Article
Books
Culture
Paganism
6 min read

Mr. Darcy: pagan hero?

Just over 200 years ago, Jane Austen died on July 18 1817. Not happy with how some today might interpret Mr. Darcy, the most beloved of Austen's male protagonists, Beatrice Scudeler re-examines the virtues he practises.

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here

A man dressed in Georgian clothes walks out of the mist.
Mr Darcy, portrayed by Matthew Macfadyen, in the 2005 TV adaptation of Pride & Prejudice.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in how Jane Austen thinks about morality, and how she uses the characters in her novels to explore ideas about what it means to be ethical or virtuous.  

‘Virtue’, a word not particularly popular in our contemporary society, is what all her characters must attain if they are to be happy; but which virtues exactly take priority, is a matter that remains up for debate.  

When I first read British philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s piece on Austen, ‘Jane Austen and the Moralists’, I began to seriously question whether her heroes and heroines exhibit virtues which are more distinctly secular or Christian. Ryle argues that Austen’s virtue ethics follows the Aristotelian tradition. For Aristotle, virtue consists in finding the golden mean between a lack of a quality, and an excess of it. For example, courage is the virtue in-between cowardice, which is a lack of courage, and rashness, an excess of courage.  

Similarly, Austen’s characters must find a balance, for instance between Elinor’s excessive reserve and Marianne’s excessive feeling in Sense & Sensibility. So far, so good. But Ryle’s take is that, while Austen was most likely ‘genuinely pious’ in her own life – especially as the ‘dutiful daughter of a clergyman’ – her ethics remain essentially ‘secular’, rather than presenting an evolved, Christianised version of Aristotle’s virtue ethics. Ryle notes that Austen’s heroines and heroes are rarely seen discussing religion or praying, and thus leaves the question at that. 

The more I thought of Ryle’s explanation, the less convinced I was by it. So, I started wondering, can we really think of Mr. Darcy, the most beloved of Austen’s male protagonists, as an essentially pagan hero? Or, in contrast to that, can his narrative arch better be compared to Dante’s spiritual pilgrimage in the Divine Comedy?  

He is magnanimous, – that is, neither too vain nor too timid – generous without being excessively so, and careful in all his actions.

Let’s test these two possibilities by looking at which virtues Mr. Darcy practises and learns in Pride & Prejudice. From the very beginning of the novel, Mr. Darcy acts the part of the ideal Aristotelian hero. He is magnanimous, – that is, neither too vain nor too timid – generous without being excessively so, and careful in all his actions. Rash characters such as Lydia, and occasionally even his own sister Georgiana, are described as acting with ‘imprudence’. On the other hand, Elizabeth Bennet confesses to her sister Jane that she believes Charlotte Lucas, in accepting Mr. Collins’ marriage proposal, has acted with excessive ‘prudence’, which becomes tantamount to ‘selfishness’. Not so for Mr. Darcy, who is prudent in the right way, and to the right extent.  

The entire proposal scene is one of the most elegantly crafted clashes of values in fiction.

And then we come to the crux of the problem, that is, pride. While all the qualities I listed above are pagan virtues which Christians have historically had no trouble accepting, pride stands apart as a distinctly pagan virtue. For Aristotle, pride was entirely acceptable. While the excess of pride, hubris, is undesirable, pride is positively laudable when it consists in the acknowledgement of one’s accomplishments. Aristotle believed humility, on the other hand – a key virtue to Christians – to be symptomatic of a deficiency of truthfulness. For the first half of Pride & Prejudice at least, Mr. Darcy is in perfect agreement with Aristotle on these points. While Elizabeth is staying at Netherfield, he remarks that, while vanity is indeed a vice, ‘pride—where there is a real superiority of mind—pride will be always under good regulation’. 

