AMERICAN LITERATURE LECTURES, PART II
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Shaping of the National Ideals
I. Pictures of Eighteenth-Century America
The Importance of Eighteenth-Century Literature. Until near
its close, the American eighteenth century, like the seventeenth, produced
no great amount of artistic writing. Looked on purely as literature, most
books of the period are drab-colored indeed. Looked on from another viewpoint,
however, these same books become luminous with meaning. For the eighteenth
century was, above all others, the crucial period in which our national
ideals were taking form; and eighteenth-century writings show us, as through
so many windows, the national culture in the making. To a reader unfamiliar
with this background, much that is valuable in nineteenth-century literature
would remain unintelligible or pointless.
The more one reflects on the cultural changes illustrated in eighteenth-century
literature, the more amazing those changes appear. In these hundred years
a ragged line of colonies along the seaboard, supporting a total population
of only 250,000, developed with startling speed into a united and independent
nation of five million people. In 1700 few communities had emerged from
a frugal, half-primitive condition; by 1800 a complex agrarian and mercantile
society had grown up, supporting a wealthy class whose members moved with
cosmopolitan ease in the drawing rooms of Europe. In 1700 American thought
was still living in the Calvinistic and Lutheran world of the Reformation;
by 1800 the majority of Americans had moved toward the pietism of the English
Methodists, while a smaller but no less influential group had, like Franklin,
adopted scientific deism. In 1700 there were no facilities for a professional
literature; not a single newspaper, magazine, or theater existed in the
entire length and breadth of the colonies. By 1800 journalism had become
a growing, though inchoate, profession; the theater was an accepted institution;
the first American novels had been published, and the foundation had been
laid for the professional literary careers of Irving, Cooper, and Poe.
Altogether, the story of the unfolding America of the eighteenth century,
as mirrored in American literature, is one of more than epic adventure.
Colonel William Byrd and Colonial Virginia. Into the making of the
new nation, materials were to go that were quite different from Sewall's
bourgeois New England. While the Puritan mind was being secularized, a
stratified, semifeudal society was taking form in Virginia. Here lived,
in the older-settled regions near the coast, a landed aristocracy similar
to that of England, secured in their lands by the English provisions of
primogeniture and entail, supported by slave and white servant labor, and
already devoted to a graciously patrician mode of life. But away from the
Virginia Tidewater, in the more newly settled "back country" or
down in North Carolina, lived people of a quite different sort--shiftless,
uncouth folk who followed an improvident, careless mode of life midway between
savagery and civilization. Both types of society are portrayed by Colonel
William Byrd (1674-1744), a paragon of Virginia gentlemen, and the most
entertaining raconteur of the colonies. Byrd's own character is in epitome
the best of the virginia aristocracy; his writings contain a picture, done
with no very flattering touches, of the Virginia back country.
Byrd's personality--his command of men, his fondness for action, his
good humor, his wit, and his genial worldliness--is disclosed in his History
of the Dividing Line. The History is based on a journal the author
kept in 1728 while helping direct a survey of the North Carolina-Virginia
border. Portions of the History are interesting as adventure narratives.
The story of the search for a channel among the shoals of the Sound, and
the story of the loss and final escape of a surveying party in the Dismal
Swamp, arouse no little suspense. The hardships of the route Byrd treats
with a bluff good nature which is strikingly unlike the austerity of the
Puritan religionists. How foreign to the temper of Cotton Mather's society
is this incident which occurred in the Dismal!
It was now a great misfortune to the men to find their provisions
grow less as their labor grew greater; they were all forced to come to short
allowance, and consequently to work hard without filling their bellies.
Though this was very severe upon English stomachs, yet, the people were
so far from being discomfited at it, that they still kept up their good-humor,
and merrily told a young fellow in the company, who looked very plump and
wholesome, that he must expect to go first to pot, if matters should come
to extremity.
This was only said by way of jest, yet it made him thoughtful
in earnest. However, for the present he returns them a very civil answer,
letting them know that, dead or alive, he should be glad to be useful to
such worthy good friends.
Other passages of Byrd's History portray the back-country people along
the Carolina, and reveal, incidentally, the origin of important social forces
that were making for democracy. To Byrd's patrician eyes the North Carolinians
appeared lazy, irreligious, lawless, and above all, dirty.
The men, for their parts, just like the Indians, impose all
the work upon the poor women. They make their wives rise out of bed early
in the morning, at the same time that they lie and snore, till the sun has
run one-third of his course, and dispersed all the unwholesome damps. Then,
after stretching and yawning for half an hour, they light their pipes,
and, under the protection of a cloud of smoke, venture out into the open
air; though, if it happens to be never so little cold, they quickly return
shivering into the chimney corner. When the weather is mild, they stand
leaning with both their arms upon the corn-field fence, and gravely consider
whether they had best go and take a small heat at the house: but generally
find reasons to put it off till another time.
Thus, they loiter away their lives, like Solomon's sluggard,
with their arms across, and at the winding up of the year scarcely have
bread to eat. Everywhere, however, these shiftless people agreed in preferring
their improvident freedom to the restraints of oligarchial Virginia. "Some
borderers, too, had a great mind to know where the line would come out,
being for the most part apprehensive lest their lands should be taken into
Virginia. In that case they must have submitted to some sort of order and
government; whereas, in North Carolina, everyone does what seems best in
his own eyes." As is quite natural, the significance of this frontier
aversion to government escaped Byrd altogether. In Byrd's time the wisest
philosopher could hardly have forseen that such improvident, agu-shaken
communities would become the nurseries of the democratic revolution, would
aid in overthrowing the imperial regime of Great Britain, and would coalesce,
under Jefferson and Jackson, into a major political party. And Byrd was
in no sense a social philosopher or original thinker. But as an attractive
type of the early Virginia gentleman--well informed, witty, observant, practical,
and gifted with a facile, neoclassic grace of style--he holds a significant
place in colonial literature.
