The term "Calvinism" is applied to the teachings linked to John Calvin (1509–1564), a French theologian and church reformer, whose Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) provided the five basic doctrines of the Protestant churches and Reformed tradition: (1) total depravity—the "complete corruption of humanity resulting from Original Sin"; (2) unconditional election—"the predestined salvation or damnation of every individual"; (3) irresistible grace—necessary for conversion but available to the "elect" only; (4) perseverance of the saints—"the enduring justification and righteousness of the converted"; and (5) limited atonement—"Christ's gift of life through His death but only for those already predestined for heaven" (Elliott, p. 187). In short, Calvin stressed the sovereignty of a deliberate God and denied the innately depraved individual all agency.
Calvinistic faith flourished in early America. The Pilgrims, under the leadership of Governor William Bradford (1590–1657), planted it in New England in November of 1620. Only ten years later, roughly one thousand Puritans, led by John Winthrop (1588–1649), set sail for Massachusetts Bay. Particular Baptists removed it to Virginia, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island. George Fox's (1624–1691) Quakers, whom the church historian Sydney Ahlstrom characterized as the "most important and enduring manifestation of Puritan radicalism in either England or America" (p. 176), brought it to Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. The Dutch Reformed transferred their "predominately Puritan" ethic (p. 253) to New York, New Jersey, and Maryland. The Scotch and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians introduced their faith to the Carolinas and parts of Georgia. By 1730 Puritan Calvinism represented a firmly established theology in the soon-to-be United States. Its ideological and rhetorical legacy for American culture and literature proved both profound and multifaceted.
PURITAN IDEOLOGY
With its emphasis on predestination and simultaneous insistence on the indistinguishability of the "elect" (the "invisible church"), Calvinist theology might have led to the erosion of standards and values. To prevent this from occurring and to help their congregations cope with the uncertainty of unconditional election, seventeenth-century New England Puritan ministers introduced the doctrine of preparationism or "covenant theology." Covenant theology substituted divine decree as the basis for election with a compact between God and his worshipers. In exchange for absolute obedience, God allowed human beings to prepare for grace. Preparation, however, did not guarantee election. Rather, it demanded from the believer a display of a heretofore unseen degree of self-reflection, paradoxically paired with a relatively large portion of self-confidence. To doubt one's election was indicative of the lack of grace and revealed vulnerability to the temptations of the devil. To act as one saw fit was equally disgraceful, as human beings' reliance on the moral faculty was not only misleading but also presumptuous. In order to gain certainty of salvation or certituto salutis, then, Puritans had to follow their "effectual calling" or fides efficax: they had to dedicate their lives to the glorification of God.
Based on their readings of the Bible, the Puritans believed that there were two ways to answer the effectual calling. On the one hand, they could follow their "general (effectual) calling" and further God's glory by worshiping his creation—that is, by heeding Christ's dictum to love their fellow human beings. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. The second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour like thyself" (Matthew 22:37–39). On the other hand, they were encouraged to follow their "particular (effectual) calling" and demonstrate their love and usefulness for others by thriving in their vocation. In theory, then, Puritan theology considered all legal occupations equal. It measured the public utility and worth of individuals by their dedication to their predestined vocation and not in terms of social status.
Although the Puritans' covenant withered and finally collapsed in the mid-eighteenth century, its biblical theme stipulating grace for reciprocal altruism, an ascetic work ethic, and disregard for class differences persisted. Even Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), a paragon of the American Enlightenment who dismissed revealed religion, epitomized Puritan precepts. In his Autobiography (1791), Franklin boasted his "modesty and . . . disinterestedness" (p. 87) and his "industry and frugality" (p. 41), which, if paired with "respect to all" (p. 93), proved a "means of obtaining wealth and distinction" (p. 91). Franklin set for himself the "arduous project of arriving at moral perfection" (p. 94) and strove to perform "the most acceptable service of God, [that is,] . . . doing good to man" (p. 92). Thus, Franklin's Autobiography reflected the Calvinist belief that God helped those who helped themselves and other members of the "imagined community" (see Anderson).
