"The redemption of the world": the rhetoric of Jane Austen's prayers.

Dabundo, Laura

ONE OF THE LEAST REMARKED but in some ways most significant parts of" all of Jane Austen's much-celebrated novel Pride and Prejudice occurs at the very end of Mr. Darcy's long exculpatory letter to Elizabeth Bennet in the very middle of the novel. After he has explained and justified himself at great length, he closes, very simply, by saying, "I will only add, God bless you" (203). In this final turn, away from himself, Darcy offers the embrace of the Christian community toward the woman whom he fears he has lost. With that gesture, that benediction, we see the world of God's grace in which Jane Austen and her characters dwell.

In the authoritative edition of The Works of Jane Austen, Volume 6, Minor Works (originally published by Oxford UP in 1953), editor R. W. Chapman appends as the final portion, following the evidently more superior juvenilia and novel fragments, three prayers. He indicates that they "were preserved in two manuscripts," transcribed partly by a sister and brother of Jane Austen and "partly in a hand which has been thought by experts to be JA's own" (453). They are striking examples of a prose different from that for which the author is famed. Grounded in the rich Elizabethan and Jacobean language of Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer and of the King James' Version of the Bible, they are yet as individual and particular as Austen's more familiar work in voice and subject, and the language choices the author made yield an informed and interesting commentary upon the characters and worlds of her six novels. Jane Austen was unschooled in theology as much as her formal academic education was lacking, but she nonetheless sought a spirituality that engaged with the world. For example, in the first of the three prayers, Austen writes, Above all other blessings oh! God, for ourselves and our fellow-creatures, we implore thee to quicken our sense of thy mercy in the redemption of the world, of the value of that holy religion in which we have been brought up, that we may not, by our own neglect, throw away the salvation thou hast given us, nor be Christians only in name. (454)

In this petition, the speaker places herself within a community of the living, of the faithful, of the church, actively engaged in the affairs and work of the world yet mindful that such labors and associations must ever be oriented toward Christ and Christian living. The self is subsumed into the first-person plural of the prayer, but the community that constitutes this "we" accounts for the human specimens evident in her fiction, ranging from the fallen including such rakes as John Willoughby and George Wickham, the selfish and cruel such as Fanny Dashwood and General Tilney, the clever and worldly such as Mary Crawford and Caroline Bingley, and the stupid and foolish such as Sir Walter Elliot and maybe Harriet Smith. These are Jane Austen's "fellow-creatures," a term she invokes in all three prayers, and the rhetorical purpose of the prayer indicates that it is their world that is to be redeemed, following the sacrifice of Christ and realized through the reformed examples and good works of Elinor Dashwood, Catherine Morland, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse, Anne Elliot, and their mates, inspired and emulating Christ's exemplum, who must descend into the depths of the self in order to arise, to connect with the other, to remake their lives, their worlds.

That is to say, the language of Austen's prayers and her novels focuses on what the great Romantic poet and contemporary of Austen William Wordsworth situated to be Not in Utopia--subterraneous fields, Or some secreted island, heaven knows where-- But in the very world which is the world Of all of us, the place which, in the end, We find our happiness, or not at all. (The Prelude 1805, X, 140-44)

Austen would not have known these verses, but she writes in the third prayer in the same spirit, by asking "that we feel the importance of every day, and every hour as it passes, and earnestly strive to make a better use of what thy goodness may yet bestow on us, than we have done of the time past" (456). The language is early modern--that is, the Latinate words, orotund sentences, and high tone of the English Renaissance, but the sentiment is Romantic, as Wordsworth intoned and now Austen adopts. Her characters' work, as the rhetorical circumstance of the prayer demonstrates, is to redeem their fallen world and find the Lord's kingdom there, "on earth as it is in heaven," for all three of Austen's prayers close with the commencement of the prayer taught by the Savior.

Let us now look first at the context of Austen's Christianity and then more closely at these prayers.

Irene Collins, in her very fine study Jane Austen and the Clergy, notes that "Jane Austen was a deeply religious woman" (182). She argues that Austen was a firm believer in taking reformative action in the world (185) and that "the undesirable characters in her novels are not so much born wicked as led astray" (187). Thus, good works, as Emma Woodhouse undertakes, sending or bringing food to the less fortunate, is an essential component of village life, as was a rigorous and disciplined prayer life (192-93). Gary Kelly, from looking at personal papers, notes that "according to her family, she practiced an unostentatious yet consistent and mainstream Anglican faith. Scattered remarks on religion in her letters indicate that she placed great importance on taking holy communion ..." (152). Her religion, as reflected in her own prayers, then, would demonstrate her liturgical conviction for a faith grounded in daily prayers and occasional and regular Eucharist.

