The Pragmatist Turn
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The Pragmatist Turn

Religion, the Enlightenment, and the Formation of American Literature

Giles Gunn

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The Pragmatist Turn

Religion, the Enlightenment, and the Formation of American Literature

Giles Gunn

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In The Pragmatist Turn, renowned scholar of American literature and thought Giles Gunn offers a new critical history of the way seventeenth-century religion and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment influenced the formation of subsequent American writing. This shaping was dependent on their pragmatic refiguration less as systems of belief and thought than as frames of reflection and structures of feeling, what he calls spiritual imaginaries.Drawing on a large number of figures from earlier periods and examining how they influenced generations of writers from the nineteenth century into the early twenty-first —including Henry Adams, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, William James, Henry James, Kenneth Burke, and Toni Morrison—Gunn reveals how the idea or symbolic imaginary of "America" itself was drastically altered in the process.

As only a seasoned scholar can, Gunn here presents the history of American religion and literature in broad strokes necessary to reveal the seismic philosophical shifts that helped form the American canon.

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ONE
The Difficulty of Beginnings
Provisional Definitions
This narrative must begin with the difficulty of beginning itself, or at least with the difficulty of beginning here. There are, in fact, at least four such difficulties that increase in ascending order. The first concerns the reference of the two constitutive terms of this inquiry, religion and the Enlightenment. Even if we set aside the fact that Roman Catholicism was not an inconsequential presence in some of the colonies, and that by the time of the American Revolution Judaism had also established a modest foothold in Rhode Island and South Carolina that did not miss the attention of George Washington, we are still confronted with a conundrum. Restricting what we mean in this case by religion to the basic tenets of American Protestantism in the first two centuries of colonial settlement, and of the Enlightenment to the core of epistemological, anthropological, and cosmological ideas shared by the Founding Fathers, we are still presented with considerable variation in the way such principles and axioms were interpreted by representative figures of each so-called camp.
The theological affirmations of the Synod of Dort—unconditional election, limited atonement, total depravity, irresistible grace, the perseverance of the saints—were by no means accepted by all Protestant Christians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, any more than Voltaire’s cynicism, Hume’s skepticism, or Dugald Stewart’s common sense can be flattened out into a characterization of the beliefs of all members of the Enlightenment. Just as colonial Christians differed greatly over their views on everything from the nature of God, the ineradicability of sin, the universality of redemption, and the order of worship to the proper organization of the church, so the American Enlightenment was composed of at least four discriminable traditions that ranged in ethos and method from the moderation, rationality, and balance of figures like Locke, Newton, and Franklin, through the skepticism and critique of Voltaire, Hume, and Holbach, to the utopian optimism and revolutionary millennialism that begins in Rousseau and continues through Jefferson, Paine, and Godwin, to, finally, the didacticism of Scottish Common Sense philosophy associated with Thomas Reid and Lord Kames.1
In addition, it must be noted that the Enlightenment did not constitute itself as a historical movement in reaction to religion, and thus by nature opposed to religion, but rather as itself an alternative to or substitute for religion.2 Hence religion and reason, belief and doubt, faith and freedom, are never opposed, or at least opposed as absolutes, in the writings of the Founding Fathers but are opposed instead, particularly as one moves closer to the Revolution, to what Jonathan Mayhew described as “Tyranny, PRIEST-CRAFT, and Nonsense.”3
Since so much of the concern about liberty and democracy in the eighteenth century, no less than the suspicions of authoritarianism, originated in debates about explicitly theological issues and were nourished by evangelical interests, this is, or should be, scarcely surprising.4 The founders came by their ability to mix secular and religious rhetoric in their writing naturally, and they exploited that ability for reasons other than political expediency. As in the changes the signers of the Declaration of Independence made to Jefferson’s initial draft, they felt that they could not convey their theological sense of the cosmic significance of the events in which they were participating unless they added to the phrase about “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” an appeal “to the supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions.” One can try to discount this kind of appeal as merely the hegemonic efforts of a dominant group to appropriate the theological language of its residual precursor, but the Founders’ need for such discourse was anything but disingenuous or simply calculating: “Irrespective of belief, the frame of mind within which the Founders operated has a vital religious component, and that component is richly connotative. ‘In God we trust’ is more than just the motto of American republicanism; it points back in time to a central promise in the language of national creation.”5
