George Eliot's Religious Imagination

Front matter

George Eliot’s Religious Imagination

George Eliot’s Religious Imagination

George Eliot’s Religious Imagination

Preface

I have always been finding out my religion since I was a little girl. —Dorothea in Middlemarch, 4:39, 387

When I think of how I came to produce this book, I find myself encountering a number of friends, mentors, colleagues, and family members who have lighted my way. I think of Teilhard de Chardin’s idea—whose affinity with George Eliot in reference to this and much else I discuss in chapter 5—that while each individual consciousness is an “absolutely original centre,” each center becomes more and more itself as it is drawn constantly and increasingly “into association with all the centres”; each self becomes more and more, not less and less, itself “by convergence” with other selves.!

If I have become more myself by converging with other selves I have also come to understand, in the course of writing this book, more about convergence itself, a concept that increasingly delighted and enthralled George Eliot and is a key theme in her last novel, Daniel Deronda. Convergence, Teilhard would say, increases complexity, and increased complexity leads, for those who are open to it, to increased consciousness. Indeed, coming to understand this and learning how to act upon this awareness is one way of describing the evolution that Dorothea undergoes in Middlemarch.

George Eliot’s ever-increasing understanding of and belief in convergence, which I explore mainly in chapter 4, is one of the key elements of what I am calling her “religious imagination.” Convergence is crucial to her religious imagination particularly because she sees it as affirming the power of imagination in various forms. Along with convergence, the three main components of her religious imagination are inwardness, incarnation, and integration. All four of these elements develop according to evolution, which Teilhard calls “the light illuminating all facts.”* Inwardness and incarnation are my two main themes in chapter 1, but in chapter 2 I show how George Eliot’s understanding of them evolves such that they move from being themes in her work to becoming essential to her own being and practice. Another way to describe what she learns through her writing at this stage is the power of integration (my main focus in chapter 3), as she comes to experience her own integral relation with her characters and their stories. This insight comes at a cost, and underlying and informing George Eliot’s religious imagination in all four of these elements is an ever-evolving understanding of suffering. From the start of her career she shares Kierkegaard’s understanding that suffering, he

F Preface when turned inward, constitutes growth; she furthers this understanding until she arrives at the insight that Teilhard will later develop, that suffering, turned inward, produces energy for good.

These four elements—inwardness, incarnation, integration, and convergence, but in no particular order and often all at once—have also been fundamental to my experience of writing this book. That I was able to begin at all, at least as we conventionally understand beginning, was because of an insight that allowed me to recognize and to set free my own process of integration: this was the realization, initially only intuitive, that my scholarly journey and my spiritual journey were one and the same. Even the impulse to pursue that intuition until it became articulate and productive is a manifestation of the sense of convergence and the belief in a suprarational consciousness that George Eliot embraces. For key to my own process was the ongoing discovery of convergence between my work and hers.

Crucial to this insight into the convergence and integration of my scholarly and my spiritual lives was my compulsion—at first in spite of myself—to find spiritual retreats to be the sites of scholarly work and, conversely, to find in scholarly work much spiritual worth. On one such retreat, early in this process when I was working toward what turned out to be chapter 1, I was given instruction in inwardness by an unlikely teacher: walking meditatively and repetitively the winding, mulch-covered paths of the tiny but wondrous grounds of what was the Queenswood Centre in Victoria, British Columbia, I took a seat on a small makeshift wooden perch facing the pathway. Though my eyes were wide open all the while, it was nonetheless at least ten minutes before I realized that staring back at me from the other side of the pathway, nestled in his own comfy enclosure, was a large buck. Though it was not unusual to see deer even on the streets of Victoria (to the chagrin of gardeners and drivers), it was unusual to see a large, solitary buck, much less in peaceful repose. From this encounter I took the lesson that if I was intending to write about inwardness, I had better find out what it was.

There is no need to report on how I also needed to internalize and make my own the lesson I show George Eliot learning in chapter 2, that even failures can be prophecies, or the lesson of her whole career that suffering turned inward produces energy for good. It will already be clear, I think, that what I was learning in the course of my writing was the nature of my own religious imagination, or what a fellow traveler on another retreat called the spirituality of intellect.

It remains for me simply to thank those fellow travelers, dead and alive, who have played Virgil to my Dante and at times allowed me to do the same for them. Thank you for accompanying me on this journey, sharing your bread and wine with me and lightening my load by lighting my way with lots of alliterative love and laughter, mixed with tears too deep for words.

Preface

But as my sight by seeing learned to see The transformation which in me took place Transformed the single changeless form for me.

