Te: books on my bookshelves are generally Graeme Smith teaches at Westminster College, Oxford, and is co-editor of the forthcoming journal “Political Theology” (Sheffield Academic Press) REVIEWS: BOOKS Alternative Victorian Values The new biographies of Coleridge and George Eliot reviewed by David Boulton Coleridge: Darker Reflections by Richard Holmes, Harper-Collins, £19.99 George Eliot: The Last Victorian by Kathryn Hughes, Fourth Estate, £20 n recent years there has been a spate of biographies of nineteenth century giants: Wordsworth, Keats, Darwin, Wilde among the very best, and now the completion of Richard Holmes’ superb two-parter on Coleridge, and Kathryn Hughes’ marvellous unravelling of the life of Marian Evans, better known to us as George Eliot.
Our fascination with the period and its giants is no great mystery.
The nineteenth century completed the job, begun falteringly in the seventeenth, of taking leave of God and the whole panoply of supernaturalism and gaseous spirituality, and fighting through the fug and fog of aeons of obscurantism towards a more kindly light. In 1800, God still ruled, OK. By 1899, Shelley, Spencer, Darwin, Neitzsche, Strauss, Feuerbach, Marx, Huxley, Arnold and Marian Evans had helped him on his way to a quiet retirement and a dignified death. The odd thing is that, in 1999, with God so long in his grave, so many of us should still be mourning his absence and agonising over how on earth we shall get on without him.
For we soon find, plunging ourselves into the world of the Victorians and their immediate predecessors, that the brightest and best of them spent much of their lives grappling with questions we are ignorant enough to suppose are peculiar to us and our postmodern generation.
What does the word “God” mean? In what sense does the word point to a “personality”, an “intelligence”, a “purpose”, a “will” behind or innate in the universe? If there is no such personality and purpose, on what may we ground our values? And what is the relation of language to consciousness? Can we step outside the world of language? Long, long before a twentieth century Cambridge clerical don got to puzzling it all out, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was dividing his time between opium, Asra, poetry and the most intense theological speculation.
The young Coleridge of the 1790s was a radical Unitarian, when unitarianism was already groping a way towards what would later be called humanism. In the early 1800s he was involved for a time with Quakers, naming his own journal “For both Coleridge and Eliot, the exhilarating theological quests on which they embarked were driven by love experiences.” Victorian giants: Coleridge and Eliot The Friend. Like Blake before him and Keats contemporaneously, he hated the “deist” notion of God as an impersonal power “like Gravitation”. But this did not drive him back to a personal God.
Instead, he thought God must be considered as an “idea”, “the Archetype” of all living things. The God-idea was made manifest in the word: in language. As Richard Holmes writes, “Coleridge believed that the human language-world depends upon an entire structure of perceptions, which is generated by human social experience and ultimately by religious beliefs. So language, like the soul, was a unique form of unifying human consciousness and collectivity... In what sense it had ‘evolved’ from Nature, or was a gift of God (‘the Logos’), or perhaps both, constantly shifted in Coleridge’s thinking and was often expressed differently in his poetry and his philosophical prose.” This is Wittgenstein well over a century before Wittgenstein (or Cupitt long before Cupitt), as was his comment on Wordsworth’s observation that “language is the clothing of thought”. “No”, said Coleridge, “language is the incarnation of thought”.
Mary Anne Evans, as she was in her first incarnation, was a different kettle of fish. Coming under the influence of a devout teacher on whom she developed an adolescent crush, the teenage Mary Anne was a pious, puritanical evangelical with the manners of a marquess and the morals of a Methodist. But she was saved by Shakespeare, Shelley, Byron and Wordsworth, all of whom she first rejected as mere fiction-writers (and therefore enemies of Truth), till their spell overwhelmed her. Shortly after her twentieth birthday she became increasingly friendly with a small group of Coventry intellectuals who were busy questioning every article of religion, politics and received morality. Mary Anne put away childish things, including her childish name and childish God, and announced that she would no longer attend church.
The convenor, we might say, of this proto-SoF group in Coventry was Charles Hennell, another Unitarian with his roots planted firmly in the Enlightenment philosophies of Locke and Hartley.
Hennell’s book An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of Christianity (1838) scrupulously separated what might reasonably be considered history from myth, fantasy and wishful-thinking to uncover a wholly human Jesus, “explicable within the known laws of nature” as “a noble-minded reformer and sage, martyred by crafty priests”. True Christianity would focus not on an unknown afterlife but on the known present, both in terms of the pleasures to be derived from “this beautiful planet” and on the improvements to be made in our own lives and those of others:
Hennell may have picked up his ideas from the German theologian David Friedrich Strauss who had just published his epoch-breaking work The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Mary Anne, soon to be born again as Marian but still several years distant from George Eliot, was barely 22 when she translated Strauss’s tortuous German into English, publishing it anonymously as no-one would have taken seriously a theological book with a woman’s name on the fly. She followed this with a translation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, which sought to save Christianity from terminal decline, redefining and reinvigorating it by filleting out the supernatural and misty-mystical. Thus, still in her twenties, and the first woman to put Coventry on the map since Lady Godiva, the anonymous Miss Evans, whispered to have “advanced” opinions and to behave in “advanced” ways with some of her men friends, introduced stuffy Victorian pre-Darwinian England to the most revolutionary theological thinking since Job got into a hassle with his Creator.
But perhaps the most intriguing and most SoFish thing about Miss Evans was that, though she ceased to “believe in” God, she did not call herself an atheist or make herself an enemy of the church.
Indeed, after her initial rebellion, which permanently alienated her family and produced the scars which are so painfully visible in The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, she made peace with a church she recognised as flawed and wrong-headed but at its best expressive of her own humanist “religion of humanity”. When, after the death of her lover George Lewes, she married John Cross, she did so in church, prompting her agnostic friends to ask each other how, if she didn’t subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, she could possibly repeat words she didn’t believe. Where have we heard that before - or since?
For both Coleridge and Eliot, the exhilarating theological quests on which they embarked were driven by love experiences, very different in each case.
Coleridge’s doomed love for “Asra” led him into a life-long nightmare of dependence on opium and masturbation, which in turn produced the guilt which led him to seek redemption in the pursuit of a saving “God idea”. Marian Evans’ complex love life, culminating in the long and happy love-match she made with a married man, though it scandalised even her “advanced” friends (who thought irregular sex was better practised than preached), taught her that love is all you need, and all that is usefully left of the God idea. Poet and novelist-to-be, they thought and felt their away across largely uncharted territory, opening tracks we quaintly think we “religious radicals” are * opening up for the first time.
Of course, neither of these books concentrate exclusively, as I have done, on their subjects’ theological and philosophical explorations. They would be odd books if they did, given that one is the story of one of our greatest poets, the other of our greatest novelist. But together they remind us of the cloud of witnesses who have preceded us in abandoning a dead realism to explore the living waters of an inexhaustible sea of faith. If we all read a little more widely we would not spend so much time reinventing the wheel @ REVIEWS: CONFERENCES CONFERENCE REVIEW: ‘IS NOTHING SACRED?’ Always look on the bright side of life Myth, Meaning and Spirituality” on November 7 not only filled the capacious New Theatre, King’s College, but required a videolink to accommodate the overflow.