Rectenwald Secularism George Eliot in Context-Libre

Cambridge Books Online
http://ebooks.cambridge.org/
George Eliot in Context
Edited by Margaret Harris
Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139019491
Online ISBN: 9781139019491
Hardback ISBN: 9780521764087
Chapter
32 - Secularism pp. 271-278
Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139019491.037
Cambridge University Press
:;:
Secularism is an orientation to life that places paramount importance on
the matters of this world, and considers observation and reason the best
means by which the things of this world can be known and improved.
:

It has its roots in a response to religious belief, but is not necessarily a
form of religion in itself . In some forms, secularism has been preoccu-
pied only with the elimination of religious belief; in others, it is concerned
with substituting a secular creed in its place. Tis latter form of secular-
ism was embraced by such advanced middle-class writers of the Victorian
period as Tomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold and George
Eliot.
:
Te encounter with secularism of such thinkers was often accom-
panied by a crisis of faith, a crisis that had social, intellectual and moral
implications for the newly converted non-believer. George Eliot at once
represents the reach of secularist philosophy into middle-class circles, and
provides its best expression in Victorian ction.
In ::, at the age of ::, Mary Ann Evans, then an evangelical Christian ,
had a life-changing encounter with secular thought . To this point she had
followed her fathers staunch adherence to the customs of the Church of
England, at times practising very strict religious observances . Mary Ann
was led into religious doubt when introduced to heterodox texts by new
Coventry friends, Charles Bray, his wife Cara and her sister Sara Hennell .
Te source of their religious scepticism was the new biblical or Higher
Criticism . Originating in Germany and imported into Britain, this his-
torical and naturalistic approach to the Bible held that the Scriptures, like
other ancient texts, involved myths, legends and allegory. Te events in
the Bible and the existence of the texts themselves could be accounted for
on purely naturalistic terms and without recourse to divine authorship. In
fact, scholars maintained, given the Bibles historical inaccuracies, theo-
logical inconsistencies and dubious morality, divine authorship was espe-
cially improbable.
cuairii ,:
Secularism
Michael Rectenwald
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Michael Rectenwald :;:
Probably the rst work of biblical criticism that Evans encountered
was An Inquiry into the Origins of Christianity (:,), by Charles Christian
Hennell, brother of Cara and Sara. She soon engaged in the propagation
of biblical criticism in English, when she took over from Charless wife,
the former Rufa Brabant, the massive task of translating from the German
David Strausss Te Life of Jesus (published in :o) . Strausss controver-
sial study represented an important contribution to the new form of his-
toricism because of its demonstration that supposedly miraculous events,
especially in the New Testament, were in fact mythical. She later translated
Ludwig Feuerbachs Te Essence of Christianity (:,), another signicant
work in this vein, which in a complex argument proposes that God is the
outward projection of individual human natures.
George Eliots reading also included the new secular social studies,
which inuenced her outlook and work. Te French philosopher and
historian Auguste Comte argued in Positive Philosophy (:,co) that,
like natural phenomena, social phenomena could be studied in terms of
natural law. Comte held that society and all branches of knowledge pass
through three stages: the theological, the metaphysical and the scientic
or positive. According to this Positivist schema, religious belief was part
of the infantile stage of humanity that was paralleled in the lives of indi-
viduals. Belief in the supernatural was thus equated with childhood fan-
tasy. At the time of his writing, Comte argued that the social world was
still being treated in theological and metaphysical terms and that his own
work marked the beginning of the scientic approach. Comte suggested
that an understanding and submission to natural law in the social realm
was no less necessary than in the natural realm.
In :,:, Marian Evans reviewed for the Westminster Review R. W.
Mackays Te Progress of the Intellect (:,c), a work of Comtean orienta-
tion. By this time a sympathiser with Comtes Positivism , her characterisa-
tion of this tendency in thought was exemplary: she wrote Te master key
to this revelation, is the recognition of the presence of that invariability
of sequence which is acknowledged to be the basis of physical science,
but which is still perversely ignored in our social organization, our ethics
and our religion ( Essays , ,:). Te language of the Mackay review is ech-
oed in a Middlemarch passage describing the long pathways of necessary
sequence of Lydgates studies ( M , ch. :o ). Ironically, Tertius Lydgate, the
ambitious medical reformer in Middlemarch , does not apply the same sci-
entic approach to his personal life that he does to his research. He fails to