—Dante, Paradiso, 33: 112-14 xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The lengthy time this project has taken to complete means that my list of people to thank is also lengthy, but I will restrict myself here to identifying only a few, trusting that the others will hear their names implied in my “Preface.”

For generous encouragement and consistent support of my work over the years I thank my colleagues (and not least the secretarial staff) in the Department of English and the Faculty of Humanities at Laurentian University. I am especially grateful to those who mapped out with me and enjoyed the territory where collegiality and friendship overlap. To Rachel Haliburton of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sudbury at Laurentian and to Michael John DiSanto of the Department of English at Algoma University I offer thanks for their generous and incisive readings of a draft version of the major portion of this book; their comments helped sharpen and develop my analysis throughout. To Bruce Ward of the Department of Religious Studies at Thorneloe University at Laurentian I am grateful for practical advice and support when the project was little more than an idea. I am also grateful for the LURF grant I received from Laurentian University to help with costs related to publication.

My many long-suffering students also deserve thanks for their endurance of my George Eliot passion; their insights and questions often helped to sharpen and deepen my reading, and their enthusiasm fueled mine. My own teachers also deserve grateful acknowledgment, but for special merit in this regard I must recognize Ina Ferris at the University of Ottawa, who has supported and encouraged my work since we first met as student and teacher decades ago. She continues to model for me what it means to be a fine scholar and a good friend. I am also grateful to the late D. Ruth Etchells, with regret that it was only with her loss that I began truly to recognize her gifts.

Over the years I have tried out ideas I was developing for this book on many academic audiences. I would particularly like to thank the members of the Christianity and Literature Study Group, which always provided a supportive and stimulating environment for my work. I also have benefited tremendously from the work of the George Eliot Fellowship. Particularly wonderful was a Study Day devoted to The Mill on the Floss; I am grateful to the Fellowship for allowing me to use material in chapter 2 that appeared as “Even our Failures are a Prophecy’: The Mill on the Floss and the 1860s” in The George Eliot Review no. 42 (2011): 38-48. I would also like to thank the editors of Christianity and Literature for giving me permission to reproduce xiii xiv Acknowledgments here as chapter 1 a piece that appeared as “Incarnation, Inwardness, and Imagination in George Eliot’s Early Fiction,” Christianity and Literature 58, no. 3 (Spring 2009): 451-81.

Like any profession, I suppose, academia is a mysterious domain to those outside of it. For this reason it is especially wonderful for me to have experienced support, encouragement, and even serious interest in my work from my family. I dedicate this book to the memory of my parents, Owen and Josephine, and to my four siblings, their spouses, and their offspring, with love.

George Eliot’s Religious Imagination

Introduction

Writing is part of my religion.

—George Eliot, Letters, Haight edition, 2:377

This book reexamines religion and related questions in the work of George Eliot. It is conceived as a study of her “religious imagination” because at the center of the argument is the conviction that George Eliot’s idea of religion is an outgrowth of her imaginative work, which is in turn an outgrowth of her mind and life. One of the key principles of the present study imitates one of the key principles of George Eliot herself: integration. Middlemarch, generally held up as her masterpiece, represents the climax of her fictional work because it embodies this principle of integration almost as perfectly as any novel could. The web has long been noted as a predominant metaphor of Middlemarch, and it is so important exactly because it figures so beautifully the impossible complexity of the task before any writer—of George Eliot to explore the world of the recent past without unraveling it, and of the present writer to explore the world of George Eliot’s writing life with a similar delicacy.

The project I have set myself is to take seriously George Eliot’s own words, first, as in the epigraph above, her deep conviction that her calling as a writer is a religious one. This book is an exploration of what she means by “religion.” At least as challenging is to take seriously her conviction of the unknowability of human beings, including herself, even to herself. In her first story, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” her narrator exposes the myth of self-knowledge and the corresponding need for “dear friendly illusion” to allow us “to dream that we are charming.” Here too she expresses the subjectivity of all of our knowledge and our reliance on one another’s faith: “no miracle can be wrought without faith—without the worker’s faith in himself, as well as the recipient’s faith in him. And the greater part of the worker’s faith in himself is made up of the faith that others believe in him.”! This epistemological paradox helps explain the intense difficulty of her writing process; this too speaks of integration in that “the mystery of human sorrow” she speaks of in her first novel and explores throughout her career is also her own.”

