In Memoriam Bill Hugonin

Bill Hugonin was for many years one of the churchwardens at St Michael's, Alnwick, including the years I served there as vicar of the parish. He died in March 2022. He had asked me to speak at his funeral, not to give a formal eulogy (which was beautifully offered by one of his oldest friends) but to introduce the prayers by reflecting briefly on his faith and the part it played in his long and active life.

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It is exactly 40 years ago this year that I first got to know Bill Hugonin. I came as the new, young and raw incumbent of this parish of Alnwick. How much I had to learn, and how good a mentor he proved to be! I wasn’t to know the importance he would come to have for me not only during my years here but in the decades that lay ahead. I owe him a very great debt of gratitude for being one of the key influences of my life. He would have laughed at the thought - and did, when I tried much later in life to thank him. But it is true.

Latterly, he spoke often about what he called the “end-game”. He was not afraid of death, though he hoped his dying would be gentle. He had wanted to live well, he said, to be a human being with integrity, to try to make some difference in the world. Which he did, as we’ve heard, with characteristic generosity, practicality and kindness. And he wanted to die well too, if that was possible. His funeral was worked over with great care: the hymns, the readings, the prayers. A good funeral, he said, must always celebrate a person’s life, give thanks for all that he or she meant to family, friends and the wider community. It should try to reflect character, values, what really mattered to that person. So Bill wanted this service to reflect the faith that was so central to his life. He saw his funeral as a ceremony in which we would give back to his Maker and ours a precious life that was lent to us for a while. Which is to say, today is first and foremost an act of worship, of celebration, of thanksgiving, of prayer, and of loving commendation to God.

Bill’s faith was understated and modest. In a very Church of England way, he was not given to extravagant displays of piety. He valued the quieter, more reflective spirit of Christian wisdom informed by the best insights of theology and literature, poetry and art. His faith went deep, very deep indeed, for Christianity had borne and shaped him, nurtured him, made him aware (one of his favourite words). But conviction was nuanced by what I would call his tentativeness. He was wary of religious certainties and of those who claim to know too much about “God’s will”, how God is involved in human history or the evolution of the cosmos. Religious faith is precisely not to have easy answers but to look for and glimpse God in the arena of life as it is lived in the real world. His was the journey of the relentless questioner, a seeker-after-truth. For him, soul-making was always a work in progress. He believed faith should expand our horizons, stretch our minds beyond what is comfortable or conventional or familiar. And he undertook this lifelong work of striving to become a human being who is fully alive.

You get a feel for his faith in the quotations at the end of this order of service. It’s in the spirit of the reading from T. S. Eliot that we heard: “we shall not cease from exploration” - or, as St Anselm said, "faith seeking understanding". He pondered life’s sorrowful mysteries: suffering, cruelty, injustice, for he felt and grieved deeply for the pain of the world. But at the same time, he had learned that even in dark times, all of life is gift, transfigured by goodness, truth and beauty. And by joy. “Rejoice in the Lord always” said St Paul in the Bible reading Bill chose. And transfigured above all by the love he knew surrounded him: in his family, in his many friendships, in the goodness of things, and supremely in “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars".

In this Holy Week of Jesus’ cross and passion, we face death in all its darkness, all its bitterness and loss. But, as Bill used to say to me at times when I faced worry or despondency, we remember that Christ Easters in us too, rises within us as the bringer of love and joy and peace. In a few days we shall celebrate this resurrection once again, and glimpse how it is love, not death, that speaks the final word.

To that great and everlasting Love we turn now in trust and thankfulness, in the words Bill chose for us. Let us pray.

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The prayers that followed were all chosen by Bill, as were the Bible and poetry readings, hymns and a selection of texts printed in the service order that reflected his values and aspirations as a man of faith.

"Mary Ann Did Not Go": George Eliot stays away from church

I first gave a version of this lecture in 1992. That year marked the 150th anniversary, little noticed in either the literary or the theological worlds, of what I believe was the great turning point in George Eliot's life: that wintry Sunday morning in 1842 when she took her resolve in both hands, defied conven­tion and her father, and refused to go to church.

Since then, of course, George Eliot has joined the big-time authors, with the television adaptation of Middlemarch. Now you can buy her on station bookstalls for around a pound. The TV Middlemarch might have made a very interesting topic for the 1994 George Eliot Memorial Lecture, for the interplay between the written text of a novel and its reworking for the screen, small or large, is one of the more absorbing topics of media studies. Should we speak of television's Middlemarch, or merely of its `Middlemarch'? In other words, was the screen version the authentic work of George Eliot, albeit collapsed, cut down to size?  Or is the outcome of that process of col­lapsing great literature so distorting in its effects that it should not bear the same name as the original? 

 

It is probably elitist to say that any reworking of a written text for a visual medium is bound in the end to be a deconstruction, and that any purist should shun it.  Neverthe­less, most reviewers not only praised Middlemarch as good television. There appeared to be a consensus that in an important way it did attempt to be true to the spirit of the novel whose name it bears, even if it took some liberties with its shape. More cynical observers recalled that the BBC had served notice that if this hugely expensive adaptation was not well received by the critics, it would be the last of the big-budget costume dramas to be seen on television. Some would say that this would not have been a disser­vice to litera­ture. For we have all had to reconstruct for ever our mental images of Dorothea and Casaubon, Lydgate and Rosamund, and that is the price you always have to pay for the easy access televi­sion offers to the storylines of classi­cal lit­erature. It is a medium short on imagination, precisely the quality that makes great litera­ture great.

Meanwhile, those of us who live in George Eliot's Mid­lands also had to re-envision the novel's chief character of all, the town itself. Here, there was perhaps more to complain about. Stamford, Lincolnshire, where the film was made, is undoubtedly one of England's most beautiful towns, and I am not going to begrudge it the dividend Middlemarch has earned it in visitor income since the broadcast. Neverthe­less, the town as portrayed did seem a long way from the west midland setting the author had created. Of course, `Middlemarch' is not a geo­graphical place, but a town of the mind. Never­theless, it was unkind for a stage-coach to trundle on to the set boldly bearing the east-Midland names of Grantham and Newark rather than Leamington, Nuneaton or Bir­mingham.

