Ship of Fools: An atheist gets the point of liturgical worship

Thread: An atheist gets the point of liturgical worship Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by venbede (# 16669) on :

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, the most distinguished Victorian novelist after Dickens and considerably more intellectually informed than him and sensitive to religious experience.

As a young woman she was an enthusiastic evangelical, but lost her Christian faith and was the first translator into English of Strauss’ Life of Jesus, which was the first attempt of a biography without the miraculous or theological element. However in all her novels, she recognises the positive aspects of religion.

In her last novel Daniel Deronda she describes a visit by a gentile to a synagogue in the following passage, which seems to me to give a compelling account of liturgical worship:

“Deronda … gave himself up to that strongest effect of chanted lliturgies which is independent of detailed verbal meaning. The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer that seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us; or else the self-oblivioius lifting up of gladness, a Gloria in excelsis that such Good exists; both the yearning and the exaltation gathering their utmost force from the sense of communion in a form which has expressed them both, for long generations of struggling fellow men.”

Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :

Eliot was not only raised in the faith. She was imbued with it, her entire culture, the nation even, supporting it. (As I recall even if Jews were allowed to sit in Parliament in her day they had to be sworn in on the Christian Bible.) It was the ocean she swam in. We cannot say the same. I would love to see something similar, from a more modern atheist.

Posted by Macrina (# 8807) on :

I need to re-read his book because as with most of them I need to do several readings to get the subtleties of all his points but what about 'Waking Up' by Sam Harris?

He's about as big an advocate for atheism as you're going to get and on par with Dawkins and Hitchens for his attacks on organised religion but this book intrigues me.

Posted by venbede (# 16669) on :

HER books.

Intellectually she clearly rejected God “God, immortality, duty - how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third.”

I didn’t mean to raise the subject of atheists writing positively about religion. Given that there are many Shipmates who don’t see the point of liturgical worship, I was very interested in this defence of liturgy from a viewpoint where you would not expect it.

Posted by Amos (# 44) on :

There's another very good passage, in Adam Bede, where Eliot talks about the way the rhythms of the Prayerbook shape people's lives--my copy of the book is with someone else right now or I'd look it up.

Posted by Cantiones Sacrae (# 12774) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Amos:
There's another very good passage, in Adam Bede, where Eliot talks about the way the rhythms of the Prayerbook shape people's lives--my copy of the book is with someone else right now or I'd look it up.

A 1-minute Google found this on the Durham Cathedral website:

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.

Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :

The novel "The Seville Communion" comes to mind. IIRC the author is Arturo Peres Reverte. For some characters, it's about comfort, and having something to hang on to, and not necessarily about belief.

Posted by venbede (# 16669) on :

That's interesting - it's from her first full novel (Deronda was her last) and I remember it mainly for the account of Dinah Morris, the Methodist lay preacher, her sermon and her contemplative prayer afterwards.

Adam ends up marrying Dinah by which time the Methodists have stopped women preaching.

But the passage shows a similar sympathy with liturgical worship (without accepting the doctrinal basis).

Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :

D.H. Lawrence, in the execrable The Plumed Serpent and Kangaroo - and some of the novellae (is that the plural?) creates liturgies - part of his search I think for what he calls "dark gods."

He came from a Congregationalist background and rejected what he saw to be a pale anaemic Christ (probably a narcissistic projection of himself as much as anything!).

The liturgical constructs he generated were as uplifting as collectively chomping off one's own genitals in single-minded harmony with a like-intended congregation.

Or a North Korean adore the Emperor rally.

I wish he'd just gone to Mass.

Posted by venbede (# 16669) on :

Which supports my view I never want to read any D H Lawrence ever again.

Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on :

I'm already have a wife, venbede, but there's a job going as my servant if you'd like it. [Smile]

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