George Eliot
1819–1880
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.” — George Eliot (attr.)
The Argument
George Eliot — Mary Ann Evans — is the most intellectually formidable of the Victorian novelists and the one whose relationship with Christianity is most instructive for literary apologetics. She lost her faith in her twenties, translated Strauss's Life of Jesus and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity into English, and became the central figure of London's secular intellectual culture. And then she wrote novels saturated with the moral seriousness and the narrative structures of the Christianity she had abandoned.
Middlemarch — widely regarded as the greatest novel in English — is a sustained argument about the relationship between personal virtue and social circumstance, about the cost of moral seriousness in a world that rewards the superficial, about the unhistoric acts of ordinary people whose goodness shapes the world without leaving monuments. This is not secular humanism. It is Christian moral theology without the theology.
For literary apologetics, George Eliot is the test case for the question of whether Christian moral categories can survive the loss of Christian metaphysics. Her own answer, worked out across the novels, is ambiguous: the categories survive, but they become increasingly difficult to ground. The sympathy she preaches requires, as she tacitly acknowledges, something more than she can give it.
The Literary Apologetic
New essays from the long tradition. No noise. Just letters worth reading.