recognise that the relationships he is establishing in Middlemarch with
Nicholas Bulstrode, the self-serving religious hypocrite, and Rosamond
Secularism :;,
Vincy, Lydgates self-centred and demanding wife will have necessary,
mostly negative, consequences.
Like the poet Alfred Tennyson, George Eliot read with keen interest
the major scientic works that supported the secular worldview under for-
mation at the time, including Charles Lyells three-volume treatise, Te
Principles of Geology (:,c,) . Tis masterwork, which laid the foundation
of modern geology, ridiculed the biblical explanations for geological nd-
ings, including the Mosaic ood. According to Lyell, those studying the
earths surface had allowed for dramatic and even supernatural causes
massive oods, earthquakes, a plastic force in nature and explained the
otherwise inexplicable by reference to the origin of things.
,
Lyell suggested
that no such catastrophes could be allowed if geology was to become sci-
entic. Instead, the history of the earth demonstrated an uninterrupted
uniformity natural forces aecting the earths surface uniformly across
time. Although he maintained that humanity had been created by a spe-
cial theistic at, Lyell explained all other geological and biological phe-
nomena with reference to uniform natural causes.
In Te Mill on the Floss , George Eliot deals with uniformity in nature
and the social order, and the enormity of geological causes as they compare
to the minuscule scale of human drama. While the ood in the novel may
seem to have some of the supernatural power of the Mosaic ood, the nar-
rator makes clear that it is one of many that have taken place in the past and
of more that will take place in the future. Te Floss is described in the novel
as the great river [that] ows forever onward, and links the small pulse of
the old English town with the beatings of the worlds mighty heart ( MF ,
book , ch. : ). Te river has no regard for human aairs and is an instanti-
ation of the unalterable uniformity of causes that operate on the surface of
the earth and on its several inhabitants, including human beings.
George Eliot also read the major evolutionary treatises of the period ,
which had a great impact on her views and those of many of her contem-
poraries. Evolutionary works prompted religious doubt and were used to
support a secular worldview. One of the most inuential was the anonym-
ously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (:) which
introduced evolutionary ideas into the drawing rooms of the middle class.
While its author, the Scottish journalist Robert Chambers, maintained a
providential source for the beginning of the universe (the Divine Author),
all subsequent developments, including the introduction of human beings,
were the results of evolution, not Gods creative intervention.
Of course, George Eliot also read Charles Darwins works, which form
the basis of modern evolutionary biology : On the Origin of Species (:,,)
Michael Rectenwald :;
and Te Descent of Man (:;:). In the Origin , Darwin explained the intro-
duction of all species, including, by implication, human beings, in terms
of the law of natural selection acting on randomly appearing variations.
In Te Descent of Man , he fully naturalised human beings, treating them
as animals descended from a pre-human ancestor. He also treated human
sexual behaviour, invoking sexual selection to explain the relationship
between the sexes in terms of evolutionary adaptation.
George Eliots treatment of evolutionary theory is best illustrated in
Middlemarch , where she explores several aspects of evolutionary thinking ,
including Darwins and Herbert Spencers theories of sexual selection as
applied to human beings. She also portrays a model of an organic social
economy operating according to the same causal forces which act in the
natural economy, as depicted in the Origin . In the provincial town of
Middlemarch, every element has its impact on other elements, and the
whole is tied together in a web of relations that is too complex for even
the narrator to grasp fully. Tis organic web mirrors the incredibly com-
plex set of relationships that obtains in nature.
George Levine has recently argued that the prevalence of secular-
ism among the Victorian middle class may have been overstated by
twentieth-century readers and critics, based on the attention paid to
the writings of a small, yet inuential, group including Carlyle, Mill
and George Eliot. Yet religious defection among the working classes was
no mirage.
From the early :ccs, waning church attendance among

working-class men and women in industrial towns was already a cause
for concern. By the :,: religious census, working-class attendance was
lower than that of other groups. Working-class radical secularists saw
the Church and state as a piece in an oppressive Old Corruption. Te
Anglican Church buttressed the dominant classes ideologically and, at
the same time, the state Church and its clergy were supported materi-
ally by taxes. Together, for artisanal and working-class radicals, the unholy
alliance represented a bar against progressive change. Until the :cs,
working-class indels a term of derogation suggesting that irreligion
represented a moral and social deciency faced imprisonment and nes
for their expression of anti-clericism and unbelief.
,