Shortly afterwards, the Observer rang to ask me for a clergyman's quote from the town of Middlemarch-alias-Coventry itself.  Were Coventrians buying the book of the film, I was asked; were they talking about it on street-cor­ners; how was it affecting Coventry's self-aware­ness on the literary map of England; and were there many Casaubons (male or female) left now­adays in the Church of England, and if so, what mythologies are they attempting to discover the key to? My wise and thoughtful answers went unrecorded, apart from my wish to see another Daniel Deronda on screen if the BBC were looking for another of George Eliot's novels to adapt.

Middlemarc­h, as I have said, means middle England, the England of Warwickshire, of Nuneaton, of Coventry.  But the real George Eliot country is the landscape of human life. In Middlemarch, her study of provincial life, we recognise the provincialisms of the worlds we ourselves inhabit, the shift­ing sands of human relationships, the struggles for power and recognition, our quest for value and meaning. George Eliot is one of her century's most brilliant portrayers of the human spirit.  Simon Callow, in his autobi­ography Being an Actor, says that the important thing in acting `is not to feel a lot, but to feel accurate­ly.'[1] That is what George Eliot excels at: not so much tidal waves of emotion, but an uncanny accuracy in her depiction of human life. Hers is an art that is sharply focused, pro­foundly true. She herself embodied in her writing those qualities she so much admired in Dutch painting: what she called `this rare, precious qual­ity of truthfulness'. Her plea for realism in the great 17th chapter of Adam Bede, "In which the Story Pauses a Little", bears quoting again, because it seems to embody the programme George Eliot set herself as a writer:

I turn without shrink­ing, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her soli­tary dinner, while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel, and her stone jug, and all those cheap com­mon things which are the precious necess­ities of life to her....

"Foh!" says my idealistic friend, "what vulgar details! What good is there is taking all these pains to give an exact likeness of old ugly women and clowns?  What a low phase of life! - what clumsy, ugly people!"

But... things may be lovable that are not altogether handsome... human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty - it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.... Paint us an angel if you can.... paint us yet oftener a Madonna.... but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world - those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions.... Let Art always remind us of them: therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful repre­sentation of commonplace things.

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But I want tonight to look at George Eliot's art in the light of that particular event in her early life with which I began. It is appropriate perhaps that a Coventry clergyman should be giving this lec­ture, because it belongs to the Coventry period of her life, when she was living in Bird Grove, Foles­hill.  It was on Sunday, 2 January 1842 that her father wrote a laconic entry in his diary: "Went to Trinity Church in the forenoon.  Miss Lewis went with me.  Mary Ann did not go.  I stopd the sacrement (sic) and Miss Lewis stopd also." Few words to describe a momentous and life-changing deci­sion.  Two weeks later, again: "Went to church in the fore­noon. May Ann did not go to church".[2]

Robert Evans, the fine looking man whose portrait hangs in Nuneaton, was less interested in Marian's inner religious struggles than in making sure that his daughter behaved as was proper for a middle class young woman with eligible prospects.  As so often, religion was not so much a matter of conviction or truth, rather a convenient social tool. We know what grief this wayward act of subversion caused Marian's father. We know that she and her father were barely on speaking terms for two months, communicat­ing only by letter.  One Monday February morning, she wrote about her intellectual difficulties with Christi­anity. 

Such being my very strong convictions, it cannot be a ques­tion with any mind of strict integrity, what­ever judgment may be passed on their truth, that I could not without vile hypoc­risy and a miserable truck­ling to the smile of the world for the sake of my supposed interests, profess to join in worship which I wholly disap­prove.  This, and this alone I will not do even for your sake. [3]

What she called her "holy war" lasted four months. After that, she agreed to conform, resume churchgoing, and restore the status quo.  Robert Evans sighed with relief. But for Marian, nothing had changed.  She had not reverted to ortho­dox Chris­tian belief, and would never do so again.  Far from it.  For this profoundly inward woman had been rocked to her foun­da­tions by a deep spiritual crisis. For her, things could never be the same again.

Now, I suppose that as a clergyman, I am bound to find this little episode particularly fascinating.  After all, most of us clergy spend a great deal of time asking why people don't go to church.  Large sums of money, and an inordinate amount of time, are spent on considering that question. The Decade of Evangelism, which we are in at present, shows that it has not gone away. So when an erstwhile evangelical churchgoer sudden­ly throws it all over and does a dramatic spiritual volte face, well, any ordained admirer of George Eliot will find in that little drama much to ponder.

It is my view, as I have said, that what happened to Marian Evans in Coventry in 1842 was of the pro­foundest importance for the rest of her life: that, together with her meeting George Henry Lewes. I cheekily sug­gest that whereas it was Nuneaton that gave the world the woman, it was Coventry that conceived the writer; after which it was Lewes, as the best literary midwife of the 19th century, who eventually brought the novelist to birth.  For Marian's crisis brought to the surface hitherto repressed energies.  It marked, I think, the beginning of what was to be characteris­tic of her life and her art:  rigorous, relentless questioning of what she took to be a superficial status quo; an upsurge of radical doubt within her as to the validity of any belief or position that she had not ruthlessly made her own.  Hers was a determination to discard for ever what she called "crutches of superstition"; and to be as truthful with herself as it was possible to be, even at the cost of hurting those to whom she felt closest.