St. Jean De Crevecoeur (1735-1813). The observations of Colonel
William Byrd, though witty, are superficial. For a profounder study of
the social forces moving in colonial America, it is necessary to turn to
a later author, Crevecoeur, the French immigrant. His most important work,
the Letters from an American Farmer, was not published until 1782 and portrays
the colonies just prior to the Revolution. Yet his descriptions can be
applied, with slight modifications, to the whole eighteenth century in America.
Of this seedime of American civilization they offer the fullest literary
portrait.
The ordinary history text has little to say of colonial events between
1700 and 1750. No important political developments, no exciting struggles
with the mother country mark this forgotten half-century. But in population,
wealth, and racial stock the period brought important changes. The middle
colonies in particular, though founded later than Virginia and the New England
commonwealths grew rapidly. Into these colonies poured a heterogeneous
mixture of European races and religions, the immigrants being attracted
by the policy of religious toleration. English Quakers and Anglicans were
there; Scotch-Irish Presbyterians; German Lutherans, Moravians, the Mennonites;
and at least a liberal sprinkling of other folk. The majority of these
middle-colony people became thrifty farmers and merchants who, in their
devotion to business no less than in their mixed racial stock, forecast
the typical American of the following century. By virtue of a broad familiarity
both with European culture and with colonial life, St. Jean de Crevecoeur
was well equipped for the task of describing this heterogeneous society.
From the first of Crevecoeur's twelve Letters the reader learns that
the work is addressed by an "American Farmer" to an imaginary
correspondent in England, who is curious about the colonists'new manner
of life. The second
letter describes the situation and pleasures of a typical American farmer.
The third portrays the mixture of races in the middle colonies, enumerates
the advantages America offers to the immigrant, and forecasts the emergence
of a new national type, the American. Succeeding letters discuss the Quaker
settlements on Nantucket and Martha's Vinyard, and the slaveholding society
of the Charleston district. Letters ten and eleven disclose Crevecouer
as an amateur naturalist, able to discourse amusingly on such incongruous
topics as snakes, the hummingbird, and a visit to the gardens of the famous
Pennsylvania botanist, John Bartram. The twelfth letter expresses the distress
of the peaceful farmer at the outbreak of the struggle between the colonies
and Great Britain. Constitutional quarrels do not concern him, and the
security of his beloved family is menaced by Guerrilla warfare.
Crevecoeur's Letters constitute, for American literature, the first
important romantic idealization of nature and the simple life. Primitive
nature is to Crevecoeur a never-failing source of wonder and beauty. The
songs of the thrush and robin delight him; the economy of a hive of bees
is a thing of admiration. Like Shaftesbury, he marvels at the perfect order
and symmetry of the world-machine, Nature. In this unspoiled environment
lives the typical American farmer, fortunate in his economic independence,
in his snug, comfortable house, in his wholesome country sports of husking
bees and sleighing, and in the affections of his family hearth. This rural
life Crevecouer regards ad the most fortunate lot possible to the common
man.
Such a portrait of country life is obviously produced, not by simplicity,
but by sophistication. To the interpretation of the American scene Crevecouer
brought a mind trained in European literature and philosophy. His addiction
to feeling, his facile emotionality, allies him with the eighteenth-century
trait of "sensibility" which, in reaction against the arid rationalism
of the age of Queen Anne, infused the work of Richardson, Rousseau, and
Burns with throbbing emotion. His economic and political philosophy parallels,
if it is not derived from, the precepts of the physiocratic economists of
France. Like the physiocrats, he emphasizes the dignity and importance
of agricultural pursuits, and prefers a minimum of legal restraint on industry.
These
views he finds abundantly justified in the workings of the new American
social order.
Plainly, Crevecoeur's work was deeply influenced by an ideal that was
to become peculiarly American, and to affect the entire course of American
literature--the ideal of a larger and fuller life for the common man. to
the oppressed of Europe, he maintains, American can give economic independence
and completer manhood. The motives to immigration, he perceives, are largely
economic. the European leaves his native country because that country,
overcrowded with population, has no bread for him. Granted only that the
immigrant be industrious, American society can regenerate him by offering
him a decent living, land, citizenship, and self-respect. Nor the least
factor in this change is the indulgent American law which, instead of exploiting
the many in behalf of the few, restrains the people by "the silken
bands of mild government, all respecting these laws, without dreading their
power, because they are equitable." The foundations of an American
patriotism Crevecoeur traces to the loyalty inspired in the immigrant by
America's indulgence and bounty. The evolution of a distinct American race
he forecasts as a result of the fusion of numerous European strains, particularly
the english, Irish, Scotch-Irish, and German. In fine, Crevecoeur's work
not only celebrates the idyllic charms of the American countyryside, the
attractions of an agrarian society, and the advantages offered by America
to the despairing Old World peasant; it clarifies the forces which were
creating an American unity and a new nationalism:
He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices
and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced,
the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American
by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals
of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity
will one day cause great changes in the world....The American is a new man,
who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and
form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury,
and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded
by ample subsistence.--This is an American.