I focus on George Eliot’s religious imagination because she implicitly accepts the Romantic view of the imagination as the predominant human faculty, famously defined by Coleridge as the great repeater of the creator’s power and the unifying force of all experience. Indeed, it is because of this imagination that George Eliot’s work can be both realistic and idealistic. It is because of this imagination, with its compulsion to think and feel together, that she has always been criticized by some purists for importing philosophy into fiction. Like Coleridge she sees life as an integrated whole, refusing to make a separation between mind and soul and heart. I call her work “theopoetical” because, rather than writing theology, she can be numbered among poets such as Coleridge, Shelley, Hopkins, Blake, and Dante, whose imaginative work shapes and expresses their response to God.

George Eliot’s understanding of imagination is remarkably consistent throughout her career. In several of her early essays, as I discuss in chapter 1, she castigates writers who mistake weakened, fanciful intelligence for imagination. And in her very last essays, collected as Impressions of Theophrastus Such, she is only more articulate and pointed about this. In “How We Come to Give False Testimonials, and Believe in Them,” George Eliot uses the voice of Theophrastus to try once more to clarify that a “fine imagination” is not opposed to intelligent perception but is instead dependent upon it.’ Her reiteration of the point could readily pass for a gloss on Coleridge’s definition of imagination:

It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiae of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and stored residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations of human existence.*

To illustrate this understanding of imagination, Theophrastus turns to Dante, further supporting the idea that George Eliot belongs among practitioners of theopoetics.

The principle of integration that undergirds the Coleridgean sense of wholeness of being and Dante’s artistic practice is fundamental to George Eliot’s religious imagination. Equally important is the notion of incarnation, both in its ethical and sacred modeling of integrated humanity and in its modeling of the aesthetic goal of making the words of her art become flesh, in a figurative sense. For, despite her withdrawal from the institutional church, she continues to believe in the incarnation as the basis for human values and relations. As an artist she believes not only in the ethical imperative to live one’s beliefs but also in the aesthetic imperative to “show, not tell” one’s ideas.

The interrelation of integration, integrity, and incarnation reveals itself as a deeply personal idea in the course of George Eliot’s writing: in the process

Introduction í of bringing her characters and ideas to life in fiction, she discovers that she herself, as their creator, must bear their suffering in her own body. This process is fundamentally integrating because it is not an idea that she decides to demonstrate; instead it is an experience that she learns to believe. In Christian terms, one might say that belief in the incarnation is fundamental to the possibility of integrated humanity; George Eliot lives out this notion in the course of her career. In the deepest sense then, her imagination is religious and her theopoetics is comprised of and energized by love.

The principle of integration also explains the deceptively simple design of this book, which takes seriously George Eliot’s own understanding of her career as a developing continuum. While interspersing comments on works from every period of her career, I trace the growth of her religious imagination as it evolves, with the exception of reserving my analysis of the early work Silas Marner for chapter 5. As I will try to show, her central beliefs— always founded on a sense of ultimate mystery—change only in the sense of growing and deepening, thereby demonstrating again the fundamental importance of integration.

Indeed, the other essential element of George Eliot’s religious imagination is her belief in evolution as fundamental to all of life, including consciousness. Failure to understand the importance of George Eliot’s belief in evolution is responsible for the notion that she “lost her faith” as a young woman, a view that has been the mainstay of a secular dismissal or misunderstanding of her serious religious concerns. Basil Willey seems to have lost the argument he took up in his Nineteenth-Century Studies, published in 1955, when he famously disputed Lord David Cecil’s claim that George Eliot was “not religious.” Willey argued that religious was “just what she was,” contending that “the whole predicament that she represents was that of the religious temperament cut off by the Zeitgeist from the traditional objects of veneration, and the traditional intellectual formulations.”* His voice was drowned out in the secularizing tide, however, such that much critical work on George Eliot is founded on the assumption that Cecil was correct. As recently as 2001, for example, Barry Qualls’s chapter “George Eliot and Religion” in The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, while thorough and subtle, began by stating that George Eliot maintained her connection to biblical texts and language “when she lost her faith,” without his feeling the need to defend or explain this premise.° Willey supported his claim by citing George Eliot’s sustained attention to “righteousness,” “renunciation,” and “reverence.”’ These are key themes for my argument as well, and in a way I am able to take up where he left off because the Zeitgeist has shifted toward more openness to exploring religious experience and beliefs.

