Four Things Christians Can Learn From Middlemarch

George Eliot's Work Surprised Me in Ways I Didn't Expect

Why does a 19th century novel provoke more theological reflection in me than some of the systematics I read this year?

Middlemarch is a work of literature with few peers. George Eliot is rightly recognized as one of England’s greatest writers. And it’s unquestionably a product of its time. Middlemarch was published in 1871, but it is set in 1829-1832. This was a time of reform and upheaval. Roman Catholics could enter public life where previously they hadn’t been able to and the abolitionist movement was in full swing. The plot is too layered to describe, but the social context of the town of Middlemarch is indelibly marked by Christianity, Anglican and Puritan, low church and high church, as well as the budding secular alternatives. The characters embody so many sociopolitical contexts, philosophical positions, and enlightenment thinking.

Middlemarch’s gift to Christians is four-fold. In Casaubon, Eliot gives Christians, particularly intelligent, reformed Christians, a cautionary tale. His distortion of Christianity is dangerous to himself, and dangerous to the spiritual condition of people around him. Secondly, we see loving humility displayed in Caleb Garth. Thirdly, we see the danger of pinning all our hopes on marriage. Lastly, Dorothea gives us a window into the allure of trading good morals for true faith. Dorothea doesn’t deconstruct, but she’s a version of someone who did, George Eliot herself. Middlemarch is a novel that understands much of Christianity and shows us illustrations of dangers and examples of the faith well lived. We can learn from them.

The Danger of Prideful Knowledge

Edward Casaubon is a clergyman with considerable wealth who spends his time pursuing increasingly esoteric and useless studies. He meets Dorothea and perceives her deep desire to know more theology and to increase her study. He sees her as a woman who would be wholly devoted to supporting his intellectual work, yet never considers the possibility that she might be an intellectual equal. They (against all odds) marry. It is not a happy marriage. Casaubon regularly deserts her for his pointless theological pursuits, going so far as to abandon her for stacks of books on their honeymoon. He is prideful because of his intellectual learning, this is part of why he can never see Dorothea as an intellectual equal. He looks down on other characters around him. It’s this pride that drives him to hate Will Ladislaw, who can see that Casaubon’s work is inadequate and behind the latest scholarship. All of this leads him to increasing nastiness towards Dorothea, including paranoid jealousy, and quite a wicked act at the end of this life.

Casaubon is a perfect personification of knowledge puffing up, and without love, he tears down instead of building those around him. His intellectual pride, as is so ubiquitous in such cases, is wrapped up in deep insecurity. He doesn’t look to Christ for his confidence or satisfaction, he looks to his own sense of achievement and intellectual capability.

For her part, Eliot is not entirely unsympathetic.

“Instead of wondering at this result of misery in Mr. Casaubon, I think it quite ordinary. Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self. And who, if Mr. Casaubon had chosen to expound his discontents—his suspicions that he was not any longer adored without criticism—could have denied that they were founded on good reasons?” Eliot, George. Middlemarch (p. 504). Kindle Edition.

Casaubon begins to think that Dorothea sees that his intellect is not what he dreams it to be, that she begins to see him as Ladislaw does, and that his marriage will be far different from what he expected. This insult to his pride and secret insecurity drove his cruelty to his young wife.

Christians are to be marked by love, not pride. We are commanded to avoid idle speculation. (1 Tim. 1:3-4) Casaubon’s coldness diminishes everyone around him, especially Dorothea. Dorothea doesn’t leave the faith in Middlemarch, but George Eliot did. One wonders if real life Casaubons codified her belief that Christianity was at best incomplete, and at worst, actively leading people to cruelty.

The Attractiveness of Virtue, Diligence, and Humility

Encouragingly, Middlemarch also paints a beautiful picture of faithful Christian living in Caleb Garth. Garth works as a land agent, managing estates for others. He works with tenants, improves agricultural practices, handles accounts, and looks to constantly improve all he works on. Garth works heartily until the Lord. He’s compassionate and merciful. There is a young man, Fred Vincy, who is close to the Garth family and loves Mary Garth. Fred gambles and invests foolishly, and he takes on a debt which he cannot pay. He asks Caleb to co-sign his loan and he does. Inevitably, Fred loses all his money and is unable to pay his debt. Nor will his plans to inherit money from a dying old man solve his problems. Garth responds by showing Fred undeserved mercy. He takes on the debt and pays it. This mercy is the first step in Fred turning away from foolish living and becoming a man worthy of his future wife, Mary. Caleb Garth’s mercy brings Fred’s repentance. Likewise, Christ’s mercy to us ought to bring our own repentance. When confronted with the cost of Christ’s forgiveness, the cross, our only right response is repentance and trust in him. Caleb Garth urges us towards showing mercy and Fred Vincy calls us to turn away from the things that demanded that very same mercy.

Proverbs 22:29 asks “Do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before kings.” Garth never stood before kings, but someone, somewhere, lived out these values of mercy, humility, integrity, and diligence before George Eliot. And she wrote a book that countless people read.