Nevertheless, there are important distinctions to be made between the spiritual legacy associated with the Protestant tradition of thought and feeling in America and that associated with the American Enlightenment, distinctions which, for purposes of discussion, can be formulated as follows. By “religion” I shall mean the predisposition to view all human problems not traceable to natural accidents as reducible to the corruptibility and depravity of human nature; to view the corruptibility and potential depravity of human nature as unamenable to satisfactory redress by any agencies such as reason, will, or feeling intrinsic to human nature itself; and to view access to any agencies of empowerment that are transcendent to human nature as possible only through faith rather than works, including the efforts of the human mind to secure through analysis, criticism, or imaginative projection relief from such problems. By the “Enlightenment” I shall mean, in contrast, the inclination to view all human problems amenable to any kind of redress, whether they derive from human nature or not, as dependent for such resolution as they can obtain on the human capacity to think about them critically and to critically validate the insights achieved by the intellect through appeal to human experience.6
These provisional definitions sometimes carry with them—though not necessarily always—certain other associations. Religion is often linked with belief in a sovereign God, dependence on a personal savior, the existence of original sin, the treachery of reason, the need for justification and absolution, the intercession of the sanctified, or the immortality of the soul. The Enlightenment is frequently related to convictions about historical progress, the beneficence of nature and its author, the reliability of ordinary human understanding, the salience of criticism, the existence of inalienable rights, the virtues of free inquiry, and the pursuit of happiness. But the key to the difference between Protestant Christianity and the Enlightenment, as I am defining them here, is the question whether relief of the human estate is dependent on powers that originate in, and derive their authority from, realms of experience beyond the boundaries of its own agencies and capacities or rather from realms of experience within, or at least accessible through, them.7
Previous Scholarly Consensus
The second difficulty that attends the problem of beginning an inquiry into the relations between religion and the Enlightenment in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature has to do with the state of much modern scholarship. The problem can be put simply. While elements of religion and the Enlightenment have both exerted a measurable—in fact, considerable—cultural pressure on the shape of literary life in the United States during the last two centuries, their comparative significance has not been assessed equally. Indeed, the presence of the Enlightenment, no less than an appreciation of the tension between Enlightenment and Protestant presences, has grown more and more invisible, or at least opaque, to recent generations of literary historians. This phenomenon is the more surprising just because traces of their dual presence beyond the confines of the eighteenth century are everywhere evident in subsequent American writing.
Evidence of those presences and the tension between them can readily be seen, for instance, in Poe’s vacillation between experiments with the associationist psychology of David Hartley in nature poems like “Tamerlane,” or his more radical commitment to reason in such “tales of ratiocination” as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue, “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” and “The Gold Bug,” and the residual religious gothicism of other tales like “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “The Cask of Amontillado” and poems such as “The Raven,” “Ulalume,” and “Annabel Lee.” But marks of this tension between Enlightenment interests in reason, freedom, and individual fulfillment and Christian, really Protestant, commitments to faith, obedience, and self-renunciation are even more visible in a writer like Nathaniel Hawthorne. Often acknowledged as one of America’s best historians of American Puritanism, Hawthorne was also a child of the eighteenth century who, for all of his anguished misgivings about the rights and responsibilities of the detached observer, was incapable of subordinating his quasi- scientific interest in the psychological complexities of human nature to any residual religious scruples about their moral impropriety or experiential belatedness. Employing ethical and religious allegory in his best work only to suspend and often deconstruct it, Hawthorne risked the “specular gaze,” as it has come to be called, because in the last analysis he was as convinced as any of his Enlightenment forebears that the only way we can see at all is first by looking at the empirical facts of human behavior intently, remorselessly—even if, in a reflex action deferential to his own conscience, he quickly added that the act of looking out and looking at requires the ironic correction of an equally intense and unforgiving look within.
In a different and less tortured form, this tension is also present in the writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, “the autocrat of the breakfast table.” An early imitator of Lawrence Sterne and a devoted scientist as well as distinguished physician, Oliver Wendell Holmes could be adamant in his opposition to the harshness of Calvinist doctrines like predestination in Elsie Venner, and yet indulge in playful satire on the logic of Jonathan Edwards in “The Deacon’s Masterpiece; or, The Wonderful ‘One-Hoss Shay.’” But Holmes’s more characteristic stance is expressed in poems like “The Chambered Nautilus” and “The Secret of Stars,” where science and faith are shown to be perfectly compatible and religious and Enlightenment concerns can, like the lamb and lion of the book of Revelation, lie down together.