II. Religious America: Edwards and Woolman
Middle-colony society, as portrayed by Crevecoeur, was not deeply
concerned with religion. the absence of a state church and the intermingling
of various sects had combined to lessen the driving power of early Protestantism.
In New England, the original Puritan impulse was slowly losing energy;
in Virginia the staid Anglicanism of the establishment was proving incompetent
to leaven the crude masses of the frontier. Throughout the colonies, therefore,
an abundant but neglected harvest was awaiting the sickle of a new religious
movement. Such a movement came in a series of religious revivals known
as the Great Awakening, which permanently changed the course of American
religious history. The initial figure of this movement, its profoundest
thinker, and its only worthy representative in literature, was the Puritan
mystic, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758).
The Orthodox Environment of Edwards. Edwards was born at East
Windsor, Connecticut, of an orthodox and ministerial ancestry. His father
was a clergyman; his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, was the young man's
predecessor as pastor at Northampton, Massachusetts, where the great awakening
was begun. East Windsor was a stronghold of old-fashioned Puritanism; and
Yale, where Edwards graduated in 1720, was still untouched by those liberalizing
influences which ad overthrown the Mather regime at Harvard. Edwards graduate
study of theology, his brief pastorate in New York, and his tutorship at
Yale confirmed the previous orthodox influences to which he had been subjected.
In his environment, therefore, there was little to guarantee that his
mind would exceed in range the narrow and puerile Calvinism of Wigglesworth.
That Edwards did go inconceivably farther than Wigglesworth in religious
experience; that he became, Franklin excepted, the most eminent and influential
author of colonial America, is owing to the imperious drive of his native
genius. For in native gifts he was supremely endowed. He was the most
acute logician of his times; he was potentially a great philosopher; he
was at heart a poet; and he was one of the great mystics of the race.
Mysticism and the Personal Narrative. Though Edwards was theologically
orthodox, his religion differed widely from traditional Puritanism. romanticist
and poet by nature, he brought to the support of the Puritan creed a beautiful
mysticism quite foreign to Calvin's scholastic logic. Mysticism means immediacy
of religious insight, a feeling, a sense, an intuition of divine truth not
founded on evidence nor achieved by reason. At some time during the rigorous
self-discipline which he practiced in youth, Edwards began to achieve this
mystical intuition. "As scientist and philosopher he moved among the
foothills of the Mount of Vision, conscious always that the Mount was there;
but when, at about eighteen or nineteen, he underwent his great conviction
of its presence, he saw such glories at its summit that he never quite recovered
from that light" (Van Doren, Carl). Thereafter, he was frequently
visited with intense and rapturous moods, during which he enjoyed, untroubled
by doctrine, an "inward, sweet delight in God and divine things."
The most poetic expression of Edwards's mysticism is A Personal
Narrative, which he composed about 1743 as a record of his earlier religious
affections. The Narrative abounds in recollections of moods of exalted
rapture. Even the thunderstorms, Edwards testifies, which formerly had
terrified him, came to delight him because he felt in them the immanent
presence and majestic of God. the virtue of holiness appeared to him bright,
charming, and serene; the soul of a true Christian seemed like a white flower
bent to receive the sunlight of God's glory. The contemplation of religion
he found to be not gloomy, but full of joy. The things of the spirit were
"immensely the most exquisitely beautiful. The spiritual light is
the dawning of the light of glory in the heart."
Unlike many Puritan writings, the Personal Narrative is excellent even
when it is judged by the requirements of artistic literature. Edwards's
mysticism appeals to human traits that are immemorial and enduring--to man's
brooding, reverent sense of the mystery that lies beyond phenomena, to man's
intuitions of austerly spiritual glories
which the senses cannot perceive. Alone among American Puritans, Edwards
transmutes religious experience into forms of lofty and enduring beauty.
If at times his diction is too flowery, if his words are inadequate to
carry the burden of his visions, he nevertheless possesses the romantic
gift of suggesting far reaches and overtones of experience that words, by
their very nature, cannot fully convey. No religious autobiography in English
is so rich in poetry as the Personal Narrative. Free in the main from theological
shackles, it endures as the lyric embodiment of Puritan aspiration.
Edwards's Defense of Calvinism: The Freedom of the Will.
Yet Edwards's reliance upon a mystical inner light, instead of making him
the founder of a new creed, only re-enforced and strengthened his orthodoxy.
that his vision led him, not to the discovery of new doctrines, but merely
to the exaltation of the old, is shown by his sermon on the reality of spiritual
light. This sermon maintains "that there is such a thing as a Spiritual
and Divine Light, immediately imparted to the soul by God, of a different
nature from any that is imparted by natural means." This miraculous
light is used of God, not to disclose new religious truths, but to display
the superlative excellence of the old. "There is a beauty in them
that is so divine and Godlike...a glory that is so high and great, that,
when clearly seen commands assent to their divinity and reality."
Now this intuitive vision of the splendor of an ancient creed is the connecting
link between Edwards's mysticism and his defense of Calvinistic theology.
Only in the Calvinistic doctrine of absolute sovereignty could he find
an adequate statement of his concept of God's glory; and to this central
doctrine of Calvinism he submitted himself with passionate devotion. "I
rejoiced in it, that God reigned, and his will was done." "My
heart panted after this, to lie low before God, as in the dust; that I might
be nothing, and that God might be all." This is Calvinism at its purest
and austerest heights--the utter selflessness, the supreme trust of submitting
the soul utterly to the arbitrary fiat of the Omnipotent.