At one level, all this can be read as the search of any young man or woman for identity.  Most of us need, in adoles­cence or later, to make our protest, put our mark on things by questioning what was handed down to us, daring to doubt that our parents and grandparents had a monopoly of wisdom. Robert Evans' daughter was always very much a free spirit.  Her various spellings of her name suggest a restless seeking after her own authentic self: first Mary Anne, then Mary Ann, then Marian, and right at the end of her life, Mary Ann once again. Whether we should see the name `George Eliot' as part of this search for self, or simply a literary conveni­ence can be discussed.

But Marian's sitting at home one Sunday morning while the rest of the family went to church is of a piece with the pattern of her life.  The out­rage she caused her domestic circle was repeat­ed, on a far bigger stage, when she chose to live with the married George Henry Lewes.  It is as if she was destined to be a peren­nial thorn in the side of the Victor­ian estab­lishment. We could say that life, for her, was more com­plex, more elusive, more subtle than conven­tional wisdom could see; that her life-choices entailed a difficult balancing act between public morality and private faith. This of course is one of the themes explored in Middlemarch.  When you read George Eliot, you know that like those Dutch interiors she loved, you are touching the experi­ence of someone who has truly lived.

Alice Miller, in her study of infant trauma The Drama of Being a Child, suggests that the world's greatest art often seems to emerge out of struggle of some kind,  mental, emotional, or physical.  Our most searching novel­ists, musicians or artists are often people who stand somewhat on the margins of human life, who are able to look into it from the vantage point of "the dangerous edge of things", to quote Robert Browning's great phrase. They seem to know, so many of them, social ostracism, loneliness or pain.  It is as if struggle sets a man or woman apart, enables a person to see in a new way, inter­pret the life of his or her contempor­aries back to them.  One fashion­able west‑end preacher singled out Bulstrode, he of the "seri­ous Christian beliefs", and described how he shud­dered at the novelist's "awful dissection of a guilty con­science. That is what I mean by the prophetic spirit" he said.  The great novel­ists are the prophets of their day, and perhaps that is because, in Wordsworth's words, their experi­ence leads them to "see into the life of things".

Now, prophets are by nature disturbers, protesters.  We don't always like them, but we need them. It seems to me that only those capable of protest are capable of great art. To give a counter‑example, so much of the art of the Third Reich or Stalinist Russia strikes us now as devoid of inspiration precisely because this astringent element of protest was absent. So we must not think that Marian Evans' little protest in not going to church was unimportant, nor that it was easy, or impulsive, or petulant. Romola has a telling comment:

The law was sacred, yes; but the rebellion might be sacred too.  It flashed upon her mind that the prob­lem before her was .... the problem where the sacredness of obedience ended, and where the sacred­ness of rebellion began.

If I read her aright, it cost her dear to stay at home that January Sunday morning, just as it cost her dear to enter into a relationship with George Henry Lewes and forgo not only the respect of society, but, much more important to her, the love of her brother as well.  It seems to me at least plausible that had Marian Evans gone to church that day, we might never have had George Eliot the novelist whom we cel­ebrate tonight. Instead, we should have had merely a virtuous woman of impec­cable evangelical orthodoxy and irreproach­able habits.  She would have married well and borne seven children.  But she would have left not the slightest trace in history at all.

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What was the religious crisis that led Marian Evans to give up going to church in 1842?

The 1840s were a time of seething religious foment in England. The Church of England was racked by bitter disputes that many said would split it apart. The Victorian crisis of faith was a crisis at many levels. The Church of England was already losing its grip on the popula­tion.  There were a number of reasons for this: the rise of nonconformity, the effects of the industrial revolution and the shadow of the dark satanic mills, the growth of cities. But for many thinking people, the diffi­culties with religion were more intellectual. Natural science, in particu­lar, seemed to pose a huge question mark by the revealed truths of scripture.  Charles Darwin (himself once destined for the Anglican priesthood until his conscience got the better of it) was yet to write his Origin of Species that was to bring the science‑and‑religion debate to a head.  But Charles Lyell's Elements of Geology had been pub­lished in the early 1830s.  Its theme was that the evi­dence of geology pointed to the world being far older than the six thousand or so years sug­gested by Genesis. What science was disclosing was that the world around simply didn't seem to fit the narrow categories conven­tional dogma tried to force them into.  The universe was more elusive than that: it had out­grown the tired formulae of organised religion.

And so had many thoughtful men and women of the 1840s. It was not without regret.  Matthew Arnold, born three years after Marian Evans, became the spokesman of this spiritual malaise:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

There is no poem that so perceptively catches the mood of the religious dilemma of the 19th century as Dover Beach: both its despair at ever finding meaning in the new understandings of the universe natural science was opening up, and its incurable nostalgia for the past, when everything seemed secure, and religious faith timeless. Like Matthew Arnold, Marian found herself on Dover Beach, gazing into the void. She probably approved of the sentiment that:

There lives more faith in honest doubt
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

as Tennyson put it in that manifesto of the Victorian search for meaning, In Memoriam.  In 1842, Marian Evans publicly joined the company of honest doubters.

She had Coventry to thank for that.  In 1841, when she had lived at Bird Grove for only a few months, she met Charles and Cara Bray, and Cara's family the Hennells. At the Brays' home at Rosehill, she fell under the influence of free thought. It was said that `everyone who came to Coventry with a queer mission....or was supposed to be a "little cracked" was sent up to Rosehill, where they all sat on a bearskin under an acacia tree, talking endlessly about phrenology, labour co‑operatives, the repeal of the Corn Laws and how the new science of geology had undermined the sanctity of holy writ.

Charles Hennell's book An Inquiry into the Origins of Christi­anity had been published in 1838. This painstakingly researched book was a key influence on the young woman's inquiring mind. So was the epoque-making book by the great German theologian David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu. This work was one of the pioneering works of New Testament criticism.  Strauss set to work to rein­terpret Christianity in a non‑supernatural way. He wanted to probe beneath the surface of the gospels, remove the mytho­logical accretions he saw there, so as to discover a historical Jesus modern 19th cen­tury men and women could identify with. It was an influential, and subversive book. In 1839, at Charles Hennell's invi­tation, Marian began to trans­late the book into English, so we can assume that by that year, she was already moving swiftly away from the Calvinism of her youth. 

