Emily Bronte and the Religious Imagination

Simon Marsden

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441153500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Readers of Emily Brontë's poetry and of Wuthering Heights have seen in their author, variously, a devout if somewhat unorthodox Christian, a heretic, or a visionary "mystic of the moors". Rather than seeking to resolve this matter, Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination suggests that such conflicting readings are the product of tensions, conflicts and ambiguities within the texts themselves. Rejecting the idea that a single, coherent set of religious doctrines are to be found in Brontë's work, this book argues that Wuthering Heights and the poems dramatise individual experiences of faith in the context of a world in which such faith is always conflicted, always threatened. Brontë's work dramatises the experience of imaginative faith that is always contested by the presence of other voices, other worldviews. Her characters cling to visionary faith in the face of death and mortality, awaiting and anticipating a final vindication, an eschatological fulfilment that always lies in a future beyond the scope of the text.

1

Introduction: Emily Brontë and the Death of God

This book examines the animating dialogues and creative frictions between Emily Brontë’s writing and the texts, traditions and theological resources of Christianity. It reads Wuthering Heights and a selection of Brontë’s poems in relation to theological concepts including natural theology, biblical hermeneutics, original sin, apocalypse and eschatology. Brontë’s literary engagement with religious language is marked not only by representations of liberating numinous encounter, divine immanence and apocalyptic renewal but, also, by notes of uncertainty, despondency and absence. The world in Brontë’s writing is both the site of immanent presence and the place from which God is absent. Focusing upon these notes of tension, this book does not attempt to ‘claim’ Brontë for either side of the faith/scepticism debate.¹ Rather than seeking to resolve Brontë’s depictions of uncertainty and incompletion into secure positions of either belief or unbelief, I want to suggest that they are convergent with the renewed emphasis upon paradox, aporia and otherness that have characterized the postmodern ‘return’ of the religious in contemporary culture and theory. Brontë’s writing is informed and animated by the religious discourses of its time and, particularly, by Romantic interpretations and appropriations of theological language, the legacies of which continue to influence contemporary theology. Bernard Reardon writes in Religion in the Age of Romanticism (1985):

What . . . pre-eminently distinguishes the Romantic understanding of Christianity is its subjectivization of all religious truth, and this new attitude may, I think, be said to mark the beginning of that process of immanentizing religious reality which was characteristic of the nineteenth century in general and which, despite the neo-orthodox reaction, has continued through the present century as well. For the modern theologian, however orthodox he way mish to appear, finds the thought of two worlds worrying. Somehow or other eternal life has to be seen to be lived here and now, eternity itself to be a dimension of the present order of things, the basic Christian values rooted in this world, Jesus Christ to be the man in whom all men may see their own idealized reflection.²

Like her Romantic predecessors, Emily Brontë asks questions both of the theological orthodoxies of her time and of the emerging metanarratives of modernity. I will argue in this book that Brontë’s persistent explorations of tension and uncertainty – her recognition that faith and despondency (to borrow the title of her first poem in the sisters’ 1846 collection) are more intimately related than is often supposed – give her writing a particular resonance with the postmodern situation that has seen religion ‘return’ as the excluded other of secular modernity.

