity to incarnate ideas is the basis of the embodied aesthetic of her fiction. For what early reviewers saw as what Carroll calls her "dissociated sensibility" — a conflict between George Eliot the artist and George Eliot the philosopher — is what might also be called a paradoxical effect of her effort to incarnate her aesthetic.

In this study I am taking up George Eliot's works more or less chronologically because, as others have recognized, there is a deeply evolutionary quality to George Eliot's career. Like many writers I suppose, she is loathe to repeat herself and, while readers might recognize characters and situations that she is revisiting, she always needs to believe in her own development as a writer. In her letters she repeatedly champions her first stories, for example, largely because they contain "ideas" that she doubts she "can ever embody again." This is an important idea in a broader sense too in that her philosophy was grounded in a belief in the idea of progress. This is most neatly exemplified in Silas Marner, which is often called a fable, but is a fable not just of one man's life but of the progress of humanity and civilization, as reflected in the growth of a single consciousness and community. (I will save further comment on Silas Marner until chapter 5, in which I will discuss more fully George Eliot's work in the context of evolutionary ideas.)

Two of her earliest reviews reflect the importance of this belief in progressive thinking. In 1849, writing of Froude's The Nemesis of Faith, she affirms "its suggestive hints as to the necessity of recasting the currency of our religion and virtue." In an important essay of 1851, her review of R. W. Mackay's The Progress of the Intellect, George Eliot explicitly refutes the Comtean view that "human progress" means "devot[ing our] energies to the actual rather than to the retrospective," affirming instead Mackay's "survey of the past," which shows "how each age and each race has had a faith and a symbolism suited to its need and its stage of development." It could be said, I think, that George Eliot's whole opus demonstrates this view with regard not only to her characters but to herself. In the same essay she affirms "Mackay's faith" in what theologians came to call progressive revelation, which he sees, she writes, as "co-extensive with the history of human development." She quotes Mackay at length on the alliance between religion and philosophy. Sounding very much like a prosaic version of the "Prologue" to Tennyson's In Memoriam, Mackay writes:

Religion and science are inseparable. No object in nature, no subject of contemplation is destitute of a religious tendency and meaning. ... Faith [is] the inseparable companion and offspring of knowledge ... Faith, as opposed to that blind submission to inexplicable power which usurped its name in the ancient East, is an allegiance of the reason; and as the "evidence of things unseen," stands on the verge of mysticism, its value must depend on the discretion with which it is formed and used.

In a statement resonating with Kearney's ideas, Mackay states, "True faith is a belief in things probable." Equally important to George Eliot's work is Mackay's criticism of the pervasive understanding of religion as having "nothing to do with the head" but rather as "exclusively an exercise of the heart and feelings" meant to train moral character yet leaving the feeling "uneducated," abandoned by reason. It might not be overstating the case to cite this essay as the central text of George Eliot's philosophy, except that to do so would contradict the philosophy it states. For, as I mentioned above, it is crucial to recognize how vital to her work is this belief in progress. And it is interesting to note that in her last novel, Daniel Deronda, as we will see in chapter 4, her religious revisioning finds her back before her own time, in a kind of mystical Judaism. In her own way, then, George Eliot was engaged in the work that Carlyle called retailoring the tailor, refashioning the myth for a new age. And as with Carlyle, Mackay's mention of mysticism is apt, in that this is about a new way of seeing the "evidence of things unseen" which is faith.