There was a rigour of thought and argu­ment in this book, published in English in 1846 as The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, that her finely-tuned mind, with its love of detail, could respond to. Her evangeli­cal friends tried to win her back, but in vain. The die had been cast.

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It seems to me that there is a strong connection between Marian's religious faith of a few years before, and her rejec­tion of it in 1842.  The link is in her fervour, in the passion with which, one year she is obsessed with Christian­ity, and not long after, is turning her back on it. You remem­ber that, in her letter to her father, she talks about her loathing of hypoc­risy. That letter is as deeply felt as any religious writing can be: there is some­thing evangelical about her rejection of religion, something crusading. And that stems directly from the kind of faith she had practised up to that time at the evangelical school of Mrs Wallington, and the Calvinistic establish­ment of the Misses Franklin. Evangelical belief looked for a personal relationship with God, a radical honesty that refused to hide behind rituals or priests or formulae, but instead called for "truth in the inward parts".  Churchgoing, as such, was of no virtue at all, said the leaders of the evangelical awakening at the end of the 18th century, unless it corresponded to an inner disposition, a heart set free by the love of Christ.  The perennial danger of organised religion was that it so easily led to hypocrisy, literally `play acting'. From this well, with its call to relent­less self-examination of inner motive and disposition, Marian had drunk deep.

What is more, the evangelicals taught that in Christ, every man, woman or child was equal before God, accepted, not on the basis of what they had achieved, but solely because of God's love. In other words, evangelicalism was an emancipation from a dogma‑ridden system of belief.  It taught the primacy of personal value. It stressed the part feeling played in relig­ion. It proclaimed that no‑one else could believe on your behalf, do your thinking for you.  You had to do your spiri­tual work for your­self. This, too, became a hall‑mark of Marian's world view. She wrote of it in the following year in a letter to Sarah Hennell:

Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds, agreement between intellects seems unattain­able, and we turn to the truth of feeling as the only univer­sal bond of union.[4]

It is precisely these same, evangelical instincts that were at work in the 22 year old Marian as she resolved that she could no longer go to church. Organised religion, I think we may say, was just too facile. "Falsehood is so easy, truth is so difficult" writes the novelist in Adam Bede. At Holy Trinity Church, evidently, not enough was demanded of her.  Her evan­gelicalism had taught her that she could find happiness only in thinking her own thoughts and becoming her own person. And that must mean saying farewell to evangelicalism. For her, as for John Henry Newman on the brink of joining the Church of Rome three years later, it was "the parting of friends".

But evangelical belief was still on the agenda some years later. From the portrayal of clergy in Scenes of Clerical Life, it is true, as Graham Handley says, that "fifteen years after her rejection of her faith George Eliot could look back with tolerance, compassion, understanding and irony to what she had left behind". [5]  But from much the same period of her life comes the piece of writing that first convinced George Henry Lewes of her genius. Here is how it begins:

Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral stan­dard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth and money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society?  What is the Goshen of medi­ocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the pres­tige of erudition, a middling morale with a high reputa­tion for sanctity. [6]

There is nothing very tolerant here. What occasioned this piece was the writing of Dr John Cumming, a Scottish Presby­terian preacher who drew large crowds at his London chapel through his extravagant and bizarre account of Bible proph­ecy. I myself once possessed a copy of his lectures on the Book of Revelation. Mary Ann Evans is unsparing in her withering condemnation of the rhetoric of what we now call fundamental­ism: its preoccupation with hell, its lack of charity, its superficial notion of truth and its subver­sion of personal responsibility and public morality. But we seem to hear more in the diatribe than the examination and exposure of a kind of religion that fraudulently manipu­lates men and women.  What we overhear is Mary Anne Evans confronting her own past, the convert freethinker disowning, with the same apostolic vehe­mence as in her letter to her father, what she perhaps only half realises will always be a part of herself. The tone of this review is in striking contrast to the sympathy with which she writes of religion in the novels, as we shall see.

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What, then, was the faith of the mature Marian Evans?

In her changing attitude to religion, as I have suggested, George Eliot accurately symbolises and embodies the profound changes in society at large as it wrestled with the great religious questions of the 19th cen­tury.  The Victorian crisis of faith was Marian's.  She charts its progress from faith to doubt with uncanny accuracy.

It is difficult to be too precise, however, about the exact nature of her beliefs. On the one hand, there are plenty of indications that she aban­doned all belief in a supernatural God, adopting instead a positivist, Comte-ian `religion of humanity' in which the ethic of Christianity, shorn of its metaphysics, becomes the governing principle. In the article I have just quoted, she writes:

The best minds that accept Christianity as a divinely inspired sys­tem, believe that the great end of the Gospel is not merely the saving but the educating of men's souls, the creating within them of holy dispositions, the subduing of egotistical pretensions, and the perpetual enhancing of the desire that the will of God - a will synonymous with goodness and truth - may be done on earth.

Fatally powerful as relig­ious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider than religious systems, and though dogmas may ham­per, they cannot absolutely repress its growth: build walls round the living tree as you will, the bricks and mortar have by and by to give way before the slow and sure oper­ation of the sap.... The idea of God is really moral in its influence - it really cherishes all that is best and loveliest in man - only when God is contemplated as sympathizing with the pure elements of human feeling, as possessing infinitely all those attributes which we recognise to be moral in human­ity.  In this light, the idea of God and the sense of His presence intensify all noble feeling, and encourage all noble effort.

In the same decade, she was saying:

I have not returned to dogmatic Christianity - to the accept­ance of any set of doctrines as a creed, and a superhuman revelation of the Unseen - but see I see in it the highest expression of the religious sentiment that has yet found its place in the his­tory of mankind, and I have the profoundest interest in the inward life of sincere Christians of all ages.... where I used to delight in expressing intellectual difference, I now delight in feeling an emotional agreement.[7]

There is the famous story of her meeting Frederic Myers in the garden of Trinity College Cambridge in the rain in 1873.

Taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet calls of men - the words God, Immortality, Duty, pro­nounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable was the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.... I seemed to be gazing on a sanctuary with no Pres­ence to hallow it, and heaven left empty of a God.[8]

And then there is her discovery of the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach, whose book The Essence of Christianity influenced her deeply.  Feuerbach believed that the entire edifice of religion could be collapsed into a single truth, that "Love is God himself, and apart from it there is no God". Religion is the consciousness of the infinity of the conscious­ness, and "God" is but the outward projection of the inwardness of human beings. Marian's translation of this book was occupying her in the 1850s, a decade during which her religious convictions were evidently arriving at stability after the foment of the 1840s. Perhaps significantly, this was the only book to bear her own name on the title page - Marian Evans, as if to say that the Feuerbachian version of religion was, so far as she was con­cerned, her final position.

On the other hand, Marian's deep interest in the figure of Jesus is an important clue to her inner self. There is the well known story of how Marian, immersed in Strauss and get­ting bogged down, like Casaubon, in this key to all mythol­ogies, became, in her own words, `Strauss‑sick'. Her antidote was to set up a statue of Christ in her study, and contemplate it. That is of a piece with that contemplative scene in Mill on the Floss, where Maggie, in the aftermath of the crisis that has ruined the Tullivers, goes in search of something, any­thing, to read. Her brother Tom's trunk of school books yields only Latin, Euclid and Logic.  But on the window sill, unnot­iced until now, she finds "a little, old, clumsy book" which turns out to be Thomas à Kem­pis' Imita­tion of Christ.

A strange thrill of awe passed through Maggie while she read, as if she had been wakened in the night by a strain of solemn music, telling of beings whose souls had been astir while hers was in stupor....Here...was a secret of life that would enable her to renounce all other secrets ‑ here was a sublime height to be reached...here was insight and strength.

This is the classic account of evangelical conversion, as Wesley had recounted it when he told of his heart being `strangely warmed' at Aldersgate Street, and as the young Marian Evans had herself experienced it. Maggie's soul, adrift on the chaotic streams of her emotional life, begins to find an anchor. She discovers the strength to renounce Stephen's seduc­tions, to rescue Tom. Religion issues in moral courage, in being good.  In The Mill, George Eliot quotes the text of The Imita­tion of Christ at length. It is said that this well‑thumbed book was found by George Eliot when she died, along with her Bible. She could not worship Christ.  But she could endorse, and cel­ebrate, the moral and spiritual insights she saw in his teach­ing; be drawn to the charisma of the man. You could even say that she longed to imitate him.

Despite the clear autobiographical material in The Mill, we must not assume that Maggie's faith is necessarily that of Marian Evans'. Nevertheless, in the sympathetic light in which per­sonal relig­ion is portrayed in that novel, indeed, in all her novels, "atheism" (John McDade is only the latest commentator to use that word in a recent article on George Eliot's religion) seems too crude to describe her own finely nuanced relig­ious position. The mysticism of "The Choir Invisible", as per­sonal a piece of writing as you could find in her canon, while hardly an orthodox Christian statement, is far removed from the bleak positiv­ism of Auguste Comte and his dis­ciples. Her lifelong inter­est in religion (not, incidentally, shared by Lewes) seems to have been the pursuit of the "essence of Christianity" which she found in Jesus' call to personal responsi­bility, to moral serious­ness. Kierkegaard said that every human being needed to find "that idea for which he can live and die". Marian Evans found it in the solemn word "duty". It was easy for Matthew Arnold to carica­ture that kind of religion as "moral­ity, tinged with emotion". That memorable epithet accurately por­trayed a good deal of Victorian society religion, and the species is not dead yet. But for Marian, the word "duty" connoted the life task of achiev­ing personal authen­ticity. It was a profoundly relig­ious, because inwardly experienced, vocation.

In that sense, you could say that what happened to Marian Evans in 1842 when she `did not go' with her father to church, was as much a conversion, that is a turning-point in life, as it was a rejection of faith. It was, perhaps, a moment of illumination, a discovery of that idea for which she knew she could now live and die. And because I believe that throwing away the "crutches of superstition" is always the prelude to a truer finding of oneself, I want to say that George Eliot is really a profound­ly religious writer.

This, to me, marks her out as very dif­ferent from Charles Dickens, whose novels strike one as remarkably untouched by any spiri­tual vision, despite their marvellous perception of the humour and incon­gruity of so much of life, the agony and ecstasy in the often unobserved for­tunes of men, women and children, the fierce protest against the injustices endured by the London poor.  She is different again from Anthony Trollope, whose own deep interest in religion seems somehow to be the more detached view of the professional clergy-watcher. While cel­ebrating sincerity when he finds it (in Mr. Harding, for example, in The Warden), Trollope's account of Victor­ian relig­ion is so laced with irony that the overall effect, for all his establishment loyalties, is actually far more subvers­ive of traditional values than George Eliot's. Per­haps she is more akin to Thomas Hardy, who, like her, had lost confidence in orthodox religion to provide answers to life's riddles; yet who, from his profoundly pessi­mistic, even tragic, view of things, never abandoned a nostal­gic instinct for religion and the tran­scen­dent element in life ‑ call it God, call it des­tiny ‑ mysteriously at work in the inscrutable changes and chances of the world, "hoping it might be so" as he puts it in his poem `The Oxen'.

Anyone who reads George Eliot will, I think, be struck by this sensitivity to what is spiritual, this openness to life.  That is what makes her novels so generous, so illuminat­ing, so humane.  Let me offer one more example of her insight into the spiritual order of things.  It comes from Adam Bede, and in view of our church going theme this evening, it is all the more significant that the maturing George Eliot, and not the adolescent Marian Evans, should have written it.

