Gospel & Universe 🪐 At The Wild & Fog

Love Amid the Fog

To an agnostic, the lofty realms of Religious Truth are so difficult to see that they resemble the heavy banks of fog that Dickens describes at the beginning of Bleak House (1853). The connection between the Higher Truth of Religion and the High Court of Chancery (which sits “at the very heart of the fog”) may seem far-fetched, yet the language Dickens uses to describe the Chancery is subtly and insistently religious. Dickens invokes both religion (Creation, the Fall, and the Flood) and science (in the striking image of Megalosaurus) to describe the outdated institution of the Chancery, which in the first half of the 19th century was notorious for inefficiency and corruption, for bankrupting those who were party to its suits, and for its inability to perform its role, which was to dispense equity justice. Dickens’ aim isn’t to attack religion, but rather to critique institutions and practices which mistake lofty goals, abstraction, and elitism for virtue — whether these institutions and practices be the High Court with its endless procedural inefficiencies, the myopic elites of Chesney Wold who focus on luxury and aestheticism while the poor eek out miserable lives, or the philanthropic hyperopia (far-sightedness) of Mrs. Jellyby who obsesses over Africa and ignores the pitiful state of those around her.

Bleak House fits into a roughly secular, agnostic, existential pattern: since elitism compounds the cruelty and the absurdity of the world, the best way to find meaning is to avoid elite, idealistic, and religious language, and instead force religious ideals such as love and charity to take concrete form. Dickens depicts the harshness of the world, refuses to impose a theological or positivist order on this harshness, and finally suggests that we can find a continuous, unfixed meaning in our own, human-scaled creations of art, order, and justice.

The structure of the novel is crucial here, since it seems like “a wild, where weeds and flowers promiscuous shoot,” yet it has a plan to it — although not the divine plan or “mighty maze” of Pope’s Essay. Bleak House gives a detailed picture of what absurdity looks like, showing what insane mazes humans have created for themselves, and then suggests ways out. He first shows us the indulgent, indifferent elite in the characters of Tulkinghorn, Lady Dedlock, and Sir Leicester, and in the locations of the Chancery and Chesney Wold. He also shows us the victims of this elite — characters like Jo and locations like Tom-All-Alone’s. These negative aspects are counter-balanced by — and hence the novel is knit together by — humane, secular, down-to-earth values of love and caring, such as we see in the wealthy but charitable John Jarndyce of Bleak House and in the common goodness of Esther Summerson (who ends up living in a Yorkshire home given to her by Mr. Jarndyce). While the elitist Sir Leicester sees the lumbering Jarndyce and Jarndyce Chancery suit in positive terms, the progressive Mr. Jarndyce sees it as a curse.

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Into the Fog

Bleak House begins its attack on uncaring people and institutions with a description of what ought to ensure equality and justice: the Law. Everything about the High Court of Chancery suggests an outdated and indifferent institution. Even the word Chancery itself suggests volumes: the Latin cancelli (grating or bars) refers to the barrier that separates normal people from the law in a courtroom — and also, one might note, from the altar in a church. Chancery also might take on the more fanciful notion of a state or realm of Chance, a connection Dickens seems to encourage when he describes it as surrounded by “Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog.”

Dickens might have situated his Chancery among the grandeur of great streets, rays of light, and the wonder of unique crystalline snowflakes. Instead, he shows it to us with “mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth.” The reference to the biblical Flood is subtle yet sustained incrementally, and is fused with notions of Creation and the Fall. The Chancery is a place of “general infection of ill-temper,” where “foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke).” Here, the “flakes of soot” are “as big as full-grown snowflakes— gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.” Inside the Chancery, where the court is in session,

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

Dickens’ use of religious language is brilliant here, for it underscores the traditional notion that man has fallen from a better state (“the foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke”) and it also suggests that grandiose institutions and conceptions — such as The Law, Catholicism, Evangelism, Creation or the Flood (“the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth”) — don’t easily fit with the reality of our muddy, foggy world.

Dickens doesn’t openly question the traditional view of Creation, but implies this doubt as an aside, parenthetically, buried deep in his grand opening scene: “(if the day ever broke).” It’s within this setting that the lizard-monster, Megalosaurus, came waddling in earlier in the same paragraph. This is a creature from the new timeline of science, a timeline that goes back way further than the biblical 4004 BC:

As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

Dickens is writing in 1852 and 1853, when science had moved beyond the optimism of the Enlightenment to the more realistic, less salvational form we know today. A decade later, after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, the scientific explanation for our existence becomes substantially more solid than it ever was throughout all of history. Writing a decade before this full and integrating explanation, it’s not surprising that Dickens uses science not as a complete explanation, but as an interruption. The Megalosaurus doesn’t really explain anything, yet it does interrupt the old timeline of religion. And yet it also leaves room for religion, especially for religion which emphasizes charity instead of cosmic doctrine. Here Dickens is in line with humanist Christians who argue that grandiose conceptions of religion aren’t as important as compassionate values which find a concrete form in bettering the living conditions of the poor. It’s as if he’s writing with the compassion of a Saint Francis or Thomas Moore, yet without the notion that the impulse of charity is necessarily a religious one. It’s as if he’s making the case for a non-religious altruism a hundred years before Sartre’s essay, Existentialism is a Humanism (1946).

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Next: God Among the Scientists

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