This understanding of Austen's faith is echoed in Michael Giffin's study, Jane Austen and Religion, which, fortunately or unfortunately for our purposes, does not discuss in detail the prayers I am examining but shines its manifold illuminations on the novels. He observes, for instance, similar to Collins, that "Austen's religious position prevents her from being harsher on her more foolish or wicked characters, because the tenor of Georgian Anglicanism was one of tolerance rather than retribution" (25). The argument that Giffin, an Anglican priest in the church in Australia, develops with respect to the novels is an overarching frame of Christian humanism, Austen as "an Anglican author who writes Christian stories." What this means, in short, thereby, is that "a fallen (and continually falling) humanity is called to imitate the human character of the earthly Jesus, and to participate in the divine character of the risen Christ, and therein share the physical and metaphysical soteria [that is, salvation] ... The way Austen and her heroines seek to imitate Jesus is by learning the necessity of loving their enemies, turning the other cheek, denying themselves, fixing their faces on the heavenly Jerusalem, taking up their cross, and making their journey to the place of their metaphorical crucifixion.... It is the way to achieve a fullness of life both in this world and in the next" (27). This message of faith and charity, engagement and repentance, hope and community suffuses the rhetoric of her prayers, as we can now hear.

All three prayers of Austen's are evidently written, as their words reveal, for evening recitation, which in itself imposes interesting rhetorical limits. They all address the fall of night and the evident terrors that that time of day apparently posed for people two hundred and more years ago. To that end, one notes that the Church of England's Order of Service for Evening Prayer includes a collect dedicated expressly to an application "by thy great mercy [to] defend us from all perils and dangers of this night" (62), which is entirely Austen's wish and rhetoric too.

Also, Austen's prayers can be distinguished according to distinctive merits that reveal the issues that dominated Austen's Christianity, consonant with her Church. And the ground of the Church of England is its precious Book of Common Prayer. A long time ago, Richard Hooker, early modern author of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1597), argued in favor of what he called "public prayer," that is, prayer that is shared, exemplary, open, even ordained by the Lord, "having his Angels intermingled as our associates" (qtd. in and drawn from Wright 24-25). This is the basis and meaning of Common Prayer. And Austen, Anglican to the core, very obviously subscribes to this tenet. All three of her petitions are couched relentlessly in the first-person plural, and, rhetorically, the author conceives of a posture suiting that of students, disciples obviously, to Jesus, the rabbi, the Teacher. This is a communal faith, in other words; these are not the utterances from a hermitage, of an anchorite, except as she might intercede on behalf of others. But more accurately, the rhetorical situation is of a group of people, presumably related, kneeling together at the close of a day, who may well be reciting along with the heavenly host.

In the official service which the Church of England authorizes for Evening Prayer, the minister says, "as many as are here present, to accompany me with a pure heart, and a humble voice..." (54-55). Thus, Austen's rhetoric is almost similarly casual but heartfelt, prayers for a gathering of people assembled as the spirit has moved them, not only because it is an hour set for customary offerings and dedications but because the days of their lives and the fears of impending nights warrant their assembly.

To understand Austen's liturgical model, then, I shall briefly rehearse the service she is following, for her three prayers bear much similitude to the Order of Evening Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England, which is a concise, uplifting, and noble service. In their entirety, Austen's prayers are most similar to the words given the minister to say, following the opening Biblical sentences, at the start of the Anglican service, still preserved in the Prayer Book of the 1960s and offered, as Bishop John Henry Hobart, a theologian contemporary to Austen, explains, "to impress on the people their guilt and unworthiness in the sight of GOD, and also his promises of pardon and forgiveness; in order that they may be excited to worship him with reverence and godly fear, and at the same time with humble faith and confidence" (qtd. in Wright 179), certainly the virtually explicit intention of Austen, as well. And, all of the service, as we see, is very Biblically tied and derived, for Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer is very scriptural, following the exquisitely formal Elizabethan and Jacobean language of the King James Bible in vocabulary, syntax, and pitch. And this would be the model and context for Austen's own forays into prayer construction. She, in effect, effaces her own voice and authority before the exemplum of the church's own adopted voice and presence.