This more irenic position sometimes found a correspondent resonance in the work of several of Holmes’s other contemporaries, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier. But it was not until after the War between the States that strong Enlightenment concerns, still colored by religious ideality but also chastened with a strong dose of Scottish Common Sense, found their way back into the center of literary culture and seemed to displace religion, or at least the religion of American Protestantism, altogether. The route back for the Enlightenment was mapped by a somewhat disparate group of writers that included the poet Edmund Clarence Stedman, novelist-editors like Thomas Bailey Aldrich and Charles Dudley Warner, and better-known figures such as William Dean Howells and even Henry James—men of letters who for all their diversity of talents and accomplishments helped create, in the second half of the nineteenth century, perhaps the closest thing the United States has ever achieved to “a coherent national literary culture.”8 Easily dismissed for its sometimes tepid spirituality, its latent didacticism, and its reliance, at least in writers like William Dean Howells, on common sense, the “Genteel tradition” not only gave new life to Enlightenment perspectives and postures but extended itself deep into the present century. Its descendants include the New Humanists of the 1920s, many of the Southern Agrarians and New Critics of the 1930s and 1940s, and even, it should be noted, several of the more prominent cultural critics of the 1940s and 1950s who, like Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling, were deeply suspicious of the Genteel tradition’s overly optimistic assessment of human nature but no less indebted to some of the Enlightenment values it consistently emphasized of balance, variousness, complexity, possibility, modulation, and mind.
Other major writers in the later nineteenth century, however, worked to one side of the Genteel tradition and expended much of their energy puncturing its pretensions. In these authors—particularly Mark Twain and Henry Adams—the dialogue between what still existed of the Calvinist roots of American religion and what remained of the Enlightenment origins of American skepticism left an indelible imprint on later nineteenth-century American literary culture. Think only of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which reduced the posturings of a debased and sentimentalized Calvinism to “soul butter and hogwash,” or Mark Twain’s most enigmatic novel, Pudd’nhead Wilson, in which he mounted a withering satire against the emergent religion of Jim Crowism through a defense of the empirical temper. All the more interesting, if not surprising, that in his last years the Calvinism that Mark Twain had earlier spurned in its specious versions of racist sentimentality and spiritual soporifics tended to turn against him by darkening his view of humanity and generating the quiet but corrosive bitterness of “The War Prayer” and The Mysterious Stranger.
In Adams, it could be said, the Enlightenment confronted its old Calvinist antagonist more directly than it had for an entire century. But it was a confrontation that took place not in the realm of ideas so much as in the medium of temperament, when a child of New England resistance—“the atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial, revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmother’s birth, in the odor of political crime”—sought to measure the value of an eighteenth-century education for living in a nineteenth-century world.9 The Education of Henry Adams is simultaneously one of the genuine masterworks of American literature and one of the few fully self-conscious assessments of the two moral, intellectual, and spiritual legacies that have shaped its past. In this, The Education not only sums up a century but seeks to rescue a divided past, or at least to assess what has been irretrievably lost to it.
Mention of Adams’s central achievement in The Education returns us again to the puzzlement with which we began: Why has the Enlightenment disappeared so quickly and, seemingly, so irretrievably from our modern estimation of the religious meanings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary culture? Why has the Enlightenment been so often effaced in modern literary historiography, even when critics and scholars have continued to employ distinctions that reflect the difference between the American religious heritage and the American Enlightenment heritage, distinctions between piety and rationalism, or enthusiasm and skepticism, to structure their understanding of the past?10
The Erasure of the Enlightenment
Looming above all other reasons has to be the primacy we have given to the geographical region known as New England and to the experience of its seventeenth-century Protestant spokesmen in American literary history. Ever since the appearance in 1939 of the first volume of Perry Miller’s The New England Mind, American literary historians have, with comparatively few, though notable, exceptions, maintained—often in the face of considerable counterevidence—that European colonization of America took most fateful root around Massachusetts Bay, and that the most politically consequential as well as intellectually articulate colonists spoke, thought, and felt almost exclusively in the language of a selective kind of Christian theology. Moreover, by the time Miller had published the second volume of The New England Mind in 1953 and complemented it in 1956 with the enormously influential collection of essays that made his view of this “errand into the wilderness” fully accessible to literary scholars, it had become possible to see how this significant immigration of peoples and ideas across the Atlantic had also made its way not only spatially across the water but temporally across the centuries.
Miller’s case for the existence of Puritan continuities of experience capable of surviving the successive articulation of ideas for three centuries, dated though it may now be, owed its credibility to the brilliant intellectual and cultural links that he forged in various of his chapters between, say, “the marrow of Puritan Divinity,” or the federal theology of the sevent...

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