George Eliot's Religious Imagination: A Theopoetics of Evolution - Softcover

Orr, Marilyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810135884 ISBN 13: 9780810135888

Verlag: Northwestern University Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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

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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."

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Northwestern University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0810135884
• ISBN 13: 9780810135888
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 175
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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