George Eliot and atheism

I regard these writings as histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction, and while I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life . . . to be most dishonorable to God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness. 

--Mary Anne Evans (aka George Eliot) on the Bible, 1842

Decades after offering this passionate account of her disbelief in a letter to her father, Mary Anne Evans would move to London, become Marian Evans, and eventually assume her status as the Victorian literary giant, George Eliot. Contemporary treatments of George Eliot rightly celebrate her writing for its affirmation of everyday life, and more often than not invoke her self-proclaimed atheism as one of its key components. The most recent example is an article in Salon called "Good without God," (originally published by the LA Review of Books) which argues that Eliot can teach modern atheists and skeptics how to be more inclusive and affirming of those who, for whatever reason, are still holding on to their religious beliefs. The article suggests that Eliot's loss of faith can temper those like Dawkins or Harris who sacrifice dialogue and community for the smug certainty of their exclusively "rational" position. Not a bad corrective, but it still comes off sounding rather patronizing where religious belief is involved. Gone is the antagonism that seems to be fuelling most contemporary atheism and its religious rebuttals.  Despite losing the rigid Methodism of her youth, Eliot, in fact, kept attending church ceremonies, in part because she simply appreciated the form of the service and its liturgies. But for her, it seemed necessary that we not confuse institutionalized ritual with what was most important: cultivating a sense of "sympathy with the difficulty of the human lot."

For Zadie Smith, one of many contemporary novelists who has celebrated Eliot's ability to embrace the faithful from a faithless position, Middlemarch gives us the story of Dorothea (a work of brilliant self-parody for Eliot), who begins as a self-effacing servant of lofty principles untempered by actual living. After a disappointing marriage, she is finally able to recognize the importance of emotional experience as a form of knowledge that is perhaps even more valuable than that of the intellect.

Henry James complained that Middlemarch seemed too diffuse and disorganized, but he seems to miss its point. He wanted more of Dorothea and less of those who should have been minor characters, like Fred Vincy and Dr Lydgate. Like many others before her, Smith claims this as the novel's great strength: it is a novel about "everybody." For Smith, Fred is "Eliot's ideal Spinozian subject" because his "moral luck is all encounter, arrangement, combination," and the love that he is continuously striving for throughout the novel--that of Mary Garth-- "is that encounter; she is Fred's reason to be good." Smith's point is well-made, but then she goes and says this: "This is not biblical morality but practical morality." Here, in Eliot's novel, Smith writes, "Love is a kind of knowledge." Again, I'm left wondering how Smith's categories work. It all sounds incredibly biblical and damn near Augustinian to me. Smith argues that "Eliot has replaced metaphysics with human relationships," but this kind of humanism, this opening to earthly relations in all their practicality, seems like the point of most Christian literature as well. "What is universal and timeless in literature is need," she claims. "Forms, styles, structures . . . should change like skirt lengths. They have to; otherwise we make a rule, a religion, of one form." She's taking her cue from Spinoza, but this claim about "need" is also there in Augustine; of course, the two philosophers go off in significantly different directions, but Smith's reading doesn't go further than a simple affirmation of desire as such. An ontology of desire, in other words, runs up against the stale forms of tradition and ritual. Nothing new here, especially when you look at the history of Christianity. Smith ends up sounding like a postmodern Protestant.

But back to the "Good without God" article, which is a good example of modern attempts to "rescue" the energy of religious belief from an absent projection of transcendence. It closes with what should an inspiring claim: "people can be their own salvation." (And perhaps it would be a bit more inspiring if it affirmed a collective politics as something more consequential.) But as I was searching for the article yesterday, I came across another article of the same name, this time in the American Catholic publication First Things, this time by Alan Jacobs. It's much smarter and provides a good contrast to the Salon piece because it recognizes that modern atheism is often simply a watered down version of Christian morality. Jacobs does us the service of highlighting Nietzsche's brief dismissal of George Eliot, which is, like most of Nietzsche's writing, to be taken with a grain of salt. Still the point is well-made. Nietzsche's certainty is our ambivalence.

G. Eliot.—They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality: that is English consistency, let us not blame it on little bluestockings la Eliot. In England, in response to every little emancipation from theology one has to reassert one’s position in a fear–inspiring manner as a moral fanatic. That is the penance one pays there. With us it is different. When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality.

Summer reading projects, briefly noted

The Politics of Friendship by Jacques Derrida

My encounter with Derrida's meditation on the Western secret of friendship and the limits of fraternity was short-lived. Our study group only met a couple times, and only managed to get through the first four chapters; but those chapters provided much to talk about and did a perfect job of articulating one of the fundamental tensions running through the third chapter of my thesis. I managed to work the insight into one of my footnotes. It takes up Derrida's aphorism, "The friends of the perhaps are the friends of truth": 

Derrida’s reference to the “friends of truth” is taken from Nietzsche’s projections of a future audience in Beyond Good and Evil. In Politics of Friendship, Derrida reads Nietzsche’s faith in the “coming philosophers” in terms of the German philosopher’s qualifying “perhaps,” and explores the conditions of impossibility that Nietzsche identifies with the “common good.” Following England’s Restoration, Milton may have shared some Nietzsche’s sentiments, at least with respect to his audience. Derrida’s attempt to engage Nietzsche on friendship (which, for the philosopher depends on the “I” and, occasionally, a “we”—what amounts to a contradictory community of solitudes) is an attempt to “honour (faire droit) what appears impossible” in Nietzsche’s anticipations (36). This chapter addresses a similar impossibility in the audience of readers anticipated by Milton’s 1671 poems.

What's going on here, in other words, is a revaluation of the Western tradition of friendship, an attempt to demarcate the limits of this tradition, and the conditions that define friendship for philosophers like Aristotle, Carl Schmitt, and the aforementioned Nietzsche. While the politics of friendship might suggest otherwise (and this "otherwise" is what Derrida is trying to get at by emphasizing "perhaps" of friendship: it's openness to the impossible, to who or what is "to come"), our idea of friendship emerges from an old boys club, a collection of citations from men who are singled out by the philosophical tradition, and at best resembles an oligarchy. 


Middlemarch by George Eliot

I'm two thirds of the way through what many consider to be the quintessential Victorian novel and I'm actually enjoying most of it. I was pleasantly surprised to find plenty of allusions to Milton in the figure of Casauban, the sterile scholar and clergyman whose intellectual pursuit of the "highest things" has lured the young Dorothea into a miserable marriage. Eliot's prose is full of wit and insight. It's not odd for me to laugh out loud while I'm reading on my daily bus ride to campus. Dorothea, the first of our protagonists, begins by treating every inconsistency or hindrance with joyful acceptance and even compares her supportive relation to her dry-as-dust-husband, Casauban, to that of Milton's daughters to their father, reading aloud texts they don't understand solely for benefit of the blind poet. Luckily, the irony that Dorothea lacks in her own life is provided by the narrator, whose constant refrain "poor, poor Dorthea" is enough to keep the reader mindful of her naive brand of saintliness. Of course, Dorothea doesn't suffer in isolation. As one would expect, Middlemarch boasts a typically large cast of characters, but the novel weaves through their various threads at a pretty manageable pace. (In other words, I'm much less confused that I thought I'd be.) In Eliot's hands, they're all brilliantly flawed, from the vain artist (Will Ladislaw) and the amoral doctor (Lydgate) to the pathetic student (Fred Vincy), who finds it nearly impossible to do anything on his own. I'll probably follow up on this one when I'm finally finished all 800 of its pages.


Marxist Feminism (reading group)

Orchestrated under the auspices of the Edmonton Free School, this group has been at work reading through texts that can be loosely grouped by their approach to the topic of gender and sexual relations more broadly. We began with Engels' Origin of the Family, and moved to some more recent interventions, such as Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman, Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch, and, most recently, a pair of essays from the 2011 anthology Communization and its Discontents (Ed. Benjamin Noys). Each text marks an attempt to engage sexual relations, not as a stable arrangement or simple binary, but from the vantage point of historical materialism; that is, as a site of social and economic reproduction. The theme of reproduction is obviously central to any understanding of sex and economics, and is reflected in the double sense of the term: as a biological effect--to reproduce the labouring class--and as the social function of the domestic realm--to sustain/care for such workers, such that they can continue to labour. For Della Costa and James, class exploitation is built upon the exploitation of women and their respective emancipation must therefore be thought together--thus, the famous call of "wages for housework" is, as Federici argues, a demand that must be made so that it can be rejected along with the role of the housewife.

We want and have to say that we are all housewives, we are all prostitutes and we are all gay, because until we recognise our slavery we cannot recognise our struggle against it, because as long as we think we are something better, something different than a housewife, we accept the logic of the master, which is a logic of division, and for us the logic of slavery. We are all housewives because no matter where we are they can always count on more work from us, more fear on our side to put forward our demands, and less pressure on them for money, since hopefully our minds are directed elsewhere, to that man in our present or our future who will “take care of us” (from "Wages Against Housework").