Indeed, while it is true that the discovery of evolution constituted the major challenge to traditional Christianity in the nineteenth century, this was only the beginning of a process of revisioning religious beliefs, experience, and consciousness in the context of scientific discoveries. For some, it is true, the scientific challenge led to abandoning religion, as belief in reason replaced religious faith. The climate of intellectual skepticism did become widespread and came to feed the pervasive secularism following the World Wars; it is only now in the twenty-first century that what has been called “the religious turn” has given us a wider perspective in which to consider the nineteenth-century response to evolution. One of my aims is to contribute, along with such books as Peter Hodgson’s The Mystery Beneath the Real: Theology in the Fiction of George Eliot and J. Russell Perkin’s Theology and the Victorian Novel, to a reconsideration of the complexities of nineteenth-century religion, in the hope that we might begin to recognize that it is just as complex as that of our own century.

It is in the context of an evolutionary understanding that I try to clarify what George Eliot meant by faith and religion. By examining the way that she lived out their meaning in her writing, I wish to show how inadequate, even useless and misleading, is the concept of a lost faith as applied to George Eliot. Fundamental to my argument is the idea that in her work George Eliot is anticipating ways of reconciling faith and reason, mainly through the action of imagination, which had yet to be theorized or adequately understood. I therefore enlist the aid of several thinkers whose work she did not know, most because she predated them and, in the case of Kierkegaard, because she never happened (as far as I know) to encounter his work. Kierkegaard’s arguments for the truth of subjectivity and the subjectivity of truth are fundamental to my approach.

Since one of the most important catalysts of George Eliot’s evolution with regard to religion occurred when she encountered Roman Catholic art in Europe, it seems apt that most of the thinkers I invoke are from that tradition. My work benefits greatly from the insights of the Catholic philosopher Richard Kearney. I particularly draw from his understanding of imagination as a force that, in allowing for the possibility of the unseen, awakens the human potential for change by actualizing goodness, beauty, and truth, as well as his theory of “anatheism”—the process by which one may come back to God in a new way. Kearney’s teacher, Paul Ricoeur, helps me develop an idea of George Eliot’s “narrative identity” in chapter 2. For chapters 3 and 41 rely on Karl Rahner and Evelyn Underhill (the latter a member of the Church of England) for their understanding of mysticism.

Perhaps most controversial is the use I make of the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, since it is here that I act upon Kierkegaard’s affirmation of the subjectivity of truth to claim that Teilhard’s reconciliation of science and faith might have effected George Eliot’s own “anatheistic” return to a newly understood God. In my effort to support this claim I am grateful for the work of Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds on Dante’s Divine Comedy, as well as, of course, the work of the great Italian master himself. George Eliot did read and love Dante’s work, a fact that I read as testament to her intuition concerning what there was to believe and what it meant to believe.

Chapter 1, “Incarnation and Inwardness: George Eliot’s Early Works in the Context of Contemporary Religious Debates,” begins with an outline of the early life of Mary Anne Evans—later George Eliot—and her movement from the evangelical Christianity of her youth toward the noninstitutional religious attitude of her mature life. I discuss several key essays she wrote before venturing into fiction. I refute the standard view that George Eliot accepted Strauss’s demythologized Jesus and embraced Feuerbach’s “religion of humanity”—both of whose key works she famously translated—by showing the importance to her of the individual as a spiritual being. While acknowledging that George Eliot did not know his work, I propose Kierkegaard’s idea of the individual as a better model. The chapter argues that two key concepts of Christianity, incarnation and inwardness, inform George Eliot’s work from the start. The importance of integration is evident from the beginning as well, as I show by introducing the notion of incarnation as a principle that underlies the understanding of fiction as well as the understanding of faith at this time. My main focuses for illustrative analysis in this chapter are “Janet’s Repentance” (the last story in the Scenes of Clerical Life), Adam Bede, and The Mill on the Floss.

Chapter 2, “‘Even Our Failures Are a Prophecy’: Toward a Post-Evangelical Aesthetic,” covers George Eliot’s middle period between two major successes, the publication of The Mill on the Floss in 1860 and that of Middlemarch in 1871-72. Generally understood as a time of experiment if not outright failure, this period sees the publication of two major works that deal directly with religion in a historical, European context—the novel Romola and the long dramatic poem The Spanish Gypsy—as well as a novel, Felix Holt, the Radical, which seeks to create a secular saint in near-contemporary England. This is also the period when George Eliot writes lesser-known poetical works, several of which investigate the value of art and the role of the artist. My argument in this chapter is that, having finished in The Mill on the Floss with the evangelical Christian landscape of her youth, George Eliot is seeking in this period a new terrain for her fiction. Because, as quoted above, writing is part of her religion, this means seeking a religious terrain and a way to affirm the artist as a kind of religious figure. In this context, these works take on a profound importance in helping her to work out the implications of her calling as an artist and in mapping out the landscape of future works.

