John Wesley, Practical Divinity and the Defence of Literature

Emma Salgård Cunha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351395960
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Denominazioni cristiane

John Wesley (1703–1791), leader of British Methodism, was one of the most prolific literary figures of the eighteenth century, responsible for creating and disseminating a massive corpus of religious literature and for instigating a sophisticated programme of reading, writing and publishing within his Methodist Societies. John Wesley, Practical Divinity and the Defence of Literature takes the influential genre of practical divinity as a framework for understanding Wesley's role as an author, editor and critic of popular religious writing. It asks why he advocated the literary arts as a valid aspect of his evangelical theology, and how his Christian poetics impacted upon the religious experience of his followers.

1Methodist literary culture

Literacy and grace

Over the last decade, increased interest in the relationship between religion and print in the eighteenth century has resulted in an increase too in our knowledge of Methodist book production and distribution. In part this is due to the improved accessibility of more ephemeral material relating to early Methodism. Research has also been advanced by the realisation that Methodism was a literary as well as a religious phenomenon. The 2003 Wesley Tercentenary Essays contained several essays focussing on the literary or print history of Methodist evangelicalism.¹ A series of chapters and articles by Isabel Rivers and Michael Suarez have addressed the significance of religious print in the eighteenth-century book market, in the development of institutional religious education, and in the reading experiences of ordinary lay people. Archival research carried out at Duke University has in the past few years resulted in the creation of electronically accessible texts of both manuscript and published edited works of John and Charles Wesley, especially abridged and extracted texts which are often separated from Wesley’s authorial corpus and so excluded from scholarly editions. Other studies have addressed in different ways Wesley’s contributions and debts to the literary sphere: his use of scripture and of other sources, his engagement with contemporary scientific and philosophical writing, his late periodical Arminian Magazine and its relationship to contemporary publishing strategies.² Most recently, studies of the Methodist influence on popular literature – plays, novels, satirical and controversial writing – have appeared. As in the seminal work by Phyllis Mack, Misty Anderson’s Imagining Methodism maps out the impact of Methodism through a study of its literary manifestations, especially in the imaginations of outsiders to the movement. Anderson figures the Methodist movement as both a threatening and a seductive model for an alternative, transgressive personal identity For Anderson, Methodism’s spectral presence in the literary sphere, in novels, satirical writings and prints, in music, and in autobiographical writing, expressed a growing literary concern for previously suppressed elements in experience and identity.

Anderson’s description of Methodism in the popular imagination puts a new twist on the critical fascination with the psychological and social contexts for the rise of the novel – perhaps especially the work of J. Paul Hunter. Hunter’s view of Methodism as a ‘cultural event’, which responded to an ‘abiding cultural loneliness’, has the unfortunate result of reducing the meaning of the evangelical ‘single moment of experience’ to a cultural desire to divorce individual experience from narratives of causality or of human progress. By his account, the discovery of supreme meaning in the instantaneous conversion looks either fantastical or pathological. Despite this, Hunter’s incorporation of Methodist experience into the story of the early novel does provide a useful first step in acknowledging the pervasiveness of Methodism as both a religious and as a social phenomenon. It also points to the preoccupation with intuition versus reason, emotion versus thought, which characterised eighteenth-century Methodist testimony and coloured contemporary reactions to Wesley’s Societies.

Brett McInelly’s analysis of anti-Methodist literature also discusses this entrenched connection between emotionalism and enthusiasm in popular conceptions of Methodism, especially demonstrating how the pejorative charge of religious enthusiasm was teamed with worries about the stability of the Church of England in the face of attacks from new forms of dissenting and evangelical worship.³ McInelly asserts that a ‘reading’ of early Methodism is only possible in relation to its literary culture and textual reception:

[W]e need to see the revival as participating in and being produced by a rich textual culture that includes both pro- and anti-Methodist productions […] Methodism [needs to] be understood and approached as a rhetorical problem—as a point of contestation and debate resolved, at least in part, through discourse.⁴

Literary analyses of Wesley’s evangelical strategies are apt given that the rise of Methodism occurred within a society suffused with religious books. Religion was an integral part of daily life and, unsurprisingly therefore, an integral part of the eighteenth-century literary diet. Around a fifth of all works published in the 1750s were on explicitly Christian themes.⁵ Writing and publishing were a normal and desirable aspect of a clergyman’s role, and were increasingly a possibility for the religiously-minded layman. Although ‘Augustan’ Christianity has often been depicted as restrictive and utilitarian in its outlook, even a cursory glance at some of the many different types of literature in circulation shows a culture which applied itself eagerly to thinking on a huge range of religious topics – from everyday devotion to the controversies of Protestant doctrine, and from church politics to mysticism and millennialism.

Religious literature was not a homogenous field. Despite the ‘established’ nature of the Church of England at the turn of the eighteenth century, the institution covered many versions of Protestantism, including branches of radical Calvinism, Arminianism, Unitarianism and (by the mid-century) Methodism. The rise of dissenting schools and the gradual relaxation of governmental attitudes towards nonconformity (as well as the controversy this provoked) encouraged a flourishing market in religious publications aimed specifically at minor denominations, adding another branch to the already large and profitable religious book trade.⁶ The republication and circulation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious books written by Christian authors from many different sects also contributed to the heterodoxy of the religious literary marketplace. Controversial writing, including a very copious range of anti-Methodist literature, was resoundingly popular. Christianity was not merely a context, but in many cases the stimulus for the very existence of works of literature.