As the Puritan clergyman John Winthrop, professor of the Andover Theological Seminary, Harriet Beecher Stowe, E. A. Park, and Mark Twain suggest, Puritan Calvinism left tangible and intangible legacies.
God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection.
(Winthrop, p. 101)
[Edwards] sawed the great dam and let out the whole waters of discussion all over New England, and that free discussion led to all the shades of opinion in modern days . . . yet Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker were the last results of the current set in motion by Jonathan Edwards.
(Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks, quoted in Gura, "Jonathan Edwards inAmerican Literature," p. 153)
The metaphysics of New England Theology is such as the yeomen of our fields drank down for the sincere milk of the word. It is the metaphysics of common sense. . . . The New England system is not only scriptural, but is scriptural science.
(E. A. Park, "New England Theology," 1852; quoted in Noll, America's God, p. 225)
I wallowed and reeked with Jonathan in his insane debauch; rose immediately refreshed and fine at 10 this morning, but with a strange and haunting sense of having been on a three days' tear with a drunken lunatic.
(Mark Twain, quoted in Gura, "Jonathan Edwards in American Literature," p. 153)
Puritan millennial thought also figured prominently in later American literature and culture. Its ideology underlay not only the writings of nineteenth-century progressive reformers such as Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Maria Cummins, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, but also the work of proexpansionist thinkers such as John O'Sullivan, editor of the United States Democratic Review and author of "The Great Nation of Futurity" (1839). Puritan millennialism was grounded in the readings of the New Testament, especially the books of Matthew (24:29–31), Mark (13:24–27), and Luke (21:25–28). These passages foreshadowed Christ's return, or his Second Coming, to earth and his subsequent one-thousand-year (hence millennial) reign of peace. Millennialists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries split into two camps: premillennialists such as Cotton Mather, who believed that Christ's return would precede the age of peace, prosperity, and triumph of the church, and postmillennialists such as Daniel Whitby, Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Bellamy, and Samuel Hopkins, who held that Christ's Second Coming directly followed the expansion of civil and religious American values on earth ("civil millennialism") and hailed Judgment Day and Satan's return.
Intricately connected with notions of civil millennialism and Manifest Destiny was the Calvinist assumption that the priest, as the truth-seeker of an elect elite, had access to an objective reality—an absolute, metaphysical Truth. While Martin Luther granted access to objective reality through a literal and rational reading of only the Bible, Calvin entrusted human beings with a limited allegorical reading of the "Word of God." However, not until the revolutionary writings of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) was nature read as a "diffusion of [God] into time and space" (Miller, p. 603). Edwards believed that, under the effects of grace, human beings could experience a mystical union with the divine induced by nature: "God's excellency, His wisdom, His purity and love, seemed to appear in everything: the sun, moon and stars; in the clouds, and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature" (Edwards, p. 179). Yet Edwards was very careful to point out that the mysticization of nature neither denied original sin nor questioned God's absolute sovereignty. As his sermon God Glorified in the Work of Redemption, by the Greatness of Man's Dependence upon Him, in the Whole of It (1731) and his later works, including Careful and Strict Enquiry into Notions of . . . Freedom of Will (1754) and The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758), made patently clear, "natural man" was "corrupt and his self-reliance is reliance on evil" (Miller, p. 605). Only free grace—experienced by a select few who had attained a "full and constant sense of the absolute sovereignty of God, and a delight in that sovereignty" (Edwards, p. 186–187)—could save human beings and expose them to the supernatural light described in A Divine and Supernatural Light, Immediately Imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God, Shown to Be Both a Scriptural and Rational Doctrine (1734).
Edwards's cosmology bridged Puritan and Enlightenment discourses when it reinterpreted the world as a place suffused with both God's presence and divine truth. Both Calvinism and the emerging theories of evolution, such as Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), believed in natural hierarchies governed by an "inexorable sovereignty" or "impersonal law"; they agreed that evil, or the struggle for survival, was "an integral part of that reality"; and, most important, they accepted as true an objective, common-sensical, reality to be discovered by the spiritually graceful or physically fit (Dawson, p. 512). The precarious combination of spiritual and physical superiority facilitated the objectification of the encountered "other" (at home and abroad) and aided territorial expansion.