"That God might be all" became the master passion of Edwards's
life. this is the underlying rock upon which the Calvinism of all his sermons
is founded. His Calvinism, contrary to popular opinion, is not displayed
chiefly in the terrible damnatory sermons like the "Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God." The tenor of his preaching in regard to future
punishment is evangelistic; and in its strenuous efforts to secure voluntary
conversions, it cuts sharply across, if it does not contradict, the determinism
of Calvin's creed. Typical Calvinistic sermons of Edwards are "God's
Sovereignty" and "God Glorified in Man's Dependence," which
proceed to the utmost conceivable extreme in withdrawing all glory from
humanity and laying it on the altar of an immanent, overwhelming Deity.
But Edwards was not content with establishing the doctrine of God's
sovereignty merely on the bases furnished by Scripture; he wished to establish
it on the bases of logic and metaphysics also. He must, in short, give
an answer to the perennial philosophic questions of free will and determinism.
If he could show that the human will is not free, but is controlled by
nonvoluntary forces, then the last shred of human independence would be
taken away, and the very mind itself of man would cast helpless at the feet
of its Maker. This ultimate problem of Calvinism Edwards attacked in The
Freedom of the Will (1754). Edwards's approach to the question is psychological,
after the manner of introspection, reflection, and analysis which he had
learned in his youth from John Locke. The arguments of his theological
opponents, the Arminians, he demolishes by bringing them to their reductio
ad absurdum that the will is absolutely independent of man's other functions,
its actions absolutely unswayed by preceding causes. He then proceeds to
show that the will is swayed by, and subject to, whatever desire is uppermost
in the mind; and the origin of man's desires, the evil as well as the good,
he traces back through infinite labyrinths of causation to an all-embracing,
always-enduring First Cause. These views Edwards sustains with a logic
at once rigorous and subtle, which can at no point be penetrated, but which
can be successfully attacked only by undermining the first premises on which
it rests.
Though the psychological methods of Edwards are not antiquated, The
Freedom of the Will became famous in its own age. The work has been designated
at the only original contribution of colonial America to philosophic thought.
It was translated into several European languages. When it was discussed
in England by Boswell and Dr. Johnson, the latter characteristically summed
up his criticism of the common-sense dictum, "All theory is against
the freedom the will, all experience for it."
THE GREAT AWAKENING. The historical importance of Edwards,
however, does not inhere directly in his mysticism nor in his belated defense
of Calvinism. It inheres in his influence on the great awakening, that
long series of religious revivals which, during three quarters of a century
swept America from Massachusetts to Georgia and established Protestant evangelism
as the prevailing religion of the American people. The movement was especially
strong in Edwards's Northampton church in 1734, and its early history is
traced in his Faithful Narrative of the Surprising work of God (written
in 1736). The origin of the revival was spontaneous; unplanned, it arose
as a natural result of the powerful preaching and influence of Edwards.
Notwithstanding certain lesser awakenings in the time of Solomon Stoddard,
Northampton--indeed, all New England--knew little of the processes of religious
revivalism. Manifest first in a growing seriousness on the part of the
young people, the revival soon swept the whole community. Even upon the
street corners the seeking of salvation was eagerly discussed. Hundreds
of people underwent the experience of a terrible conviction of unworthiness
and sin, a resignation to God's justice in concerning the sinner to an eternal
punishment, and finally a healing assurance of salvation through surrender
to Christ. This vivid religious experience, this abrupt transition from
a state of sin to a state of grace, was called conversion.
Though not unknown among former American Puritans, these abrupt conversions
were unfamiliar. The revival system, with its unrestrained emotionality,
its visions, trances, weeping, and even swooning, broke completely with
the staid formalism of the old-fashioned Puritans.
Opposition to the movement, accordingly, was widespread. Even the congregation
of Edwards proved unable to endure the emotional tension, and the revival
expired in a wave of mental abnormalities. Meanwhile, however, similar
awakenings were under way in other Massachusetts towns, and the movement
was on the verge of sweeping New England like wildfire.
The Edwardean revival system, with its emphasis on vivid and profoundly
emotional religious experience, has several European parallels. In Germany,
a strong reaction against Protestant formality had appeared in the pietism
of Spener and the Moravian communities of Count Zinzendorf. In England,
dissatisfaction with the laxity of the establishment was prompting the Methodist
associations of the Wesleys and Whitefield. Faced with a wholly unevangelized
population among the north-English workingmen, the Methodists developed,
alongside their piestic morals, an evangelical system strikingly like that
of Edwards. Like the older Calvinism, their evangelical theology stressed
the doctrines of the Fall of Man and the lost state of humanity. Unlike
Calvinism, it stressed also the voluntary search of the sinner for salvation,
a sharply defined conversion or "experience of grace," and the
free play of the emotions.
