The Unvarnished Doctrine

The Unvarnished Doctrine

            In his 240-page defense of the Lockean liberal influence on the American Revolution, Steven Dworetz builds a strong levy against the high tide of classical republicanism. This school – originating around the third quarter of the twentieth century – attempted to unseat John Locke as the “prophet” of the American Revolution, relegating his classical liberalism to the margins of Revolutionary thought. In its stead this “revisionist” school sought to place the classical republicanism of “Cato” in the center stage, essentially pitting liberal “commerce” against republican “civic virtue” in an ideological struggle over the soul of the American Revolution. Originally published out of the Duke University Press in 1990, Dworetz claimed to explore a “critical examination of the republican revision” while reasserting the centrality of Locke’s liberalism in the Revolution (7). Quickly admitting that his book is insufficiently exhaustive to provide a final answer to the question of ideological centrality in Revolutionary American thought, his work does provide a valuable contribution to the, sometimes tense, scholarly exchange. This book is certainly not without its weaknesses, but Dworetz’s topics are well researched and his arguments are compellingly articulated. The criticisms that he provides cannot be easily overcome, nor should his questions be quickly dismissed if a rigorous academic investigation into the questions of the American founding is of any consequence.

             Dworetz begins his book by explaining that Western nations have a long history of tolerating – if not celebrating – critical reviews of political doctrine while, simultaneously, warning that this practice can behave as a corrosive force on a nation’s foundational political culture (3). It is precisely this danger that he charges the classical republican school of injecting into the American political discourse with their “revisionist” interpretation of the American founding (4). Claiming that the motivation of the classical republicans to remove Lockean liberalism from the American Revolution – primarily inspired by scholars such as J.G.A Pocock, Leo Strauss and C.B. Macpherson – was anti-commercial in nature, Dworetz subtly paints them with the brush of socialistic ideology (7). At this point, it would not be inappropriate to place these works within a greater historiographical timeline and, hopefully, provide an explanation for their respective points of view. The ideological clash between capitalism and socialism, instigated by the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the member-states of NATO, not only prompted heated political and economic disagreements but also acted as a backdrop for critical new ways in understanding historical events and dramatic social changes. The 1960s and 1970s represented the “high tide” of socialist influence on the historical discipline and, from this, came the revised interpretation of the American founding that unsurprisingly discounted Locke – a champion of commerce and property rights – as a major influence of the period. It is also unsurprising that books like Dworetz’s – books that championed Locke’s bold return as a central figure of the American Revolution – were published in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Soviet Union was languishing in the throes of its impending demise and the West was celebrating the triumph of commerce, liberty and freedom. While it would be a mistake to over-politicize the nature of these kinds of research publications, it would also be a mistake to ignore the larger ideological and historiographical context that these books can be placed. Perhaps worse than charging the classical republican scholars with being motivated or blinded by their ideological leanings, is Dworetz’s later accusation that these researchers dismissed Locke out of a fundamental unfamiliarity with his writings, and that they “failed to grasp the very basics” of Lockean political theory (10). Moreover, he claims that the entire school of classical republicanism relied on the linchpin of a hostile interpretation of Locke and “some wishful thinking about Cato”, suggesting that the historians of the republicanism school superimposed a twentieth-century worldview onto an eighteenth-century implementation of Locke’s seventeenth-century political doctrine (12, 31). While these indictments against the classical republican scholars are weighty indeed, Dworetz claims that the true value of his project is in its attempt to reinforce the strong tradition and foundation of American liberalism, an attempt that he hopes will keep a political paradigm shift at bay (38).

            Thoughtfully devoting an entire chapter of his book to both the general methodological challenges of historical studies and critiques of political theory, as well as the interdisciplinary challenges of studying these two fields concurrently, Dworetz makes clear that he fully anticipates and welcomes a thorough critical examination of his research. While this chapter not only introduces the reader to the difficulty involved in the research for his book, it also does an excellent job of reminding his would-be critics that a certain amount of critical latitude must be afforded historians for making the best of what they are given. In this sense, Dworetz adequately reminds his readers that the modern historian bears a remarkable resemblance to a forensic investigator. With regard to The Unvarnished Doctrine, Dworetz relies heavily on political pamphlets, state papers, official documents, newspapers, correspondence, and even “circumstantial evidence” in order to capture the “character of the Revolution” (34, 54, 67). Rightfully suggesting that the most important thing a researcher can do is familiarize himself with the source material and the sources that those writings cite, he also admits that the selection – and, by implication, the exclusion – of one’s sources can go very far in determining the conclusions of a research project (51, 61). This reminder is a curious one since the extensive section of end notes in the back of the book would suggest that Dworetz has done considerable research for this project, whereas the obviously heavy reliance on New England clerical writings in the latter half of the book appears to betray or contradict his own warning on sources.

            By performing a reasonable exploration of “liberal” political theory of Locke in chapter three of The Unvarnished Doctrine, Dworetz establishes the that primary concerns of the colonists in the eighteenth century consisted of taxation, representation, property, consent and liberty – all topics that Locke had extensively written on (74, 98). He continues by arguing that the considerable protests of the American colonists against Parliament’s revenue policies found justification primarily in the writings of Locke and that Locke’s theory of limited legislative government provided a critical validation for resistance against Britain’s Declaratory Act (70, 93). These claims indeed supply a compelling refutation of the classical republican claim that Locke was simply a “bourgeois capitalist” and that his ideas were not influential in the mechanical development of American political theory. In addition to his reiteration of Lockean political theory, Dworetz also invests a considerable amount of space in his book to proving that “Cato” could not have been Locke’s would-be replacement as “prophet” of the Revolution. Not only is there an alarming lack of – what he refers to as “empirical textual evidence” – to suggest that Cato’s writings were important to the Revolutionaries, Dworetz also asserts that Cato would not have resonated with any of the founders and Revolutionary leaders for the following reasons: Cato believed in original sin and claimed that the “making of laws supposes that all men are wicked”, Cato’s political theory is Hobbesian in nature and believed that laws were needed to create terror and instill order, and, lastly, Cato believed that liberty and property were as linked as Locke did, thus making Cato no less of a “capitalist” with regard to liberty and property than Locke (41, 100, 101, 104, 109). While Dworetz does a particularly good job of showing that the writings and ideas of Locke were more in tune with traditional Revolutionary values than Cato, he leaves the overwhelming burden of proof for chapter five where he discusses the relationship between the New England clergy and Locke’s theological and political writings.

            Near the end of chapter four, Dworetz lays the foundation for the next chapter by claiming that Locke was “distinctively a Biblical Christian” (118). While the classical republicans did call into question Locke’s spirituality (and Locke’s religious predilections would certainly have an impact on the general acceptability of Locke’s theological arguments by the host of New England clergy), the suggestion that Locke was a “Biblical Christian” is problematic on many levels. The first question this raises is: what does Dworetz mean by “Biblical Christian”? It would not be inappropriate to suggest that Christianity remains a spiritual tradition without an overriding orthodoxy and yet Dworetz does nothing to qualify that label except to say that Locke believed that God existed and that he, evidently, was a powerful deity. This definition could just as easily describe a devout Jew or Muslim as much as it would a “Biblical Christian”. Unfortunately, this question is not resolved anywhere else in the text and it is upon this basic assumption that Dworetz proceeds to the most important chapter of his book: establishing a relationship between his ideas and writings, and those that would – ostensibly – serve to disseminate them to the public: the New England clergy. This element of Dworetz’s research is, perhaps, the most unique as he branches into the writings of the colonial religious culture to find explanations for the colonial political culture. This method can provide its own challenges, however, as you must first demonstrate that the New England clergy really were representative of the larger intellectual macrocosm in America while, simultaneously, demonstrating that the colonists themselves tended to “take their ministers seriously” (135). Arguing that the New England clergymen boldly broke the overwhelming clerical tradition of preaching “passive obedience” to a doctrine of revolution, Dworetz goes to great lengths to prove that these ministers – among the variety of religious controversies – all basically held that both reason and revelation were legitimate sources of knowledge (138, 159). From this essential foundation, Dworetz works to establish that the change in doctrines of obedience was directly influenced by Locke’s theological interpretation of Romans chapter 13. Linking old Calvinist theological principles such as the limited power of God to Locke’s principle of limited sovereignty in legislative government represents a particularly innovative interpretation in Dworetz’s book but not without the cost of exposing him to a lot of criticism (150, 154).

The connections that he establishes in this book, while excellently researched and convincingly argued, have a number of “moving parts” to them that cannot help but raise questions and inspire critical review. There are a number of places where his findings can break down. Dworetz claims to have found that, among the writings of New England clergy, Locke’s thoughts On Government were quoted more often than any other non-Biblical source, yet he doesn’t quantify this claim with actual counts or percentages, nor does he qualify it by explaining whether those citations were favorable or unfavorable (43). His suggestion that the New England clergy were a fairly representative microcosmic barometer of colonial attitudes and beliefs is not new, but it is certainly not closed off to critical analysis (59). The danger of relying on Locke’s orthodoxy as a “Biblical Christian” was already discussed, but so is his argument that the New England clergy found justification for placing reason and revelation on the same footing in Locke’s writings (147). Despite these weak points in his rousing defense of Locke’s position as vanguard of the Revolution, Dworetz delivers precisely what he aims for: to correct errors in some previous historical works on the American founding political doctrine while not seeking out a completely comprehensive explanation of the American founding (37). It is his parting advice, however, that may provide the most important contribution to this field: to leave the mutually exclusive approaches of the American founding “myth” in the past while seeking out new ways to understand how the formation of “American republicanism in the Revolutionary years was a distinctively liberal republicanism” (191).

The American Reformation

The American Reformation:

A Historiography of the Social History of Early American Christianity

            While reading the book Myth of a Christian Nation, by Gregory A. Boyd, I came across a passage where Dr. Boyd recounted a familiar scene in my own past experience: sitting in church during a service dedicated to Independence Day where an old rugged cross made of wood sat in the back corner of the stage with an American flag wrapped around it while the projector played video clips of fighter jets flying over the Capitol in Washington and the congregation sang the Star-Spangled Banner and the Battle Hymn of the Republic. In my youth I thought nothing of the images, the sounds or the general spectacle of this kind in a church service. After reading Myth, however, I began to realize how peculiar and – in a way – how distinctly American this blending of patriotism, democracy and Christianity were. Many of the American Christians I’ve had the opportunity to know personally – whether conservative, moderate or liberal – believe that American political and social values are uniquely suited to host vibrant communities of evangelical Christianity and celebrate a marriage of American exceptionalism and Christian millenarianism. The courtship of this relationship in the early republic period of American history has come under renewed study and recent scholarship has attempted to fill in the gaps left my previous historians. Early modern contemporaries and modern historians alike have found themselves challenged in trying to understand not only one of the most significant political revolutions during this period but, arguably, one of the most important socio-religious transformations in Western history as well. While the greater body of research done on early American Christianity has been centered on the theology and biographies of prominent Puritans and evangelical ministers, recent scholarship on the subject has begun trending toward an understanding of this transformation in the context of social history.[1] In this sense, the democratic and populist changes that swept across America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are no different than other similarly researched events. As with most historical research, there is no significant consensus among the scholars on many ideas expressed in each of the studies I have researched for this essay. From ideas about socio-economic conditions to clerical abuse, political power struggles, and a developing hunger among contemporaries for a new kind of ethics, it is possible to come away from each text with more questions than answers. Having completed similar research on a related social movement, the European Protestant Reformation, it has become clear that many of the research techniques, scholarly approaches and even conclusions overlap significantly between the two periods. Just as European social historians very clearly claim that the religious nature of the Protestant Reformation contained significant political connotations, American historians surveyed in this essay suggest that the political revolution in the late eighteenth century accompanied, if not altogether responded to, a budding religious revolution in North America. It is within this transatlantic historical perspective that I refer to the changing religious landscape of the early republic as an “American Reformation”. It is understandable that some may object to my reference of this period of religious history as an “American Reformation” but – as I hope to show early in this essay – the reference is not only justified, but fitting. Moreover, this essay will attempt to trace the topical evolution of the American Reformation as a “social history” in order to understand the questions it has raised, the fresh viewpoints it has unveiled, and the significant contributions it has made to our understanding this groundbreaking movement.

            As mentioned previously, there are several shared themes, techniques and conclusions between the social historiography of the European Protestant Reformation and the American Reformation. The foremost and – hopefully – most obvious between these two historiographies is the attempt by social historians to place significant developments in religious history into a broader social, economic and political context. Social history surrounding the Protestant Reformation in Europe began in the mid 1960s by, mostly, German historians during a very troubled time in modern German history. As any historian might remember, Germany was divided into two separate nations – one communist, one democratic – and the clash of ideologies bled over into every facet of life, including historical research. Produced as a post-modern descendent of Marxist economic-historical critique, the new social history attempted to place new interpretations on previously settled historical questions like the German Reformation. Firstly, I would like to show that the social historians of the American Reformation not only shared similarities in technique and findings with their European counterparts, but also that there is a solid chronological continuity from the European studies to the analogous American ones. Whereas the bulk of European Protestant Reformation scholarship was published between 1979 and 1988, most of the current scholarship on the American Reformation was done between 1985 and 1994. There are, of course, a few outlying exceptions for both research fields on both sides of the timeframe, but, again, the large majority of published works fall into those timeframes. Researchers like Max Weber, Steven Ozment, Hans Hillerbrand, Peter Blickle and Lee Palmer Wandel – among others – took up the history of the common man’s Reformation with particular enthusiasm, exploring questions of increased involvement of local layman on the eve of the Reformation, the German Peasant War of 1525, Christian millennialism, iconoclasm, clerical antagonism, the notion of sola scriptura, local election of church pastors in conjunction with increased laity control over church administration and access to the Bible in vernacular German. As will hopefully become evident through the course of this essay, American and European social historians shared as much in common as the two religious cultures they studied.[2]

            Turning now to the research on the relationship between American Christianity and American democracy it seems appropriate to begin with Alexis de Tocqueville. Certainly, it feels suitable to begin with Tocqueville by the simple fact that he was among the first scholars to write extensively about the relationship between American Christianity and American democracy, or that he is quoted ubiquitously on the subject by twentieth-century historians, but it is also fitting that should begin a comparison of Protestant religious phenomena on two continents with the observations of a Catholic that had a foot in both. While it is true that Tocqueville was not an American, a Protestant or a “common” man, he does provide an important window into understanding this relationship during the early republic period. In the book Tocqueville’s Civil Religion, Sanford Kessler attempts to bring Tocqueville’s astute observations and claims about American “civil religion” into a context of the contemporary social history. Kessler’s understanding of Tocqueville, constructed from an analysis of the book Democracy in America, begins from the starting point that religion was the first of America’s political institutions. Claiming that Protestantism – from the very beginning with Luther – required a very real and present reliance on private judgment, Tocqueville draws an invisible, but direct, line from the events in America to the events in Reformation Europe. Not only is this reliance on private judgment a hallmark of Protestant confessions, it is – as he reminds us – a requirement democratic polity. Moreover, Tocqueville’s unique attunement to the contemporary cultural phenomena of democratic populism led him to claim, well ahead of his time, that religious authority had shifted dramatically after Jefferson’s election to become vested in public opinion for most Americans. This new democratic atmosphere not only fostered the Enlightenment and sectarianism, but also allowed religion to function as a practical apparatus for common people to access political franchise and even political power.

This is not to say, however, that Tocqueville believed that these changes did not come without considerable risk. Indeed, the principles of democratic equality, if implemented in daily life, had such a decentralizing and individualizing potential that he feared it might bring down traditional Christian institutions. As some modern historians would later argue, Tocqueville could not have been more correct. These dangers were born out of evangelical religious leaders and itinerant preachers – most of whom placed such a central emphasis on eternal salvation and eternal damnation – making the acceptance of Christianity dependent on self-interested motivations. Kessler, in his appraisal of Tocqueville’s study, finds few faults in this visionary observer, but primary among them is his most serious failure to anticipate or acknowledge the importance of American evangelicalism, which goes almost completely unmentioned in Democracy in America.[3] These conclusions and observations of Tocqueville on the effects of individualization and democratic values on American Christianity are similar, in many respects, to those that were made in European Reformation studies about the affirmation of the laity and the relationship between the Reformation and the German Peasant War of 1525 as a means to access power through the close-knit religious communities made by Gunther Vogel, Heiko Oberman and Peter Blickle. Where the German Peasants had failed in their revolt against oppressive ecclesiastical and feudal lords, the Americans succeeded and – in doing so – secured even more control over their local religious and political communities than the Reformation-era Germans were able to.

One topic that few other historians even attempted to seriously address in their research was the concept of evangelical millennialism. I found that the relatively surprising gap in this field of research was sufficiently and pleasantly filled with Ruth Bloch’s 1985 book, Visionary Republic. Millennialism, according to Bloch, returned with vigor to the forefront of Christian communities after the Protestant Reformation – especially among the more radical denominations – and, in response to magisterial persecution, these communities were forced to migrate to America bringing the millennialist expectation with them. For the English colonists, she claims that millennialism started mostly in the English Civil War in 1640 by the Whigs, and Radical Whig ideology came, in part, from some of the more radical elements of the Reformation. While the Puritans were especially attuned to this concept, Bloch believes that the French and Indian War on the eve of the American Revolution helped advance the belief that the end was near as it was the worst in a series of wars between England and France, Europe’s two largest and strongest powers. Moreover, the French and Indian War saw an uncommonly high increase in the employment of terms such as “liberty” and “tyranny” especially when drawing a distinction between English civil liberty and French monarchy, or Protestant and Catholic values. The American millennial vision was almost wholly centered on the American belief that these colonies had a special role to place in bringing about the end of days and the coming of the Lord, and soon after the French and Indian War charges of “Romish” behavior – which was synonymous in eighteenth century English society with antichristian – in the Church of England were also levied as veiled attacks against the English political institutions. The American Revolution, then, was not simply a political revolution, according to Bloch, but also may have been understood as Christians participating in a movement that would bring them one step closer to the coming of the Kingdom of God. After establishing that American colonists were abundant in comfort with Great Britain being paralleled with the Beast of Revelation, she outlines a very meticulous path among American evangelicals in the earliest years of the republic of disillusionment with the centralization of American government. This disillusionment translated, in Bloch’s research, to a direct religious change of Christianity’s enemy from the British Empire to moral and social reform at home. In other words, with the enemy from without subdued, American Christians turned their attention to the myriad of enemies within near the turn of the nineteenth century.[4] While Bloch’s survey of American millennialism stops, rather abruptly, around 1800, what she does provide is fascinating and enlightening. What she does appear to lack, however, is the permutation of American millennialism that inevitably came in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Her more than fifty pages of endnotes demonstrate both the extensive and diverse research she conducted for this book, much of which are primary sources ranging from sermons to hymns and even early modern prophetic pamphlets. Bloch’s work not only does much of the heavy lifting in drawing a thematic line between European religious phenomena and the American Revolution, but also sets up a perfectly acceptable foundation for understanding the kind of political, social and religious expectation that set the evangelical revolution in motion in the nineteenth century.

In his 1987 book, Faith of Our Fathers, Edwin Gaustad attempted to build, in some respects, upon those initial observations about the institutionalized nature of religion in America by analyzing not only the state of American religious sentiments in the early republic but also the doctrinal confrontations between evangelicals and the Founding Fathers. Gaustad argues that in the decades leading up to the Revolution, evangelicals began a socially intrusive campaign against ecclesiastical authority. This campaign, he claims, stemmed from the popular opinion among Americans that civil and religious authorities were co-conspirators in the effort to keep men in servility, thus the liberty of one necessitated the liberty of the other. This attack on religious authority did not happen in a vacuum, however. The Church of England went wherever England went, and to attack the legitimacy of the Church of England was to attack the legitimacy of England in whole. In the same way that the Reformation movement was a rebellion against papal and Catholic ecclesiastical abuses, so too was the rise of evangelical reform movements a rebellion – of sorts – against England in Gaustad’s opinion. After the success of the Federalist agenda in 1789, churchgoers in America found it more appropriate to become closely involved in both the administration both of their local church as well as government policy. The explosion of evangelicalism is in some respects, according to Gaustad, a response to Federalist success in government of keeping power both centrally located and in fewer hands than many Americans were comfortable with. It should be no surprise – in the way that Gaustad frames his message – that the explosion of evangelical religion in America coincided with the Jeffersonian presidencies. In simple terms, evangelicalism was most certainly an exercise in popular authority by lay churchmen. Gaustad’s conclusions are drawn, if not too heavily, on the overwhelming statistical data that illustrates just how quickly the Methodists and Baptists replace the Congregationalists and Episcopalians as the churches with the most members. Indeed, in just seventy years Methodism grew to be over 500,000 members and outnumbered Congregationalism, Episcopal, Presbyterian and Lutheranism combined. Like many of his contemporaries, he finds solid footing on the inter-related nature of the cultural transformation as he claims that the “age of volunteerism turned into an age of reform – an American revolution all over again, only this time not in politics but religion.”[5] In the epilogue of his book, Gaustad initiates what will become a recurrent theme in the study of Western Christianity, by claiming that religion, like politics, found itself torn between establishing liberty and equality via individualization and governing via community. Where Gaustad might earn some criticism is that his endnotes cite, so lopsidedly, secondary resources from the mid-to-late twentieth century in contrast to some contemporary works that do far more analysis of primary documents. This is not to suggest, however, that Gaustad did not perform an appropriate amount of research but the question of how much of his conclusions and arguments rely on other historians remains. I also found it curious that his analysis of the social dimensions of American evangelicalism were located in the beginning and the end, but the middle sections of his book – where one might find evidence of extensive and exhaustive research in the primary sources – were only biographic profiles of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison and Adams. These chapters were not entirely unrelated to the central thesis of this book, but the unusual format certainly made it harder to follow the thread of thought from start to finish. In all, however, I think Gaustad’s argument that challenges to ecclesiastical authority in the eighteenth century paved the way for American challenges to English political authority are valid and deserving of further investigation.

The suggestion that evangelicals were the “principal subculture” and among the principal shapers of the larger American social, religious and political culture is the topic that occupies Richard Carwadine’s 1993 book, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America. Focusing his research primarily on the larger denominations of the nineteenth century, he claims that there was considerable pressure from within the rank-and-file membership for ministers and organizations to throw their collective weight behind moral legislation during this period. Whatever prior objections Christianity had about getting into bed with politicians and governments had to be laid to rest quickly as, Carwadine claims, to abstain from political involvement would have been to swim against the current of mainstream American expectations, religious or otherwise. Providing an uncompromising tone to American politics, the visionary and idealistic evangelical Christian communities exercised a more active role in influencing the direction that American society took, after complaining from the political sidelines about corrupt electioneering by the party-driven system that flourished after Jefferson. The most important contribution that this hefty work of scholarship provides to the field is an explanation of the evolving relationship between evangelical denominations, especially Baptists and Methodists, and political parties, such as the Whigs, to deliberately and effectively influence the legislative process in America. Moreover, what is particularly significant about this relationship is that it was driven by pressure from within those denominations and it represents a radical change in status for the Methodists and Baptists who, until then, had been denominations that represented those on the disenfranchised margins of American society.[6] The similarities in the evolution of church-state relations between the Methodists and Baptists in America and the Lutherans and Calvinists in Europe are striking and, as with several other topics, are prime targets for further review.

Approaching the topic of early American evangelicalism from the rare perspective of gender studies, Susan Juster’s Disorderly Women strikes a delightfully balanced note between respecting the evangelical movement on its own terms while incorporating important questions about how masculine and feminine relationships influenced the dominant religious and political values of the time. While the gender perspective is both important to historical studies in general and to this topic in particular, I am particularly interested in the arguments that she raises with regard to the relationship between American religious communities and the political development of American democracy. This selective treatment of the text should not be interpreted as a lack of respect for the body of Juster’s research, rather it simply reflects the focus of this essay’s historiographical question. As Juster, herself, claims that this book is more about political discourse and the boundaries of power than simply gender in Christianity, I feel that my interpretation of the text for these purposes is within bounds. Juster’s overriding theme in Disorderly Women is that evangelicalism was a “particularly powerful way” to construct the relationship between self and community and, in light of that, New Light Puritanism can be understood as movement that facilitated a “relative egalitarianism” with regard to church government in colonial America. Perhaps more directly to the point, Juster claims that early American history can be understood as an “evolution of political ideology away from the consensual model of republican virtue to the mechanical mode of democratic self-interest”. It is precisely this theme of transference from republicanism to democratic ideologies. The Great Awakening overturned the hierarchy and structure of sacred space, while social arrangements and social orders were abandoned at revival camp meetings. Not only would you find the poor, the marginalized and the sinners, but you would also find the itinerant preacher providing access to the power of God. Drawing from a concept that the “feminine” element of society does not simply include women – but also the marginalized – her claims at evangelical egalitarianism begin to take sharp focus. These camp meetings had both religious and political significance in that the Puritan community was made up of highly ordered people and space, and the evangelical community was one of language: something everyone had equal access to and – at least theoretically – equal control over. It was this quasi-egalitarian “golden age” that was sacrificed during the Revolution as the cultural tide in America shifted to a hyper-masculine sense of independence, making a revolution for property rights and right of self-rule for proto-Victorian values against Britain more important than the retention of Christian communal equality. Turning to the question of the American Revolution, Juster claims that was radical in that evangelicals – especially Baptists – wanted to see the apparatus of church and state disappear, but less radical in that they sacrificed many of their “called out” values at the alter of political revolution. In the midst of the American Revolution, Evangelicals began to transfer their position from “outside” temporal and spatial arrangements of power to engage them from within and, in doing so, secured a powerful position in that alliance. Post-Revolutionary America, to Juster, represented the completion of a shift in values from the egalitarian qualities of primitive evangelicalism – an expression best seen in the Anabaptist communities of southeastern Germany – to a renewed affirmation of cultural masculinity. In the end, she we are asked to revisit the age-old question of “what does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?” as she argues that evangelicals sacrificed too many of the egalitarian principles that made them attractive to the “feminized” element of American society in order to become mainstream and acceptable within the new masculine-dominated social order.[7] Disorderly Women is a particularly well-researched book and the number of Puritan and Baptist church records books she pored over in order to write this book is overwhelmingly impressive. Her interpretation of masculinity and femininity in the negotiation of social power provides an altogether rare vision of American power politics and the role that evangelicals played in creating, then abandoning, a true vision of inclusion for all.

While there are many good questions yet to be raised over what the “spiritual center” of Christianity in America is, there are few scholarly discussions that take place on this question without Mark Noll’s extensive research coming to the table. His many books and papers on the topic of American Christianity are considered to be among the highest and most exhaustive secondary sources in modern historical research. One of the earliest papers Noll wrote on the subject of American Christianity was, titled “The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation, 1776-1865”, wherein approaches the centrality of the Bible as a text of private as well as political significance in the early republic. To Noll, the Bible was not only used in private for personal “nourishment”, but ministers used it to explain and encourage the American vision that saw exceptionalistic potential and destiny. From the most unlikely success of the Revolution, ministers were able to claim that America had a divinely providential place in God’s plan to redeem the world and establish the Kingdom. In this way, the Bible was both a source of truth, the source of a narrative that could be replicated to produce prosperity and power. In a later paper, titled “Revolution and the Rise of Evangelical Social Influence in North Atlantic Societies”, Noll explores what he sees as a consistent relationship between evangelical revivalism and political revolution in North Atlantic countries. Market revolution was a very close ally to evangelicalism at “every state in its North Atlantic history”, Noll claims and suggests that Evangelical preachers “exploited” revolutionary environments in various regions. The success of evangelical revolution in America – among other regions – was due to the success of political revolutions. Noll claims that successful economic and political revolutions have the effect of destroying traditions. In the midst of disarray, the individualization of evangelical religion found it much easier to spread than under the more traditional – if not more repressive – social conditions. It does not take much to see how these observations are related to those arguments – made especially by Peter Blickle – that the German Reformation was a hand-in-hand collaborator of the German Peasant Revolt of 1525. It is in his 576-page tome, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, that Noll shows his most exhaustive research. In this book, he claims that there was – and some say there still is – a symbiotic relationship between American socio-political identity and American religious identity. Tracing the beginning of the major social changes to the population booms following the American Revolution, he claims that churches in America had to meet the needs of a growing and diverse communities, produce enough trained ministers to meet the demands of that growth, and expand their influence to the “hinterlands” of the colonies in response to the migration and expansion. The subsequent revivals that contributed to the Great Awakening saw the Gospel preached more to the socially outcast element of America more than any other time in history.  Instead of insisting that sinners come to church, the revival mentality saw that church came to the sinner. He also claims that the Great Awakening was America’s first truly “national” event: it facilitated an identification of individuals as Americans and fostered a growing distrust of European hierarchical order. The fear of centralized political tyranny after the French and Indian War led many Americans to affirm that the human being was responsible for his own conscience and this translated to religious beliefs as well, thus leading to the evangelical revolution. Noll attunes his argument about the values-smashing nature of revolutions in general to the American Revolution in particular and claims that it stimulated social changes of every kind, including the “new tide of democracy” that influenced the old denominations and created new ones. The result of these changes was that by the midpoint of the nineteenth century evangelicals were no longer the “outsiders” of American religion but, rather, occupied the greatest and highest positions of social and political recognition. This is not to say, however, that there were not still “outsiders” to reach – or exploit – as he turns, albeit briefly, to the question of Mormonism and Joseph Smith. Smith’s religion, Noll claims, drew upon culturally surging themes of democracy – the right of one to choose and think for himself – and republicanism – the distrust of power to corral a new congregation of followers for an entirely new dispensation: a topic that is brilliantly researched by the next author, John Brooke.[8]

In his book, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of a Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844, Brooke immediately introduces the reader to one of the most powerful differences between Mormonism – now referred to as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – and the rest of the Christian denominations that were created and flourished in the early nineteenth century: Mormonism was not a new denomination, but an entirely new dispensation – equal to the ones given to Moses and Jesus. Brooke, while on shaky ground according to some criticism he has received in response to this book, is insistent that the cultural “preparation” among the disenfranchised members of American society was linked, albeit via a rather ambiguous and confusing route, to the Radical Reformation movements of Europe. Similarly to Bloch’s arguments about the transmutation of expectant millennialism from the Radical Reformation communities to American evangelical groups, Brooke also claims that Mormon cosmology was influenced heavily by restorationist millennialism and occultism. Occult practices, Brooke claims, accompanied the migration patterns of communities that came over from Europe after magistrates started cracking down on Radical Reformation sects, though he does little to substantiate that claim. Where his argument does find stronger footing is in the area of social franchise. Mormonism gave radical Christians a place to belong and captured a popular need to restore authoritative polity to Christian religion in a very decentralized and fragmented faith, while not being strictly hierarchical. In this way, Brooke claims that the founding families of the Mormon faith were all “particularly prepared” because of the outsider and dejected social conditions they came from. Not only did Mormonism give outsiders ground-level access to a new community that promised both social and cosmically metaphysical power, but Smith also relied on the economic anxieties of these families. In the new faith debt was emphatically placed as a supreme enemy, but Smith also placed a premium on alchemical and counterfeiting practices that – according to Brooke – many of these families would have already been familiar with. Alchemy was important for these radical Christian sects, Mormonism included, because it was a vehicle of wealth for poor families and communities. The ability to change common materials to precious metals or stones was, as Brooke alludes to, the ultimate “get-rich-quick” scheme of the day. Moreover, the creation of a new money economy in America saw an unprecedented growth in counterfeiting, from coins to bills or – in Smith’s case – religious documents. These documents were worth more than money to those that needed to hear what was contained within and it was the content of those documents, rather than the dubious nature of their creation, that were valuable to the early Mormon families. In this way, Brooke argues that a “ church of miracles attracted a particular kind of convert”, with the implication being that those converts were either naïve, desperate or both. Whatever the case, Brooke’s book – despite some of the criticisms it received – does quite a bit not only to trace a line via similar cultural conditions between radical, post-Reformation American Christianity and radical, post-Reformation European Christianity, but he draws an intentionally direct one as well, linking the two research fields together as well.[9]

With his two books, The Sacred Cause of Liberty and The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan Hatch has shown why his is one of America’s leading scholars on the topic of the American Reformation. Tracing the symbiotic revolution of evangelicalism and populist democracy in America from the late eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth century, Hatch has provided the kind of research and analysis that only a very few American historians of this period have ever reached. A fellow professor of history at Notre Dame with Mark Noll, Hatch’s work matches a similar quality and, in the process, has earned several prestigious awards in American history. In his earlier work, The Sacred Cause of Liberty, Hatch outlines how republican liberty came to be known as a cardinal Christian belief – thus necessitating a strong reliance on individual conscience – and how between 1740-1780 the clergy were asked to be ever-increasingly involved in the formation of a prosperous and republican nation. Among other topics, this book’s central area of focus is on American ministerial involvement in the Revolution via the vision of “God’s elect” against the “antichrist” of oppression and tyranny. Hatch claims that the civil millennialism of the Revolution grew directly from politicizing the millennialist expectations and experiences of New Englanders for the prior 20 years and that American ministers were convinced that they were to play a special role in the providence of the coming of the millennium. Hatch also claims that the “vision of history” in Revolutionary New England was that the success or failure of liberty was the single thread of events that connected the European Protestant Reformation to the Revolution. Once the Revolution was over and independence from Britain had been secured, the quest for virtue – the lack of which in history showed to be the death of the ancient republics – was the preeminent quest of American clerical and political patriotism, according to Hatch. The republic’s future was understood to be tied to the amount of its direct investment in American Christianity, both in public education an the promotion of public worship and which assisted in a developing belief, for many Christians, that “cosmic forces” were arrayed against liberty to continue seeking religious and civil oppression. Moreover, a sense of romantic patriotism provided ministers and churches with the solidarity of Christian unity that they required in a time of intense denominational splitting. It is the occasion of this intense fragmentation of American Christianity that occupies Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity, wherein he argues that democratization is the key to understanding American Christianity and suggests that an increasing value of populism changed both the political and social landscape. Claiming that the Revolution changed the dynamic of American society in all forms, he goes on to argue that people could take charge of their own lives not only in politics, but in their religious associations as well. In this wildly changing climate of religious associations, American Christianity suffered from a form of “withering” institutional establishments, as American congregants wanted their churches to come down to their level. Moreover, Hatch’s claims are pinned on the suggestion that the establishment of major print in America made all of these changes possible and this change shifted the power to produce information away from the elites of American society to commoners. What immediately becomes obvious, with Hatch’s expert help, from analyzing the papers produced by this print revolution is that there was a deep-seated animosity against the educated and highly-trained professionals in American society and that this anticlericalism was part of a larger movement of class struggle. Traditional institutions were portrayed as incompetent, there were ubiquitous comparisons of the educated clergy to an aristocracy or canonical tyrants and a general equation of “elite” professionals with the antichrist. The religious free-market principles that Hatch sees in the early nineteenth century lowered the quality of religious rigor as the population of America – then as now – favored the majority of individuals with little or no education over the elite few that received extensive educational training. Sermons of this time became very similar in nature to campaign speeches, with elements of demagoguery and party-style membership recruiting, where populism in religion borrowed from revolutionary ideas of dissent as well as fear of consolidated and “back-room” power. Hatch claims that there was a complete lack of uniform recognition in religious circles and that this coupled nicely with a cultural development that helped democracy and nationalism became the uniform idea that everyone could jump on board with. This is not to say, however, that there was a declension of religious zeal in favor for the political sphere, but rather that Hatch sees transference of popular assent from traditional institutions to the enthusiastic revival. This period, according to Hatch and many others, is characterized by an unprecedented buffet menu of Christian churches from which the average citizen could choose, and since the common man had a tendency to identify with itinerant and unschooled preachers, the solidification of evangelical populism became complete. Hatch’s work helps bring the question of the American Reformation back to a practical question of, “how did this period shape the landscape of American religion today?” He suggests that democratization has led to a complete, downward trend in the kind of men that American religion and statecraft produces reminding today’s Americans of the woeful fact that post-democratic America has not produced the kind of theologian as Jonathan Edwards or the kinds of statesmen as our Founding Fathers. The term “winning souls” has become an indicator of a capitalistic numbers game of quantity over quality in both American churches and American politics and, barring another epoch-splitting catalyst, it is unlikely to ever do so again.[10]

It is a common axiom among historians that a topic will receive as many unique interpretations as there are scholars researching it. The American Reformation, while able to be loosely grouped into a finite number of mildly contending groups, is no exception. Perhaps one of the strongest qualities of modern historical research is the diversity of viewpoints offered among scholars. There should be no doubt that the studies of social historians on topics of both European and American religious phenomena have irrevocably impacted the modern historical discipline and, by my estimation, for the better. What we may now see more clearly through the efforts of both historical fields is that each respective religious Reformation served not only to reinvigorate religious affections among groups of people that may have otherwise seen declension, but that they served another – perhaps even greater – purpose of providing those outlying members of society access to political, economic and social power that had been so long to them denied. Perhaps more importantly, with regard to the history itself, this socialization of historical research provided both the inspiration and the means for scholars to research the most underrepresented demographic in history: the everyday person. From comprehensive social studies, like A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, to gender-related research projects, like Disorderly Women, social history of the American evangelical revolution has cast an increasingly bright light into the shadows of our common past. Understanding such an important turning point in American history is crucial for understanding the world we currently live in. It is difficult to resist, in history, the dangerous temptation of an easy explanation and the potential overzealousness to draw direct causalities, especially on a subject so profoundly important as democratization. The rich heterodoxy of the American Reformation research provides generous material for not only understanding the nature of the movement itself, but also insights into the culture that produces the historiography.

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[1] Harry Stout, “George Whitefield in Three Countries,” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies in Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles and Beyond, 1740-1990, ed. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington and George A. Rawlyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 68.

[2] See attached bibliography for list of published works cited in German Reformation social history

[3] Sanford Kessler, Tocqueville’s Civil Religion: American Christianity and the Prospects for Freedom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 2, 17, 50, 86, 93, 95, 98, 169.

[4] Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3, 4, 13, 37, 43, 47, 58, 68, 87, 107, 110.

[5] Edwin Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 13, 21, 110, 122, 123, 136.

[6] Richard Carwadine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), ix, xv, xix, 9, 17, 34, 61.

[7] Susan Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), vii, 3, 4, 10, 11, 22, 24, 33, 108, 113, 144.

[8] Mark Noll, “Revolution and the Rise of Evangelical Social Influence in North Atlantic Societies” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies in Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles and Beyond, 1740-1990, ed. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington and George A. Rawlyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 113-30.

Mark Noll, “The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation, 1776-1865” in The Bible in America, ed. Nathan O. Hatch, Mark A. Noll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 41-3.

Mark Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), 83-243.