The Tragic Reliance on Marriage to Fulfill All Our Dreams

Marriage is one of the through lines in Middlemarch. There are young couples, who see marriage as a path to the finer things in life, there are older couples who have been married for years, but with deep deceit present, there is Fred Vincy who thinks his life will be perfect if he can just have Mary as his wife, and there are good marriages, based on love, mutual respect, and service, like the Garths. In all of these marriages, Eliot is revealing a biblical principle, that marriage should not be the thing we lay all our expectations on. Marriage, alone, cannot make us happy. Those who pin their hopes on marriage, such as Dorothea who saw marriage as a path to her intellectual pursuits, to Rosamond, who saw marriage as a vehicle to the finer things in life, to Fred, who saw marriage to Mary as the only thing that could make him happy, end up in truly difficult circumstances. Dorothea suffers from Casaubon’s cruelty, Rosamond and her husband come to a place where she loathes him, and he despairs of life, and Fred has to radically change through repentance before a healthy marriage with Mary is possible.

Eliot gives us a portrayal of something the Bible testifies to, marriage is meant to make us holy, not happy. It’s meant to refine our character, not cater to our whims. Ephesians 5 calls husbands to self-sacrificial love that serves their wives, 1 Peter 3 calls wives to exemplary godly character that wins their husbands to godly living. When we ask the institution of marriage to do something else, like fulfill our every desire, we set ourselves up for misery. It’s far too common in churches to have marriage lifted up as the solution to every single person’s problems. ‘Well you just need to find a husband/wife then everything will be fine.’ This isn’t true, marriage is one of the hardest things we do in this life. If we expect it to do something it wasn’t meant to, the consequences are devastating.

The Temptation of Trading Faith for Moral Living

Dorothea is the hero of the book, and goes through a moral transformation from the start of the novel to the end. She begins as a puritanical woman of grand ideals looking to engage in sacrifice that serves a greater good. She believes that rigidity and joylessness are earnest pursuits of God. For instance, consider her view of horseback riding at the beginning of the novel.

Most men thought her bewitching when she was on horseback. She loved the fresh air and the various aspects of the country, and when her eyes and cheeks glowed with mingled pleasure she looked very little like a devotee. Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.” Eliot, George. Middlemarch (p. 13). Kindle Edition.

But this isn’t Christianity. This is a misunderstanding of the Christian faith as something that seeks to rob our joy instead of something that completes it, deepens it, and widens our ability to receive it. Paraphrasing the Shorter Westminster Catechism, our purpose is to glory God and enjoy him forever. Or as C.S. Lewis states “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” Frankly, if Dorothea truly understood the Puritans, she would see they didn’t desire denying her joy, they wanted her to find its fullness in Christ.

Dorothea’s inclination to deny herself horseback riding is the “appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.” (Colossians 2:23)

And Dorothea moves away from Christianity and towards self-made religion. The novel doesn’t say that explicitly, but Middlemarch is an incredibly philosophical and theological novel. Dorothea never deconstructs, she never leaves the faith, Eliot is being realistic, most would not make such a move. But her trajectory reflects a move from ‘traditional’ faith to moralistic values. And Dorothea does end the novel as a more sympathetic, moral, caring, humble, and gracious person. She shows Rosamond mercy she does not deserve. She chooses loving Will Ladislaw over social position, she gives up wealth for living in line with her own values. In short, her arc is from joyless Christianity to humanistic courage. She suffers with Casaubon and thereby learns sympathy and understanding for the human beings around her. In this, Dorothea traces George Eliot’s own arc. Eliot had an evangelical period, but discovered the work of Ludwig Feuerbach who wrote “The Essence of Christianity” which in short claimed that Christianity to be human wish projection. We want the world to be just, so we invent a just god who punishes what we find evil, we want mercy so we create a god that will give us grace, we don’t want death to be the end, so we give god eternality. God becomes a reflection of human desires and praise-worthy human values.

Matthew McCullough summed up Feuerbach like this

“Feuerbach was one of the first and most influential purveyors of what you might call cultivated hopelessness. Our hunger for something more, for a world beyond the limits of this one, deceives us at best. At worst it deprives us of what might be had here and now. Better to do combat against the deepest longings of the human heart.” McCullough, Matthew Remember Heaven, p. 143

George Eliot embraced Feuerbach’s human invention of god in his own image, and concepts like Adam Smith’s sympathy, and David Strauss’s contention that Christianity cannot be understood supernaturally but only through reason. Dorothea is a literary representation of that trajectory. And this is, from a Christian perspective, an absolute tragedy. Eliot was a genius, she translated Feuerbach, knew Spinoza’s work backwards and forwards, and wrote perhaps the greatest English novel of all time. But she left the faith because she fell for a very old lie. “But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Feuerbach claims that we invented god to be like us in order to satisfy our desire for transcendence. That we can be like god because we made him and we can find satisfaction in this world. Eliot was persuaded, yet kept a whole lot of Christianity’s moral structure. The ethics without the Savior.

McCullough cites C.S. Lewis as a rebuttal.

“Feuerbach saw our longings as evidence against the possibility of heaven. The essence of Christianity is wishful thinking. Because we long for a world beyond the reach of death and all its minions, such a world must not exist. We invent heaven to help ourselves sleep through the night. But what if the truth is the other way around?

(C.S.) Lewis saw our longings as evidence for the existence of something we long to see. How did we get these longings in the first place? ‘Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise [...] If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.’” McCullough, Matthew Remember Heaven, p. 146

Yet even in writing Dorothea with this arc, Eliot gives Christians yet another gift: a deep dive into the thinking, feeling, and worldview of someone who turns from the supernatural God to focusing on loving her fellow man. I can’t help but lament that Eliot didn’t have the opportunity to walk with someone like Charles Spurgeon, someone who could rightly affirm where Eliot’s critiques of dead religion were right on the money, but also demonstrate how Feuerbach leaves one hopeless. Her work calls Christians to be ready for those conversations.