Created thus independently in America and in England, the evangelical
system proved admirably adapted to the colonial environment. From Massachusetts,
revivals swept through Connecticut and into New Jersey. thence, in the
powerful preaching of the Presbyterian Samuel Davies, the awakening was
carried into Virginia back country, where it created a numerous Presbyterian
denomination alongside the established church. No sooner was the Presbyterian
impetus spent than the Virginia Baptists began evangelization. Meanwhile
the piestic German sects had waxed strong in Pennsylvania and the Shenandoah
Valley, and the whole antiformalistic reaction in America had been strengthened
by the evangelical tours of Charles Wesley and George Whitefield. By 1800
the wave of religious enthusiasm had leaped the Appalachian barrier and
was overrunning the frontier in Kentucky and Tennessee. The older colonial
church establishments had been overthrown, and the thought of America had
been stamped indelibly with the forms of Protestant evangelicism.
the great awakening produced no writings that can properly classed
as literature; yet its indirect influence on the development of American
letters has been enormous. It determined as the original Puritan impetus
alone might not have determined, that American writing should be conditioned
by the influence of an aggressive religion. The development of the drama
would be retarded; the novel would have to struggle to maturity through
a heavy fog of moral didacticism. The romantic movement, when imported
from Europe, would be sobered and chastened; its moral idealism would be
admitted, its moral anarchy rejected. To nineteenth-century readers, earnestness
would become an important criterion of literary excellence. In recompense
for certain restrictions American literature would gain in idealism, restraint,
and moral decency. Moreover, with the passing of the nineteenth-century,
evangelicism was to harden into the stiff-necked village piety that drew
down the bitter satire of Mark Twain. In the twentieth it was to evolve
into the fundamentalism which provoked the vigorous satirical attacks of
Sinclair Lewis. by a grotesque irony, Elmer Gantry only mirrors the obverse
side of a religious movement whose first literary result was Edwards's Faithful
Narrative of the Surprising Work of God.
While the great awakening was gathering headway about him, Edwards's
position in his own church was being undermined. Undoubtedly his pastoral
yoke was galling, and the burdens he laid were heavy. When he insisted
that only believers with definitely marked conversions be admitted to the
Lord's Supper, his congregation deserted him and in 1750 dismissed him from
the pastorate. For some years thereafter--during part of which time he
composed The Freedom of the Will--he served as missionary to the Indians
at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In 1757 he was called from his obscurity
to the presidency of Princeton, then Nassau. He took up his new duties
in January, 1758, only to be stricken down by his fatal illness in March.
The career of Edwards was on the whole strangely mixed and self-contradictory.
Variously gifted as a scientist, philosopher, and poet, he sternly wrought
his opulent nature into submission to the God of John Calvin. Possessed
of a new mystical vision of divine excellence, he thought to express its
splendors in the verbiage of an obsolescent theology, whose decay no human
being could have arrested. Yet, confronted with the revivalist phenomona
in his own church, he broke with Puritan formalism to follow the path of
the impassioned evangelical. He thus became a strong influence in fostering
that type of Protestantism which shaped the American mind for more than
a century, and which even the present age is still powerful. His enduring
literary work is the Personal Narrative, in which he crystallized
into language of permanent beauty one of the great mystical experiences
of the race.
ENLIGHTENMENT IN THE COLONIES
I. THE AGE OF REASON
In striking contrast to the gloomy determinism of orthodox Puritan
thought was the brief but strongly influential flowering of scientific rationalism
known as the Enlightenment. This attitude of mind, which dominated British
intellectual life in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
and which colored the thinking of most influential Americans up to 1789,
did much to destroy the Calvinistic conception of the earth as a vale of
tears and suffering and to convince man that, far from being the infinitesimal
plaything of an inscrutable God, he was rather the master of his fate and
the hope of the universe. With its emphasis upon reason rather than authority,
its encouragement of scientific inquiry, and its almost childlike belief
in the perfectibility of man and his world, the Enlightenment marked a happy
departure from Puritan authoritarianism and
engendered a spirit of optimism especially fitting to the emergent Colonial
culture.
The Enlightenment was in essence simply a further development of the
spirit of inquiry which had dominated European intellectual life since the
inception of the Renaissance. From the fourteenth century on, European
thinkers had been striving to dispel the fog of mystery and superstition
which had hung over medieval Europe, fostering unsound conceptions of nature
of the universe and sicouraging, on theological grounds, a further inquiry
into its workings. To the medieval scholastic, the entire universe testified
to the order and perfection of the Divine Mind, and the guardian of that
order and perfection was the Church, with the Bible as the final court of
appeal in all matters. From the Bible the medieval scholar learned that
the earth was the center of the cosmos because it was the home of man, whom
God had created in his own image and whom , of all creature in existence,
he most favored. The planets, being less important, revolved around the
earth, and in their unchanging course served as a constant demonstration
of the eternality and perfection of the Creator. Having in this way settled
the question of why the universe exists, medieval scholasticism proceeded
to draw inference after inference from its hypothesis itself. To the scholastic,
it was enough to know the why of existence; to search into the how
would be presumptuous and sacrilegious.
It was this theological approach to learning that came most sharply
under attack after the fourteenth century. With the coming of the Renaissance,
European thinkers were increasingly unwilling to have their conception of
man and his universe governed by grand scholastic hypotheses. The global
expansion of trade and the consequent passion for exploration and discovery
broadened intellectual as well as geographical horizons and tended to lessen
the hold of scholastic metaphysics in favor of a more tangible and material
value system. As man perceived a greater future for himself on earth, he
became less concerned with preparation for eternity and less moved by religious
arguments based upon acceptance and faith. Furthermore, it became clear
that many basic assumptions, held on the authority of the Church, were open
to question. The discovery of Chinese civilization by the
West in the late thirteenth century and growing trade relations between
East and West cast considerable doubt on the validity of certain scholastic
premises. The religious tolerance and high moral and cultural standards
of the Chinese contrasted embarrassingly with Christian bigotry and persecution
and gave evidence that Western religion had no monopoly upon virtuous and
ethical living. Furthermore, Chinese culture had obviously preceded the
accepted date of the Flood (the Chinese had records of antediluvian eclipses),
thus bringing the infallibility of the Bible into question. By 1543, when
Copernicus demolished medieval cosmology by proving that the sun, rather
than the earth, was the center of the universe, the Western intellectual
world had already developed a sufficient protective coating of skepticisims
to avoid the chaos this discovery would have caused a century or so earlier.
