Essay

Culture

14 December 2023

7 min read

Praying with Jane Austen

From Elizabeth Bennet to Emma, Jane Austen’s heroines often consider their own character then change. As the anniversary of the novelist’s birth approaches, Beatrice Scudeler explores their author's prayers.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

A head and shoulders portrait of a young woman inclining her gaze to one side.

Portrait of a Young Woman in White, 1798, Jacques-Louis David.

In his essay ‘A Note on Jane Austen’, C. S. Lewis argues that the heroines in each major Austen novel go through a process which he terms ‘undeception’, leading them to ‘discover that they have been making mistakes both about themselves and about the world in which they live.’ This can take the form of self-analysis, or of a more explicitly Christian examination of conscience. Elizabeth Bennet or Catherine Moreland may not be constantly described praying, for instance, but they certainly engage in a healthy amount of self-examination. On the other hand, we have a much more explicitly Christian example of repentance in the character of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, who, after her abandonment by Mr. Willoughby, and having just recovered from a dangerous illness, confesses to her sister that is grateful to have been given the chance to repent and ‘have time for atonement to my God.’ But what about Austen herself? What was the role of self-examination in her own life?

I got my answer earlier this year, when my husband and I went on a Jane Austen prayer retreat at the charming vicarage of Edenham, Lincolnshire. When not engaged in prayer, we spent our time learning about and discussing Austen’s faith, which she practised devoutly throughout her life as the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. Austen’s life was immersed in prayer.

According to Fr. Ed Martin, who hosted the retreat, the Austens would have read through all of the Old Testament once in a year, the New Testament twice in a year, and the Psalms once each month. What’s more, Fr. Ed estimated that, once personal devotion and church services were accounted for, Austen would have prayed the Lord’s prayer about 30,000 times over her the course of her life.

I was also delighted to learn more about one of only twenty books that we know with certainty to have been in Austen’s personal collection – A Companion to the Altar by William Vickers. Austen’s copy, signed 1794, resides at the Princeton University Library; according to Irene Collins, whose book Jane Austen: The Parson’s Daughter (1998) I highly recommend, Austen made regular use of Vickers’ book, which was meant as a guide for Anglicans to prepare themselves spiritually to receive Holy Communion.

I was intrigued to read A Companion to the Altar for myself. What stood out to me is Vickers’ emphasis on self-examination and repentance as crucial to one’s spiritual life, especially leading up to Sundays when a communion service was going to happen. This struck me as being very much in keeping with the experience of the heroines in Austen’s novels which Lewis details in his essay on Austen.

These three prayers also reveal that, for Austen, the key to a virtuous life resides not in blindly sticking to a set of moral rules, but rather in cultivating one’s character.

While thinking about these ideas of examination of conscience and repentance, I was reminded that, thanks to her sister Cassandra, three of Jane Austen’s own prayers have survived. They were penned by Austen as an adult, judging by the handwriting, and would have been written for the purpose of personal or family devotion, especially on a Sunday evening. These three prayers, though brief, reflect – and even clarify – so many of the issues that Austen returns to again and again in her novels: the danger of pride, the necessity of repentance and humility, and more generally, a call to lead a virtuous life. For example, in the third prayer she writes:

Incline us oh God! to think humbly of ourselves, to be severe only in the examination of our own conduct, to consider our fellow-creatures with kindness, and to judge all they say and do with that charity which we would desire from them ourselves.

This passage could have been written for Emma Woodhouse herself! After the disastrous trip to Box Hill, where she deeply embarrasses Miss Bates in front of their friends, we are told that the normally confident and even haughty Emma admits that ‘She had often been remiss, her conscience told her so’ and, after much reflection, she experiences ‘the warmth of true contrition.’ Nor does this call to humility apply solely to Austen’s female characters.

While Lewis does not extend his concept of ‘undeception’ to Austen’s heroes, this is clearly what happens to Mr. Darcy by the end of Pride and Prejudice, so much so that, once he has realised the extent of his past pride, he tells Elizabeth, ‘By you, I was properly humbled.’ Similarly, in Persuasion Captain Wentworth admits to Anne Elliot that if he had not been ‘too proud’, their separation need not have been so long, and they might have been able to get married and begin a life together much sooner.

