Spiritual Sunday
My good friend and editor extraordinaire Rebecca Adams just alerted me to a fine blog post on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. In the view of Lindsey Brigham Knott of the Circe Institution, Eliot’s magnificent novel grapples with the question, “What happens when a person of fervent ideals is born into a place and age that cannot support them?”
Knott points out that Middlemarch compares protagonist Dorothea Brooke with Teresa of Avila. As Eliot states in her preface, certain people, “with dim lights and tangled circumstance [try] to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement.” Unfortunately, to all the rest of the world,” their struggles seem
mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Teresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul.”
Knott observes that the challenge arises in figuring out what path to choose. Since that path must be “greater and beyond” self, the ardently willing soul “longs to be directed, subsumed into an end other, greater, and more self-evidently transcendent than its own whims and fancies.” For St. Teresa, this transcendence involves working to reform the Carmelite Orders within the context of a divine mission. For Dorothea, lacking this religious context, it takes the form of marrying a stodgy professor who seems to be working on a great work, a key to all mythologies. Dorothea will (as she sees it) become his amanuensis, supporting him as Milton’s daughters supported their father to produce Paradise Lost. Unfortunately for Dorothea, Casaubon is no Milton. Knott points out,
She creates plans for cottages that would improve the lives of neighboring estates’ tenant farmers; she embarks on regimens of personal discipline and denial; in what should be her culminating glory, she marries a man in order to aid him in finishing his life’s work of scholarship before his looming death. But these attempts, though they promised great reservoirs to fill, prove too shallow for the flood of her zeal. Her plans for reform are dismissed as frivolous and expensive; her efforts at denial earn her only a reputation of oddness; and, rather than a great work, her husband’s scholarship turns out to be little more than the crabbed scrawls of a weary mind. So she pours her passion out, only to watch it overspill and soak, heedlessly, into barren ground.
Dorothea is not the only character who experiences such frustration. Lydgate is a visionary doctor who wants to bring new medical and sanitation practices to the area and also build a much needed hospital. Unfortunately, his vision is stymied by local politics and he is essentially broken by his failure, leaving in disgrace and spending the rest of life servicing wealthy invalids in a resort town. His shallow and materialistic wife is happy but he himself, having been denied a higher purpose, dies an existential death, which in turn is followed by his actual death.
Thus, Dorothea and Lydgate are in the same boat. Knott writes,
For what Eliot critiques through her novel is not the protagonist, whose impetuous errors are described with gentle pity, but rather her setting—Middlemarch, as the title indicates, an English neighborhood that represents the social order of the whole nineteenth century, and that our own twenty-first century perpetuates. Dorothea’s ideals do not fail because of her poor choices, but because of the poor circumstances her world offers her.
At this point in her essay, Knott cites Middlemarch’s finale:
[A]midst the conditions of an imperfect social state . . . great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Teresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone.
Applying the message to our own times, Knott writes that,
in the world of the modern West’s secularized syncretism, the medium of ardent deeds is forever gone. Here, neither Teresa nor Antigone would have known how to act significantly, because there is no consensus on what constitutes significant action. The actions that were clearly transcendent in the medium of their own times could only be met with this response today: “Well . . . it was an extreme choice . . . but if it was personally meaningful . . . then it must have been fulfilling to them”—and no ardently willing soul would want to pour its fervor out for something merely personally meaningful.
The answer, as Knott sees it, is “a classical Christian education [that offers] not offer a worldview, but a world”:
This could, perhaps, form a fresh metaphor for understanding the task of classical Christian education. It is not only to train students in wisdom and virtue, but to summon them into a medium beyond their present circumstances in which wise and virtuous acts can take shape. It is to make the legends of Homer’s Troy, Dante’s Paradise, Milton’s Eden feel like students’ own history, and then to make their history feel like a grand legend, and their present but a small chapter in that tale. It is to reveal their religion, not as a school’s statement of faith or Sunday church attendance, but as the interpretive key to all time and space. It is to cultivate, within the walls of the classical school and classical home, a communion of people who share this sense of the drama in which they are supporting cast.
I’m not entirely sure of the relationship between “classical” and “Christian” in Knott’s articulation. Homer, after all, is not a Christian author and Dante and Milton have different Christian visions. But I fully subscribe to Knott’s view that many people, those in their teens and twenties especially, long for a meaningful quest and sometimes thrash around trying to find it—and that literature is a powerful guide to help them find their way. The quest, in other words, has a spiritual dimension, even though I would disagree with Knott that it can find articulation only through a religious education.
And in that light, I believe that the political path that Dorothea is planning with her second husband at the end of the book addresses some of the meaning that Knott finds missing. The social reform to which the couple dedicate their lives is as worthy–as spiritual–as convent reform.