George Eliots Adam Bede: Christian Ethics Without God Essay example --

George Eliots Adam Bede Christian Ethics Without beau ideal The greatest recent event -- that God is dead, that the spirit in the Christian God has ceased to be believable -- is... casting its shadows over Europe. For the few, at lease, whose eyes....are strong and sensitive enough for this spectacle... What must collapse now that this belief has been undermined... is our whole European morality.--Nietzsche, from The Gay Science Book V (1887) Dr. Richard Niebuhr writes, in his introduction to Eliots translation of Feuerbachs The Essence of Christianity, that Eliot sought to retain the ethos of Christianity without its faith, its humanism without its theism. In her for the first time full novel, Adam Bede, Eliot succeeds at doing this. By replacing Gods all-seeing eye with a plethora of human eyes, Eliot depicts characters in the close-knit community of Hayslope who dont need God to be good Christians, who can hold their standards without their faith. Eliot begins with the simp listically Christian notion that God can see everything. Adam, our title hero, sings a tune in chapter one that refers to Gods all-seeing eye, (Eliot 24). Meanwhile, Bessy, a topical anaesthetic Hayslope country girl, feels that Jesus is close by looking at her, though she cannot see him (Eliot 40). According to this model, a person must act morally other God will know through sight and he will punish her. But, Eliot abandons these sorts of references to an all-seeing God by chapter four in favor of a twist that does not require Gods eye. On the most basic level, Eliot is continually describing the physical eyes of her characters, and reminding us of their presence, although she gives up talking about Gods eye. Adams eyes, for instance,... ...f course, this analysis leaves me with a egregious question. wherefore does Eliot hold onto the morality defined by Christianity after surrendering its God? Why doesnt she re-evaluate that structure as well, rather than holding onto it by transferring authority? Why bother dismissing God if the visible fabric remains static? Perhaps shes being pragmatic -- perhaps she fears anarchy in the wake of a qualifying God. Bibliography Dickens, Charles. Letter to George Eliot on 10 July 1859, in Ed. David Carroll, The Critical Heritage. London Routledge and Kegan Paul, (1971). Eliot, George. Adam Bede. England Cox and Wyman, 1994. Ferris, Ina, Realism and the Discord of Ending The Example of Thackeray, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 38/3 (1983), 289-303. Goode, John. Adam Bede A Critical Essay, in Ed. Barbara Hardy, Critical Essays on George Eliot, (1970).