But Adam's thoughts of Hetty did not deafen him to the ser­vice; they rather blended with all the other deep feelings for which the church service was a channel to him this after­noon, as a certain consciousness of our entire past and our imagined future blends itself with all our moments of keen sensibil­ity.  And to Adam the church service was the best channel he could have found for his mingled regret, yearn­ing, and resignation; its interchange of beseeching cries for help, with outbursts of faith and praise ‑ its recurrent responses and the familiar rhythm of its collects, seemed to speak for him as no other form of worship could have done.

That passage could only have been written by someone who understood Anglican worship very well indeed, knew it from within, understood the connection between liturgy and living that is basic to religious faith. It is, I suggest, a deeply nostalgic piece of writing, in the same way as the Imita­tion of Christ passage in Mill on the Floss. It is as if the novel­ist is once more in dialogue with her own past, just as she had been in her pol­emics against Dr Cumming and his evan­geli­cal funda­mental­ism. The difference is that in the novels, she is able to affirm and celebrate her religious past which, in the diatribe against Cumming, she is rejecting and disowning. Of course, they are different sides of the past. Her angry rejec­tion of evangeli­calism is a disowning of a more recent and tumultuous relig­ious experience than the gentle village Angli­canism of her childhood. Perhaps in the novels, she found herself returning, if not to the doctrines, then at least to the eirenic temper and ethos of the faith in which she had been brought up before she encountered Calvinism.

So it matters less to me that George Eliot should have severed her links with organised religion than that she learned to read the map of the human heart. In that, the novelist makes common cause with the priest.  The art of both is to invite men and women into an experience of life that is richer and deeper than perhaps they have yet glimpsed, "larger life" as she calls it in Daniel Deronda.  Their common vocation is to explore meanings, make connections, point to the possibil­ity that human life, in the midst of its brokenness and pain, can reach out towards wholeness.

Let me end with a twentieth century tribute to the moral power of George Eliot's writing. Vera Brittain, in Testa­ment of Youth, describes how the novelist helped her make the choice at the start of the Great War to renounce Oxford (an ambition for which, like Marian Evans, she had defied her father) in order to serve as a nurse. She is contrasting the sig­nificance she had hitherto attached to her private life with all its immedi­ate, absorb­ing personal concerns, with the remoteness (as it then seemed to her) of the dramas being played out on the wider stage of current affairs. Sud­denly, with the out­break of war in 1914, her entire world-view was overturned. 

Now, suddenly, the one impinged upon the other, and public events and private lives had become insepar­able.... Uneasily, I read a passage from Daniel Deronda that I had read in comfortable detachment the year before:

"There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger des­tinies of man­kind, which have lain aloof in newspa­pers and other neglected read­ing, enter like an earthquake into their own lives ‑ where the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the trend of an invading army, or the dire clash of civil war....Then it is that the submission of the soul to the Highest is tested, and....life looks out from the scene of human struggle with the awful face of duty."[9]

Like Maggie Tulliver, like Marian Evans, that writer found the moral courage to do what was required of her and chart a course through life.  She found the idea for which she must live and die, as we all must do. It may not be religion in the conven­tional sense. But there is a fire in the belly that to me is religious in all but name. Our own relig­ious and moral vision of life would be the poorer without her.

October 1994

---

[1]              Being An Actor, London, 1985, 100.

 

[2]              Robert Evans' Journal 1842; cited Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Harmondsworth 1985), 40.

[3]              Letters, I, 128-30; cited ibid., 41-43.

 

[4]              Letters, I,

[5]              Graham Handley, George Eliot's Midlands: Passion in Exile (London, 1991), 109.

 

[6]              `Evangelical Teaching: Dr Cumming' (1855) in Selected Critical Writings (ed. R. Ashton), Oxford, 1992, 138 

[7]              Letters, III, 230-1.

 

[8]              Century Magazine 23, November 1881, 62-3; cited Haight, op. cit., 464.

[9]              cited Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, London, 1933, 98.

 

The Wager: Religion is Worth It!

Tonight we read from the story of Joseph. Let me leap forward to the end where Genesis sums it all up. After all the twists and turns, Joseph speaks to the brothers who had done him so much wrong: ‘even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good’.  Until now, even though Joseph has been reconciled to them, the outcome is not yet clear. Will he, the powerful Egyptian officer of state, treat them as family or as vassals?  What will forgiveness mean for him and for them?  Joseph reaches a true ‘my Lord and my God’ moment. “You intended evil…. God intended good”. In conspiracy and catastrophe, God has done all tings well.  

When is it a true act of faith to say ‘it was for the best, and good has come out of it’, and when is it just a thoughtless cliché to make us feel better about the bad things that happen?  We don’t say it, and shouldn’t say it, when we hear of a child who has been abused, or bystanders blown to pieces by a suicide bomber, or a pensioner murdered in her own home.  We condemn wickedness, and we do what we can to help its victims, but we try not to theorise because we know that words can make things worse as well as better. In the face of what is wrong or just bewildering, we won’t try to guess what God intends in the perplexing, inscrutable events of human life.  

Yet the instinct to find meanings is also part of being human. And this is where Joseph helps us with an insight of faith into life’s meaning.  Faith tells a story of how God has been moving within the ordinary processes of cause and effect to work his wise and loving purposes in the world.  It is not always apparent from the evidence: it’s faith that makes the connections. It takes the long view where we can only see the foreground. That brings strength and hope. It’s possible to pick up the pieces and carry on. 

I was talking once with a distinguished astronomer. ‘Where is the ground for your beliefs?’ he asked.  I said it was as much a matter of the heart as the head, for the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.  I went on to say that I had a strong instinct what my life would have become if I had not been a Christian. I would have been only half alive, and served the wrong gods.  Now I have been a Christian for fifty three years and a priest for more than forty, I have staked my whole adult life on Christianity being true.  As my retrospect lengthens, I echo Joseph’s words. God did indeed intend it for good.  But they are still said in faith.  Suppose Christianity turned out to be a fantasy?  Would my life have been wasted?  I have only this one life to live. I can’t go back and start again, choose a different ladder to climb up on. We stake our lives on the beliefs and values that matter to us.  Pascal’s Wager taught us how much of an act of trust faith is.

