Introduction

Abstract

Over the last two decades or more, scholars have proclaimed the advent of postsecular literary studies, thereby conferring increased recognition on the significant role that religion—more particularly, Christianity—has played in the development of American literature. Such a recognition of this pervasive influence on the work of many nineteenth-century American writers is long overdue and follows a period of relative neglect in the later twentieth century as theory and cultural studies won an increasing number of critical converts. But despite the recent proclamation of the arrival of postsecular literary studies, the larger debate over the historical reality of secularization in the United States and elsewhere is far from over. Certainly, the remarkably tenacious hold of evangelical Christianity on the contemporary United States accords with traditional ideas of American religious exceptionalism—after all, a third of Americans today still think the Bible is the literal word of God—but the steady rise in number of a younger generation of unbelievers is also incontrovertible, in keeping with the increasing polarization in virtually all realms of American life including core principles of truth and fiction. One might also conceivably argue that our growing distance from the great age of Christian hegemony in the United States in the nineteenth century allows us to better understand its literary culture, in keeping with Hegel’s well-known dictum that the owl of Minerva flies at twilight. Over the last few decades, theologically informed scholars such as Michael J. Colacurcio and David S. Reynolds have accordingly given us renewed intellectual access to the major writers of the American Renaissance, whose work arguably cannot be fully appreciated without a basic understanding of Christian doctrine and its historical development in this country.As the unofficial literary chronicler of Puritan New England and its nineteenth-century cultural legacy, Nathaniel Hawthorne has long been recognized as a writer whose work demands a basic knowledge of Protestant ideas and values, as mediated through the Calvinist dogmas of colonial history. A number of critics and biographers—including Randall Stewart, Hyatt H. Waggoner, Leonard J. Fick, Joseph Schwartz, Agnes McNeill Donahue, Michael J. Colacurcio, John Gatta, Roberta Weldon, and Martin Kevorkian—have thus helped to shape our understanding of Hawthorne’s writings in relation to his religious heritage. Strongly marked by the official reign of traditional Congregational worship and biblical teachings during his Salem upbringing and college education at Bowdoin, Hawthorne also personally witnessed the rise of Unitarianism both in his hometown and Eastern Massachusetts generally, and as a struggling author holed up in the family residence for a dozen years and then more briefly in Boston, he saw the disestablishment of the Congregational Church in Massachusetts in 1833, the rise of Transcendentalism later in the decade, and the steady growth of the religious marketplace with competing sects of Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Quakers, Shakers, Mormons, Catholics, and others in antebellum America. Like the rest of the country, New England was a spiritual hothouse during the prolonged revivalism of the Second Great Awakening, and as the nation’s first great historical and psychological romancer, Hawthorne was well equipped to record his region’s pervasive dramas of sin and redemption.Despite a reluctant personal identification with his family legacy of Puritanism, Hawthorne’s extensive use of religious ideas and symbolism in his writings still leaves the exact nature of his own beliefs in an undefined no-man’s-land between conservative Calvinism and liberal Unitarianism. As Melville first noted in his review of Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, it is still a moot point whether Hawthorne’s repeated use of Calvinist ideas of universal evil and original sin in his writings reflected a deeply held personal faith or was largely employed for aesthetic purposes. There is no doubt of Hawthorne’s tenacious belief in the pervasiveness of evil in the world and in the deep human need for redemption from sin. Yet viewed from a biographical perspective, the Hawthorne family had a long-standing affiliation with the liberal-leaning First (Congregational) Church in Salem, which became Unitarian in the 1830s, and Hawthorne’s own marriage into the Peabody family, affiliated with Salem’s Unitarian North Church, helped to provide additional moral and aesthetic distance from the forbidding faith of his Puritan fathers, as did his distaste for the hell-fire Calvinist preaching at Bowdoin College. Moreover, his general lack of attendance at any church during his adult life might lead one to believe that the author was largely secularized in outlook and notably skeptical of ministerial sanctity. But as his fiction and nonfiction both testify, Hawthorne still clearly embraced a basic nondogmatic Christian outlook shaped by the New Testament, and the providential irony of his plots and the preoccupation with sin and redemption in his characters is in accord with a basic loyalty to traditional Christian ideas of human fallibility and divine sovereignty, as taught by Puritan doctrine.In his introductory sketch to his Mosses from an Old Manse, Hawthorne thus presented his instinctive religious faith as justified by the canons of natural theology, as he rhapsodically noted his enjoyment of reclining on the grass in August near his Concord residence: “‘Oh, perfect day!