Horror and Religion

New Literary Approaches to Theology, Race and Sexuality

Eleanor Beal, Jon Greenaway, Eleanor Beal

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786834423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Horror and Religion is an edited collection of essays offering structured discussions of spiritual and theological conflicts in Horror fiction from the late-sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Contributors explore the various ways that horror and religion have interacted over themes of race and sexuality; the texts under discussion chart the way in which the religious imagination has been deployed over the course of Horror fiction's development, from a Gothic mode based in theological polemics to a more distinct genre in the twenty-first century that explores the afterlife of religion. Horror and Religion focuses on the Horror genre and its characteristics of the body, sexuality, trauma and race, and the essays explore how Horror fiction has shifted emphasis from anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism to incorporate less understood historical and theological issues, such as the 'Death of God' and the spiritual destabilisation of the secular. By confronting spiritual conflicts in Horror fiction, this volume offers new perspectives on what we traditionally perceive as horrifying.

1

‘Headlong into an Immense Abyss’

Horror and Calvinism in Scotland and the United States

Neil Syme

THE BRANCH of Reformed Protestantism that would be named Calvinism after its principal theologian emerged in the sixteenth century, well before the widespread popularity of the novel form, let alone the emergence of Horror literature as a distinct genre. The long historical and geographical influence of Calvinism, however, has seen writers identify and develop a number of horrific potentialities from within the theology, so that John Calvin’s seminal Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) might be considered a source text for several Horror tropes which persist to this day. Central to the doctrine is the conception of original sin, the notion that due to Adam’s temptation mankind is inherently depraved. Drawing on Paul the Apostle’s Epistle to the Galatians, Calvin sees the soul divided between divine spirit and flesh. The flesh, he argues:

denotes the nature of man. Disobedience and rebellion against the Spirit of God pervade the whole nature of man. If we would obey the Spirit, we must labor, and fight, and apply our utmost energy; and we must begin with self-denial. The compliment paid by our Lord to the natural inclinations of men, amounts to this, – that there is no greater agreement between them and righteousness, than between fire and water. Where, then, shall we find a drop of goodness in man’s free will?¹

Here, Calvin proposes that the grace within man comes from God alone. Other interpreters, including writers such as Charles Brockden Brown, James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson and Stephen King, have located in this theology the potential for horrific revulsion at the coterminous, inherent sinfulness of the self. This is coupled with a disturbing sense of profound salvific uncertainty since Calvinism denies redemption through worthy acts or prayer. Rather, those few who are righteous, and who will ascend to heaven, have already been selected. The rest are damned, and their actions cannot alter that destiny. Calvinist theology marked a stark contrast with the Roman Catholicism that preceded it in Europe since, as Kristen Poole points out:

This theological system [Calvinism] is the antithesis of a system relying on purgatory, good works, and prayer. Under a purgatorial system, … human beings have a great deal of control over their afterlife. Under a system of double predestination, by contrast, human beings have virtually none. Free will, the idea of human agency, and the balance sheet are no longer factors in God’s judgment.²

Thus, whether an individual has lived a good life or not, they are subject to:

the eternal decree of God, by which he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every man. All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death.³

Among the faithful are those elect individuals who are predestined by God for salvation, and Calvin’s vigorous, passionate works proclaim this as a cause for joy in God’s greatness, presuming that the elect will naturally behave in a righteous manner. Yet, over time, writers (and, no doubt, parishioners) would reconceive the uncertainty over who is saved, and the inner division of spirit and flesh, as a gateway to paranoia, insecurity, suspicion of one’s neighbours and intense self-scrutiny. Christopher Marlowe and Nathaniel Hawthorne are two authors who have explored such anxieties in their more disquieting texts. Following the Protestant Reformation, meanwhile, there also arose the antinomian interpretation that the elect need not feel bound by any moral codes, since their salvation is assured. Most famously taken to disturbing extremes in Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or The Transformation (1798) and Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), the antinomian position proved fertile ground for literary horror. Over and above all these fearful interpretive possibilities is the chilling concept of a cold, indifferent deity who is heedless of good deeds or righteous behaviour, or as Joyce Carol Oates puts it:

the loving, paternal God and His son Jesus are nonetheless willful tyrants; ‘good’ is inextricably bound up with the capacity to punish; one may wish to believe oneself free but in fact all human activities are determined, from the perspective of the deity, long before one’s birth.⁴

