George Eliot's religious imagination: a theopoetics of evolution

190 Pages·2018·1.414 MB·English

by  Eliot, George;Orr, Marilyn

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
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.
—D orothea 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 increas-
ingly “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 conver-
gence 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 imagi-
nation 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-e volving understanding of suffering. From
the start of her career she shares Kierkegaard’s understanding that suffering,
ix