You may recall, a few years ago, the slogan on London buses: ‘There is probably no God.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’.  The word ‘probably’ is the clue.  It tells us that atheism is not so much a cool decision of unbiased reason as a true act of faith. It’s a wager: weigh up the evidence, then stake your life on it. Worry is only for religious people. But what if it said: ‘God may exist, so stop being frivolous and start living well’? I can only speak for myself. I concluded years ago that I would rather have lived as a Christian and tried to make a difference in the world than serve the gods of money, power, ambition and self.  The wager is that Christianity is true.  Even if it turned out not to be, the Christian life would still be worthwhile. It would still add to the sum of human happiness including my own. 

Faith doesn’t mean knowing for certain. If only we could!  It’s trusting that this is good news worth investing the whole of life in, a wager that makes sense because of the man who calls to us to follow.  Two thousand years of Christian experience tell us about the life-changing power of goodness.  My scientist conversation partner had a lot to say about how religion divides and demeans people.  He is right: debased religion is mad, bad and dangerous to know.  But, I said, why not judge religion as you judge science, not at its worst but at its best?  For me, it is the goodness and integrity of so many Christians I have known that makes Christianity not only attractive but believable.  

On this first day of the week we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.  He is God’s pledge that our hope in this good news is well placed. If ever it was true of an event that ‘you meant harm but God meant it for good’, it is the crucifixion. Who’d have thought it on Good Friday? Yet Easter makes it both possible and believable.  It is not the certainty we crave. Faith still has to be faith. “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” There is still a wager  in entrusting ourselves to Jesus and his kingdom. How can we know where it will lead? But to construct our life on this rock gives us stability amid shifting sands.  With the years the conviction grows that it was a wise decision. It was worth believing that “God intended it for good”, that ‘love is his meaning’. In that faith we can both live and die. 

Haydon Old Church, 28 July 2019

Genesis 42.1-25

Easter Day at Southwark

“While it was still dark.” The sun has not yet risen, but the Son of Man is risen. “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they have laid him.” Who are they? Not mischief-making soldiers, not friends stealing the body to pretend a resurrection, not even the demonic emissaries of death and hell. No. They are none other than the powers of the Eternal God, the powers of grace and truth laying claim on the One whom the grave could not hold. For “love is strong as death”, as it says in the Hebrew scriptures; “many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it”.

On Good Friday St John’s passion story ended in the garden where he was laid to rest. And now we are back there in the darkness and the grass is wet with dew and birds are still silent and the tomb is empty. It’s the first day of the week and like the disciples we are perplexed, maybe a little afraid in this sombre place of death. Would we have the courage to peer inside that rocky cave? And if we did, might we begin to glimpse what it could mean and find ourselves wondering what if…what if?

We mustn’t miss the symbolism of the garden and the first day of the week. It takes us back to the creation story in Genesis when in the picture language of ancient myth, God placed our first parents in the Garden of Eden and invited them to take care of it. In John’s story that we heard just now, it’s here in a garden that the risen Jesus appears to Mary, and she imagines him to be the gardener! On this first day of the week when God once said “let there be light” and now there is light, for the sun has risen and the Son of Righteousness has risen too. So this paradise, this garden (which is what the word literally means) is once again a place of creation. Here is where the new creation begins, the new heaven and the new earth, the promise that everything will be different now that this last Adam has come back from the dead and a new day has dawned over all the world.

But let’s stay with the half-light of breaking dawn. Night shadows still linger in the garden before the full light of day has dawned. That empty tomb and those what ifs? What if this deep magic is true? If only it could be! What a difference it would make to our lives. What a new perspective it would bring to the world. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a hope to live and die by? I think many of us are living in this twilit kind of world a lot of the time: puzzled, but open to what could happen; feeling for God in the dark, if only we knew where we might find him; not expecting too much of life yet wishing we could have hope and envying those who do. 

Easter is the answer to that search. It changes everything. I can’t prove to you that the tomb was empty and that Jesus rose from the dead. But there is evidence that has touched the lives of people down the centuries, convinced them that the resurrection changes everything, that what happened in that garden matters more than any other event in human history. This has been going on ever since the days of Mary Magdalen and Peter and John who were the first to come to that garden before dawn on Easter Day. It has been happening across history in every place under the sun. It happens today. And it’s why I am here as a priest speaking to you about it on this Easter morning.

What evidence? I mean that the resurrection of Jesus touches lives and transforms them. It really does. I was brought up in London in the 1950s in an entirely secular family. I was a chorister and that played a key part in my formation. But I became a convinced Christian as a schoolboy because I saw the difference faith was making in my friends, a faith clearly rooted in the cross-and-resurrection of Jesus. It wasn’t just a matter of ideas and beliefs. It was being lived out in front of me with hope and love and real joy. I was profoundly moved by it. I still am as I look back more than half a century. That kind of evidence spoke for itself. And as I read the New Testament I saw that this was how the truth of the resurrection began to take hold on people across the world. In St John’s story, we can see it as a journey from darkness through twilight into the full light of day, from the grief and puzzlement of the disciples in the garden to the joyful meeting with the risen Jesus when he calls Mary by her name and she recognises him and acclaims him as her Lord. 