These three prayers also reveal that, for Austen, the key to a virtuous life resides not in blindly sticking to a set of moral rules, but rather in cultivating one’s character, starting by training one’s disposition through habitual practice of certain key virtues like charity, patience, and humility. As Alasdair Macintyre notes in his seminal philosophical work After Virtue (1981), Jane Austen follows ancient philosopher Aristotle in thinking that ‘Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways.’ Therefore, a moral education is not simply about doing what’s right whether you feel like it or not. Rather, it’s an ‘education sentimentale’: it’s about becoming morally mature enough to do the right thing not because you have to, but because you want to. Let me quote here a key passage from the first surviving prayer, in which Austen is asking God for forgiveness and guidance:

Look with Mercy on the Sins we have this day committed, and in Mercy make us feel them deeply, that our Repentance may be sincere, & our resolutions steadfast of endeavouring against the commission of such in future. Teach us to understand the sinfulness of our own Hearts, and bring to our knowledge every fault of Temper and every evil Habit in which we have indulged to the discomfort of our fellow-creatures, and the danger of our own Souls. May we now, and on each return of night, consider how the past day has been spent by us, what have been our prevailing Thoughts, Words, and Actions during it, and how far we can acquit ourselves of Evil. Have we thought irreverently of Thee, have we disobeyed thy commandments, have we neglected any known duty, or willingly given pain to any human being? Incline us to ask our Hearts these questions Oh! God, and save us from deceiving ourselves by Pride or Vanity.

Everything about Austen’s petitions to God in this prayer revolves around the formation of a virtuous character. First of all, she wishes that her ‘repentance’ may be ‘sincere’, and her ‘resolutions’ to lead a more virtuous life ‘steadfast.’ But how are we to achieve such sincere repentance? For Austen, it is through the examination of our disposition. She invites God to bring to her knowledge ‘every fault of Temper and every evil Habit’ in which she has ‘indulged’. As you can see, the focus here is not on resolving never to do one specific ‘bad’ thing again; rather, it is on getting rid of bad habits, so that you will not even be tempted to do that bad thing in the future. This becomes even clearer in the final section I quoted: ‘Incline us to ask our Hearts these questions Oh! God, and save us from deceiving ourselves by Pride or Vanity.’ Achieving virtue is a matter of a sentimental education, in the sense of having the right feelings; for Austen, a devout Christian, this can only happen with God’s aid. Both Lewis and Macintyre, then, got it right. Lewis is right that Jane Austen is deeply concerned with the fictions which we tell ourselves, and which lead us away from goodness. She asks God to save her from ‘deceiving’ herself by ‘Pride’ and, like Lewis shows, whenever one of her heroines falls precisely into this trap, a process of ‘undeception’ always takes place. But Macintyre is also right in pointing out that undeception cannot take place until we train our ‘Hearts’, not just our heads, into a habit of virtue.

What both Macintyre and Lewis guessed from Austen’s novels, we can experience and understand more directly by reading Austen’s prayers. We learn from her direct addresses to God how seriously she took the sin of pride, and how highly the virtue of humility ranked for her. We learn that no true repentance can happen without regular self-examination and confidence in God’s forgiveness. We learn that true virtue can only be gained through habit, and that constancy in practising virtues like humility and charity is crucial, even in the face of our own mistakes. If you are already someone of faith, I urge you to read Austen’s prayers and make use of them in your prayer life. If you don’t consider yourself a Christian, I urge you to read her prayers nonetheless: you may find they help you on your way to the kind of self-examination, without which none of Austen’s heroes or heroines could have achieved happiness.

Review

America

Books

Culture

Politics

2 November 2024

8 min read

James Davison Hunter: diagnosing America’s health

A great experiment is depleted, and nihilism slips into the void.

Roger Standing

Roger is a theologian and author with a particular interest in the relationship between faith and culture.

Riot police stand guard outside a White House fence line.

The White House, June 2020.

Angela N., CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

It was unsettling. Disturbing. And in the months since, it has proven to be a powerful and haunting image, etched in my memory. Thinking about it now has exactly the same chilling effect.

