God and Jane Austen

When Christianity was based on reason what need had we of the church? The answer came, to support the status quo, to make men good, to ritualise the three central events of life: birth, marriage and death. Thus Austen’s characters live at ease with God in that God has no place in their lives. Austen’s characters drink from a different well, they obtain virtue and education and fine feeling not from any obvious influence of the gospel but from purely secular sources.

A man or woman are who they are not because of the transforming influences of the church but because of the poetry they have read, the musical accomplishments they have obtained, their manners and conversation that make them agreeable to everyone. They are, in short, men and women of sense and sensibility.

This is not to say that Austen is blind to hypocrisy: hypocrisy is constantly lampooned for example in the vain and silly father Elliot in Persuasion. These characters are contrasted with those rare men and women who have achieved the apogee of taste and agreeableness as well as the strength to see through the worldliness of the age. The gospel is not so much absent in the novels but exits incognito in their criticism of worldliness. It is assumed into another kind of worldliness, that of fine feeling and virtue.

The place of the church in Austen’s novels is the place allotted to it by the aforementioned laicisation in that the clergy represented seem no different from ordinary men. Austen’s characters are entirely secularised, including the clergy and that is the great appeal for today’s readers and audiences.

They tell us that we can refine ourselves and that is what we wish to know above all. For our age is the most Pelagian of all, we expect to arrive at who we are entirely by our own devices and we react with anger at the suggestion that we may be influenced from outside ourselves. It is as if Sinatra’s I did it my way has become the hymn of our time. So Austen’s novels speak of the deep things of life, love, virtue, character without having to resort to the old formulas of religion and that suits us very well.

But is it enough? Is this anthropology just another form of piety but in nice surroundings? Certainly the heroine’s insight into character is compelling but it also breeds self satisfaction, how could it not?

While I deplore the bandying about of the word “elitist” one does wonder about all of those millions who do not have large libraries, gracious drawing rooms, musical tuition, and £12,000 a year. Austen’s salvation is salvation only of the upper classes whose position in society enables them to nurture the fine feelings that make up their character.

What is at stake for Austen’s characters is not those dualities proclaimed in Christianity between the flesh and the spirit and between universal sin and redemption. Humanity cannot now be described in terms of the old religious narratives of “sin and Satan, faith and fall” but as a more polite and tasteful modification of them.

Certainly, of all of the virtues displayed by Austen’s heroines the central one is self containment. One does not give into the desire for love or large houses but one demonstrates patience and endurance in disappointment. One does not strive for happiness but trusts that control of feeling, steadfastness in resolve and a commitment to what one knows about human nature will nevertheless deliver.

God is displaced by aesthetics and manners and fine sentiment. Truth and beauty displaces the divine and become themselves divine, capable of salvation from coarseness of manner, pomposity and avarice.

This owes much to the third Earl of Shaftesbury in that “beauty followed universal standards, but only the great-souled man, who had nurtured his taste, would recognise and cherish it. Man’s end lay in a disinterested pursuit of virtue which would lead to self perfection.” The quest was not now for the beatific vision but for the nurturance of taste and virtue and the leading of the good life.

Austen’s gentle villains are not murderers or thieves; they are men and women whose lack of virtue and decorum lead them to fatal outcomes. In an age in which virtue is whatever one makes it to be this is refreshing and perhaps this accounts for the novel’s popularity. Add to this that there is no mention of religion, of brutal death on Golgotha, of the death of the self in Christ or of any of the hard bits of religion, then the Jane Austen industry is, at least partially, explained.