PURITAN AESTHETICS
The Calvinist aesthetic reflected the Puritan penchant to view the world in terms of dichotomies: depravity vs. innocence, predestination vs. free will, self vs. other, type vs. antitype. Followed by the jeremiad and the conversion narrative, perhaps the most distinctive rhetorical strategy that informed Puritan writing was the typological reading of the Bible. Typology is a form of allegorical reading in which Old Testament "types" are interpreted as prefigurations of future "antitypes." A type, as literary scholar William G. Madsen explains, is (1) strictly historical; (2) "looks forward in time" and foreshadows the appearance rather than essence of an event; (3) can represent "natural objects"; (4) must differ from and resemble their antitype; and (5) is not recognized as such by neither the "actors of a typical event nor the authors of their history" (Lowance, p. 20). Samuel Danforth's A Brief Recognition of New-England's Errand into Wilderness (1671), for example, interpreted the Puritans' settlement in the "new world" and construction of the "city upon a hill" as the antitype to Moses's exodus from Egypt and the subsequent arrival of the "holy nation" at Mount Sinai. Broadly speaking, notions of Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism that developed in the nineteenth century owe much to this typological tradition.
The Puritan jeremiad was a form of oration that "recalled the courage and piety of the founders," denounced social evils of a backslidden generation, and exhorted believers to return to their original, innocent ways (Elliott, p. 257). The term "jeremiad" derives from the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, who urged the house of Israel to live up to the terms of the covenant, return to "holiness," and prevent damnation and the fall of Judah. The Puritan jeremiad consisted of four parts: the doctrine—a passage taken from the Old or New Testaments; the explication, or "reasons," in which the doctrine was explained in its biblical context; the "uses" that stressed the community's misapplication of the doctrine; and a final part that might be called "prescription," in which the preacher explained what the community must do to renew the covenant. In his "An Indian's Looking Glass for the White Man" (1833), William Apess, a Pequot, adopts the four-part model of the puritan jeremiad to exhort his white Christian readers to return to righteousness by loving all "skins of color" (p. 97).
The jeremiad, however, targeted community members only. In order to become a member, applicants had to undergo an "elaborate preparation" or conversion "process" of six psychological stages, outlined by the Puritan clergyman Thomas Hooker: "contrition, humiliation, vocation, implantation, exaltation, and possession" (Elliott, p. 201). The completion of each of these stages was subject to public scrutiny and assured both convert and community of the truthfulness of the endeavor. Although secular versions of the jeremiad occur occasionally (e.g., in Henry David Thoreau's Walden), conversion narratives abounded in the nineteenth century. Works such as Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850), Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860), or Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) continued this tradition as they subjected the convert's experience to the scrutiny of their "imagined [print] community."
LEGACY
It might be useful to situate Calvinist and anti-Calvinist literature during the nineteenth century as a latter-day expression of the Augustinian-Pelagian tradition, or controversy, that characterizes Christianity more broadly. Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430), author of Confessions and City of God, was a staunch defender of the orthodox belief in original sin, predestination, and divine grace (and, logically, inequality). His theological opponent, the Romano-British monk Pelagius (c. 355–c. 425), asserted that there is no original sin, that human beings have free will, and that divine grace is universal. In the fifth century, Saint Augustine openly declared Pelagianism a heresy, but, as the emergence of Unitarianism in the early nineteenth century shows, Pelagian sentiments survived. In fact, as much as Calvinism is seen as "a Renaissance representative of the Augustinian point of view" (Harmon, p. 75), Unitarianism, which believes in salvation by character, is a post-Renaissance version of the Pelagian point of view.