George Eliot represented working-class indelity in her most explicitly
political novel, Felix Holt, the Radical , where the trade-unionist speaker
expresses his hostile attitude towards established religion:
Its part of their monopoly. Teyll supply us with our religion like every-
thing else, and get a prot on it. Teyll give us plenty of heaven. We may
have land there . Tats the sort of religion that they like a religion that
Secularism :;,
gives us working men heaven, and nothing else Well give them back
some of their heaven, and take it out in something for us and our children
in this world. ( FH , ch. ,c )
As an unbeliever, Felix Holt accepts the anti-supernaturalist aspect of
the speakers diatribe, but nevertheless rejects his proposed solution for
working-class ills voting reform. According to Felix, something else [must
come] before all that. As he makes clear in an Address to Working Men,
By Felix Holt (rst published in Blackwoods Magazine in January :o and
later appended to the novel), this something is the moral improvement of
the working class through education. Te Address was solicited by John
Blackwood as an intervention in the second Reform Bill debate in :o; to
counter Benjamin Disraelis speech delivered to working men in October :o;
and to convince working men that they needed to improve morally before
any improvement in society might be eected by their exercise of the vote.
Felix Holt and the Address thus exemplify the political dierences between
George Eliots secularism and that of working-class radicals, especially before
:,c. For her, a secularist faith in an all-subsuming natural law did not signify
the kind of political upheaval that it did for working-class indels. On the
contrary, for Comtean secularists like George Eliot, natural law was seen as
the regulatory mechanism for social and political conservatism.
Working- and middle-class secularism shared a philosophical lin-
eage and drew support from each others eorts. Tis is apparent in the
Bray circle of which Eliot was a part. Charles Bray was a supporter of
freethought, election reform, and many other progressive working-class
concerns, including the Utopian socialist philosophy of Robert Owen .
In May ::, he attended the opening of Owens Millennium Hall in
Queenswood, Hampshire. Bray read and recommended the standard
works on which the working-class radicals relied in their periodical cam-
paigns against theism, including Baron dHolbachs System of Nature and
C. F. Volneys Ruins of Empire (Haight (:,o), ,;; ,o).
On the other side, working-class secularism, then known as free-
thought or indelity, was well under way before it found expression
among middle-class thinkers.
o
As early as ::, well before Mary Ann
Evanss translation, working-class radicals had reviewed Strausss work in
the Oracle of Reason , according to its editor the only exclusively atheisti-
cal print that has appeared in any age or country.
;
Working-class in-
dels endured prison sentences for blasphemy and sedition and fought for
the removal of legal sanctions against the expression of anti-clerical and
anti-theistic views. By the :,cs, they had already won a wider toleration
for freethought.
Michael Rectenwald :;o
Until the :,cs, the middle-class sceptics had, for the most part, eschewed
working-class indels for fear that such associations would threaten their
respectability. Ten George Jacob Holyoake steered working-class free-
thought away from vitriolic cleric-baiting and Bible-roasting when he
founded Secularism proper in :,:. At this point, the views of working- and
middle-class secularists came to resemble each other more closely. Holyoakes
strain of Secularism was a positive form of unbelief. Like Comte, Holyoake
sought not strictly to destroy religious belief, but to supersede it with a sci-
entic morality and epistemology. His moderation and the emphasis he
placed on positive Secularism won him middle-class support.
In :,c, the two secularist lines nally crossed. Holyoakes periodicals
had earned him a reputation among middle-class reformers as a stalwart
and capable publisher. Te Reasoner , founded in :o, dened and pro-
moted his brand of Secularism and ran reviews and notices of liberal
theological and heterodox middle-class writers, including his own review
of George Henry Lewess Robespierre (:,) . Te Leader , the periodical
founded by Lewes and Tornton Hunt in :,c, positioned itself at the
forefront of liberal opinion. Holyoakes notoriety as a leading radical with
sober judgement had earned him entrance into middle-class radical soci-
ety , where he met and discussed politics and philosophy with the lega-
tees of philosophical radicalism , including Francis Place, Robert Owen,
Francis Newman, Tornton Hunt, Louis Blanc and others. Some of these
writers even contributed articles to the Reasoner . At the Leader , where
George Lewes was responsible for the reviews of literature and the arts
and Marian Evans assisted him with editing and writing , Holyoake was
brought on as the business manager. He also contributed articles on the
co-operative movement under the pseudonym Ion. He had become good
friends with Lewes, and later befriended Marian Evans.