So, it was earlier this year. I was at the cinema with a friend, sitting comfortably and waiting for our movie to start. Our shared love of Sci-Fi had taken us there that afternoon. Not unexpectedly, up pops the reel of trailers. Fast paced, dramatic and with loads of loud music, they’re either enticingly engaging or mercifully short.

On this occasion the climax of the reel saw America engulfed in a modern-day civil war. And the image?

A man is pleading, ‘There’s some kind of misunderstanding here, we’re Americans, okay?’

There’s a pause. The music stops. Silence. It’s a long pause.

Then the camera pans to a man in military fatigues, with sunglasses and a rifle sitting ominously on his hip, cocks his head and responds:

‘Okay … [another pause] what kind of American are you?’

Guns cocked, the trailer explodes back into life.

Our movie was really good. My friend’s company, as usual, was delightfully affable. But the image that remains echoes with that question, ‘what kind of American are you?’

I have to confess, I love America. I studied there. I have good friends there. I gorge on American food. I watch American football with my son, every week, on a pay-per-view live stream with real US TV ad breaks (‘Go, Pack, Go!’). In my personal experience Americans are some of the kindest, most thoughtful and most generous of people.

Maybe that’s why I’ve found the image so troubling. Not that it was some kind of fantastical dystopian depiction, but rather that it portrayed something altogether more plausible. Especially in the light of the ‘storming of the Capitol’ on January 6, 2021, the epidemic of mass shootings and the ongoing violent rhetoric on both sides of the political divide.

How do you square the circle of America? How do kindness and generosity sit alongside gun violence? Is the country on the brink of civil war?

Back in 1991 the University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter’s book, Culture Wars: the Struggle to Define America suggested that cultural controversies would be increasingly significant in American politics. At the time not everyone agreed and some even pushed back against such an overblown prediction. Time, however, has vindicated Hunter’s reading of the runes. The ubiquity of his ‘culture wars’ epithet is the proof of his pudding.

Hunter’s latest offering picks up the story once more. Using the present situation in America as a case study, his reflections ‘bookend’ his earlier thinking. However, Democracy and Solidarity is not an extended commentary exploring the rise of populism and the radical right, or the snowflake, woke elitism of the socialist left. Rather, it seeks to understand why the sentence that opens his preface is true: ‘Democracy in America is in crisis.’

Grievance and hurt issue in rage, the unchallengeable moral authority of ‘my personal experience!'

For Hunter, understanding what is going on in a culture requires diving deep into the sources it draws on. What forms it? What drives it? All too easily we focus on the observable and what we can see. The stuff that happens and the values, beliefs and institutions that comprise our common life.

But that is to miss the deeper structures of culture that are formed by our tacit assumptions and the latent frameworks of meaning that nestle unseen and form the cultural architecture that surrounds us. The power of culture is demonstrated by how far it is taken for granted’.

In an interview Hunter likened his approach to be the difference between weather forecasts and climate studies. Or, to put it another way, moving from ‘the politics of culture’ to ‘the culture of politics.’

Beginning at the beginning, Hunter goes to the origin story of the nation. Deeply influenced by the principles of the enlightenment the Founding Fathers of the United States set about their task of nation building. Proposed by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in 1776, the national motto on the Great Seal of the United States, E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, one), summed up their political objective. The creation of solidarity. The glue that binds a society together.

The genius of the Enlightenment in America was that it facilitated this solidarity. What was created was a ‘Hybrid-Enlightenment’, fusing the insights of French and British intellectuals in a context deeply influenced by the faith of religious dissenters, with the Puritans chief among them. The blending of the secular and faith insights from the Enlightenment was what provided its robust inclusivity and durability. For Hunter, this proved key because:

“In the end, the hybrid-Enlightenment in America was a broad enough and opaque enough amalgamation to encompass substantial diversity and the tensions that diversity implied.”

This opacity enabled different groups to see themselves in the enterprise and gave wider American society an ability to absorb a plurality of views, opinions, and traditions. A commitment to Enlightenment rationality also then provided the tools whereby differences could be ‘worked through’ in reasoned debate. Thus, the culture was a living thing, growing, evolving and developing. All the time maintaining the wider solidarity, the ‘buy-in’ from the different communities and constituencies that comprise America.