The unsettling notion of a divine entity that is uncaring, unfathomable and effectively inhuman or alien, underpins the influential Cthulhu Mythos created by H. P. Lovecraft in the early twentieth century. All of these doctrinal concerns have proved fruitfully horrific territory for writers, sometimes by means of theological exaggeration, distortion and reductio ad absurdum, but always rooted in concepts of self and societal division, salvific insecurity and fearful metaphysical injustice inferred from Calvinism itself. Modern writers, prominently Stephen King, while often less directly concerned with the specific theology, continue to disturb and unsettle by imbuing Horror literature with recognisably Calvinist sensibilities, invoking themes of psychological division, madness and ‘justified’ murder.

While this chapter identifies Calvinist Horror as primarily emergent within and resulting from Scottish and American cultural contexts, perhaps the earliest notable work of literature to locate a sense of the horrific in the doctrine of Calvinism is Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (1604, 1616). Written just after the gradual – and often, for ministers and the general population, disorientating – Elizabethan shift towards the Calvinist Protestantism of predestination, Faustus teeters between theological systems, ultimately refusing to confirm or reject the Calvinist ideal that there is no salvation through confession. As Kristen Poole notes:

[t]he play seems to vacillate between a theology based on free will and God’s forgiveness and a theology based on Calvin’s conception of double predestination … Are human beings agents in their salvation, or is the notion that people can affect their afterlife an ‘illusion’ and ‘lunacy’?⁵

Having summoned the demon Mephistopheles, pledging his soul to Lucifer in the process, Faustus struggles to fathom the truth of the pact he has entered, and of the true interrelation between mortals, heaven and hell. Spiritual advice arrives in a contradictory form:

Good Angel: Faustus, repent yet, God will pity thee.

Evil Angel: Thou art a spirit, God cannot pity thee.⁶

The second statement is particularly chilling since if true it suggests that God lacks not only the inclination but the ability to redeem, a deity either bound by his own rules or simply cold and unempathetic. Even if man resists the Devil, he may have been damned by God all along, so that Faustus’s pleading – ‘hide me from the heavy wrath of God’,⁷ ‘My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!’⁸ – is futile if, but only if, Calvinist predestination is true. While Faustus ultimately rejects the system of repentance, Marlowe lets the question of true faith linger. The implicit horror lies both in that salvific equivocation, and in the conception of God as ‘a wrathful judge who has already judged, one who condemns those whom he himself has damned … The rational, reasoning man was thus governed by an irrational and inscrutable God.’⁹ Calvinist Horror, therefore, emerges here from the ability of fiction to cause a disturbing (and characteristically Protestant) self-examination in its audience.¹⁰ This is accompanied by the awareness that to acknowledge that contradiction is to recognise a doubt in one’s own faith, and therefore to realise one’s own inherent sinfulness, and worse, to face the idea that there is nothing one can do to change it.