As Ian Green admits at the beginning of his important study of Protestant publishing in the seventeenth century, it can often be difficult for literary historians to draw a meaningful line between the religious and secular literature of the period at all.⁷ A great deal of apparently secular writing – from political tracts, medical articles, and advice on running a household, to meditative lyric, nature poetry and philosophical essays – was fundamentally concerned with the same questions as were addressed in more explicitly theological works such as prayers, sermons or meditations. Indeed, our designations of ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ (taking the latter in its now most common sense of ‘excluding religion’, rather than ‘concerned with the world’) must be fluid and flexible in approaching the period. Novels and poetry might be read for religious or moral counsel. Classical texts were also used as improving literature for Christian readers. Practices such as anthologising and common-placing effaced the boundaries between the heterogeneous literary snippets they brought together in one binding. Even the most ‘profane’ texts show the marks of a society in which some variety of Protestant belief was an expected norm.

Wesley created a great deal of original material, much of it liturgical (sermons and hymns), catechetical (including letters and instructions to his followers, his preachers, and his students at Kingswood) and autobiographical (diaries, journals and other accounts of the rise of Methodism and significant incidents in his spiritual development). However, it is when we include his editorial activity, such as his republication of poetry, his solicitation and publication of letters and autobiographical narratives from his followers, and his abridgements of religious and philosophical tracts, that we get a true sense of the massive scope of his literary work. Rivers cautions us to avoid attaching modern notions of authorship to Wesley – his repurposing of other authors’ work under his own name (or none) cannot carry the same ethical connotations as today, and as we shall see the borrowing and repurposing of other religious works was common practice across denominations:

We need to be cautious in applying to eighteenth-century editorial practices our modern proprietorial concern with the integrity of the author and his or her control over the original text—what is now known as ‘the moral rights of the author’. It is anachronistic to accuse editors such as Edwards or Fawcett or Wesley (as some modern commentators do—though ironically this criticism tends to be levelled at Wesley by admirers of Edwards) of violating the texts they reshaped to fit the needs of their own audiences. In order to write the history of early evangelicalism we need to add this awareness to our proper sense of the eclecticism and fluidity of evangelical culture.⁸

We see this clearly in the example of Wesley’s Paradise Lost. His anonymous extraction of the work displays a sense that it is a commonly available resource for the furthering of Christianity, and that the original, ‘authorial’ text is separable from abridged editions which apply themselves to a different purpose or readership. Yet Wesley was sensitive to issues of literary reputation and of what we might call intellectual as well as legal property, and he took care to prohibit unauthorised republication of his works even inside the Societies. He valued individual creativity and acknowledged poetic genius, and he was especially protective of the hymns written by his brother (though the issue of their co-authorship was also fraught at times). If nothing else, we need to bear in mind that the authorial and proprietary connotations of editing, abridging, publishing, distributing and performing or using were more fluidly applied within the reading culture of the eighteenth century than in our own.

Fundamentally, religious writing was of central importance to the creation of Methodism. Wesley showed a clear desire to use the technologies of print publication as a persuasive and educative tool for Christian ministry. Writing and publishing were significant to early Methodism in terms of the time, energy and professed religious objectives of its leaders and adherents. But when we address Wesley’s commitment to literature as a function of his evangelical theology, discrepancies soon appear. In particular, I want to argue that Wesley’s ‘practical divinity’, his focus on the spiritual journey of the individual towards conviction and grace, is not compatible with either the educative or aesthetic processes we usually equate with the production and reception of literature.

One simple way to imagine literature as a necessary tool in Methodism is to link it to its aims as an educational and pastoral organisation. It is persuasive to think of Wesley’s investment in religious publishing in particular as a pragmatic use of the technology of print with a straightforward educational purpose, and thus to tie the expansion of the Methodist press to a wider cultural concern with Christian mission and evangelism. Wesley was canny enough to understand at once the value of print as a geographically and temporally unlimited form of preaching – wherever he was not, wherever his preachers were not, his words could still make an impact in written form. Just as his American contemporary, Jonathan Edwards, saw the potential for the expansion of the revival he saw around him in 1720s Northampton by swiftly publishing witness accounts on both sides of the Atlantic, Wesley too saw the possibility of creating a body of literature which reported, and in so doing furthered, his evangelical cause. The suggestion that he understood his literary responsibilities primarily as a furthering of the gospel message is also evidenced by his (and his father’s) association with the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), under whose auspices he first travelled as a missionary to the Georgian colonies in 1735.⁹ The most influential of the religious tract societies, the SPCK was an Anglican evangelical and philanthropic organisation founded in 1698, which functioned from the principle that reading was key to improving both the religion and the morals of the poor and uneducated at home and abroad. Its charitable book-donation program emphasised the practicality and usefulness of the reading mat...