Interlude: Nietzsche on Eliot

While doing some research I came across this passage in Nietzsche's writings:

G. Eliot. -- They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females à la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there. 

We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth--it stands and falls with faith in God. 

When the English actually believe that they know "intuitively" what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem. 

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols. 

So the question is: Can one keep the Christian system of morality while throwing away the metaphorical dimension of Christianity? Can you have your Christian cake and eat it too?

Nietzsche criticizes Eliot for trying to do so. It reminds me of the assertion in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov: If there is no God, then everything is permitted.

George Eliot has transitioned in her own life from an evangelical Christian perspective to an ethical humanism view of the world. She retains a Christian sense of morality (in a broad sense) while leaving the belief in a personal God behind. I wonder how much Spinoza's writings have shaped her spiritual viewpoint. After all, she had translated Spinoza's works into English.