Central to this chapter is a consideration of the idea of suffering, which, while a key theme from the beginning, takes on a new meaning in this context. The major figure here is that of the martyr, and, as throughout the study, integration will be seen to be an important clue to how George Eliot’s religious imagination is developing in this period. Integration will also provide the clue as to why she begins to explore different literary forms: not only does she write more and more poems, but she also writes about tragedy. Incarnation again comes into play in that, though she keeps at bay any suggestion that her own physical and emotional suffering has an ultimate meaning, we see her own view of suffering change as her experience grows to embrace what might be seen as artistic failure.

In chapter 3, “Religion in a Secular World: Middlemarch and the Mysticism of the Everyday,” I argue that Middlemarch, as an almost flawlessly integrated whole, demonstrates how central integration is to George Eliot’s religious imagination. Middlemarch not only explores the way in which integrity manifests as integration but also itself represents George Eliot’s own achievement of personal and artistic integration. Even its status as both a critical and popular success demonstrates a triumph of integration. As in the previous chapter, I turn first to two poems of this period—“The Legend of Jubal” and “Armgart”—in this case poems that focus on the role of the artist. In them George Eliot expresses a Romantic, idealistic view of the artist so that she is able to ground her prose—or, in other words, to subordinate her own need for idealism—in order to incarnate her ideas and ideals in realistic characters and situations. This approach sets the pattern for her novel Middlemarch as Dorothea must learn a similar kind of grounding, which involves a shift in her understanding of religion when her experience with Casaubon drives her from the apostolic, idealistic, doctrinally pure Christianity of her youthful dreams to a religion that is based on love in action and practical goodness. I argue that in this Dorothea is learning what might be called the theology of integration that is the basis of the mysticism of everyday life.

This chapter also includes a brief survey of the clergy of nineteenth-century Britain and their representatives in George Eliot’s novelistic world. The theology of integration is crucial again in that fundamental to her religious imagination at this time is the belief that religion is an integral part of society. Through her fictional clerics in Middlemarch George Eliot demonstrates that the clergy are at their best integrated into society and that, like men and women of every profession and role, they are called to manifest integrity by living out their faith in their daily lives and integrating themselves into the life around them.

Chapter 4, “‘The Religion of the Future’: Daniel Deronda and the Mystical Imagination,” shows George Eliot further pursuing the ideas and concerns of Middlemarch as she sets a novel for the first time in her own time and city, confronting the sense of jaded purposelessness and anxious hopelessness that pervades her culture in the wake of its loss of a religious center. She offers religion as a solution by reclaiming three kinds of religious life—the everyday mysticism modeled by Dorothea, the ancient Jewish mystical tradition, and the Romantic understanding of imagination. All three of these attitudes exemplify the mystical notion that faith transforms the ordinary world into a realm of poetry and possibility. With these three mystical possibilities George Eliot gestures toward “the religion of the future” that she refers to in a letter of this time. Her sense of the future clearly incorporates religious ideas from the past, is grounded in present action, and envisions the future as something other than the afterlife that is present-day religion’s preoccupation. In Daniel

Deronda we also see George Eliot furthering her efforts toward integration by writing a novel in which religion, poetry, art, and music are thematized.

In chapter 5, “Evolutionary Spirituality and the Theopoetical Imagination: George Eliot and Teilhard de Chardin,” I move to the conclusion of this study by speculating about how very deeply evolutionary and religious George Eliot’s attitude was. I do so by placing her in a continuum of theopoetical thinkers, with Dante as her ancestor and Teilhard de Chardin as her heir. I show in Daniel Deronda three specific cultural illustrations of the religious imagination at work, and I analyze Silas Marner in light of Teilhard’s evolutionary spirituality in order to show that underlying George Eliot’s novels is her appeal to ways of religious being that are at once ancient and ever-evolving. The discussion in this chapter is framed by my contention that Teilhard’s ideas on evolutionary spirituality, particularly those concerning the convergence of science and faith and the evolution of consciousness, along with his radical perspectives on interpretation and on the meaning of suffering, can help us to understand George Eliot’s religious imagination. As I have argued from the beginning, George Eliot’s affirmation of subjective, individual, evolving ways of knowing is central to her religious imagination. Here, I develop this notion by briefly exploring some of the ways in which subjective, individual, evolving ways of interpretation have always been central to Christian thought.

In a brief “Conclusion,” I suggest that George Eliot’s ever-evolving religious imagination finds an echo in the contemporary understanding of “The Word Continuously Incarnated.”

Chapter 1 +

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.

Is there not a spiritual existence that belongs to individuals? —Soren 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.°