~ Daniel Thomas Dyer
I was struck recently by a passage from George Eliot’s Middlemarch (perhaps her most celebrated novel from 1871–2) that powerfully evokes Sufi wisdom. The heroine, Dorothea—noble, idealistic, but naïve and unworldly—is in conversation with her admirer, Will Ladislaw. Will is a young man with obvious gifts and potential, but he’s self-centred and ‘raw’ as Sufis would say. He’s in love with Dorothea, but she’s married and he must be content to admire her from afar. Dorothea, in her innocence, sees him only as a friend. Her husband, Casaubon (whom she freely married having misjudged his weak character), is a cold shell of a man, yet she remains loyal to him despite his regular cruelties. Will grows painfully aware that while Casaubon is certainly not worthy of her, neither is he. She’s rarely able to leave her husband’s estate at Lowick, where Will is not welcome, and so it is they have this exchange in Chapter XXXIX, giving us a glimpse into their anguished souls:
“I shall know hardly anything about you,” said Will. “No one will tell me anything.”
“Oh, my life is very simple,” said Dorothea, her lips curling with an exquisite smile, which irradiated her melancholy. “I am always at Lowick.”
“That is a dreadful imprisonment,” said Will, impetuously.
“No, don’t think that,” said Dorothea. “I have no longings.”
He did not speak, but she replied to some change in his expression. “I mean, for myself. Except that I should like not to have so much more than my share without doing anything for others. But I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me.”
“What is that?” said Will, rather jealous of the belief.
“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”
“That is a beautiful mysticism—it is a—”
“Please not to call it by any name,” said Dorothea, putting out her hands entreatingly. “You will say it is Persian, or something else geographical. It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it. I have always been finding out my religion since I was a little girl. I used to pray so much—now I hardly ever pray. I try not to have desires merely for myself, because they may not be good for others, and I have too much already. I only told you, that you might know quite well how my days go at Lowick.”
“God bless you for telling me!” said Will, ardently, and rather wondering at himself. They were looking at each other like two fond children who were talking confidentially of birds.
“What is your religion?” said Dorothea. “I mean—not what you know about religion, but the belief that helps you most?”
“To love what is good and beautiful when I see it,” said Will. “But I am a rebel: I don’t feel bound, as you do, to submit to what I don’t like.”
“But if you like what is good, that comes to the same thing,” said Dorothea, smiling.
“Now you are subtle,” said Will.
The clue here is, of course, Dorothea’s oblique reference to Persian mysticism. Where could Eliot have come across Persian mysticism?
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, ‘Persian Poetry’ had been published a decade or so earlier in 1858 in The Atlantic, and introduced English-speaking audiences to the likes of Hafez and Rumi. However, Eliot also had access to Sufi poets from other earlier sources. The man with whom she lived as wife, George Henry Lewes, published a universal history of philosophy with a chapter called ‘Arabian Philosophy’ giving particular attention and praise to the eminent Sufi mystic Al-Ghazali. Lewes was also the foremost biographer of the great German poet Goethe, and Eliot herself was fluent in German. Most of the Sufi poets were translated into German long before English, and so it was that Goethe, many decades before Eliot, had fallen in love with Sufi poetry—especially the poetry of Hafez, whom he considered his ‘spiritual twin’. Goethe wrote a poem in praise of Muhammad (‘Song of Muhammad’), and in his Hafez-inspired West-Eastern Divan he says of Islam:
If Islam is surrender to God,
Then we all live and die in Islam.
Eliot had some familiarity with Sufism, and we even have some brief notes of hers taken from Sprenger’s The Life of Mohammad, from Original Sources which specifically reference Sufism (she made these notes as part of her wider research into Judaism for the novel Daniel Deronda).[1] Whilst Sufism and Islam might never have been a primary focus for her, nevertheless the passage above suggests a fine appreciation of the soul-work intrinsic to Sufism.
The most obvious example of this is Dorothea’s repost when Will begins an attempt to define her faith. There’s a sweet irony here, for in denying Will the opportunity to cleverly label her beliefs—as ‘Persian’, ‘Sufi’, or anything else for that matter—she unwittingly aligns herself with Sufis who likewise wish to avoid the intellectual posturing to which Will is sometimes prone. Will can glibly define something as ‘Persian mysticism’, but Dorothea, without having read the Persian poets, has lived some of the reality of which they speak and is no need of the label. Rumi puts it like this:
Oh, how often have knowledge and wit
become as deadly to the wayfarer as any demon or bandit!
Most of those destined for Paradise are simple-minded,
so that they escape from the mischief of philosophy.
Strip yourself of useless learning and vanity,
so that every moment Divine mercy may descend upon you.
Cleverness is the opposite of humbleness and supplication:
give up cleverness and take simplicity as your companion.
Know that cleverness is a trap for victory and ambition:
why should the pure devotee wish to be clever?
The clever are content with an ingenious device;
the simple have left all artifice
to be at rest with the Artificer,
because at breakfast time a mother will have gathered
the little child’s hands and feet in repose upon her breast.
[Mathnawi VI, 2369-75][2]
In her simplicity, Dorothea is a touchstone through which Will senses his own inauthenticity, his widely read but superficial knowledge in sharp contrast to her religion of lived experience and heartfelt ‘finding out’. A little later, when Dorothea asks Will about his religion, she stresses she wants to hear not what he ‘knows’ about religion, but the belief that helps him most—again giving Will a disarming glimpse of his own useless knowledge.
In confessing that she now prays less than she did, there’s a strong implication that Dorothea has discovered that her prayers were previously mechanical and devoid of any conscious presence. This is an experience that many Sufis report: it may sometimes happen that, as we mature, outwardly we may go through phases in which we pray a little less, but those prayers are far more real than anything we offered before.
Consider, too, Dorothea’s belief: “That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.” For Dorothea, good intentions have an unseen impact all of their own when we are able to resist our egoism and humbly acknowledge that we simply ‘don’t quite know’ what is best or what to do. For Sufis, it’s in the wake of such honest humility and supplication that Divine Grace often arrives. Such Grace is like the mother that Rumi describes as gathering ‘the little child’s hands and feet in repose upon her breast.’ We might become that child if we can abandon our hubris. Inspired action then becomes a possibility.
Dorothea and Will are described as ‘looking at each other like two fond children who were talking confidentially of birds.’ This oddly specific simile may be a quiet nod to one of Sufism’s most influential literary masterpieces, Attar’s Conference of the Birds. In that epic, the birds find their inauthenticity mirrored back to them by the hoopoe, much as Will does before Dorothea.
Perhaps Will’s attempt to honestly answer Dorothea’s question as to his religion offers him the most valuable glimpse of his own nature. Will fancies himself a rebel, telling Dorothea, ‘I don’t feel bound, as you do, to submit to what I don’t like.’ He’s as yet unaware of how he slavishly conforms to the whims of his own ego. Contemporary Mevlevi teacher Kabir Helminski diagnoses the problem and articulates a remedy similar to Dorothea’s:
What are the signs that someone is lacking soul? To be dominated by the random attractions of the world, bouncing between likes and dislikes…[3]
The ultimate state, we might suppose, is to be able to really sacrifice for other human beings without seeing them all personally, but in a sense, feeling love for all manifestations of life. We may not be there yet, but maybe the circle of our love is widening and maybe, for instance, our love is not limited on the basis of the mere likes and dislikes of our personality.[4]
Catching from Dorothea the fragrance of a beautiful inner state previously unknown to him, we sense that Will is abashed yet also strangely elated, feeling the potential for his own circle of love to widen.
This is a small, isolated passage in a very big novel, but the central themes of Middlemarch as a whole are also closely aligned with the Sufi perspective. Rumi describes womankind as ‘a ray of God’, adding ‘She is not just a created, she is creative,’[5] and in reading Middlemarch we often have a sense of this enigmatic insight being unpacked for us. Whilst Eliot never idolises her own sex and gives us at least one example of a wife who arguably isn’t worthy of her husband (Rosamond), the general thrust of her novel is to show how women of greater spiritual maturity than the men to whom they are attached navigate their limited opportunities, improving those men in the process.
Then there is the way that the novel slowly builds towards a vision of tawhid—the irreducible Oneness of reality that defies analysis and to which we must all eventually submit. The many characters who attempt to master or control what their egos take for reality, to predict or model its behaviour for their own advantage, plumb its depths or capture its essence, eventually experience failure and disillusionment. David Carroll, in his introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of the novel, astutely notes:
The major characters in the novel are, by definition, those whose world-views are in the process of being formed, challenged, or dismantled. Their very different narratives are all generated by a marked discrepancy between a hypothesis of reality and the world in which they find themselves.[6]
It’s those characters who let go of their ego’s fixed ideas of how things should be who find true happiness. Able to step outside themselves (ex-stasis), some, like Dorothea, even experience ecstasy, and come to see their disappointments as profound spiritual lessons. David Carroll succinctly encapsulates Dorothea’s moment of ecstasy in Chapter LXXX as a ‘sense of oneness through otherness which embraces not only her nearest and dearest but also the anonymous figures moving dimly at the end of the drive on the horizon of her world.’[7] This is the widening circle of love made possible by our acknowledgement of our incapacity and our dependence on that mysterious One who binds us all together. The central message of the novel is in perfect alignment with Rumi’s advice to the spiritual seeker:
…know that with every one who feels incapable,
there is a goodly Incapacitator.
Incapacity is a chain laid upon you:
you must open your eye to behold the One who lays the chain.
[Mathnawi VI, 767–68][8]
~ Daniel Thomas Dyer
[1] For more on Eliot’s engagement with Islam, see ‘George Eliot & Islam’, Dallel Chenni, Revue Expressions n°1, Juin 2015, pp. 140–48.
[2] Jewels of Remembrance, trans. Kabir & Camille Helminski, p. 160.
[3] The Mysterion, Kabir Helminski, p. 12.
[4] The Knowing Heart, Kabir Helminski, p. 250.
[5] Mathnawi I, 2437, Love’s Ripening, trans. Kabir Helminski and Ahmad Rezwani, p. 75.
[6] Introduction, p. xiv.
[7] Introduction, p. xv.
[8] Jewels of Remembrance, trans. Kabir and Camille Helminski, p. 142.