To continue then, the minister offers a short but wide-ranging progress from the announcement of a confession, which is also how Austen's prayers begin, presented within a general declamation of humility, and proceeding to a thanksgiving. The service then unfolds with the General Confession, as Bishop Hobart clarifies, "'in order that the guilt of the congregation being removed by penitence, they may with holy confidence supplicate GOD for his grace and praise him for his mercies" (qtd. in Wright 180). Thereupon devolves the Lord's Prayer; an appointed Psalm; the appointed First and Old Testament Lesson, followed by the Magnificat of Mary in Luke 1 or the Cantate Domino (Psalm 98); and the appointed Second and New Testament Lesson, followed by the Nunc Dimittis of Luke 2 or the Deus Misereatur (Psalm 67). This is a very scriptural service, as Bishop Hobart says, "in order to practice and be doers of the word" with "Hymns and Psalms ... intermingled with the lessons, to secure the people from weariness and to keep alive their devout affections" (qtd. in Wright 188), climaxing with the Apostles' Creed, and then moving to several very specific and short collects against night and on behalf of the Royal Family and the Clergy and People, ending with the lovely Prayer of St. Chrysostom and a benediction from 2 Corinthians 13 ("The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore. Amen"; 53-64). All of this, as we shall see, confirms the spirit of Austen's prayers, too, surely. It is a simple but eloquent and profound service, which is very much that to which Austen also must surely aspire, for her prayers all conform to a similar liturgical paradigm.

Her first of these published prayers begins with a proclamation of divine grace and request for an audience; moves to a personal confession and to a cry for dedication, expressed as tutelage: "Teach us to fix our thoughts on thee" (453), a mode found in the other prayers. Next, the prayer advances to a thanksgiving and appeal for protection through the night, as we have seen; continues to a request for comfort for the suffering and less fortunate whose different plights are distinctively imagined, all of which is fairly standard Anglican business, leading to a provocative final paragraph which someone very much the daughter, sister, and aunt of Anglican clergy might well have strongly felt. It seeks mercy and expresses gratitude for the Christian community that is the church, very much a device of Common Prayer worship. This prayer asks, to begin with, for self-knowledge in order to act properly toward others, therefore ever affirming the centrality of community here, presumably Anglican. Austen writes, "Teach us to understand the sinfulness of our own hearts, and bring to our knowledge every fault of temper and every evil habit in which we have indulged to the discomfort of our fellow-creatures, and the danger of our own souls" (452). In other words, knowing the self, as the contemporary Romantic writers of the day advised, is desirable, but not as an end in itself, but in a Christian, even Anglican context, for a particular end, which is, in short, saving the world. And, moreover, the world can only be redeemed, as this prayer ends, within the structure of the church, "that holy religion in which we have been brought up" (454). The Church of England is the linchpin for the transformation of the world and the development and maturation of its people who have been reared within its hallowed and sheltering precincts. Thus, of the three published prayers, its language and sentiments become the most conventionally orthodox, a proper prayer from someone living in a small rural English village under the guidance of the paternal rector. We could term it the "church prayer."

The second prayer, the shortest of the three, also transparently intended for collective and public worship, begins immediately with a more developed general confession than in the others, concerned about sins both known and forgotten and expressing a desire for repentance and reform very much in keeping, as we have seen, with Anglican rhetoric. Interestingly, those praying bestow on God a blessing for what has been given, which extends into a thanksgiving; they hastily call for relief for the afflicted; and they then close in abject humiliation and entreaty, a very Anglican device. Opening as it does by evoking "thy servants here assembled" (454), this prayer was most likely designed for and can best be imagined in a setting of Anglican family worship. It takes on a tutelary frame when in its abasement its speakers opine, "we have perhaps sinned against thee and against our fellow-creatures in many instances of which we have no remembrance" (454). This sets up a relationship of subordination and relative ignorance parallel to the teacher/student prototype in the other prayers. In this one, the catalogue of sins stresses those "against our fellow-creatures" and "neglected duties," both of which indicate that its author is cognizant of the group around her, and it might well be called the "family prayer."