Following Copernicus' discovery, the interest of the sixteenth century
turned increasingly from the why of things to the how. In this search scholars
worked out many devices, both intellectual and mechanical, which aided their
quest for understanding and supported their findings. Galilleo's telescope
(1609), the mathematical developments of Kepler (1571-1630) in astronomical
calculation, Descartes (1596-1650) in analytical geometry and, most influential
of all in the subsequent development of science, Newton's (1642-1727) discovery
of law and gravitation supported the Copernican system and opened enormous
new fields in astronomy and physics. Vesalius' (1514-1564) studies om anatomy
and William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of blood (1628) put medicine
on a modern plane, while van Helmont's (1577-1644) theory of the existence
of gases and Robert Boyle's discovery of the law of gaseous expansion (1660)
metamorphosed chemistry from a medicine-show alchemy to a potent force in
the technological development of the Western world. As a result of van
Helmont's and Boyle's pioneering, Joseph Black was to discover carbon dioxide
(1755), Henry Cavendish hydrogen (1765), Joseph Priestly oxygen (1744),
and Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1797) the whole system of quantative chemical
analysis.
In other fields, the period was marked by James Hutton's (1726-1797)
studies in the geological evolution of the earth's crust (which put a further
strain on the Biblical story of the Creation), Linnaeus' (1707-1778)
classification of plants, and Buffon's (1707-1788) studies in animal species,
all of which profoundly influenced later speculation in evolution. In the
light of these major discoveries and their innumerable subsidiary developments,
it is small wonder that many minds were no longer attracted by mystical
explanations of God and the universe, or that they turned to science and
reason for an understanding of the world.
The impact of the new scientific "Enlightenment" upon the
established religious beliefs was, of course, devastating. Isaac Newton's
conception of the universe as a rational mechanical phenomenon governed
by mathematical laws of cause and effect left little room for such traditional
theological impedimenta as revelation, miracles, and Biblical authority,
nor did it give much sanction to the function of the clergy as a interceding
body between man and God. Particularly did the Enlightened philosophers
reject the older pessimistic belief in man's total depravity. Instead of
the gloomy doctrine of Original Sin, the new thought embraced the concept
of man as capable of infinite perfectibility and as a creature whose good
or evil traits resulted from environmental conditioning rather than from
Divine Grace or the sins of Adam and Eve. The philosopher Henry Bolingbroke
(1678-1751) typified this line of thought when he attached both clerics
and atheists for weakening a belief in God through admitting the presence
of evil, and Pope in his Essay on Man gave poetic immortality to this attitude
when he proclaimed:
As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns
As the rapt seraph that adores and burns:
To Him no high, no low, no great, no small,
He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all!
.........................................
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
Pope's famous utterance that the "proper study of mankind is man:"
was an aphorism given considerable development in the decades to come; and
David Hume, one of the most forceful of anti-mystics, put an ironic capstone
to the enlightened attitude against theology in the concluding paragraph
of his Essay on Miracles:
Our most holy religion is founded on faith, not on reason, and
it is a sure method of exposing it to put it to such a trial as it is by
no means fitted to endure. So that upon the whole, we may conclude that
the Christian Religion not only was at first attended by miracles, but even
at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.
All of this anti-clerical, anti-mystical talk must not be taken to
mean that the Enlightenment rejected God. On the contrary, the dominant
motive in its attempt to understand the universe was deeply religious.
Actually, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science must be considered
an attempt to establish the existence of God on a rational rather than a
metaphysical basis. By rejecting miracles, the Incarnation, the Trinity,
and Biblical authority, philosophers of the enlightenment felt they were
merely clearing away the fog that prevented man from understanding the true
nature of the Divinity. Following the trail blazed by Newton, they held
that essential truth is revealed by natural laws, which are in turn revealed
by reason. The fact that these laws exist and that they operate rationally
is proof in itself of a Divine Being, since some Force must exist to have
created and motivated the vast machinery of the universe. to Isaac Newton
the Great Machine must have a Mechanic or a Supreme Architect. Joseph Priestly
put the thought another way in his analogy of the watch--the existence of
the watch testifies to the existence of the watchmaker; thus may we deduce
the existence of God from the fact of the universe. As a matter of fact,
most Enlightened thinkers accepted the spirit of Christianity, once they
had stripped it of its mysticism and superstition; and some like John Locke,
did not even deny the possibility of revelation, though eh subjected such
experiences to the light of reason.
Whatever God hath revealed is certainly true; no doubt can be made
of it...but whether it is a divine revelation or no, reason must judge.
(Essay Concerning Human Understanding)
The most important movement growing out of attempts to reconcile science
with religion was DEISM, which reached its high point in England
in the early eighteenth century in the American colonies a half-century
later. The deists accepted the authority of human reason, rejected the
miraculous, and denied the Trinity and the authority of the Bible. They
further denied the divinity of Christ, though they revered his teachings
and took them as part of their creed. They advocated divine worship, although
in time this came to mean a private relationship between the individual
and God rather than attendance at public services. It is significant that,
though many deists were members of the clergy, there never developed any
deistic church or formal organization. Essentially, Deism was a way of
thinking rather than a formal institution, and its implications were as
much ethical and social as they were religious. The religious principles
of deism were set for th by Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648), who is
generally regarded as the founder of the movement, when he stated his famous
Five Points:
1. That there is a Supreme Power (which he further
explains to be a benevolent God).
