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So I left off yesterday beginning a rambling and disjointed discourse on 'guilt', specifically the variant 'liberal guilt'. Now I wish to go further - in light of one's 'stand[ing] before God blood-guilty' of the inherited sins of one's society, how do we go about reforming as Mr Darcy did (if I may return to the literary analog of my last post)? Good FitzWilliam, too, was the product of his time, of his class, of his parents and his upbringing - after all, Jane Austen meant him (along with her other characters) to be a biting satire of the morals and attitudes of his time. Mr Darcy reformed himself in the spirit of love - now, before my gentle readers begin groaning and scoffing at my supposed newfound Romanticism, I shall beg them to allow me to defend myself on this score. I do not use 'love' in some vapid, frivolous, adolescent sense, rather in a wholly Hegelian one:
[T]he life of God and divine knowledge may indeed be spoken of as love's playing with itself; yet this idea descends to the level of edification, and even insipidity when seriousness, pain, and the patience and work of the negative have no place in it.
For Mr Darcy, love truly was pain. It broke him down completely, took him straight to zero - after professing his love to Elizabeth the first time, Elizabeth spurned him with a scathing indictment of his character: arrogant, conceited, disdainful, devoid of all proper feeling or gentlemanly behaviour... and his goodness and status as a gentleman were what he most valued in himself, and yet shown to be lies. Mr Kierkegaard might say of Mr Darcy, in being shown what a shambles his ethical existence lay in after Elizabeth's rampage through it, that he had a choice. He could throw off Elizabeth's hold upon him in spite and in betrayal of his own feelings, plunging straight into the putrid swamp of daemonic despair, or... he could become a Knight of Infinite Resignation (which he then proceeded to do). Her words 'tortured' him, but he undertook the patience and work of the negative. Standing blood-guilty before Elizabeth, rather than casting away Elizabeth in shame, he cast away his pride.
Instead of spurning friends beneath his station and consequence, he opened himself up to Mr and Mrs Gardiner, welcoming them to his home at Pemberley. Instead of avoiding Mr Wickham and cutting his losses, he confronted Mr Wickham when he compromised the honour of the Bennet family's youngest daughter by eloping with her. Instead of merely sending his condolences to the Bennet family, he took upon himself all the expenses of covering up the scandal. He resisted his usual habits and the expectations of his relatives (represented in Lady Catherine de Bourgh), all in the hope of making himself the gentleman Elizabeth had wanted him to be - though in Infinite Resignation. He asked nothing of her in return for his efforts at reforming himself - he had no need! *
So, all's well and good for Mr Darcy, but what does this have to do with guilty liberals? Only this - the guilty liberal is faced with the same contradiction as Mr Darcy. Assuming the Christian terms of Professor Neville for a moment, as products of our society we stand indicted and blood-guilty before God. And, like Mr Darcy, we have before us a choice: either we can spurn in shame the example of Christ, or we can take up the way of the Cross - in nonviolent, radical resistance to the culture of Empire that divides, that exploits, that despoils, that goes to war in our names.
Resistance to the culture, undertaken in the spirit of love in which Christ went to his execution for us, is painful. It requires breaking out of our habits and making new ones for ourselves, in opposition to the imperial culture we inhabit. And the standard 'guilty liberal' New Year's resolutions are probably very good ones for Christians to adopt not as directionless resolutions but as our forms of witness: drive less; consume less; eat and buy locally; donate to and participate in a charitable organisation in our community - but these habits should affect the way we live our lives. These habits should cause us some level of discomfort and pain, being as they are the serious, patient work of the negative in society and in our lives.
* In the end, I suppose we should call Mr Darcy a Knight of Faith - in the end he dares to hope enough after resigning any chance of gaining Elizabeth's love to ask for it again, and receive it - which shows trust in the Absurd on his part... though Mr Kierkegaard might disagree with me in this respect.
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