The Bible and Jane Eyre: A Match Made in Heaven

I have always loved books, and my love of literature has grown over time. Occasionally I joke with English students that my love of literature was preserved precisely because I didn’t major in English while at university and suffer the insufferable dogmatism of critical theory and politicized hermeneutics that make so many hate the great garden of literature. I find it somewhat ironic, and amusing, that while educated in history, philosophy and political philosophy, and religious studies (specifically biblical studies and theology) that I have gravitated toward literary criticism since graduation. Nevertheless, I find the education I received in history, philosophy, and religion as providing a wondrous window, new eyes so to speak, into literature which preserved the spirit of love which is needed for the garden of literature to flourish.

It shouldn’t be surprising that literature is influenced by all the contours of history, philosophy, theology, and other intellectual considerations that were in vogue when an author wrote. Context is important to any book. And understanding that context often brings a deeper understanding and appreciation of any book read. It is hard, for instance, to read Homer without knowledge of Greek culture, history, and “theology.” It is equally impossible to understand the depth and imagination of Shakespeare without a knowledge of the Bible, classics, and English history. Rinse and repeat. Yet that’s precisely where we’re at with most of our celebrated “literary critics” who are all politicized theory with no cultural awareness—especially the cultural contours that matter most when reading great literature.

One of the more peculiar things about contemporary literary criticism is the critic’s saturation in convoluted theories rather than knowledge of intellectual currents that influenced textual composition. Insofar that a critic may be aware of such things, the usual platitudes of our current zeitgeist take precedence. There is a condemnation, for example, of Heathcliff’s vile toxicity or Rochester’s seductive manipulations and treatment of Bertha, but a refusal to recognize the spiritual, theological, and philosophical context in which these characters were written and what they embody.

There are continuous efforts to minimize the declarations of love and allusions to the Bible and Jesus as meaningless (even dangerous) to female heroines which disturb the feminist readings of, say, Catherine Earnshaw, Cathy Linton, or Jane Eyre. The disposition of modern criticism, to quote Joyce Carol Oates, is “those who have love have no need of this particular Lord Jesus.” How astonishing a remark from a supposed guardian of literary culture given that the very love discussed in Jane Eyre is predicated on the revelatory love of “this particular Lord Jesus.”

This tendency to shy away from the Bible, even regard it with contempt and scorn, by contemporary critics is now all the rage in literary criticism and exposition. Fly from it is their motto and mentality. Irrelevant, another. Yet this is a truncated, and ultimately philistine and vandalistic, attitude and approach to culture and literature which leaves readers disenchanted and demolished (probably by design if I can speak freely). English literature, most especially, grew out of the Bible and its stories, visions, and language. The inability to see even the cultural relevance of the Bible brings irreparable harm to the cultivated love and wonder toward literature that these guardians of culture should be enculturating. But they cannot enculturate precisely because they reject the foundation of culture.

I shall concentrate, briefly, on Jane Eyre as a wonderful retelling of the biblical story and why “this particular Lord Jesus” that Joyce Carol Oates derides is so essential to the story which opens our hearts to loving the novel more than Oates’s derisive reading can.

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Jane Eyre, as we know, is an orphaned child. She is, therefore, introduced to as not entirely unlike Adam and Eve following the Expulsion from the Garden: a wanderer, an exile. Jane Eyre is a pilgrim’s tale like the pilgrim’s tale of the English imagination formed by the biblical story of fall and restoration. But worse than Adam and Eve, Jane is alone. The lonely pilgrimage is worse than a pilgrimage with friends and even family. At least Adam and Eve still had each other.

But the story of Jane Eyre is also a pilgrimage to family through love which includes the essential reality of reconciliation as the fruition of this pilgrim’s progress (we’ll return to this shortly). Jane seeks what her life has thus far been denied. It is a story of coming into an inheritance (readers of the Bible should be familiar with this trope). Orphaned at a young age, Jane ends up in the company of her abusive and manipulative extended family. Their cruelty and oppression causes her to flee. She becomes a student and eventually a teacher before leaving again. She is the wandering pilgrim in search of love.