Elizabeth’s reaction is telling. Not only does she disagree with Mr. Darcy, in that she lists pride as a weakness of mind, but she responds to his confident assertion by turning away ‘to hide a smile’. Her sarcastic smile is a hint of the reproach that will find its full expression following Mr. Darcy’s first marriage proposal. After insulting her family and reminding her of his superiority of character and station in life, Mr. Darcy is firmly chastised by Elizabeth, who freely admits that his manner has impressed her ‘with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others’. The entire proposal scene is one of the most elegantly crafted clashes of values in fiction. Here is the hero of the story, perfect in every pagan virtue of character, being confronted by the heroine with the truth that he substantially lacks in the one virtue that would distinguish him as Christian, humility. 

I am struck by how much this proposal scene mirrors Dante’s meeting with Beatrice at the very end of Purgatory in the Divine Comedy. Up until this point, Dante has been led through hell and purgatory by Virgil but, lacking the Christian faith, Virgil cannot enter heaven. Although Virgil has been both ‘father’ and ‘mother’ to Dante, who has relied on him unconditionally, by the end of purgatory he must leave Dante’s side and be surpassed by Beatrice. Virgil’s guidance as an impeccable paragon of pagan virtue is simply not sufficient in the final stage of Dante’s spiritual growth. Virgil having silently departed, Dante finally sets eyes on Beatrice, expecting a happy reunion after not seeing her for years following her death. Instead, she is peremptory and unsentimental in her greeting: ‘Look here! For I am Beatrice, I am!’. She is reproaching him for not remaining constant to her memory after her death. Instead of letting his love for her lead him to a greater love of God, she says, Dante allowed himself to become distracted by worthless intellectual pursuits. Dante feels the ‘bitter savor’ of her sternness, but he knows that she is right in chiding his intellectual pride. He confesses his past sins, and only then is he truly prepared to enter heaven.

By the time Darcy proposes a second time, his attitude has changed entirely. He no longer values pride as the chief indicator of virtue. 

Now, if Pride & Prejudice ended with the proposal scene I described, Gilbert Ryle would be correct in suggesting that Austen’s characters, or at least her male protagonist, are virtuous in an essentially secular and pagan way. But this is not the case. Instead, exactly what happens to Dante happens to Mr. Darcy. Like Beatrice’s chiding, Beatrice’s refusal and scolding lead Darcy to repent and learn humility. By the time Darcy proposes a second time, his attitude has changed entirely. He no longer values pride as the chief indicator of virtue, and thus he has become much more explicitly Christian in his way of exercising virtue. After Elizabeth has accepted his marriage proposal, he confesses to her:  

I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit… I was spoiled by my parents, who, though good themselves…allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing… to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own. Such I was… and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled.  

Just as Dante was reminded that he must confess and repent of past pride by Beatrice, so Mr. Darcy is ‘properly humbled’ by Elizabeth. Humility thus becomes central to the resolution of Pride & Prejudice, for without it there could have been no reconciliation between hero and heroine, no marriage at the end. Although Mr. Darcy may not be seen kneeling to pray, or declaring his love of God, the deepening of his virtues as a Christian is what ensures the forgiveness of the woman he loves. He may be the perfect pagan hero when the novel begins, but by the end he becomes the Christian hero we all know and love. 

Article
Culture
Digital
Freedom of Belief
4 min read

Failure to report Nigeria’s massacres reflects a wider media evolution

The new reporters and the struggle to tell the truth.

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development. 

A man reads a newspaper called The Punch.
Muhammad-Taha Ibrahim on Unsplash.

The large-scale slaughter of any religious group deserves robust, stubborn media coverage. Merciless persecution of Christians in Nigeria is the most overlooked and yet most newsworthy story in the country’s media landscape. This violence requires immediate and significantly expanded attention from local media. So why is it not making headlines?  

Nigeria, a charmingly vibrant and dynamic capital of the Christian world with nearly 100 million believers, is paradoxically the deadliest country in the world to be a Christian. NGO Open Doors estimates that 12 Nigerian Christians die every day because of their faith – one every two hours. Between October 2022 and September 2023, 4,118 people died in Nigeria simply for identifying as a Christian. These numbers seem more appropriate to the medieval world. The sad reality, however, is that gory, gruesome, and family-destroying violence against Christians is indeed occurring throughout contemporary Nigeria.   