Family prayer is a matter Austen addresses, as is well known, in Mansfield Park. Mrs. Rushworth, as docent of the tour of Sotherton, describes the family chapel, formerly "'in constant use both morning and evening,'" provoking Fanny Price's approval, "'A whole family assembling regularly for the purpose of prayer is fine!,'" and Mary Crawford's disdain (86-87). And more likely Austen, as a close relative of clergy and a daughter of the church, sympathizes with Fanny's perspective rather than Mary's. Moreover, Fanny's words echo an alarm heard increasingly publicly against a decline in family and individual religious observance, to which the negative examples of the Rushworth house and family and Mary Crawford testify, during a time of Evangelical and Methodist challenge to Anglican ease and complacency (Dabundo 930-31). For Austen's own part, Oliver MacDonagh has said that "there can be at least no reasonable doubt that Jane Austen was a conscientious and believing churchwoman.... Her attendance at divine service was always regular; she said, and even composed, domestic prayers" (4). Her religion meant practice in familial precincts as well as in ecclesiastical quarters.

The third prayer begins with a beautiful, Wordsworthian sensitivity to time, its passing and its benefits, as she writes, "Teach us, almighty father, to consider this solemn truth, as we should do, that we may feel the importance of every day, and every hour as it passes, and earnestly strive to make a better use of what thy goodness may yet bestow on us, than we have done of the time past" (455-56). This entire prayer unfolds with language largely drawn from a pedagogic mode articulated in High Elizabethan discourse; having begun with a plea for instruction, it continues in that vein in the direction that the Reverend Giffin points out, for Austen asks to learn how to imitate Christ, modeling "forbearance and patience," humility; kindness, and charity.

From there, she moves to a thanksgiving larger and more specific than in the other prayers, to an appeal for the night's safe passage, but then, uniquely, to an entreaty for a new day's "serious and religious feeling," followed by a petition on behalf of the largest community of all, all humanity, in keeping with the educative mode, for "knowledge of thy truth" for "the ignorant," and then contracting its expansive reach to "family and friends," ending with the prayer "to secure an eternity of happiness with each other in thy heavenly kingdom" (456-57). This range enfolds the terrain also envisioned in the novels Austen writes, wherein, in this context, we might say that fallen souls learn to imitate Christ and day by day strive through life's challenges to build the kingdom of heaven on earth. One remembers, as the prayer winds down with its vision of the familial and collegial group reunited in heaven, the similarly reunited "small band of true friends" with which the novel Emma ends (484). Thus, this prayer is different from the others in the clarity of language concerned with community and enlightenment. To live each day seriously and religiously is nearly to adopt a vocation, and certainly to undertake to redeem the world is, finally, a sanctified calling to which Austen seems not in the least hostile, and which would indeed be in line with Anglican theology.

Once again, there is a correspondence to Wordsworth's great Prelude, where he approaches his close by summoning Coleridge, saying in highly religiously charged language, "Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe--/ Of their redemption, we may teach them ...:/Instruct them ..." (The Prelude 1805, XIII, 449-45, 446-50). In other words, Wordsworth, ultimately another great Anglican, sees his poetic mission as didactic and salvific. And Jane Austen positions herself and the Anglican community to learn, to receive, and to be taught. We could call this last the "teaching prayer." The people must be taught, then, in order to be saved and to save.

By scrutinizing the rhetoric of these prayers, we find a community of fallen, distracted, irresolute, irreverent, disobedient, slothful, weak, and evil souls, in a world where many are distressed, ill, afflicted, orphaned, widowed, captive, and imprisoned, as the night's shadows fall and loss and separation loom. What we see, in short, in Austen's prayers is a call for self-knowledge and self-improvement in accordance with Biblical and divine strictures. Night is falling, and time is hastening. The stance is humble for all are fallen, but no one is irretrievably outside the reach of the church and therefore of instruction and improvement. The grand and dignified language that Austen adopts from Cranmer surrounds and upholds the company of the faithful, inspiring them, no doubt, to match in faith and works what it accomplishes in grandeur and eloquence. The good works of the words are the raiment of the holy.

Surely Austen is thinking of herself, her siblings, their spouses and children, and her neighbors as she writes her prayers, and as she writes her novels, for we can readily identify in these types of her "fellow-creatures" her panoply of widows, ranging in grace and blessing from Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Lady Dalrymple, Lady Russell, Mrs. Dashwood, Mrs. Ferrars, Mrs. Norris, Mrs. Bates, Mrs. Thorpe, Mrs. Smith, et al. But all her characters are represented because they are the people of her nation and church whom she knew and with whom she intimately lived. As MacDonagh notes, "she conceived of religion as ... national in character; ... her Anglicanism and her chauvinism were mutually supportive and interpenetrating" (7). Thus, yoking nation and church, she speaks the language of their familiar prayer book in these devotions, which brings their world to us as much as do her novels, for the Book of Common Prayer was the sheltering embrace of Jane Austen's family and friends, neighbors and fellow subjects.