—Oh, beautiful world!—Oh, beneficent God!’ And it is the promise of a blissful eternity; for our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal. This sunshine is the golden pledge thereof” (CE 10:27–28). Confirming Hawthorne’s grounding in the basic tenets of Protestantism and the idea of sola scriptura was his earlier claim in his Mosses preface: “So long as an unlettered soul can attain to saving grace, there would seem to be no deadly error in holding theological libraries to be accumulations of, for the most part, stupendous impertinence” (CE 10:19).Four years later Hawthorne again recorded his faith in a traditional Christian afterlife in his American Notebooks, for as he realized just before his mother’s death in late July 1849, the spectacle of human misery would be intolerable without a compensatory heavenly realm of the spirit:Rejecting the intolerable idea of spiritual “annihilation” following the misery of death, Hawthorne bases his faith on Saint Paul’s well-known model of spiritual resurrection outlined in 1 Corinthians 15, when “the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality” (1 Cor. 15:52–53).By the same token, Hawthorne rejected the idea that individuals could do God’s work, whether for good or ill; for as he wrote his social reform–minded sister-in-law Elizabeth Peabody in 1857 in response to her abolitionist advocacy: “Vengeance and beneficence are things that God claims for himself. His instruments have no consciousness of His purpose; if they imagine they have, it is a pretty sure token they are not His instruments. The good of others, like our own happiness, is not to be attained by direct effort, but incidentally” (CE 18:116). By claiming that vengeance should be effectuated by God, not by human beings, Hawthorne was again in accord with Saint Paul: “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19). And in his belief that God alone is the ultimate doer of good in the world, he is also in line with the Pauline and Protestant tradition favoring faith, not works. As Saint Paul claimed, “I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not; but the evil that I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me” (Romans 7:18–20). For Hawthorne, too, human beings are first of all sinners, and whatever good they manage to do in the world is accomplished on a strictly limited personal basis. This same Pauline doctrine was later made explicit in Hawthorne’s 1862 Atlantic Monthly essay “Chiefly About War Matters” in which he again argued: “No human effort, on a grand scale, has ever yet resulted according to the purpose of its projectors. The advantages are always incidental. Man’s accidents are God’s purposes. We miss the good we sought, and do the good we little cared for” (CE 23:431).What was the exact nature of Hawthorne’s faith? Rather than argue about the extent of his embrace of Calvinist Christianity, it would be better to think of Hawthorne simply as a Christian moralist whose writings illustrate the congruence of his view of human nature with basic doctrines of Protestant tradition, as interpreted through the lens of his hereditary Puritanism. Despite his self-deprecating attitude to signs of allegory in his own fiction, he was a master of a mode that he assimilated from Spenser, Bunyan, Milton, and other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers, and that served to convey implicit moral meanings like theirs, the basic outlines of which are often found in his notebook entries recording ideas for future potential stories. The fact that his younger daughter Rose would convert to Catholicism, found her own order of nuns, and be nominated for Catholic sainthood for her work taking care of the terminally ill, while his prolific, philoprogenitive, and adulterous writer son Julian went to federal prison for mail fraud is in keeping with the broadly allegorical conflict of spirit and flesh informing his creative vision and its religious expression.Amid the proliferation of critical approaches to Hawthorne’s work, we should not lose sight of the pervasive impact of Christianity and religion generally on his writing, and the present special issue of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review is dedicated to this end. More particularly, the focus of this issue grows out my own recent work on The House of the Seven Gables, a novel as richly textured in religious and biblical motifs as any among his full-length romances (“Christian Moralism”; “God Will Give Him Blood”). Whether it is contextualizing his writings in their contemporary religious culture, examining them within the doctrinal and historical contexts of New England Puritanism, or tracing their buried biblical, allegorical, and typological patterns, scholars still have a lot to learn about the postsecular dimensions of Hawthorne’s literary career.