2. That this Sovereign Power must be worshipped.
3. That the good ordering or disposition of the faculties
of man constitutes the principal or best part of divine
worship, and that this has always been believed.
4. That all vices and crimes should be expiated and
effaced
by repentance.
5. That there are rewards and punishments after this
life.
Before proceeding further, we must repeat the word of caution. The
Enlightenment as such was confined to a limited number of highly educated,
articulate persons whose careful reasoning was followed only by others of
like turn of mind. The great mass of people went along as usual, seeking
their daily bread and following beliefs that were more habits than convictions.
In time, it is true, many of the attitudes of the Enlightenment filtered
down to the common level and became habitual also; but it would be a gross
error to believe that the Enlightenment was consciously a mass movement,
or that because of it the common man was going to alter the slightest degree
his timeless procedure of following the line of least resistance.
II. THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN AMERICA
The spirit of the Enlightenment came rather late to the American colonies
partly because of the natural cultural lag between dependencies and a mother
country, partly because of the predominantly religious nature of the colonies,
and partly because the almost completely agrarian economy in America was
less concerned with scientific and mechanical development than was the industrialized
England. Nevertheless, by the latter half of the eighteenth century, the
eastern seaboard cities had become centers
of rationalistic thought. Nearly all the leaders of the Revolution were
children of the Enlightenment, rarely attended public worship,m and were
deeply interested in the newly developing scientific and sociological ideas.
It is at first puzzling to contemplate a society whose spiritual foundations
were largely Calvinistic turning against mysticism toward rational practicality
as the basis for its morality. But as we have seen, New England Calvinism
almost from the first had been weakened by strong currents of dissent, most
of which had attacked the authority of the clergy and had stressed the need
for individual practicality and self-reliance. Many of the New England
dissenters, particularly Roger Williams, went along with the French Protestant
Petrus Ramus (1515-1772), who believed the universe to be comprehensible
through reason rather than through revelation. The authority of the Bible
in New England, while strong, was not absolute.
One of the earliest to minimize revelation was John Wise of Ipswich
(1652-1725). Wise, like Ramus, stated that a knowledge of absolute laws
without practical, individual application was no knowledge at all, and that
reason was at least equally important with Biblical authority. In his Churches'
Quarrel Espoused (1710) and his Vindication of the Government of New
England (1717) he struck powerful blows at the Presbyterian theocracy of
the Mathers. He pointed out that New England had been founded on a Congregational,
not on a Presbyterian, system and called for a return to the earlier, more
democratic type of government. Under such attacks as those of Wise, Puritanism
gradually became more rational in self-defense, and the authoritarianism
of the "Saints" more flexible and cognizant of public wishes.
But many of the young students of the early eighteenth century were not
to be appeased by the minor concessions of the dogmatists, and as time went
on, they became more and more drawn to religious liberalism. By 1740 even
the Harvard library was full of books on the new rationalism and the orthodox
were reporting with alarm that the younger generation was avidly reading
and subscribing to anti-mystical tracts.
The most important figure among the anti-mystics was Benjamin Franklin
who, more than any other man, represents the spirit of the Enlightenment
in America. Though born in Boston of Puritan parents Franklin, while retaining
all of his Puritan faith in the standard virtues, nevertheless had no patience
with the Calvinistic attitude that the earth was a vale of tears and suffering
so constituted to try men's spirits for the wrath to come. Rather he believed
that this life should be dedicated to the pursuit of human happiness, which
is attained only through a constant cultivation of the art of getting along
with one's fellow man. For Franklin, the act of worship was carried out
most sincerely when it was directed toward the betterment of man in his
practical, every-day human relationships. Accordingly, Franklin borrowed
from the Puritan teachings his famous Thirteen Virtues (temperance, silence,
order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation,
cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility) and exhorted others to
practice them, not for their Calvinistic value of "justifying the ways
of God to man" but rather for
their practical usefulness in what Franklin recognized and approved as the
fundamental motive of existence--the desire to Get On. In a sense, Franklin's
attitude was simply a modernization of the Puritan concept of fruitful industry.
But whereas the Calvinist regarded prosperity as a mark of God's favor
and a possible sign of heavenly reward, Franklin looked upon it as a means
of establishing the earthly happiness of mankind.
It was this go-getting "tradesman's attitude" of measuring
man's worth through a material success resulting from honesty and hard work
that makes Franklin so typical of his day and so popular with future generations.
Growing up at a time when economic and political power was being taken
from outmoded aristocracy by a dynamic and commercial-minded middle class,
Franklin became a ready spokesman for the new order. Lacking great wealth,
historical fame, education, traditional distinction, the man of the middle
class found his self-justification in the one quality in which he excelled:
material advancement. Franklin found nothing wrong in the worship of success
so long as that success was honestly obtained. He believed that the desire
for social and financial security could be a powerful force in the dynamics
of society and an incitement to intellectual and spiritual improvement.
Moral virtue, far from being a mystical quantity, was a practical commodity
through the exercise of which man could succeed; it should be pursued not
through fear of God's wrath nor because it is its "own reward,"
but rather because it is the key to personal happiness and social well-being.
In his Autobiography, Franklin asserts that
Truth, Sincerity, and Integrity in Dealings between Man and Man
were of the utmost importance to the Felicity of Life...Revelation had indeed
no weight with me as such; but I entertained an Opinion, that tho' certain
Actions might not be bad because they were forbidden...yet probably those
Actions might be forbidden because they were bad for us.