In fact, significantly, we might look at that term "fellow-creatures" used in the prayers, which I think points instructively toward the Austen theology. Austen also assigns this term to Persuasion's Anne Elliot in her exquisite, revelatory dispute with Captain Harville, usefully overheard by Captain Wentworth, concerning the fidelity of men vs. women. Anne observes, "'God forbid that I should undervalue the warm and faithful feelings of any of my fellow-creatures'" (235). The compassion of Anne's statement to Harville extends the embrace of the community of the prayers and of the church reflected, it seems, across Austen's writing.

D. A. Miller has written on Austen's use of the word "creature," standing alone, unalloyed, as it were, in Emma, by noting that there and indeed throughout the novels "it pretty much bestows this same connotation [which has been developed] of sexlessness on whoever is so called" (101). What we see, then, is a way in which Austen levels everyone, rendering them, in Miller's term "sexless," but also equivalent on a common plane, that of the mass of humanity perhaps. And the addition of the qualifier "fellow" consciously adds to this usage a sense of joint plight or circumstance. That is to say, those who acknowledge "fellow creaturehood" are recognizing two truths of common identity, Anglican common prayer and a human, communal equality. Everyone stands together, in community, and everyone stands before God, with all one's misbehavior and shortcomings exposed. And in this exposure, one plunges to the depths of the self, which leads, as we have seen, to what is necessary to redeem the world. Austen's position, I think, is premised on what the rhetoric of the aforementioned Evening service from the Book of Common Prayer denotes rather abjectly, by saying, "we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep" (55). Ordinary Christians are ovine, creaturely, but in a flock, which will be tended by its good shepherd. And this leads, ultimately, to something that, Helen Lefroy, a collateral descendent of the author, identifies: Throughout her life Jane Austen had been guided by Christian principles, and she accepted the Church's teaching without question. Her faith is implicit in all her writing: the virtues of a disciplined life, a caring relationship between husband and wife, and their duty to give children a moral and loving upbringing, are reflected in her letters and in her novels [and of course in her prayers]. At her death she expected to appear before God and be judged. (75)

What Lefroy notes, therefore, is that, in recognizing ultimate judgment, Jane Austen adopts the religious sentiments of humility and self-abasement that one finds in such literary forebears as John Donne and George Herbert, whose Anglican faith impels them famously to cry, "Batter my heart, three-personed God," and elastically, nearly sadistically, to squeeze and stretch humanity in "Easter Wings." This self-castigation reflects early modern theology, contemporary with and also influenced by Cranmer and the King James Bible, where to be mortal is to be unworthy before God's unknowable and mysterious power and might. Ironically, Austen poses prayers of the unworthy whose liturgy and theology nonetheless impel them presumptuously toward a deity of grace. The good shepherd is also the judge of all His creatures.

And so, the prayers implore a merciful, charitable, gracious, omniscient, omnipresent, generous, and good Father, afflicted with these surely vexing children, deserving chiding and destruction, but Himself disposed, nonetheless, to instruct them how to redeem the world by, first, redeeming themselves, as inspired by the rhetoric of the Book of Common Prayer.

WORKS CITED

Austen, Jane. "Prayers." Minor Works. The Works of Jane Austen. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1953; rev. 1963; 1986. 453-57.

--. The Novels of Jane Austen. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1986.

The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church According to the Use of the Church of England Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David. Oxford: OUP, 1969.

Collins, Irene. Jane Austen and the Clergy. London: Hambledon P, 1994.

Dabundo, Laura. "Religion: Christianity," in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850, volume 2. Ed. Christopher John Murray. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004. 930-31.

Giffin, Michael. Jane Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian England. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

Kelly, Gary. "Religion and Politics" in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Eds. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 149-69.

Lefroy, Helen. Jane Austen. Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1997.

MacDonagh, Oliver. Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.

Miller, D. A. Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.

Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850. Eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979.

Wright, J. Robert, ed. Prayer Book Spirituality: A Devotional Companion to the Book of Common Prayer Compiled from Classical Anglican Sources. New York: Church Hymnal Corp, 1989.

Laura Dabundo is Professor of English at Kennesaw State University and founding director of its new Kennesaw State University Press. She has published and presented on Wordsworth and Austen and recently also on Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan.