The Lettered Paul: Remnant and Mission in Hannah More, Walter Scott, and Critical Theory

Abstract

DUSTIN D. STEWART The Lettered Paul: Remnant and Mission in Hannah More, Walter Scott, and Critical Theory L amenting his enjoyment of Walter scott’s heart of Midlothian, William Wilberforce expresses a common enough Evangelical insecu­ rity about secular literature. Wilberforce could hardly put the book down, but upon doing so he couldn’t forbear chiding Scott’s novels for having “so little moral or religious object.” “They remind me,” he grieves, “ofa giant spending his strength in cracking nuts.” The complaint continues with a counterexample: “I would rather go to render up my account at the last day, carrying with me The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, than bearing the load of all these volumes, full as they are of genius.”' Wilberforce commends a work by his friend Hannah More, singling out More’s Salisbury Plain, a Cheap Repository Tract, as a light and enlightening alternative to Scott’s weighty yet worldly corpus. Somewhat bizarrely, given that the reformist is generalizing from what might be Scott’s most forcefully Christian work, his contrast seems to claim for the didactic tract a religious propriety lack­ ing in the novel form. But Wilberforce’s heaven-minded recanonizing re­ lies on the same line drawn by secularization narratives that place earlynineteenth -century writers like More on the wrong side of history, as against authors like Scott who are taken to promulgate a modern secular romanticism. Wilberforce keeps the divide but reverses the sides. Because such lines need new scrutiny,2 I will trace in this essay a few continuities My warm thanks to Samuel Baker, in conversations with whom, principally in the sum­ mer of 2009, this essay found its impetus and took its shape. 1. Quoted in Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce, 5 vols. (London: Murray, 1838), 5:254. 2. Vincent P. Pecora explains this concern in Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, & Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006): “as students of Foucault, we learned how to rethink the Enlightenment’s idea ofprogress, but not necessarily the story SiR, 50 (Winter 2011) 591 592 DUSTIN D. STEWART between the two writers sharply separated by Wilberforce. Notwithstand­ ing his suggestion that the novel wastes its work on earthbound nuts, I will consider how both Scott and More rely on a vehicle that nudges literary form toward political theology: the Pauline letter. Saint Paul’s legacy is by no means settled or univocal. Competing un­ derstandings of Paul and of his literary mode arise in the epistolary texts of More and Scott, understandings that, as it happens, also extend to present-day disagreements about the apostle in critical theory. Both earlynineteenth -century writers invoke Paul as they test the possibilities of epistolarity , including its potential for universality. In a Napoleonic context, Paul the letter-writer can stand as the harbinger of a totalizing Christian empire. As he contends throughout the Mediterranean for a nascent but globalizing Judeo-Christiamty, he emblematizes the persuasiveness and the eventual triumph, the relentless translatability, of an initially fringe sect. The apparent appeal of an empire-enabling Paul is the allure of an authen­ tic universality, one that might trump those aspirations to the universal that only export self-absorbed particularity. Seemingly frustrated with the particularist outcomes of identity politics, philosopher Alain Badiou has lately developed and defended such an idea of Paul. My shorthand term for this conception of the apostle, for the stakes of Saint Paul in Badiou, More, and Scott, is mission. The works ofMore and Scott also disclose another version of Paul, however. What I will name remnant, this alternative set of associa­ tions highlights the apostle’s local specificity to explain his worldwide ap­ peal. Such a Paul is a late-comer, an oft-arrested dissident who sits uneasily between the rigorous Judaism with which he once identified and the new covenant, spirit over letter, which he comes to preach. By no means easily securing new standards, his theology sparks controversy and conflict. Situ­ ated in his waywardness, this outlaw apostle writes charged letters to spe­ cific communities about new forms ofembodied practice, and he advocates for the powerless, the residue of Rome.3 Paul’s own broken...