Some new media voices, like Truth Nigeria courageously report on these sinister, lethal attacks. It’s a Nigeria-focussed media entity backed by Equipping the Persecuted, a US-based humanitarian non-profit organisation, devoted to exposing avoidable losses of life in Nigeria.  A disproportionate number of these nightmarish attacks deliberately target vulnerable Christians living in communities easily accessible to any of Nigeria's many Islamist terrorist sects. New media like Truth Nigeria are filling the coverage gaps created by legacy media inaction. Why are its peers in legacy media not reporting on them too?  

Who are the most trusted voices in the contemporary world? For perhaps the first time in modern history, legacy media no longer have seniority in the coliseum of global thought. Popular disenchantment with it is growing globally. Billions of people worldwide no longer perceive traditional legacy media as a trustworthy and legitimate arbiter of information.  

Few Nigeria-focused media voices (legacy or new) calculate it as in their interests to speak out against the abuses. 

A key reason for the growing disenchantment is the increasingly obvious and frustrating political capture of legacy media voices. Channels and publications were once trusted for their popularly perceived independence, objectivity, and nonpartisanship. Now those politically unbiased legacy media have become an endangered species nearing extinction.  

Such media evolution is especially pronounced in the US. An American media landscape once led by legacy media channels like CNN, ABC News, and Fox News now includes new-kid-on-the-block podcasters like Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens, whose shows attract millions of views and subscribers. Independent, personality-driven new media voices like these regularly outperform their legacy media counterparts, the latter of which are being increasingly deemed by critics as too establishmentarian, out of touch, and unappealing to younger viewers.     

In Nigeria, like in the US, popular public perception apprehends the relationship between media and the state to be too close for the media to operate autonomously and impartially. A relevant factor is the federal and state governments hold the lion’s share of power. They are able to shut down or severely damage the operational capacity of the media that does highlight the kleptocratic industrial complex reinforcing infamous world-leading levels of inequality. Few Nigeria-focused media voices (legacy or new) calculate it as in their interests to speak out against the abuses so entrenched in the social and historical fabrics of Nigerian society. Mass and violent persecution of Christians is perhaps the most significant of these abuses.  

Like many other countries, Nigeria has no shortage of newsworthy stories marked by great abuse and violence. However, the fact that the ongoing slaughter of Christians is taking place in one of the global capitals of Christianity, the religion most responsible for building the modern world, suggests the refusal of legacy media there to report on local massacres is driven by political factors. Ones that differentiate it from the dramatic changes in the media industry we are witnessing in countries like the US. 

Many influential media personalities in Nigeria went to Christian schools and universities, and worship in Christian churches. However, they refuse to use their positions of power to draw attention to fellow members of their global community of Christians who are violently killed every single day in the same sovereign land on which they sleep at night.   

What’s driving the reticence? 

One of the distinctive factors contributing to Nigerian legacy media reticence to cover such killings is that Nigeria is the only country in the world that is home to both world-leading numbers of Christians and Muslims. The country has the world’s sixth largest number of Christians and the world's fifth largest number of Muslims.  

Reports on killings of Christians, especially given that many Muslims also die from radical Islamist violence in Nigeria, could be perceived by viewers as religious bias fanning flames of sectarianism in a country already notorious for such violence. A second factor is that legacy media coverage of these slaughters implicates the disappointing response of Nigerian state agencies charged with maintaining security. Proud state personalities would likely react to negative media coverage of their performance by becoming even less engaged with the media.  

Either way, the Nigerian government has built for itself an infamous global reputation for being dysfunctional when trying to serve its citizens. And in contrast, only achieving a semblance of normal function when serving the interests of its kleptocrats and oligarchs. Vulnerable Christians living in regions affected by religiously motivated violence who live to see another day (unlike their less fortunate friends and family members) bear the brunt of a disinterested government and the politically captured media that fails to report it.