[9] John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of the Mormon Cosmology, 1644 – 1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

[10] Nathan Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

On Tragedy, Poetry and Justice

On Tragedy, Poetry and Justice

            In the late eight-century BCE, the Hebrew prophet Amos spoke on behalf of YHVH and instructed the people of Israel to, “Hate evil, love goodness and establish justice at all entrances. Perhaps then YHVH, the God of the hosts, will show favor to the remnant of Joseph.”[1] Upon opening the Hebrew Tanakh, one may turn to nearly any passage and find that this collection of holy texts is overwhelmingly concerned with mishpat, the performance of “justice.” Indeed, the word mishpat appears over 400 times in the Tanakh, compared with only nine times for the Greek analogs of krisis and dike in the New Testament.[2] In this respect, one may say that the Hebrew-Jewish tradition is one devoted to facilitating an establishment of justice on Earth, with the Laws of Moses forming the cornerstone. This decalogical approach to justice – the attempt to establish justice through the legally established ethical code of the Hebrew-speaking population of ancient Palestine – was not simply a contractual agreement among the people of Israel, but a literal covenant between Israel’s descendents and El, the Holy One.[3] This emphasis on an eternal law, imparted by an eternal and unchanging god, was the key difference between the Hebrew culture and those cultures that surrounded them in all directions. That is not to say, of course, that other contemporary cultures were not devoted to justice but, rather, that these cultures included understandings of justice that differed both in its source and its measuring. Though all cultural impressions of justice from the ancient world – the Hebrews included – contained elements that were constructed out of social necessity, there were also philosophers in Athens that understood a justice that was neither metaphysical, nor anthropological in nature.

            These men understood justice in the concept of dike: the dice-roll, a measure dispensed by physis.[4] This dikaiophysis cannot be acquired, controlled or even understood by humankind. [5] The observations of these Athenian philosophers led them to understand that physis – simply by being – moves, builds energy, stores it and releases it as needed. To impose a human morality or ethical judgment to the behavior of the kosmos is not only inappropriate, but also ultimately fruitless.[6] Without assigning a consciousness to it, they simply understood that physis will simply do as it requires regardless of the human life that may be affected by it. This necessary collection and dispersion of energy and matter is neither benevolent nor malevolent, nor is it ambivalent either: it simply is.

            Perhaps one of the best examples of this kind of thinking can be found in the tragoida of Sophocles, particularly the trilogy of Oedipus Tyrannus. In his Oedipal tragedy, one of the themes that Sophocles appears intent on establishing is a healthy skepticism of the new mathesis school of thought that would attempt to fit the raw deinos power of physis into a neat and orderly mathematical form.[7] This comes as a stern warning against the seductive belief that the anthropos can observe a formula that will tame physis and produce a more “just” environment for the flourishing of human civilization. He is also quick to show that mathesis is not the only tool that man would use to subvert nature, but that men like Oedipus would also use logos.[8] Sophocles would have us know that while the power of logos does enable humankind to transfer our understanding of physis to one another, it can also behave as the mechanism that allows physis to hide itself. It would not be inappropriate to suggest that the one apparatus that humankind can point to as our key to unlocking the mysteries of the Universe was produced for us by physis to veil our understanding of it. As Teiresias said, “Of themselves things will come, although I hide them and breathe no word of them.”[9] In the last play of his trilogy, Antigone, Sophocles warns the anthropos about any attempt to escape the inevitable tragoida nature of life on Earth.[10] The tragedy of Sophocles is about strife and conflict, though it is not necessarily malicious in nature. As a form of worship to Dionysus, his tragedies involve the internal confrontation of our contradictory impulses and these conflicts are as inevitable as they are irreconcilable. This, of course, is the “tragedy” of it. Crudely stated, life – as we understand it – isn’t going to “work out” for us and we most certainly will not get out alive. The tragoidos that Sophocles presents before his audience is intended not only to provide a kind of entertainment, but also to mitigate any expectations of imported metaphysical justice while embracing the Dionysian virtue of affirming life in any form it chooses to present itself. Moreover, the conflict of Antigone can be understood as mirroring the conflict that the human being wages in her own life: a conflict between the inescapable immanence of physis and the heavenly ideals of nomos.[11] As often as the dike of physis finds itself subject to the various interpretations of the anthropos, the ideals of nomos are on much flimsier footing and the inevitable contradictions in those ideals can quickly put two individuals at odds with one another. Not only does Antigone reveal the nature of these conflicts between human conventions and human justice when she says, “I shall be a criminal – but a religious one”, but Sophocles crafts her revelations carefully near line 555 when she concedes that her sister was “right in the eyes of one, and I in the other”.[12] Antigone’s defiant declarations expose this human belief in the metaphysical “trump card” when she tells Creon, “Yes, it was not Zeus that made the proclamation; nor did Justice, which lives with those below, that enacts such laws as that, for mankind. I did not believe your proclamation had such power to enable one who will someday die to override God’s ordinances, unwritten and secure”.[13] This dike of Sophocles, however, does not decide who is right or wrong in the matter of human affairs. One would even be warranted in suggesting that the justice of human affairs is not found in the quid pro quo reciprocity of the law, but in the natural tension that exists between two opposing or contradictory forces. Furthermore, this tension between two forces or two people – which cannot be grasped or made to settle into a firm mold – may be thought of as a pattern of ebb and flow in an unceasing exchange of energy. Indeed, any attempts to manipulate or circumvent this tension may leave us like Creon who – only after calamity has struck his family – admits to “the awful blindness of those plans of mine”, to which the chorus in Sophocles’ play answers, “I think you have learned justice – but only too late”.[14] In the final lines of Antigone, Sophocles’ Chorus leaves the audience with the sobering advice to, “Pray for no more at all. For what is destined for us, men mortal, there is no escape.” To the Athenian mind of Sophocles, physis will measure out to each of us what is just and no appeal to the nomos of metaphysis will help any of us escape it.[15]

            The careful reader may now be asking herself what she can make of this dikaiophysis in a world where the decalogical ethics of the Judeo-Christian tradition seems so inescapable. The uneasy tension between the modes of “justice” for Athens and Jerusalem is, perhaps, best seen in the poems of Paul Celan. As a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, Celan not only embodies the victim of tragedy and injustice, but also exemplifies the classical tension between the Greco-European and the Hebrew-Oriental traditions. His poetry – influenced heavily by Greco-German philosophy, Jewish Messianic expectation and the ultimate tragedy of Ha-Shoah – confronts the aporia of these questions in a subtle, yet unapologetic fashion that brings his internal conflict and angst into full view.[16] Like many Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Celan was faced with what may be ultimately unanswerable questions about the inherent nature of humankind, the benevolence of divinity towards humankind, and what constitutes justice between men. In the Hebrew tradition, the Decalogical Law of Moses represents the formulaically ethical path to a concrete and metaphysically imported justice.