Although little evidence of the connection is extant in George Eliots
writing, Holyoake paid tribute to her and Lewes, stating that until he was
received by such company, he had been an outcast name, both in law and
literature. His inclusion in the Leader was the rst recognition of the
kind I have received.
,
Tis recognition was seen by many of Holyoakes
older working-class acquaintances as the gentrication of working-class
indelity and its merging with the gradualist, middle-class scientic meli-
orism avowed explicitly by George Eliot: I will not answer to the name of
optimist, but if you like to invent Meliorist, I will not say that you call me
out of my name.
:c

Tus, middle-class secularism beneted legally and ideologically from
the working-class freethought movement, which parted ways with radical
Secularism :;;
working-class politics as the latter tended towards the negative secular-
ism of Charles Bradlaugh on the one hand, and Marxian socialism on
the other. Holyoakes brand of Secularism was likewise legitimated by
middle-class unbelievers.
In a tting ending to the story, the mingling of these groups found
its ultimate expression at Holyoakes funeral in Highgate Cemetery . Years
before, Holyoake had purchased a plot at the head of the graves of George
Eliot and Lewes, where his ashes were buried in January :,co during a
service attended by thousands of Owenite co-operators and old friends
(see Figure :c ).
::

Secularism was an important context for George Eliots life and works.
She was essentially a secularist; her own personal values were demon-
strably secular, and she produced works of ction in which characters,
plots and outcomes were explained and evaluated in secular, naturalis-
tic terms. While many of her characters, like Bulstrode, have religious
beliefs, such believers are often caught in contradictions and hypocrisy,
and the failure of individuals is explained in terms of natural, dense and
complicated causality. Te view that Charles Bray and others ascribed to
Figure :c George Eliots grave in Highgate Cemetery, with Jacob Holyoakes
nearby (at the left of the image).
By permission of Mustapha Ousellam.
Michael Rectenwald :;
her, although of uncertain provenance, rings true to her character and
work:
She held as a solemn conviction that in proportion as the thoughts of
men and women are removed from the earth are diverted from their
own mutual relations and responsibilities, of which they alone know any-
thing, to an invisible world, which alone can be apprehended by belief,
they are led to neglect their duty to each other, to squander their strength
in vain speculations which diminish their capacity for strenuous and
worthy action, during a span of life, brief indeed, but whose consequences
will extend to remote posterity.
::

Tis is a quintessential expression of the secular outlook.
xoris
: George Holyoake , Te Reasoner ( London : Holyoake and Co. , :,: ), vol. xii ,
p. : .
: See Edward Royle , Freethought: Te Religion of Irreligion, in Denis G. Paz
(ed.), Nineteenth Century English Religious Traditions: Retrospect and Prospect
( Westport, CT : Greenwood Press , :,,, ), p. :: .
, James A. Secord (ed.), Charles Lyell , Principles of Geology (:,c,; London :
Penguin Books , :,,; ), p. , .
See George Levine, Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian
Literature and Science (Cambridge University Press, :cc ), pp. ::c.
, See George Jacob Holyoake , Te History of the last trial by jury for atheism in
England: a fragment of autobiography ( London : Watson , :,: ) .
o Royle, Freethought, pp. :;:,.
; Te Oracle of Reason , or, Philosophy Vindicated (London: Field, Southwell &
Co., ::,), vol. i (::), pp. :,,, ii.
See Joseph McCabe and Charles William Frederick Goss , Life and Letters of
George Jacob Holyoake ( London : Watt & Co ., :,c ), vols. i and ii .
, George Jacob Holyoake , Bygones Worth Remembering ( London : T. F. Unwin ,
:,c, ), p. o .
:c Quoted in Edith Simcox, George Eliot, Te Nineteenth Century , , (May
::), ;;.
:: Lee Grugel , George Jacob Holyoake: A Study in the Evolution of a Victorian
Radical ( Philadelphia, PA : Porcupine Press , :,;o ), p. :,, .
:: Charles Bray , Phases of Opinion and Experience During a Long Life: An
Autobiography ( London : Longmans, Green , : ), p. ;, .

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