Opacity also meant that tensions and contradictions were part and parcel of the endeavour from the start. There may have been a promise of freedom, equality and universal justice for all, yet historically these have been denied to large tracts of the American population. But still the centre held, and solidarity was maintained. As Abraham Lincoln presciently reflected in his Second Inaugural Address, given on March 4 1865, shortly before his assassination and the end of the Civil War:

“[We] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. … [Yet] the prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully.”

The problem today, as Hunter discerns it, is that the elements of the hybrid-Enlightenment are unravelling. He sees a number of contributory causes to this escalating collapse.

Right at the centre is an amoral, materialistic and individualistic neoliberalism which reduces everything to economics and the market. This is deeply corrosive of community and solidarity.

Then there is the fruit of postmodern scepticism that has filtered down from the intellectuals into the general population. Truth is deconstructed, experts are distrusted and misinformation, disinformation and fake news abound.

Widespread immigration also plays a part. It intensifies American pluralism and brings into the country those who are unfamiliar with the legacy of the hybrid-Enlightenment and for whom the national mythos of America is either strange or incomprehensible. Far from being taken for granted, their worldview does not fit.

The growth of identity politics further complicates the unravelling. Solidarity, rather than being found in the national vision, is achieved by defining ‘us’ over and against ‘them’. It doesn’t foster cohesion, it seeds division. Grievance and hurt issue in rage, the unchallengeable moral authority of ‘my personal experience!’ As with Nietzsche, this acts as a narcotic against the hurt, an anaesthetic for the pain.

Of course, identity politics has no room for reasoned debate and mutual resolution. All that matters is the outcome of the zero-sum game where the justice of my position is both acknowledged and acted upon, and you lose. Whether that identity falls on the political right or left, it doesn’t matter. Family, sexuality, public education, the news media, the arts, the law, electoral politics, you name the issue the game play is the same.

Solidarity always involves drawing boundaries. Even the hybrid-Enlightenment drew the line between what was acceptable and what was unacceptable. Who was a part of us, and who was not. Without boundaries there is no identity. It is just that now, identity politics require the boundaries to be much more tightly drawn. “What kind of American are you?”

In all of this, America’s cultural resources for ‘working through’ these issues have been seriously depleted as the hybrid-Enlightenment has unravelled. Into the void, observes Hunter, a form of cultural nihilism slips in. It is far from being all-pervasive, and he maintains that few Americans are nihilists. Yet as a cultural reality he sees it in the prevailing tendencies towards ‘epistemological failure’, ‘ethical incoherence’ and ‘existential despair’. Then, deriving from these he adds a fourth, ‘political annihilation’ and the will to obliterate everything that obstructs acquiring power by destroying enemies completely.

Does it all seem rather depressing?

Hunter admits that he has neither proposals nor a plan to address the crisis he so eloquently describes and accounts for. Yet he concludes:

“… truth be told, I myself am very hopeful – not because I don’t see the seriousness of the problem and its dangerous implications, but because I believe that the times are full of real opportunity if one has the eyes to see them. Sadly, my eyesight is not very good. … [but] without real images of a better world, without myths of a completion of the past in the future, without a world ordered towards goodness, truth, and beauty … We become something like Nietzsche’s ‘last men’.”

I’m grateful to Hunter. I think I understand my American friends, their country and their present challenges better for his insights. As for the possibility of a civil war, he thinks it’s unlikely as the ‘red and blue’ are too intermingled and economically interdependent across the country. In the meantime, political violence will continue to be a very real threat.

As for the future he hopes for, it requires a paradigm shift to imagine and articulate a new vision of public life. It needs the cultural resources of a reconstituted humanism, drawing on the rich insights available in a genuinely pluralist society. Resources that embrace the faith wisdom of exemplars like Martin Luther King, Mohandas Ghandi and Thích Nhất Hạnh. Resources that include a retrieval of the fundamental principle of forgiveness. Without the realism to accept that none of us are perfect, we’ll never be able to live together. As the influential political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition (1958):

“Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.”

Arendt’s insight is altogether more telling when seen in the light of her experience as a German Jew under the Nazis. And if forgiveness is too high a bar, at the very least we have to somehow learn to let things go and move on.

Hunter is under no illusions, such a paradigm shift remains a long haul away.

But he is hopeful.