Religious readings of Emily Brontë’s work were relatively common for more than a century after her death in 1848.³ While many readers noted the unorthodoxy and individualism of Brontë’s religious vision, she was often situated within mystical and other traditions of Christian spirituality, including the versions of intense feeling associated with Methodist discourses of religious enthusiasm. Since the 1960s, much of the best and most influential Brontë criticism has been predicated upon secular critical methodologies, a turn consistent with the theoretical directions of literary criticism more generally. As Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler point out, ‘literary criticism of the last few decades has been undoubtedly dominated by a range of theoretical movements which are clandestinely united in the silent refusal of the possibility of faith that precedes their diverse practices’.⁴ Though a ‘return’ of the religious in contemporary culture and critical discourse is now widely recognized, many commentators remain uneasy about the implications of this development, which has coincided with a resurgence of religious fundamentalism. Yet if contemporary political contexts have lent a new urgency to concerns surrounding the place of religion in culture and criticism, the concerns themselves are not new. For many readers of the Brontës, religion has for some time been associated with patriarchal structures of oppression and authoritarianism, and with notions of received truth and doctrinal orthodoxy that are seen to threaten personal autonomy and imaginative freedom. This book is written from a Christian perspective, but it does not seek to overlook or marginalize these troubling elements of religious ideology. It does, however, recognize that the horizons of religious thinking extend beyond the antagonistic frameworks within which contemporary public debates between faith and scepticism are often conducted and that many theologians are alert to and have much to say about the political, social and ideological concerns identified by secular criticism.⁵ It also maintains that Christian theology is far more open to the creative play of the imagination than is often acknowledged by critical methodologies that have tended to rely upon more constrained notions of religious and doctrinal orthodoxy. As Andrew Tate observes, ‘[i]t is sometimes strategically easier to simplify matters of faith rather than to acknowledge ambivalences, differences and uncertainties. However, critical voices, on either side of the faith and scepticism debate, are keen both to give witness to their world view and to hear stories from radically different perspectives’.⁶ One of the claims of this book is that religion need not be approached as a constrained and static body of received truth, but might rather be considered as a tradition – or a multiplicity of traditions – that is always involved in the active rereading and reinterpretation of its own sacred texts, language and theological concepts. Indeed, in the postmodern situation, the lines of demarcation between the sacred and the secular and between theology and other critical disciplines, always less clear than is often assumed, have come to seem ever more unstable.

In recent years, the metanarratives of modernity and secularization have themselves been exposed to renewed critical scrutiny. Not least among the surprising consequences of the postmodern situation has been a growing recognition that the assumptions of secular criticism and of modernity’s ‘death of God’ narrative are no more immune to postmodern scepticism than are religious metanarratives. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has described the postmodern condition as ‘the “re-enchantment” of the world after the protracted and earnest, though in the end inconclusive, modern struggle to dis-enchant it’.⁷ The now widely acknowledged religious ‘turn’ in postmodern culture and theory is not a return to or of naïve, pre-modern belief but, rather, a new openness to what Graham Ward calls ‘the re-evaluation of ambivalence, mystery, excess and aporia as they adhere to, are constituted by and disrupt the rational’.⁸ The theologian John D. Caputo’s suggestion that ‘the distinction between theism and atheism is a little more unstable than people think, including most popes and bishops’ reflects both a theological movement beyond the conceptual frameworks of onto-theology – the God of Enlightenment philosophy and theology; the God whose obituary was written by Nietzsche – and a renewed awareness of incompletion, aporia and otherness as aspects of faith rather than as unambiguous signs of its collapse.⁹ ‘[I]t has for a long time been apparent’, Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler tell us, ‘that whoever is supposed to have murdered God, firstly, seems to have got the wrong man and, secondly, appears to have done religion a favour’:

To think God outside of the protocols of onto-theology is to allow God to “be” unconstrained by the category of being. It is to throw open the idolatrously circumscribed horizons of finitude and to respect the irreducible otherness of the divine, by not limiting it in advance according to our own measure . . . The far-reaching implications of this change have yet to be fully registered in disciplines such as literary criticism, which have relied for some time on out-dated notions of theological orthodoxy. The fall of onto-theology, then, like the death of God, may be something of a “fortunate shipwreck” for the religious in that it heralds a beginning as well as an end.¹⁰

What are the implications of the theological ‘turn’ in contemporary theory for a reading of Emily Brontë’s poetry and novel? In what ways might theology ‘after the death of God’ illuminate the works of a writer whose engagement with theological and spiritual concerns often takes her far outside of the doctrinal and institutional structures of established religious formulations? As the editors of a recent collection of essays on the post-secular imagination observe, ‘[l]iterature, like religion, has always implied a challenge to strict boundaries – between fantasy and fact, transcendence and immanence, the spiritual and the material’.¹¹ This book explores ways in which Brontë’s writing engages with, challenges and disrupts these and other boundaries: between the sacred and the secular, presence and absence, faith and despondency, life and death, time and eternity. This introductory chapter examines the contexts of disenchantment and Romantic re-enchantment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It surveys critical discussions of Emily Brontë and religion, and suggests that a view of Brontë as a theological heretic might be recuperated productively. The chapter concludes with a reading of Brontë’s essay ‘The Butterfly’ that introduces the central thematic and theological concerns of the subsequent analysis.

