George Eliot's Religious Imagination addresses the much-discussed question of Eliot’s relation to Christianity in the wake of the sociocultural revolution triggered by the spread of theories of evolution. The standard view is that the author of Middlemarch and Silas Marner “lost her faith” at this time of religious crisis. Orr argues for a more nuanced understanding of the continuity of Eliot’s work, as one not shattered by science, but shaped by its influence. Orr’s wide-ranging and fascinating analysis situates George Eliot in the fertile intellectual landscape of the nineteenth century, among thinkers as diverse as Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, and Søren Kierkegaard. She also argues for a connection between George Eliot and the twentieth-century evolutionary Christian thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Her analysis draws on the work of contemporary philosopher Richard Kearney as well as writers on mysticism, particularly Karl Rahner. The book takes an original look at questions many believe settled, encouraging readers to revisit George Eliot’s work. Orr illuminates the creative tension that still exists between science and religion, a tension made fruitful through the exercise of the imagination. Through close readings of Eliot's writings, Orr demonstrates how deeply the novelist's religious imagination continued to operate in her fiction and poetry. "Marilyn Orr is one of the few literary scholars to address so directly the religious themes in George Eliot’s fiction. Orr’s intellectual range is impressive and offers a unique contribution to George Eliot scholarship." —Peter Crafts Hodgson, author of  The Mystery Beneath the Real: Theology in the Fiction of George Eliot "Recommended." — CHOICE Reviews MARILYN ORR is professor emerita of English at Laurentian University in Ontario. George Eliot's Religious Imagination A Theopoetics of Evolution By Marilyn Orr Northwestern University Press Copyright © 2018 Northwestern University Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8101-3588-8 Contents Preface, Acknowledgments, Introduction, Chapter 1 Incarnation and Inwardness: George Eliot's Early Works in the Context of Contemporary Religious Debates, Chapter 2 "Even Our Failures Are a Prophecy": Toward a Post-Evangelical Aesthetic, Chapter 3 Religion in a Secular World: Middlemarch and the Mysticism of the Everyday, Chapter 4 "The Religion of the Future": Daniel Deronda and the Mystical Imagination, Chapter 5 Evolutionary Spirituality and the Theopoetical Imagination: George Eliot and Teilhard de Chardin, Conclusion The Word Continuously Incarnated, Notes, Bibliography, Index, CHAPTER 1 Incarnation and Inwardness George Eliot's Early Works in the Context of Contemporary Religious Debates The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past: no wonder the secret escapes the unsympathising observer, who might as well put on spectacles to discern odours. — George Eliot, Adam Bede, 2:18, 180 Is there not a spiritual existence that belongs to individuals? — Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition In the great age of religious questioning, which U. C. Knoepflmacher says was "obsessed with epistemology," George Eliot's importance was such that an early reviewer could call her "the emblem of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of belief." In the "conflict of interpretations" that David Carroll rightly sees as central to her narrative situations, George Eliot's fiction reveals, I will argue, her own exploration of faith and imagination and her discovery of their inseparable connection as hermeneutical mind-sets. It is impossible to read George Eliot's novels without thinking about religion, one would think, since, even when they do not directly concern religious clerics, they focus on characters engaged in deeply religious struggles. George Eliot's work is rich enough that astute readers can find material for almost any sophisticated reading, and it is perhaps not surprising that while critics in a secular culture have tended to follow the standard view that Marian Evans "lost her faith" as a young woman, there is increasing interest in the necessary complexities of any such trajectory. While there have always been critics and readers speaking against the tide, the pervasive tendency has been to acknowledge her early piety and reiterate the "conventional wisdom" that after her encounter with Higher Criticism, firstly through Charles Hennell and then Strauss and Feuerbach, and with the Comte school, her Christian beliefs were replaced by a Feuerbachian version of the religion of humanity. While the crucial influence of all of these is undeniable, I agree with Peter Hodgson when he argues that George Eliot never became a disciple of any system or ideology. Instead, I will argue, her views were deeply evolutionary. Rather like one of the mollusks which were the subject of her hu