And later he sums up his whole ethical attitude under the frank statement
that "Nothing is so likely to make a man's fortune as virtue."
It is this common-sense side of Franklin that was most heeded in his
own time and is popularly regarded as being most characteristic of him today.
Persons who never even suspected the political, philosophical, and scientific
stature of the man quoted and believed his Poor Richard, whose homely saws
("Waste not, want not," "A penny saved is a penny earned,"
"Diligence is the mother of good luck," "One today is worth
two tomorrows") seemed to them to plumb the depths of useful wisdom.
Today some find this dollar morality the essence of Babbittry and bourgeois
pettiness, but it would be unjust to Franklin to assume that he at any time
condoned greed or that he regarded the desire for getting on as any more
than a reciprocal force to virtue and social well-being. It must be remembered
that he lived in a world of small, independent workers where large fortunes
of the Astor-Vanderbilt-Rockefeller variety were as yet undreamed of. the
Machiavellian schemings and the undisguised rapacity of the post-Civil War
era would have horrified both Poor Richard and his benign creator beyond
all measure, and the amassing of wealth for luxurious living, for special
privilege, or for its own sake would have seemed to Franklin a criminal
action. For him, the way to wealth led not through the marshes of selfishness
but rather along the highroads of social and spiritual betterment for all
mankind.
Less material minded, but even sharper in attacking metaphysical religion
was Thomas Paine. One of the Enlightenment's most fiery champions, Paine
on his once shocking Age of Reason (1794) heavily, and often crudely,
scored what he considered to be the claptrap of clerical mythology. To
him the turgid apparatus of miracles, supernatural portents, and other marvelous
occurrences succeeded only in destroying the real values of Christianity,
and therefore should be eliminated completely. Paine believed that in a
skeptical and rational age religion could hold its own only when it was
made consistent with reason, and particularly with the deistic concept of
God as a First Cause acting for the benefit of mankind through the laws
of nature. Accordingly, he attacked the notion that the Bible was the incontestable
word of God and proceeded carefully, and somewhat pedantically, to dissect
the Gospels and point out all the inconsistencies, contradictions, and statements
based upon miracles, superstition, or unreasoned proof. To many persons,
this attack upon the letter of the Scriptures was equivalent to a destruction
of their spirit, but such was not Paine's intention. Like Franklin, he
was a fundamentally pious man who wished to rid Christian theology of what
he considered its outmoded qualities in order that its finest precepts could
continue to survive. Without this purgation, Paine felt, the world would
soon reject all religious beliefs and would sink into a morass of cynical
atheism.
Far less renowned than either Franklin or Paine, but perhaps even
more effective among the non-intellectuals was Elihu Palmer, an ex-Baptist
minister who left his calling to devote his life to attacking religious
supernaturalism. His widely read Principles of Nature (1801) was
one of the most uncompromising works of the Enlightenment and also one of
the most forceful in calling for an ethical religion based on natural laws.
Like Paine, he attacked Biblical myths as dangerous fabrications which
destroy man's comprehension of the true beauty and harmony of the universe,
and advocated a rule of reason in religious as well as temporal thought.
Though by no means original in his strictures, Palmer is nevertheless a
significant figure in the American Enlightenment because of the popularity
of his writings and lectures and, more important, because of his carefully
formulated "principles of nature" which formed the creed of the
Deistical Society of New York, of which he was a founder. Since these principles
form a clear and complete summary of the rationalistic religious thinking,
they will be set forth here in their entirety. He held that all true rationalists
would believe:
1. That the universe proclaims the existence of one supreme
Deity, worthy of the adoration of intelligent beings.
2. That man is possessed of moral and intellectual faculties
sufficient for the improvement of his nature, and the
acquisition of happiness.
3. That the religion of nature is the only universal religion;
that
it grows out of the moral relations of intelligent beings,
and
that it stands connected with the progressive improvement and
common welfare of the human race.
4. That it is essential to the true interest of man, that he love
truth and practice virtue.
5. That vice is every where ruinous and destructive to the
happiness of the individual and of society.
6. That a benevolent disposition, and beneficent actions, are
fundamental duties of rational beings.
7. That a religion mingled with persecution and malice cannot
be of
divine origin.
8. That education and science are essential to the happiness of
man.
9. That civil and religious liberty is equally essential to his
interests.
10. That there can be no human authority to which man ought to
be
amenable for his religious opinions.
11. That science and truth, virtue and happiness, are the great
objects to which the activity and energy of the human
faculties out to be directed.
(Elihu Palmer, "Posthumous Pieces; Principles of the
Deistical Society of the State of New York," 10-11.)
It is astonishing how many of these deistic principles persist today
and how many of our present values, even within the functioning of relatively
orthodox religious groups, suggest the spirit of rationalistic naturalism
as set forth by elihu Palmer. Yet it must be remembered that at the time
conscious religious unorthodoxy was decidedly a minority reaction. Deism
was confined largely to the educated classes of the eastern seaboard, and
even with them it was hardly a sufficiently focused activity to be called
a "movement." The uneducated masses, of course, ignored it entirely
in favor of a more emotional religious outlook; and in the eighteenth century
no attempt was made to convert them to a changed point of view, partly because
the opinions of the mob were traditionally considered unimportant, and partly
because most of the thinkers agreed with Franklin that too strong attacks
upon popular religion without sufficient reeducation would probably result
in nothing more than a weakened lower-class morality.