Look No More Backward: George Eliot and Atheism

[rug]

George Eliot

by Rohan Maitzen
October 5th, 2012 reset

IN THE OLD DAYS there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.

— George Eliot, Silas Marner

A recent sociological study found that atheists are America’s least trusted minority. Americans, the researchers concluded, “construct the atheist as the symbolic representation of one who rejects the basis for moral solidarity.” Most Americans, that is, apparently think of atheists not just as people who don’t share their specific beliefs about the existence of a divine being, but as ethical recusants who cannot be trusted.

This is not an expert view, only a popular one: no preponderance of evidence supports it, and philosophers can readily explain how it is possible to be good without God (some have even argued it is impossible to be good with God). But prejudices are difficult to dislodge, and science and reason often, paradoxically, prove ineffective tools. Even those of us who tend to agree with “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens can find their hectoring tone wearying. Perhaps what is needed to help move people past the differences they believe divide them — or, more precisely, past the different beliefs that do divide them — is neither a leap of faith nor a rule of logic, but an exercise of the imagination, a new construction of the atheist that would transform mistrust into sympathy, hostility into fellowship. One of our best allies in such a project is Marian Evans, who by her more familiar name of ‘George Eliot’ was (as noted by one of her contemporaries) “the first great godless writer of fiction.”

Eliot’s irreligion struck many of her contemporary readers as paradoxical. How could she be at once such a stringent moralist and an unbeliever? For, then as now, religion was popularly believed to be the essential foundation of ethics. And why was it, if she didn’t believe in God, that her fiction is deeply and often sympathetically attentive to people’s religious lives — or, at any rate, to their lives as religious people?

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=977&fulltext=1&media=

[Jim__]

1. Silas Marner $2.50 @ Amazon.

Here. Sounds like it's worth the investment.

[rug]

2. That's a good deal.

I avoided reading that book in high school. Might be time to red it with new eyes.

[cbayer]

4. Middlemarch was my favorite. Might be time to reread it.

[Goblinmonger]

5. Silas Marner's a great book.

And I'm not a huge fan of the Victorian era.

There are free online versions that will work with your Kindle, Nook, Tablet, or just read on your computer, too.

[Jim__]

6. Thanks. I'll read one of the free versions.

[Goblinmonger]

7. No problems

Project Gutenberg is a great site for books past copyright.

[cbayer]

3. Ah, Ms. Eliot. She was my favorite writer at a critical time in my life and

I thank her still for what she taught me.

Her take on god and religion in general is fascinating. I like this quote:

"“the idea of a God who not only sympathizes with all we feel and endure for our fellow-men” could “pour new life into our too languid love, and give firmness to our vacillating purpose.”

as she is able to see how the concept of god is useful, while she herself does not believe in a god that is separate from oneself.