1. 演化論:But the nineteenth-century crisis is more serious, because this was also the time when the major intellectual challenge was posed to Christianity. Up until now the Christian framework was still there at bottom, giving some basis for social values; the West had been moving away from commitment to biblical faith, but no fundamental crisis of belief had occurred. But in the nineteenth century comes the intellectual assault, from two sources. First, German biblical criticism, which argued that the Bible was not a very reliable guide after all; and secondly, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
The development of evolutionism at this point is very interesting. C.S. Lewis observes that in fact the scientific theory of evolution comes after, not before, the artistic expression of the evolutionist idea. We might expect that, first, scientists would formulate the theory, and then the artists would start to work with the idea of higher coming from lower. But the opposite is true. In Keats' poetry, and Wagner's music, we find the idea of the stronger succeeding the weaker, and the superior the inferior. Now of course the Christian picture is that God made humanity perfect, but then the first people rebelled and fell, leaving us as their descendants with the problem of getting back to the glory and beauty we once enjoyed. But the evolutionary picture is the opposite: you start off with the worse and weaker, and work up naturally to the better and stronger – an idea very attractive to us, of course, as the 'latest and best'! But the interesting thing is that the artists had begun working on this idea before the scientists: it was something people wanted to believe, and then fortunately Darwin came along and gave us reasons to do so.
2. 基督教根基開始崩潰:That made a major impact on Western European Christianity. In America it was not so: many American Christian leaders did not find it difficult to relate evolution to their faith. But many western Europeans did. Thus in the nineteenth century we find the foundations of western European Christianity apparently in a state of collapse: it is the age of the 'loss of faith'. Just when the romantic dream was proving to be just a fantasy rather than something you could live by, so too the Christian framework appeared to be collapsing. As Christians in the twenty-first century we may look back and wonder a little what the fuss was about. We find it hard to be convinced by the arguments that were used against Christianity in those days. But at the time they seemed very strong to many people; and so one senses in many writers of this period a doubt as to what foundation is left for value and significance, and a doubt too as to whether goodness is something with any real basis, any real power.
3. 無神論開始抬頭:The desire for goodness is there, but there is a deep uncertainty as to whether it connects with any source in the universe that can give it strength. We see this in the novels of Charles Dickens. His evil characters have tremendous vitality; but his good characters seem weak and pale (in Oliver Twist, for example), and it is hard to understand why in the end they are victorious. The reason for this, one suspects, is that Dickens himself did not really know. Dostoevski's The Idiot raises the same question, perhaps: Is it realistic to hope for goodness to work in a world like this?
4. 機械論、科學論: We therefore find the great literature of the nineteenth century reflecting something of a quest for other ways to live or to look at the world. Some looked back to the middle ages, as in the Pre-Raphaelites – William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Others looked to science as the key to what the world was about. In the French novelist Zola, for example, we see the universe presented as a machine, impersonal, pursuing its inevitable, deterministic purposes, with no care for human beings trapped in the process. The result can be grim: at the end of L'Assommoir, for example, the heroine is found dead and 'turning green already'. For Zola, and those like him in the Naturalist movement, science is truth; but science without God shows us only a heartless machine. Yet others said that, even if there was no God and no immortality, still we must hold to a concept of duty to live by; we must still try to do what is right, even though there is no God to help us to do so. The great English novelist George Eliot is an example.
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1. Many big names: charles dickens
2. Reaction against the romantics; Counterparts of romamtic
imagination
3. Emphasis on truth and objectivity
4. Report what happens like journalism; tragic tone
5. Inductive method; induce the truth from a slice of life
6. Characters>>plot; conflicting impulses and motivations, eg. Dostoevsky; achieved through internal monologues; lay bare the internal struggles ; changes in mood, in opinions of the characters, causes the "actions"; 內心戲; report of the mind
7. Unreliable narrator; frame narrative: a story within the story>place the readers further away from the events of the story>purpose: reality is uncertain, unknowable
8. Compared with the modernists, the novels are still clear.
9. Influences: psychology; inner workings and emotions; observors of human psychology; deal with desire, the irrational, the unconscious; reason cannot explain everything; through love pity and mercy can man be saved; freedom to be irrational
10. Scientific approach to ethical problems is limited
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