Susan Warner's (1819–1895) best-selling The Wide, Wide World, for example, falls ideologically andaesthetically within the Augustinian and Calvinist tradition. Warner used what literary scholar Sharon Kim has identified as "Puritan realism"—that is, "a strictly literal, historical world, with the biblical type indicating a literal, spiritual reality within it" (p. 785)—to propagate the concepts of innate depravity, predesti-nation, and divine grace. When one of the novel's characters, Ellen Montgomery, inquires after the meaning of the biblical phrase "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me," her mother replies that if Ellen's "heart were not hardened by sin" and if she knew God, she would indeed love him more than her mother (Warner, p. 38). Mrs. Montgomery says, "You cannot help it, I know, my dear," and explains that Ellen cannot be saved "except by His grace who has promised to change the hearts of his people—to take away the heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh" (p. 38, emphases added). Like Warner, Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804–1864) "great power of blackness . . . derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free" (Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," p. 1035). Hawthorne's prose, however, is more equivocal than Warner's. In his preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Hawthorne hails his belief in original sin and predestination. The novel's moral, he proclaims, is
that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief; and he would feel its singular gratification, if this Romance might effectually convince mankind (or, indeed, any one man) of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms. (P. 2)
The novel's happy ending, of course, calls this "moral" into question. The moral reverberates in Hawthorne's fictionalized treatment of the failure of Brook Farm in The Blithedale Romance (1852). That novel exposes the innate selfishness and depravity of acclaimed philanthropists. Various analyses of Hawthorne's short stories corroborate the claim that Hawthorne's work expresses the belief in innate depravity and predestination. However, close readings of his more ambivalent if not agnostic writing—such as "Young Goodman Brown" (1835) and The Scarlet Letter (1850)—in combination with a more recent study of Hawthorne's use of Puritan typology give pause to such an interpretation. The literary scholar Bill Christophersen contends that "whereas [Cotton] Mather . . . used biblical allusions to demonstrate Providence at work, Hawthorne uses them to question Providence" (p. 615). Perhaps, Melville had it right in the first place and "this Man of Mosses takes great delight in hoodwinking the world,—at least, with respect to himself " ("Hawthorne and His Mosses," p. 1041).
More than any other canonized writer, Herman Melville (1819–1891) wrestled with the concepts of original sin, predestination, and divine grace. Echoing Edwards, Melville's writing expressed the belief in original sin. Billy Budd, the young and handsome sailor of Melville's posthumously published novel Billy Budd, Foretopman (1924) epitomized "essential innocence" (p. 1425). He is pitted against John Claggart, who represents the naturally "malign" (p. 1394). Similarly, the eternally good Pierre Glendinning in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852) struggles to worship God by loving his supposed sister and thus fulfilling the stipulations of the covenant. Worship, Ishmael explains in Moby-Dick (1851), is "—to do the will of God—that is worship. And what is the will of God?—to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me—that is the will of God" (p. 57). God, however, does not reward Pierre's struggles. His mother disowns him, his friends abandon him, his lover and sister die, and he meets death with a "scornful innocence rest[ing] on [his] lips" (Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, p. 420).
Pierre's "scornful innocence" stands for the perhaps most central dilemma in Melville's fiction. Human beings who strive to live up to the terms of the covenant, worship God, and acknowledge His absolute sovereignty cannot "delight in that sovereignty" as Jonathan Edwards had suggested. Rather than find "that unfailing comfort" in the fact that "it's all predestinated" (Moby-Dick, p. 145), they struggle "all alone"—for example, Pierre as well as the title character in "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street" (1853) and Ahab in Moby-Dick—to escape the "walls" of Providence while their peers passively witness and listen "in a dumbness like that of a seated congregation of believers in hell listening to the clergyman's announcement of his Calvinistic text" (Billy Budd, p. 1420).
Resorting to "Puritan realism" to infuse Bartleby's death with a meaning beyond the literal, to indict God of his injustice, and ask the ultimate question, the narrator, who "at leisure intervals" reads "Edwards on the Will" (p. 1061), explains that Bartleby rests "[w]ith kings and counsellors" (p. 1068). The biblical passage taken from Job 3:14 continues in verses 18, 19, and 23: "There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor. The small and the great are there; and the servant is free from his master. . . . Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, and whom God has hedged in?" (emphasis added).