All of us are somewhere on this journey of faith and hope, somewhere between the shadow of death and the full light of resurrection. So let me say something specifically to those of you who are being baptised and confirmed this morning. In a sense, you are standing by the empty tomb where those disciples stood on the first Easter Day. Ahead of you lies a lifetime of discovery – finding in your own experience what it means to say that Jesus is Lord and to live by his light of life. At times, the light will be strong and steady, a sun high in the sky to brighten your days and strengthen you to travel well. At other times it will be more like a fragile candle flame, a precarious light amid the encircling gloom where we see just enough to put one step in front of the other on the rough steep path of faith and discipleship. What matters is your memory of today and the empty tomb  and your baptism in the risen Christ that change everything and remind us he is risen. Easter faith is his gift to you today, and a hope that I pray never dies. And because he loves you to the end, he will see you through to the end when travelling days are done and you will see him face to face.

Such small beginnings in that garden before dawn; such big truths for those first witnesses to grasp hold of and take to others; such great hopes welling up within us, such dreams that are dreams no more but the fulfilment of everything we have longed for. This is resurrection. This is Easter. This is what it means to be truly alive. Can there be any day but this? So let there be flowers and songs and feasting and fun, and most of all, alleluias without end. 

Southwark Cathedral, Easter Day 2019. John 20.1-18

Amahl and the Night Visitors

I was about eight years old and in short trousers when our school music teacher, Miss Waites, who seemed to us then to be about one hundred, decided to try us out on opera. That autumn term, every Friday afternoon when grammar was over, we sat down to listen to it scene by scene on a scratchy LP. We memorised words, we learned tunes, we acted scenes, we drew pictures with wax crayons. It was quite an education. The opera was by Gian Carlo Menotti, Amahl and the Night Visitors. 

It's about a crippled shepherd boy who lives in a remote hovel with his mother.  One night, while he is playing his pipe under the desert sky, he sees a star like no star he's ever seen before. A little later, he hears the sound of travellers chanting as they cross the hillside.  Then there's a knock at the door.  It's the magi on their way to find the Child.  They do not know him, but will recognise him when they find him. They bring gifts for him: gold, frankincense, myrrh.  They need shelter for the night.  Hospitality is a sacred duty in the near east, so they are invited in.  A celebration is called for, so the village throws a great party.  Then, while everyone is asleep, Amahl's mother tries to steal the gold: just a little - surely the unknown Child won't need it all; think what she could do with it for Amahl.  She is caught by the watchful page, and is shamed. But the kings tell her to keep the gold, for the Child's kingdom is built not on riches but on love alone.  It's time for them to leave.  Amahl wants to send a gift of his own. What better than his crutch - the Child might be a cripple like him. He hands it over... and finds he can walk without it.  It's a sign from the Holy Child.  Amahl knows he must visit him too and take his gift in person.  So they set out following the star that will lead them to the infant King.

It's a charming opera.  Here are three insights from this folk-tale to ponder at Epiphany.

First:   the incarnation is about the wonderful possibility of change and renewal.  It is the new creation, whose words ‘let there be light' transform the people who walked in darkness.  The cripple becomes a new person, ready to make his own journey.  His possessive, fearful mother can let him go without regret so that he can thank the Child.  The kings learn that you don't have to be royal to be rich, for they see how God has honoured this poorest of households with a miracle.  Indeed, they have found the Child already, for he has been with them all along.  We have seen his glory, says St. John, full of grace and truth.  Each year, Christmas ought to change us, help us recapture our vision, reawaken hope.  So a good question for Epiphany is, how this latest Christmas in our life touched us, opened up in us a new awareness, some fresh vision of grace and truth, recalled the privilege of being those whom Jesus calls his friends?  

Secoondly:  Christmas is about childlikeness, becoming genuinely open-handed and humble enough to receive what another has to give.  Perhaps the magi saw in Amahl's house

that to welcome the Infant Christ, we must learn to receive before we can give.  For them this meant stooping low enough to seek shelter from the poor, as low as you have to bend down when you visit the shrine of the nativity in Bethlehem.  For the miracle happened not to the great and powerful, but to a crippled boy with nothing to offer but his crutches and a heart full of love.  Jesus said that unless we become like little children, we can never enter the kingdom of God.  If we take Christmas seriously, we see wealth and power in new ways.  To be rich before God is to have nothing in our hands; like the Christ Child to be little, weak and helpless is to know the infinite power of love. And this is all we have to come with: our worship, our longing, our love.  Yet it is enough for us to begin to be bearers of hope in our broken world.

Truth number three:  Christmas is about a journey we must all make for ourselves.  Whoever we are: prince or pauper, powerful or weak, young or old, the star is there for us to follow.  Once we have seen it, we can't not follow it - can't ignore it or tell it to go away.  Well, we can stay where we are, clinging on to old goods and old gods; but what does that profit if it means losing your own soul?  But to make the journey, fling away the crutches that symbolise the past, venture with God towards new horizons where Jesus is going to be - this is what Epiphany means.  It's a risk, for faith leads us we know not where and towards horizons we cannot even glimpse when we set out.  It calls for courage in a society perplexed by what religion is for, puzzled and even alienated by what Jesus Christ could possibly mean in a world such as this.  We are singing the Lord's song in a strange land.  But sing it we must, and gladly.  

Amahl is profound in its simplicity because it captures the profound simplicity of the gospel.  I can still recall watching the opera performed as an eight-year old, and being filled with a sense of expectancy and happiness.  Looking back, I now recognise what I needed to learn: about myself, about human life, about what it means to receive and give, about where true happiness lies.  I am grateful for those early glimpses.  Epiphany is not the end of Christmas but its enlargement that puts the incarnation into its greater context.  For the great light the shepherds and magi saw and the angels sang is for all people of all places and times, for all that lives and breathes, for all that is.  It's for us, this revealing of God's glory where the light shines in the darkness and the darkness is not able to overcome it.  During these forty days of the Christmas festival, we continue to pray that our joy at the birth of Jesus will last for ever, that its lambent glow will melt the snows of spirits long frozen over, warm cold hearts, re-awaken our love for this Infant and our resolve to place him at the heart of all that awaits us as we journey through another year.

Durham Cathedral, January 2010