Conclusion

The search for the basic shape of the central doctrine of the Christian faith – Jesus the Christ – goes back to the very foundations of the Church itself. Given the literary basis of Christianity, this shaping activity is manifested in much writing as a poetics – “a declaration of principle with regard to the ideas about literature [and writing] that have been embodied in the events [of a given] text [or work]”. ⁵¹¹ With Jesus representing the ultimate nexus of subject and sacred in place and temporality, such a declaration of principle regarding how literature functions in relation to and as the incarnation of this coming together, as well as what this embodiment within literary space ultimately concerns, is what I have termed a poetics of Jesus. As discussed in the Introduction, the question of form has been central to Christianity and its attempt to give voice to the nature of the subject, the figuring of the sacred, and incarnation as nexus of subject and sacred in Christ. From the New Testament to writings of the church such as the Creeds and works of St. Augustine, this favouring of structure to the point of delimiting the “possible” is evident. Yet prior to the Council of Nicaea of 325 CE and the forming of the Symbol of Chalcedon in 451 CE, language used to figure Jesus, as noted by John Hick, “seems generally to have been devotional, or ecstatic, or liturgical (or all three), rather than an exercise in precise theological formulation. It was analogous to the language of love, in which all manner of extravagances and exaggerations are entirely appropriate...” ⁵¹² What I have sought throughout this study is to assert that this “language of love” – that which comes before theological form – is what George Eliot and writers of her spirit sought to recover, remember, and refigure in their poetics. For George Eliot, that which has become the concern of most quests for Jesus is not the “ultimate concern” for the very figure that has been searched for. As 198ones who stood on the top of Pisgah ⁵¹³ – Baur, Feuerbach, and Strauss – saw in their different ways where the promise was in stepping free from the forms they had inherited and announcing the challenge to move beyond them. Yet they remained tied to the very structures they perceived as deathly. George Eliot became one of the key inheritors of this perception.