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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2010
In reflecting upon the fact that religious language survives long after the practices and the devotion that gave rise to it have departed, Alasdair MacIntyre once observed that what “we” are left with is “a religious language which survives even though we do not know what to say in it.”1 Some writers and thinkers who acknowledge that religious language is, for them, effectively either foreign or dead, continue to employ it because of its beauty, or because they wish to speak to people for whom such language is still living for political, moral, or literary reasons. But why a writer for whom religious language holds no personal meaning would go to near absurd lengths to construct a narrative saturated with biblical typology (and even numerology) is difficult to imagine. The question of how such a writer would seem to know almost exactly what to say in the religious language of a tradition that she never practiced is even more difficult to understand. How could someone who couldn't say that she was among those for whom religious language was a source of binding claims to truth (as opposed to a culturally important animated corpse) speak as if things were otherwise?
1 Alasdair MacIntyre, “God and the Theologians,” in Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978) 23. This essay was written before MacIntyre's conversion to Roman Catholicism; one wonders whether he would include himself among that “we” today.
2 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (London: Blackwood, 1884), 400.
3 Daniel Deronda is explicitly described as a “world-historic” individual, with the inevitable attendant Hegelian overtones (ibid, 562).
4 Ibid, 494.
5 Mary Wilson Carpenter, “The Apocalypse of the Old Testament: Daniel Deronda and the Interpretation of Interpretation,” PMLA 99 (1984) 54–71. David Carroll argues that Daniel Deronda is, in fact, “the culmination of George Eliot's fictional use of biblical typology.” George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretations: A Reading of the Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 291. As Qualls points out, “Eliot takes Deronda's plot from… the story of Israel's exile and its desire to secure the promised land.” See Barry Qualls “George Eliot and Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 130. On the theme of exile, see also Jean Sudrann, “Daniel Deronda and the Landscape of Exile,” ELH (1970) 433–55. The “Prophecy of the Seventy Weeks” is based on interpretations of Daniel 9:24–27 (which itself should be read in conjunction with Jeremiah 25: 11–12 and 29:10). It relates to the duration of the Babylonian exile (which is of central importance in a non-literal, typological sense) and the Babylonian empire (construed as a paradigmatic imperial enemy of Israel). More broadly, it suggests the theme of exile and joyful restoration. As Akenson points out, while the notion is to not to be taken in a literal sense, we may read the prophecy to suggest that “Daniel is foretelling a victory for the Chosen People.” Donald Harman Akenson, Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) 164. See also Thomas Edward McComisky, “—The Seventy Weeks' of Daniel against the Background of Ancient Near Eastern Literature,” Westminster Theological Journal 47 (1985) 18–45 and J. Barton Payne, “The Goal of Daniels Seventy Weeks,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 21 (1978) 97–115.
6 See Anna Nardo, George Eliot's Dialogue with John Milton (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003) 216–46, and Qualls, “George Eliot and Religion,” 130–31. Dante is also extremely important in Daniel Deronda; see Andrew Thompson, George Eliot and Italy: Literary, Cultural, and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 145–60 and 173–95.
7 The George Eliot Letters (ed. Gordon S. Haight; 9 vols.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954-1955) 1:128.
8 W. H. Mallock, Atheism and the Value of Life: Five Studies in Contemporary Literature (London: R. Bentley & Son, 1884) 158. For discussions of Eliot's repudiation of Christianity, see David Hempton, Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) 19-40 and Avrom Fleishman, George Eliot's Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 24-43.
9 For Nietzsche, Eliot was a paradigmatic instance of someone who had deceived herself into thinking that Christian morality could be maintained in the absence of the God of Christianity. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung. Der Antichrist. Gedichte (Leipzig: A. Kröner, 1930) 132.
10 For instance, Nurbhai and Newton suggest that “for Eliot Jewish myth and mysticism provided the metaphorical and allegorical potential to enable the novel to compete in complexity and philosophical range with tragic drama and epic poetry” (Saleel Nurbhai and K. M. Newton, George Eliot , Judaism and the Novels: Jewish Myth and Mysticism [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002] 2).
11 Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (New York: Encounter Books, 2009) 6.