Slightly more agnostic in his treatment of the Puritan legacy, Oliver Wendell Holmes's (1809–1894) poem "The Deacon's Masterpiece; or, The Wonderful 'One-Hoss Shay'" (1858) questions the validity, timelessness, and endurance of the Puritan construction of objective reality.
Lying within the Pelagian tradition, Harriet Beecher Stowe's (1811–1896) Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (1852), Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), and The Minister's Wooing (1859) deconstruct the notion of innate depravity and predestination in favor of the Unitarian idea of "salvation by character." Untainted by original sin, Stowe's characters Evangeline and Uncle Tom are paragons of virtue—innately innocent and relentlessly good.
The reaction against the tenets of Puritan Calvinism culminated in the writings of Walt Whitman (1819–1892) and the transcendentalists, who deified nature and man and made the concepts of original sin, predestination, and divine grace obsolete. In "Song of Myself" in Leaves of Grass (first published in 1855), Whitman substituted the concept of God as an outside force with Emerson's idea of the "Over-Soul"—a force that permeates matter, the origin and destination of all things. For Whitman, the deification of nature prompted a fundamental reinterpretation of the character and stipulations of covenant theology. Rather than worship God by answering the effectual calling, Whitman worshiped God by denying sin and indulging and actively participating in God's creation. Albeit in less radical ways, the transcendentalists added texture to the idea of human beings as free-thinking, untainted, and independent parts and particles of divine creation.
While a majority of Unitarians and active abolitionists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, and Lydia Maria Child strove to deconstruct the notions of original sin, predestination, and divine grace altogether, African American and Native American writers such as Harriet Jacobs, David Walker, and Robert Benjamin Lewis successfully appropriated Puritan typology for their own ends. As the historian Albert Raboteau has summarized scholarly observations in this area, "for the black Christian . . . the imagery [Puritan typology] was reversed: the Middle Passage had brought his people to Egypt land, where they suffered bondage under Pharaoh. White Christians saw themselves as a new Israel; slaves identified themselves as old" (p. 251). In his Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles, Together with a Preamble to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), David Walker (1785–1830) admonished his readers that God had his "ears continually open to the cries, tears and groans of his oppressed people; and . . . will at one day appear fully in behalf of the oppressed, and arrest the progress of the avaricious oppressors" as he did with "hundreds and thousands of Egyptians" (pp. 180–181). He clarified, "the Egyptians . . . a gang of devils, . . . having gotten possession of the Lord's people, treated them nearly as cruel as Christian Americans do us, at the present day" (p. 183). Robert Benjamin Lewis, son of an African American and Native American couple, expressed similar sentiments in Light and Truth; Collected from The Bible and Ancient and Modern History Containing the Universal History of the Colored and the Indian Race, from the Creation of the World to the Present Time (1836): "We ["Mulattoes," "Quadroons," "Mestizos," "Sambos," "Mangroons," and "Indian tribes"] are all one, and oppressed in this land of boasted Liberty and Freedom. 'But wo unto them by whom it cometh'" (p. 400).
While writers like Walker, Lewis, and the poet Phillis Wheatley awaited a new exodus, Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) used the elaborate formula of the Puritan conversion narrative to demonstrate that she had experienced divine grace and had become one of the elect. Accordingly, Jacobs examined her life in the psychological stage of "contrition" through the reflections of her fictional narrator Linda Brent in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. She experiences "humiliation" as she admits to having sinned and wonders if the "wise purpose of God was leading [her] through such thorny paths, and whether still darker says are in store for [her]" (p. 20). Her grandmother—whose "characteristic piety" and delight in God's sovereignty allowed her to weather the loss of her granddaughter with the words "God's will be done"—represents the demure Christian ideal to which Linda Brent could aspire in the stage of "vocation" (p. 21). Jacobs's appropriation of Puritan aesthetics and the narrator's manifest belief in Puritan ideology situate her firmly in the Puritan-Calvinist tradition of nineteenth-century American writing.
See alsoThe Bible; Protestantism; Puritans; Religion; Unitarians
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Merit Kaschig