Scotland’s national Kirk became predominantly Calvinist in the mid-sixteenth century under the guidance of John Knox, who had known and studied with Calvin in Geneva in the 1550s. By the mid-seventeenth century, a lasting struggle between Presbyterianism and the Episcopalian bishop system under Charles II saw unauthorised public worship banned. Scottish Presbyterians who disobeyed were subject to violent persecution during the infamous ‘Killing Times’ of the 1680s, a period in which Calvinism and genuine horror were strongly associated in the minds of Scots before the Reformed Kirk was restored after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. From the 1630s, meanwhile, Calvinist churches were being established in North America, particularly in the north-east colonies. Among the Scottish, Dutch, German and French Calvinist migrants were thousands of English Calvinist Puritans, who believed the Church of England required further reformation, and who established colonies in the New England region. Calvinism next prominently appears as a source of literary horror in texts written in Philadelphia and Edinburgh which bear marked theological similarities. Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or The Transformation and Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner were published long after the Protestant Reformation, but Calvinism remained prominent in the religious make-up of both locations, and in the minds of both writers. Brown, raised a Quaker in Pennsylvania, was concerned at the place of religious extremism in the foundational period of the United States, while Hogg was well aware of the impact of Calvinism, having grown up in the years following the Killing Times and the re-establishment of the Reformed Kirk. As a testament to the contemporary relevance and horrific potential both writers found in debates about Calvinism, each text was partly inspired by then-recent murders carried out by religious fanatics.¹¹

Wieland centres on the son and daughter of a devout Calvinist driven to extremism by his discovery of writings by the Camisards, an apocalyptic Huguenot Protestant sect inclined to bouts of religious ecstasy. Having moved to rural Philadelphia on the conviction of his calling to proselytise the local First Nations people, he has died in strange circumstances – eyewitness evidence suggests spontaneous human combustion, though the children presume a supernatural intervention. The novel focuses on his son Theodore, known as Wieland, and daughter (and narrator) Clara who observes: ‘We sought not a basis for our faith, in the weighing of proofs, and the dissection of creeds. Our devotion was a mixed and casual sentiment, seldom verbally expressed, or solicitously sought, or carefully retained.’¹² Her brother, however, gradually slips towards the fanaticism of his father: ‘Moral necessity, and Calvinistic inspiration, were the props on which my brother thought proper to repose.’¹³ Brown’s juxtaposition of Clara’s naturalistic and sensory-based empiricism with Theodore’s increasing religious fervour allows the author to exemplify his concerns about faith, freedom, government and progress facing the new nation of America in the late 1700s. At the same time, it suggests that a skewed and murderous vision of the world may emerge in the sustained theological exploration of an unbalanced mind. Wieland’s fanaticism stems from an increasingly desperate conviction about God’s plan, and a fervid and hysterical search for signs of his own place within it:

God is the object of my supreme passion. I have cherished, in his presence, a single and upright heart. I have thirsted for the knowledge of his will. I have burnt with ardour to approve my faith and my obedience. My days have been spent in searching for the revelation of that will; but my days have been mournful, because my search failed. I solicited direction: I turned on every side where glimmerings of light could be discovered. I have not been wholly uninformed; but my knowledge has always stopped short of certainty. Dissatisfaction has insinuated itself into all my thoughts.¹⁴

Michael T. Gilmore notes that ‘Brown has taken pains to distinguish Wieland from authentic Calvinists and to spell out the dangers inherent in his background and sensibility’.¹⁵ Indeed, Calvin himself warns the individual against the pursuit of ‘what final determination God has made with regard to him. In this way, he plunges headlong into an immense abyss, involves himself in numberless inextricable snares, and buries himself in the thickest darkness.’¹⁶ Wieland’s progression from Calvinist Scripture to religious mania reaches its apex in the murder of his wife and four children, and a further attempt on his sister’s life, all acts he believes he heard God’s voice command of him. The origins of this ‘voice’ remain doubtful to the end of the narrative. They may have been an effect of psychosis brought on by Wieland’s frustrated theological obsessing, or the work of Carwin, the mysterious master of ‘biloquism’ (voice-throwing and manipulation), intending to play a prank on the family; there remains the possibility of a supernatural or divine origin. His account of events is couched in the ethos of predestination – ‘This was the allotted scene: here she was to fall’¹⁷ – and the ambiguity about what incited his actions only complements the horror of his sense of righteousness:

This was a moment of triumph. Thus I had successfully subdued the stubbornness of human passions: the victim which had been demanded was given: the deed was done past recall … Such was the elation of my thoughts, that I even broke into laughter. I c...