12 Ibid, 11.
13 Ibid,148.
14 For instance, the frequently heard but inaccurate suggestion that the Holocaust is the primary normative rationale for Zionism serves as the spoken or unspoken assumption of anti-Israel political discourse to this day, especially (but not only) among deniers of the Holocaust. If the creation of Israel may be justified only on the basis of the Holocaust, and existing accounts of the Holocaust are of questionable accuracy, or altogether mythic, then the legitimacy of Israel itself is cast into doubt.
15 Himmelfarb, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, 149–50.
16 Ibid., 152.
17 Ruth R. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) 239, 243. See also Wisse's remarks on Daniel Deronda in Ruth R. Wisse, Jews and Power (New York: Schocken, 2007) 109–11.
18 Himmelfarb, 140.
19 Ibid, 11.
20 Foreward to Neil R. Davison, James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Construction of Jewish Identity: Culture, Biography, and ‘the Jew’ in Modernist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1998) xv.
21 Michael Clark, Albion and Jerusalem: The Anglo-Jewish Community in the Post-Emancipation Era, 1858–1887 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 214. The term “Zionism,” of course, did not arise until 1890. On the generally warm, but occasionally critical, reception of Daniel Deronda by the Jewish community at the time of its publication, see George Eliot's Daniel Deronda Notebooks (ed. Jane Irwin; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) xxix-xl; Minna Givton, Aviva Gottlieb and Shmuel Werses, “The Jewish Reception of Daniel Deronda,” in Daniel Deronda: A Centenary Symposium (ed. Alice Shalvi; Jerusalem: Jerusalem Academic Press, 1976) 11–43, and Michael Polowetzky, Jerusalem Recovered: Victorian Intellectuals and the Birth of Modern Zionism (Westport., Conn.: Praeger, 1995) 92–93. See as well the early essay on Daniel Deronda by David Kaufmann (George Eliot und das Judenthum [Krotoschin: Druck von B. L. Monasch & Co., 1877]), and, among others, the 1876 review by James Picciotto, in which he states that “the political future of the Hebrew race may become more important to the world at large than its religious future” (James Picciotto, “Review, Gentleman's Magazine,” in George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (ed. David Carroll; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971) 416.
22 Himmelfarb, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, 12.
23 Ibid, 150.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid,148.
26 Ibid.
27 Mordecai frames the recovery of a Jewish political center as a source of benefit for humankind: “And the world will gain as Israel gains. For there will be a community in the van of the East which carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its bosom; there will be a land set for a halting-place of enmities, a neutral ground for the East as Belgium is for the West” (Eliot, 402).
28 Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 280.
29 The portrait of Gwendolen's uncle, the clergyman Mr. Gascoigne, is especially damning. When Gwendolen is trying to decide whether to marry the vicious and tyrannical Mr. Grandcourt, who has proposed to her despite his previous commitment to his mistress, with whom he has four illegitimate children, Mr. Gascoigne effectively abandons her to a wolf because he is more concerned with the potential benefits of having his niece marry such a prominent man and with the very idea of marriage to an aristocrat than with her well-being: “To the rector, whose father (nobody would have suspected it, and nobody was told) had risen to be a provincial corn-dealer, aristocratic heirship resembled regal heirship in excepting its possessor from the ordinary standard of moral judgments, Grandcourt, the almost certain baronet, the probable peer, was to be ranged with public personages, and was a match to be accepted on broad general grounds national and ecclesiastical” (Ibid., 102).
30 Ibid., 455.
31 Ibid., 600.
32 Ibid., 575.
33 Ibid., 606.
34 On the persistence of Eliot's interest in prophetic history after her renunciation of Christianity, see Carpenter, “The Apocalypse of the Old Testament,” 57–58.
35 Himmelfarb, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, 2.
36 For a discussion of Eliot's vehement denunciation of the use of biblical prophecy in the work of Scottish Calvinist minister John Cumming, see Hempton, Evangelical Disenchantment, 27. As we see from Daniel Deronda, Eliot quietly returned late in her career to prophetic history as a source of narrative conventions, without any of the indignation that had marked her much earlier rejection of the uses to which those conventions were put in popular Protestant apocalyptic writings.
37 My thanks to Jon D. Levenson for his assistance with this essay.