The disenchantment of the world

The early nineteenth century in which Emily Brontë composed her poems and novel has been described as characterized by the secularization of the European mind.¹² While the rationalist epistemologies that gained increasing prominence in Europe from the seventeenth century onwards did not, except to a relatively small minority, seem inevitably to discredit theism, by the end of the eighteenth century they had produced a fundamental shift in attempts to articulate the relationship between God and his creation. In the empiricist accounts of natural theology that retained some intellectual credibility into the early nineteenth century, God had been subsumed into the processes of cause and effect by which the Newtonian universe was governed.¹³ God as First Cause remained a defensible proposition for scientific philosophy, but the possibility that God might be encountered as immanent presence within the world seemed increasingly unstable. When Robert Chambers published his anonymous – and enormously popular – Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1844, even God’s status as primary instigator of the material world seemed perilous: belief in a divine First Cause must come, Chambers suggested, from unspecified ‘other grounds’ beyond the horizons of science.¹⁴

In parallel with a growing sense that theism might be extraneous to empiricist reason, developments within Christianity itself had contributed to the distancing of God from the material world. Alister McGrath has argued that the Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis upon the authority of the Bible in matters of belief and practice, yielded a tendency towards literal rather than symbolic readings that was applied to interpretations of the natural world as well as in biblical hermeneutics.¹⁵ Christian apologetics and natural theologies in the age of Enlightenment placed increasing emphasis upon logical argument from creation to creator – the ‘argument from design’ – at the expense of sacramental readings of the world in which nature was allowed both to bear divine immanence and to point symbolically to a reality beyond itself. Keith Thomas claims in his influential study Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) that the gradual decline of belief in a world inhabited by spirits and magic had its origins in Protestant rejection of ritual practices that became associated with Roman Catholic superstitions.¹⁶ If this is correct, then the disenchantment of the natural world that is often regarded as synonymous with secularization is at least in part a product of Protestantism itself: the privileging of a theological epistemology predicated upon God’s self-revelation in the Bible evolved into the sense that God reveals himself only in the Bible. At the same time, the Protestant emphasis upon the individual conscience in matters of biblical interpretation, in parallel with the new ecclesiologies developed in the aftermath of the Reformation, participated in what Charles Taylor has called the great disembedding: the cultural shift in which collective beliefs and practices give way to a new individualism. Taylor writes:

Embeddedness . . . is both a matter of identity – the contextual limits to the imagination of the self – and of the social imaginary: the ways we are able to think or imagine the whole of society. But the new buffered identity, with its insistence on personal devotion and discipline, increased the distance, the disidentification, even the hostility to the older forms of collective ritual and belonging; while the drive to reform came to envisage their abolition.¹⁷

The process of secularization is not a straightforward rejection of or loss of interest in traditional religion but, rather, a complex pattern of cultural and intellectual shifts that have at least some of their origins within Christian theology and ecclesiology. The transcendent God of eighteenth-century Deism, the builder of the mechanistic universe, was in many respects the creation of the same rationalist and empiricist epistemologies that would announce his death a century later.

What Hillis Miller has called the ‘gradual withdrawal of God from the world’ might therefore be understood in the context of the changed conditions of belief that emerged with the wider cultural and intellectual movement towards disenchantment.¹⁸ In a secularizing culture, collective belief gives way to a new individualism, while the rationalist and literalist tendencies of Enlightenment thought displace symbolic readings of the natural world and thus problematize the epistemological status of the religious imagination. At the same time, denominational formulations and theologies proliferate as theologians, clergy and artists confront the need to articulate faith in new ways that might address and respond to shifting social and cultural conditions. Owen Chadwick has described the development of a free market of ideas as an inevitable outcome of liberalism in the Romantic era and beyond. For Chadwick, secularization is the increasing toleration of beliefs and opinions that stand outside of the mainstream or majority opinion. The secular state is one in which all voices, all opinions, are permitted: in a free market of ideas, all opinions and beliefs are subject to the scrutiny and challenge of alternative positions.¹⁹

More recently, Charles Taylor has offered three related but distinct definitions of the secular state. The first concerns the emptying of theistic reference from public spaces: in the modern secular state, it is possible to participate fully within political and public life without encountering God. In its second definition, secularity describes the perceived lack of relevance ascribed to religion by individuals. Clearly, a nation might be regarded as largely secular in this second sense despite retaining some religious forms – an established Church, for examp...