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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

ch apter 32

Secularism Michael Rectenwald

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.1 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 preoccupied only with the elimination of religious belief; in others, it is concerned with substituting a secular creed in its place. his latter form of secularism was embraced by such ‘advanced’ middle-class writers of the Victorian period as homas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold and George Eliot.2 he encounter with secularism of such thinkers was often accompanied 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 fiction. In 1841, at the age of 22, Mary Ann Evans, then an evangelical Christian, had a life-changing encounter with secular thought. To this point she had followed her father’s 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. he source of their religious scepticism was the new biblical or ‘Higher Criticism’. Originating in Germany and imported into Britain, this historical and naturalistic approach to the Bible held that the Scriptures, like other ancient texts, involved myths, legends and allegory. he ‘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 Bible’s historical inaccuracies, theological inconsistencies and dubious morality, divine authorship was especially improbable. 271

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Probably the first work of biblical criticism that Evans encountered was An Inquiry into the Origins of Christianity (1838), 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 Charles’s wife, the former Rufa Brabant, the massive task of translating from the German David Strauss’s he Life of Jesus (published in 1846). Strauss’s controversial study represented an important contribution to the new form of historicism because of its demonstration that supposedly miraculous events, especially in the New Testament, were in fact mythical. She later translated Ludwig Feuerbach’s he Essence of Christianity (1854), another significant work in this vein, which in a complex argument proposes that God is the outward projection of individual human natures. George Eliot’s reading also included the new secular social studies, which influenced her outlook and work. he French philosopher and historian Auguste Comte argued in Positive Philosophy (1830–46) 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 scientific or positive. According to this Positivist schema, religious belief was part of the infantile stage of humanity that was paralleled in the lives of individuals. Belief in the supernatural was thus equated with childhood fantasy. 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 scientific 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 1851, Marian Evans reviewed for the Westminster Review R. W. Mackay’s he Progress of the Intellect (1850), a work of Comtean orientation. By this time a sympathiser with Comte’s Positivism, her characterisation of this tendency in thought was exemplary: she wrote ‘he 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, 31). he language of the Mackay review is echoed in a Middlemarch passage describing the ‘long pathways of necessary sequence’ of Lydgate’s studies (M, ch. 16). Ironically, Tertius Lydgate, the ambitious medical reformer in Middlemarch, does not apply the same scientific 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

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Vincy, Lydgate’s self-centred and demanding wife – will have necessary, mostly negative, consequences. Like the poet Alfred Tennyson, George Eliot read with keen interest the major scientific works that supported the secular worldview under formation at the time, including Charles Lyell’s three-volume treatise, he Principles of Geology (1830–3). his masterwork, which laid the foundation of modern geology, ridiculed the biblical explanations for geological findings, including the Mosaic flood. According to Lyell, those studying the earth’s surface had allowed for ‘dramatic and even supernatural causes’ – massive floods, earthquakes, a ‘plastic force’ in nature – and explained the otherwise inexplicable by reference to ‘the origin of things’.3 Lyell suggested that no such catastrophes could be allowed if geology was to become scientific. Instead, the history of the earth demonstrated an uninterrupted uniformity – natural forces affecting the earth’s surface uniformly across time. Although he maintained that humanity had been created by a special theistic fiat, Lyell explained all other geological and biological phenomena with reference to uniform natural causes. In he 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 flood in the novel may seem to have some of the supernatural power of the Mosaic flood, the narrator 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. he Floss is described in the novel as ‘the great river [that] flows forever onward, and links the small pulse of the old English town with the beatings of the world’s mighty heart’ (MF, book 4, ch. 1). he river has no regard for human affairs and is an instantiation 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 contemporaries. Evolutionary works prompted religious doubt and were used to support a secular worldview. One of the most influential was the anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) 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 God’s creative intervention. Of course, George Eliot also read Charles Darwin’s works, which form the basis of modern evolutionary biology: On the Origin of Species (1859)

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and he Descent of Man (1871). In the Origin, Darwin explained the introduction of all species, including, by implication, human beings, in terms of the law of natural selection acting on randomly appearing variations. In he 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 Eliot’s treatment of evolutionary theory is best illustrated in Middlemarch, where she explores several aspects of evolutionary thinking, including Darwin’s and Herbert Spencer’s 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. his organic web mirrors the incredibly complex set of relationships that obtains in nature. George Levine has recently argued that the prevalence of secularism 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 influential, group including Carlyle, Mill and George Eliot. Yet religious defection among the working classes was no ‘mirage’.4 From the early 1800s, waning church attendance among working-class men and women in industrial towns was already a cause for concern. By the 1851 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’. he Anglican Church buttressed the dominant classes ideologically and, at the same time, the state Church and its clergy were supported materially by taxes. Together, for artisanal and working-class radicals, the unholy alliance represented a bar against progressive change. Until the 1840s, working-class ‘infidels’ – a term of derogation suggesting that irreligion represented a moral and social deficiency – faced imprisonment and fines for their expression of anti-clericism and unbelief.5 George Eliot represented working-class infidelity in her most explicitly political novel, Felix Holt, the Radical, where the trade-unionist speaker expresses his hostile attitude towards established religion: It’s part of their monopoly. hey’ll supply us with our religion like everything else, and get a profit on it. hey’ll give us plenty of heaven. We may have land there. hat’s the sort of religion that they like – a religion that