Properly understood, Jane’s pilgrimage for love in the family is a biblical allusion. Part of the biblical promise entailed in salvation is the coming home “to the Father’s house.” The Fatherly language of the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, was not a product of imposed patriarchy and sexism as all good biblical students know. It was a product of the exilic period when the exiled Jews were distraught over what had transpired to them.

The language of the father exhibited in Trito-Isaiah (Isaiah 56-66), written during the post-exilic period, embodies the reality of ancient Levantine socio-filial realities: the father was the one on whom care and compassion depended; in a despondent situation of anguish and grief, the biblical authors conceived of God as that compassionate and caring father. This is reiterated in the New Testament by Jesus who speaks of a loving and caring Father and uses parables of filial restoration (most famous being the prodigal son). The love which bespeaks of care and compassion is biblical and the essence of the love that Jane Eyre seeks to proclaim is reconciliatory and life-giving in the same vein of the merciful compassion and forgiveness found in Holy Writ.

Jane, as exiled daughter without others, is in search for that enduring anchor that Christianity calls Love; the Love that Saint Thomas Aquinas defined as the “unitive force” and the Love that Dante proclaimed “moves the sun and the other stars.” She meets Rochester at Thornfield Hall. The two begin a budding romance with Rochester using his seductive guile and manipulation to overpower and seduce the young and naïve Jane. Though in love, when Jane learns that Rochester is already married to Bertha—a woman of Creole descent which drives contemporary racialist critiques of the novel—she runs away and nearly dies of starvation until given refuge by the Reverend St. John (Eyre) Rivers.

Here modern literary critics have their field day over accusations of racism and sexism, toxic masculinity, and all the other politicized zeitgeist considerations of the twenty-first century. These are all reasons to either not read Jane Eyre or to demean its reputation as one of the greatest works of English literature. If it survives as a classic, it must be known that it is a racist and sexist work which is meant to tarnish its legacy and the transfiguring power of its story. There is no effort in creating a spirit of love and wonder on the part of the reader toward this tremendous work of genius and inspiration (which stands as a testament to Charlotte Brontë’s skills and depth of ability in reaching into the human condition to create this story).

Yet the overcoming of the clear seductive toxicity of Rochester is part and parcel of the story. Precisely because Rochester is a bad and “ugly” man, the story’s resolution is all the more potent and powerful—indeed, wonderful. Part of the larger story that Charlotte Brontë is telling is the overcoming of Rochester’s faults (to which he has plenty and we as readers recognize in our sympathy with Jane) and how Jane retains her dignity and freedom throughout this overcoming of Rochester who is a devilish villain prior to the story’s incredible conclusion.

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We have mentioned thus far that Jane Eyre is a story of an orphaned girl in search of love in the form of a family. We eventually learn that St. John Rivers is a relative of Jane. As are St. John’s sisters, Diana and Mary.

For the first time in the story, Jane has a family who loves her. As Jane herself states, ‘And you…cannot at all imagine the craving I have for fraternal and sisterly love. I never had a home, I never had brothers or sisters, I must and will have them now.’” Though she rejects the proposal of marriage by St. John—for he is merely seeking a companion wife, a helper—which leads to a ruptured relationship, she also extends him the act of reconciliation which he, initially, rejects. She implores for mercy and also asks forgiveness for her outbursts (though knowing that St. John is also culpable): ‘Forgive me the words, St John; but it your own fault that I have been roused to speak so unguardedly.’” It takes two to forgive. And forgive they do. Reconciliation follows.

This is the antecedent culmination of the story of reconciliatory love that Jane Eyre is communicating to readers who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. In Jane’s ability, in her freedom, to forgive St. John and seek a restored, reconciled, relationship with him, she grows in her ability to eventually reconcile with Rochester which produces the conclusion of the story and its transformative proclamation that reconciliatory love brings new life into the world. Jane, at every moment, has her agency preserved, even enhanced. She is the conduit of forgiveness freely given to others.

The emphasis on reconciliatory love, while having some classical antecedents—especially, in my opinion, Homer—is undeniably and unmistakably part of the biblical inheritance and a specifically Christian value taught by Jesus Christ, “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.” Our inability to forgive causes anger, animosity, and resentment. Hatred boils over without the grace of forgiveness. It brings death and destruction. Forgiveness, by contrast, brings us the freedom to move on and to soar to something better and more hopeful. Forgiveness allows love and life to enter the world.

