George Eliot's Religious Imagination

George Eliot’s Religious Imagination George Eliot’s Religious Imagination A Theopoetics of Evolution Marilyn Orr northwestern university press evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2018 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2018. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Orr, Marilyn, 1950– author. Title: George Eliot’s religious imagination : a theopoetics of evolution / Marilyn Orr. Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017029797 | ISBN 9780810135895 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810135888 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810135901 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Eliot, George, 1819–1880—Criticism and interpretation. | Eliot, George, 1819–1880—Religion. | Evolution (Biology)—Religious aspects— Christianity. Classification: LCC PR4692.R4 O77 2017 | DDC 823.8—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017029797 Except where otherwise noted, this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. In all cases attribution should include the following information: Orr, Marilyn. George Eliot’s Religious Imagination: A Theopoetics of Evolution. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018. The following material is excluded from the license: Earlier versions of chapters 1 and 2 as outlined in the acknowledgements. For permissions beyond the scope of this license, visit http://www.nupress .northwestern.edu/. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. It is perhaps the business of the commentator and critic to point to resemblances, as well as to differences, between the form of thought of a poet of the past, and our own, for it seems that unless this is done, and done repeatedly from generation to generation, works of the past cease to have significance for the ordinary reader, which is tantamount to saying they cease to live. — Barbara Reynolds, “Introduction” to Dante, Paradiso, 15 Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. — Leonard Cohen, “Anthem” Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 3 Chapter 1 Incarnation and Inwardness: George Eliot’s Early Works in the Context of Contemporary Religious Debates 11 Chapter 2 “Even Our Failures Are a Prophecy”: Toward a Post- Evangelical Aesthetic 33 Chapter 3 Religion in a Secular World: Middlemarch and the Mysticism of the Everyday 59 Chapter 4 “The Religion of the Future”: Daniel Deronda and the Mystical Imagination 87 Chapter 5 Evolutionary Spirituality and the Theopoetical Imagination: George Eliot and Teilhard de Chardin 109 Conclusion The Word Continuously Incarnated 135 Notes 139 Bibliography 165 Index 171 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 encounter- ing 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.1 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.”2 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, ix x 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 xi 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 Acknowledgments The lengthy time this project has taken to complete means that my list of peo- ple 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 Depart- ment of English and the Faculty of Humanities at Laurentian University. I am especially grateful to those who mapped out with me and enjoyed the terri- tory 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.

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