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gives us working men heaven, and nothing else … We’ll give them back some of their heaven, and take it out in something for us and our children in this world. (FH, ch. 30)

As an unbeliever, Felix Holt accepts the anti-supernaturalist aspect of the speaker’s 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’ (first published in Blackwood’s Magazine in January 1868 and later appended to the novel), this ‘something’ is the moral improvement of the working class through education. he ‘Address’ was solicited by John Blackwood as an intervention in the second Reform Bill debate in 1867 – to counter Benjamin Disraeli’s speech delivered to working men in October 1867 and to convince working men that they needed to improve morally before any improvement in society might be effected by their exercise of the vote. Felix Holt and the ‘Address’ thus exemplify the political differences between George Eliot’s secularism and that of working-class radicals, especially before 1850. 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 infidels. 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 lineage and drew support from each other’s efforts. his 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 1842, he attended the opening of Owen’s Millennium Hall in Queenswood, Hampshire. Bray read and recommended the standard works on which the working-class radicals relied in their periodical campaigns against theism, including Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature and C. F. Volney’s Ruins of Empire (Haight (1968), 37–8; 45–6). On the other side, working-class secularism, then known as ‘freethought’ or ‘infidelity’, was well under way before it found expression among middle-class thinkers.6 As early as 1842, well before Mary Ann Evans’s translation, working-class radicals had reviewed Strauss’s work in the Oracle of Reason, according to its editor ‘the only exclusively atheistical print that has appeared in any age or country’.7 Working-class infidels 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 1850s, they had already won a wider toleration for freethought.

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Until the 1850s, the middle-class sceptics had, for the most part, eschewed working-class infidels for fear that such associations would threaten their ‘respectability’. hen George Jacob Holyoake steered working-class freethought away from vitriolic cleric-baiting and Bible-roasting when he founded Secularism proper in 1851. At this point, the views of working- and middle-class secularists came to resemble each other more closely. Holyoake’s 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 scientific morality and epistemology. His moderation and the emphasis he placed on ‘positive’ Secularism won him middle-class support. In 1850, the two secularist lines finally crossed. Holyoake’s periodicals had earned him a reputation among middle-class reformers as a stalwart and capable publisher. he Reasoner, founded in 1846, defined and promoted his brand of Secularism and ran reviews and notices of liberal theological and heterodox middle-class writers, including his own review of George Henry Lewes’s Robespierre (1849). he Leader, the periodical founded by Lewes and hornton Hunt in 1850, positioned itself at the forefront of liberal opinion. Holyoake’s notoriety as a leading radical with sober judgement had earned him entrance into middle-class radical society, where he met and discussed politics and philosophy with the legatees of philosophical radicalism, including Francis Place, Robert Owen, Francis Newman, hornton 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.8 Although little evidence of the connection is extant in George Eliot’s 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 first recognition of the kind I have received’.9 his recognition was seen by many of Holyoake’s older working-class acquaintances as the gentrification of working-class infidelity and its merging with the gradualist, middle-class scientific meliorism 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.’10 hus, middle-class secularism benefited legally and ideologically from the working-class freethought movement, which parted ways with radical

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Figure 20 George Eliot’s grave in Highgate Cemetery, with Jacob Holyoake’s nearby (at the left of the image). By permission of Mustapha Ousellam.

working-class politics as the latter tended towards the negative secularism of Charles Bradlaugh on the one hand, and Marxian socialism on the other. Holyoake’s brand of Secularism was likewise legitimated by middle-class unbelievers. In a fitting ending to the story, the mingling of these groups found its ultimate expression at Holyoake’s 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 1906 during a service attended by thousands of Owenite co-operators and old friends (see Figure 20).11 Secularism was an important context for George Eliot’s life and works. She was essentially a secularist; her own personal values were demonstrably secular, and she produced works of fiction in which characters, plots and outcomes were explained and evaluated in secular, naturalistic 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. he view that Charles Bray and others ascribed to

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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 anything, 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.12

his is a quintessential expression of the secular outlook. n ote s 1 George Holyoake, he Reasoner (London: Holyoake and Co., 1852), vol. xii, p. 1. 2 See Edward Royle, ‘Freethought: he Religion of Irreligion’, in Denis G. Paz (ed.), Nineteenth Century English Religious Traditions: Retrospect and Prospect (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), p. 181. 3 James A. Secord (ed.), Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1830–3; London: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 9. 4 See George Levine, Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 210–44. 5 See George Jacob Holyoake, he History of the last trial by jury for atheism in England: a fragment of autobiography (London: Watson, 1851). 6 Royle, ‘Freethought’, pp. 172–3. 7 he Oracle of Reason, or, Philosophy Vindicated (London: Field, Southwell & Co., 1841–3), vol. i (1842), pp. 239, ii. 8 See Joseph McCabe and Charles William Frederick Goss, Life and Letters of George Jacob Holyoake (London: Watt & Co., 1908), vols. i and ii. 9 George Jacob Holyoake, Bygones Worth Remembering (London: T. F. Unwin, 1905), p. 64. 10 Quoted in Edith Simcox, ‘George Eliot’, he Nineteenth Century, 9 (May 1881), 787. 11 Lee Grugel, George Jacob Holyoake: A Study in the Evolution of a Victorian Radical (Philadelphia, PA: Porcupine Press, 1976), p. 155. 12 Charles Bray, Phases of Opinion and Experience During a Long Life: An Autobiography (London: Longmans, Green, 1884), p. 73.

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