In hearing the declarative love of Rochester, “Jane! Jane! Jane!” in her mind once more, Jane ventures back to Thornfield Hall only to find it destroyed. She meets a disfigured and blind man and asks about Rochester and what happened to Thornfield Hall. She learns in an embrace with this scarred man that he is, in fact, Rochester! (It should also be recognized that nineteenth century English society would have immediately thought of Jesus healing the blind man in Jane’s meeting a blind man who turns out to be Rochester.)

Rochester’s pride and power which he had exhibited earlier in the story has now been humbled, brought low. Yet another biblical trope to the biblically literate reader of Charlotte Brontë’s magnificent novel. True love cannot flourish with the sin of pride governing one’s soul. His formerly imposing stature is brought low to meet that Jane’s newfound freedom—a freedom found in her choice of love and forgiveness; the very freedom Jesus speaks of as the outgrowth of loving forgiveness in the gospels.

Here, Jane has every opportunity to play an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth. She doesn’t. She takes pity and compassion on Rochester and shows herself the true heroine and the embodiment of Divine Love. We can easily hear the echoes of William Blake here, “For mercy has a human heart, / Pity a human face, / And love, the human form divine.” She learns that Rochester was scarred and lost his vision after Bertha accidentally set fire to Thornfield Hall. After saving his servants and attendants, Rochester attempted to save Bertha but failed and was terribly maimed as a result.

In a world where cruelty and animosity, vengeance and violence, have thus far reigned supreme, Jane’s freedom to manifest compassion and pity and extend the sanctifying love found in forgiveness to Rochester is what brings the story to its conclusion and ushers her into the abode of love that has been denied to her: love in a family. She and Rochester marry and have a child together. Again, influenced by another biblical trope, Rochester has his sight restored (but only after experiencing the kindness and forgiving love of Jane). Love and life have brought forth healing—literally. The Rivers’ sisters also rekindle their loving friendship with Jane. Even St. John, as he ventures and works in India as a missionary, has accepted Jane’s magnanimous forgiveness of his impetuousness and keeps a modest correspondence with her until his death in India. Forgiveness has sanctified and restored the world; it has also brought our characters who were starved of love and orphaned and alone into those relationships that produce the joy the human heart seeks.

Jane’s triumph in love brings the happiness that all our souls are seeking. “My Edward and I, then, are happy: and the more so, because Those we love most are happy likewise. Diana and Mary Rivers are both married: alternately, once every year, they come to see us, and we go to see them.” The pilgrimage of love from loneliness to family—brought forth through merciful compassion and forgiveness—is complete.

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What began in orphanage ends in family. What began with a lack of love has concluded with the triumph of love. And the triumph of love is a product of that revelation of love: the forgiveness so often taught by the Lord Jesus that critics nowadays despise. Jane’s freedom, her “feminism” so-called, is found in her choice to love and forgive—in other words, to embody the actual teachings of the Lord Jesus whom critics must excise from the context of the story in order to push their vandalistic hearts. Jane is the one who chooses merciful compassion and forgiveness and thereby brings healing to the world. She, a woman, is the conduit of divine grace and healing love! That is her heroism; not the independent feisty spirit which she does exhibit that modern critics laud once all biblical context is erased and thereby distorting and depreciating the grand accomplishment of both Jane in the story and Charlotte Brontë as author.

Knowledge of history, philosophy, and religion opens the door to see literature with new eyes and ears. It can bring the reader a new joy. Those who contemptuously scorn history, philosophy, and especially religion and theology in their politicized interpretations are truly blind. Moreover, they make everyone else blind with them.

We, however, must be able to read with eyes to see and ears to hear—it also equips us to better wrestle with the shallow critics who are heralded in a philistine age as guardians of culture and not fall prey to their equally shallow understanding of culture. With those eyes to see and ears to hear we can recover the joy of reading and embark on our own pilgrimage through the pilgrimage of pages. And in doing so, we find ourselves in a beautiful oasis known as the Garden of Literature where are souls will undeniably be renewed and are souls directed to heavenly things.

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