George Eliot: the Secular Sublime, Post-Secularism, and ‘Secularization’

6 George Eliot: The Secular Sublime, Post-Secularism, and ‘Secularization’ Despite her personal skepticism and predominantly secular outlook,1 we may regard George Eliot as a post-secularist. She was decidedly not a secularist of the Bradlaughian type. (See Chapter 3.) That is, she demonstrated a particular regard for religion and religious believers and generally acknowledged religion’s ongoing viability, its potential to contribute to individual, cultural, and national identity and the general weal. Eliot often figured religion as a tissue that extended throughout and within the organic social body, a kind of living integument providing cohesion and shape, sustaining it in health and order. Religion could offer metanarratives that afforded meaning and coherence, ordering the experience of the subject, while enlarging the sympathies and recom- mending the dedication of individuals to broad social objectives. Eliot even acknowledged the Anglican Church as an important ecclesiastical body for its role in providing structural coherence and service to the community. And unlike other novelists of her time – such as Dickens and Trollope, who mercilessly caricatured clerical figures for hypocrisy, sectarianism, and factionalism – Eliot generally demonstrated respect for clerics and the clerical function, especially the pastoral duty of par- ish ministers. We have the ‘saintly Mr. Tryan in Scenes of Clerical Life, “a powerful preacher, who was stirring the hearts of the people”; the eloquent and compassionate Methodist Dinah Morris in Adam Bede; the “wonderful preacher” Dr. Kenn in Mill on the Floss; the charismatic and increasingly self-deluded Savonarola in Romola; the learned and loqua- cious Dissenter Rufus Lyon in Felix Holt; and the affable Farebrother in Middlemarch’.2 While indeed Eliot did subject Christian Britain and its ministers to criticism and unflattering comparison – for example, in her treatment of Mr. Gascoigne in Daniel Deronda – she recommended and endorsed the clerical ideal even in its failure. It repays us to recall that 168 M. Rectenwald, Nineteenth-Century British Secularism © Michael Rectenwald 2016 George Eliot 169 her first novel was entitled Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) and featured portraits of three Anglican clergymen. Whether a pastor acted from a clearly defined Christian creed or a more loosely understood set of values for doing good was not of primary importance for Eliot. In Eliot’s fiction, as Norman Vance has observed, ‘[m]oral and religious sympathy proves more durable than doctrine’.3 Like her friend Francis Newman, whom Eliot referred to in a letter to Sara Hennell as ‘our blessed St. Francis’,4 Eliot valued religious senti- ment over theology, emotional truth over intellectual certitude, moral- ity and generosity over ‘correct’ doctrines. As she wrote to Francoise D’Albert Durade in 1859, scarcely two years into her career as a novelist: I have not returned to dogmatic Christianity – to the acceptance of any set of doctrines as a creed, and a superhuman revelation of the Unseen – but I see in it the highest expression of the religious senti- ment that has found its place in the history of mankind, and I have the profoundest interest in the inward life of sincere Christians in all ages. Many things that I should have argued against ten years ago, I now feel myself too ignorant and too limited in moral sensibility to speak of with confident disapprobation: on many points where I used to delight in expressing intellectual difference, I now delight in feeling an emotional agreement.5 Thus, we should not understand the representation of religion in George Eliot’s novels as a matter of mere fictive construction or whimsi- cal mediation on her part; rather, her novels illustrate a well-considered personal and historical understanding of the place of religion within a secular framework, and probably the period’s finest expression of this understanding. This understanding is in fact what I mean calling her a post-secularist. Eliot’s sympathetic treatment of religion in fiction was essentially compatible with earlier and coterminous secular-religious projects for social and political amelioration, including Auguste Comte’s ‘Religion of Humanity’, the Leader’s ‘New Reformation’ (see Chapter 5), and George Holyoake’s Secularism.6 As I have shown in Chapter 3, Eliot was part of the literary, intellectual, and scientific avant garde that helped George Holyoake to inaugurate and develop Secularism in the early 1850s, a group that included Thornton Hunt, George Henry Lewes, Harriet Martineau, Herbert Spencer, and others. She edited the Westminster Review and was part of the Chapman circle at 142 Strand, while also assisting George Henry Lewes with the Leader. These coteries 170 Nineteenth-Century British Secularism were germinal to the founding and development of Secularism. Her close connections with her future partner, G. H. Lewes, as well as Hunt, Spencer, Martineau and others, means that, at the very least, she was cognizant of the formation of Secularism underway.7 Indeed, we can figure Eliot as a Secularist of the Holyoake stripe. Welcoming religious believers to the tasks of secular improvement, in Comtean fashion, her novels imagined and suggested a kind of ‘positive religion’, not unlike that which Francis Newman described as the ‘church of the future’.8 (See Chapter 5.) Positive religionists cooperated with religious believers and might even contingently acknowledge their metaphysical convictions, although not necessarily taking the latter at face value.9 Metaphysical assertions might either be ignored, or valued as ideals for promoting moral behavior and social cohesion. Such elements could function whether or not their epistemological status was accepted. That is, while Eliot represented the persistence and appreciated the benefits of religion, she nevertheless repurposed the religious for generally secular ends, even if those ends remained in some sense trans- cendent. As Simon During puts it, ‘Eliot’s fictions mount an ambitious attempt at spiritual and intellectual invigoration and elevation, but one which does not adhere to revealed Christianity’.10 Eliot’s fiction represents a Victorian appropriation of the Romantic sublime registered in terms of social consequence rather than aestheticism. In Eliot’s post- secular narratives, the salvation of the soul is transmuted into the salvation of character. ‘Conversion’ rehabilitates the subject for social duty as opposed to a heavenly destiny. The converted subject rejects personal egoism and narrow ambition and embraces her (generally minor) role as a contributing participant in the grand project of social amelioration and the slow, gradual development of a general human character.11 The transcendental object of religious belief becomes the sublimity of secular causality stretching to eternity, the vision of which is only avail- able in time. While the convert does not worship the secular sublime, she nevertheless is in awe of its magnitude and humbly submits to its power. In the final two paragraphs of Middlemarch (1872), Eliot conveys this sense of the secular sublime as encountered by its young heroine, Dorothea Brooke: Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beauti- ful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse strug- gling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so George Eliot 171 strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know. Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.12 This is where Eliot had left religiosity and the prospect of human agency by the end of her penultimate novel. No new Saint Theresa could again emerge under the conditions of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, by the time philological and philosophical secularism had done so much of their cultural work,13 a period during which scientific naturalism had risen to prominence if not exclusive domina- tion, and by which time the cohesiveness of a religious worldview had been severely fractured. ‘Great faith’ (in anything) took ‘the aspect of illusion’. Likewise, the prospects for ‘the ardently willing soul’14 had been profoundly altered. Spirituality had to be recalibrated for tasks with secular aims and relative insignificance, since the stakes were no longer the glory of God or the rewards of eternal salvation, but rather the arduous making of a better world. For such intensely passionate and devotional souls as Dorothea Brooke, who, as Eliot leads us to believe, likely would have become a nun in a former age, the adjustment was significant.15 Thus, the post-secular is not a return to religion from secularism. Rather, it describes a condition of secularity under which the modality of religiosity has been altered by the secular and relativized as one possi- bility among others, a relativism that profoundly affects and ‘fragilizes’ it.16 Post-secularism signifies the persistence of religion, but religion that has become a choice among other options.

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