Cosmopocalypse: From Prophetic Vision to Political Foresight in Romola

Abstract

This article contends that George Eliot's higher critical approach to biblical prophecy led her to interpret prophetic knowledge about the future as a product of historical scholarship rather than supernatural revelation. This interpretation bore creative fruit in Eliot's 1862-63 novel Romola, a book that repeatedly condemns the irrational ethos of supernatural prophecy by rebuking mystical seers' emotional volatility and their ignorance of history. As a rational alternative to supernaturalism, Romola upholds a serious, scholarly mode of prophecy whose power to predict the future derives from historical research. Recasting prophecy as a rational mode of historical scholarship enables Romola to deploy it as a method of intellectually responsible political analysis. In the process of conflating the prediction of the future with the study of history, the rational prophetic mode demands that political visionaries must temper utopian promises about a cosmopolitan future with sober-minded analyses of the intercultural violence that has plagued the past. By revealing cosmopolitan utopia's historical limitations, Eliot's prophetic mode ultimately promotes a cosmopocalyptic form of politics.