Incarnation

Another way of talking about this is in terms of "incarnation," in Christian terms the doctrine that God took on human nature in Jesus Christ: the Word became flesh; the Idea became actual. This is of course the central doctrine of dispute at this time. Strauss takes enormous pains respectfully to debunk the possibility of a historical Jesus and reaffirms the Idea of Jesus despite his lack of historicity; he redefines the incarnation as the idea of humanity as a whole incarnating Christ, pointing to the evolution of an ideal human type. Feuerbach famously turns theology into anthropology, seeing the idea of God incarnate as a projection of human need and desire. It is primarily in her response to various works, mainly in the form of reviews and, in the case of Strauss and Feuerbach, in her translations, that the writer who would become George Eliot (hereafter referred to by that name) articulates her own understanding of the incarnation, but essential to her response is what Kierkegaard would call "indirection." This approach is evident in two main ways: first, in her refusal to articulate a positive doctrine. As she writes in a letter in 1870, "I have an unreasonable aversion to personal statements. ... I shrink from decided 'deliverances' on momentous subjects, from the dread of coming to swear by my own 'deliverances' and sinking into an insistent echo of myself." Secondly, implicit throughout her fiction is the kind of secular faith expressed in my epigraph from Adam Bede: the belief that finding the truth of things is a matter of discovering and interpreting what has been revealed to the individual heart and remains otherwise hidden. In Hennell and Strauss she found an articulation of her own understanding of faith as a matter of mythical rather than historical truth, and this understanding of the power of story soon led to her own creation of stories that speak of and indeed seek to incarnate human and divine truths, their language redolent with biblical echoes. But even when she agreed with them on important matters, none of the writers she studied satisfied her. While convinced of the merit of the scientific view of the fundamental power of nature, for example, she famously refused to embrace Darwin's Origin of Species: "But to me the Development theory and all other explanations of processes by which things come to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the processes."

It is possible, then, to trace what we might call the progress of George Eliot's own intellect and her understanding of faith through her works, and I would like now to highlight views that point to her understanding of incarnation. First, however, it is important to clarify how I am using the term "incarnation" for, as Gerald O'Collins points out as he begins his book of that title, the primary theological meaning of incarnation — that God became a man — needs to be distinguished from the common usage by which we describe someone as incarnating a particular quality. Yet, as the writer Kathleen Norris makes clear — beginning with her pointed indefinite article in "A Word Made Flesh" — incarnation can be seen as the task of all writers, who are advised to "show, do not tell": good fiction-writing aims to embody and reveal the truth, rather than argue it discursively. Further, related to this is the common understanding of the importance of matching actions to words, commonly called practicing what one preaches — an ethical demand that carries greater weight for writers, who, after all, live by words. It is for these reasons that, as A. S. Byatt notes in her discussion of George Eliot's understanding of fiction, the question of how to write fiction — because it is a question of bringing together form and substance — became so pressing in the century that challenged the meaning of the Christian concept of the incarnation.

As I hope will become clear, George Eliot's struggles over the form of her fiction were always struggles to incarnate her ideas in Norris's sense and were always, at least implicitly and often explicitly, deeply entangled with her own beliefs regarding the incarnation of Christ. In what follows I will highlight four main ways in which George Eliot's complex understanding of incarnation emerges in her work: first, as suggested above, in the sense of nature itself manifesting the immanent presence of God; second, in her conviction that genuine Christians will put their beliefs into action in the form of love; third, in the way that she affirms the value of the lives and the words of ordinary folk; and, fourth — the foundation for her entire incarnational aesthetic — in the way that she affirms empathetic understanding and ultimately suffering for others as the basis of ethical and fully human living.

George Eliot's sense of the importance of incarnation and her struggles over its implications are evident in one or more of these four ways in all of her nonfiction. As I mentioned above, she takes from Hennell a completely naturalized, and then from Strauss a demythologized, view of the divine, but in the same year as her translation of Strauss's Life of Jesus is published she speaks with conviction of "the grand law which God has impressed on all nature — the production and development of life." While this is far from a belief in the incarnation of Christ of course, it does testify to her fundamental sense of nature's giving physical form to the divine. More telling is George Eliot's conflicted response to Strauss's deconstruction of the idea of God becoming a man: throughout her work on Strauss George Eliot

Eliot's conflicted response to Strauss's deconstruction of the idea of God becoming a man: throughout her work on Strauss George Eliot famously grieved for the image of Christ she was abetting him to desecrate. As her biographer Gordon Haight reports:

[She] had a cast about twenty inches high of Thorwaldsen's "Risen Christ" standing in her study, and on the wall an engraving of Delaroche's Christ, which she had once thought of using for a frontispiece. She told the Brays that "she was Strauss-sick — it made her ill dissecting the beautiful story of the crucifixion, and only the sight of her Christ-image and picture made her endure it."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from George Eliot's Religious Imagination by Marilyn Orr. Copyright © 2018 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810135884
• ISBN 13: 9780810135888
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 168