The five-line poem “In Rivers” touches this idea most directly where Celan writes, “In rivers north of the future / I cast the net you / haltingly weight / with stonewritten / shadows.” While there are certainly interpretations that are more faithful to Celan’s intent than others, his poems can be read in a number of different ways. I would offer a reading of this poem that draws on all three previously mentioned themes: Greco-German philosophy, Jewish Messianic expectation and Ha-Shoah.[17] As with Hölderlinian poetry, rivers can be understood both as vehicles for the passage of time, but also as thresholds: not only in a geographical sense, but also with regards to both the separation and gathering of life and death, the spheres of the mortal and the divine. These rivers “north of the future” not only establish a tense and chiastic relationship between chronos and kairos time in the poem, but also set up a foundation for the sense of longing that Celan intends to communicate.[18] At these rivers he casts the net, an allusion to the fisherman apostles of Christianity but also an exercise of faith in the face of hopelessness; not only in the sense of the apostles leaving their nets behind to follow Jesus, but it also refers to the two times that Jesus instructed his apostles to cast their nets and were greatly rewarded for their obedience and faith.[19] The nets, however, were “hesitantly burdened” (zögernd beshwerst) with “stonewritten shadows.” This line provides a unique window into Celan’s poetic genius, as the careful reader may be able to make out deliberate allusions not only to the Decalogue, but the teachings of Plato, Jesus and Nietzsche as well. Plato understood the best ideals of human life to be but “shadows” of the eternal light of the divine. As for the Christian imagery in this line, one might remember that Jesus calls his “net” or “yoke” a “light burden” that makes the schwergewicht of the “stonewritten” Law of Moses a mere shadow of itself.[20] Celan also seems to make use of this Platonic teaching only to turn it on its proverbial ear by showing how crushingly heavy even the shadow of that which is “stonewritten” in Judaism has proved to be on the Jewish people in history. Yet it is this schwergewicht that is precisely the kind of burden that – as Nietzsche claimed in his novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra – was ripe for the teeth of “the Lion”. In this way, Nietzsche seemed to argue that the burdens of metaphysical convention weigh down the human being and distance it from an appropriate relationship with physis, keeping her – as Heidegger might say – “homeless.” While this five-line poem does seem to convey a message of disillusionment with the Decalogue of Judaic religious and cultural tradition, it may go too far to suggest that Celan has no faith in the Hebrew tradition of justice that attempts to place the “the other” in an experiential relationship with “the self.”

Similarly, in the nine-line Jerusalem poem, “There Stood”, Celan notes the surroundings of he and his erotic companion, “There stood / a splinter of fig on your lip, / there stood / Jerusalem around us, / there stood / the bright pine scent / above the Danish skiff we thanked, / I stood / in you.” In the first three stanzas, Celan observes – an act that distances him from those objects. He is distanced from the lip of his companion, from the whole city of Jerusalem surrounding him, and even from the scents of pine. But his distance evaporates by the final stanza when he writes, “I stood in you.” Not only is there an erotic function of this rhetorical device – and it should not be ignored – but there is also a subtle philosophical worldview revealed here. One of the foundational principles of justice in the Judeo-Hebrew tradition instructs men to “practice love for the other, for you were once an other in a strange land.”[21] By standing in the “other”, Celan is affirming the ethical attempt to navigate, and close, that invisible distance between the “self” and the “other” while – as we saw earlier – not relying on decalogical metaphysics.[22] Indeed, while many in theological history may have treated his ethical teachings as “irrelevant” when compared to the dominant “atonement” theologies that sprouted up after his death, it seems that Jesus may have anticipated this non-decalogical Hebrew ethics in his own life.[23] The mere suggestion that one could simply collapse the hundreds and thousands of commandments in the Torah (and the accompanying Talmud) into a simple observation of loving “the other as you love your self”, was both scandalous and radical in the first century and, to some, it still is.[24]

Readers of Celan may also recognize this merging of self and other through the lens of dikaiophysis in the poem “I Drink Wine” as he writes, “I drink wine from two glasses / and plow away at / the king’s caesura / like that one / at Pindar, / God turns in his tuning fork / as one among the least / of the Just, / the lottery drum spills / our two bits.”[25] As with Celan’s other poems, these ten lines contain enough potential meanings to fill a dozen pages. One might make a successful reading of Celan claiming to “drink wine from two glasses” as a recognition of his dual heritage, both Jewish and German. The fact that he “[plows] away at the king’s caesura” may suggest not only that he recognizes no natural break between his German and Jewish heritage in the same way that Pindar recognized no natural break between poet and priest. Further on in the poem, Celan claims that “God turns in his tuning fork as one among the least of the Just” which, in my reading, shows God relinquishing this tuning fork – a metaphor for the skeptron of justice – that produces an initial tension and dissonance between two pitches and eventually fades into one authoritative pitch.[26] Not only does God relinquish this skeptron, but he does so “as one among the least of the Just” suggesting that the kind of justice that was produced by the Law is – in some way – insufficient or, perhaps, that God, himself, is the least of the Just. In the end, it appears that Celan has returned – in full Hölderlinian fashion – to the somber warning of the Sophoclean Chorus in Antigone when he concedes that, “aus der Lostrommel fällt / unser Deut” (“the lottery wheel spills our two parts”). The “lottery wheel”, in my reading, is to be understood as a modern analog to the “dice-roll” of dikaiophysis, measuring out what it finds necessary. Yet from this lottery wheel falls the two parts of Celan, Deutsche and Deuteronomy: German and Jew, oppressor and oppressed, murderer and victim.[27]

When attempting to navigate this suspended tension between two worlds – this Janusian threshold of justice that can neither be circumvented nor pierced – we may find only more contradictions, more conflict, and more tension than we expected or desired. How can we separate our tradition of ethics from the arbitrary lottery-wheel of physis and see justice outside of an anthropocentric mode of thinking?[28] What claims on justice can we hope to make in light of such an unspeakable tragedy as Ha-Shoah and who can hope to make them? Does that light forever cast “stonewritten shadows” on the schwergewicht of our human convention: our laws and our ethics? When even the most brilliant minds are unable to find a point of reconciliation between the Athenian dike and the Hebrew mishpat, the endeavor presents itself as hopelessly daunting to the rest of us. If we begin to recognize that the human being can never approach the event of justice, should that then discourage us from even trying? Do we punish those that violate the polis as Creon did, or do we leave this task to physis?[29] Would we even be satisfied with the kind of justice that physis, or the gods, provide? After all, as Jesus once said, “[God] causes the Sun to rise both on the righteous and the wicked, and makes the rain to fall on the just as well as the unjust.”[30] In the end, our yearning and hoping for justice may be – like logos and mathesis – simply a mechanism by which physis keeps the human being from transgressing the dangerous threshold that only our priests, prophets and poets may even hesitantly approach.

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[1] Amos 5:15; YHVH is known as the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of the Hebrew god

[2] The Tanakh is the Hebrew Bible

[3] Decalogical is used here to reference the Ten Commandments as outlined in the Hebrew Torah

[4] Dike – Greek for “justice”; Physis, Greek for “that which comes of its own power” or, crudely, “nature”

[5] I use the word dikaiophysis to represent “the justice of the natural universe” or to approximate the meaning of “that form of justice which has no causal relationship to the efforts of human beings”

[6] Kosmos – Greek for “the earth” and “the heavens” or, simply, “the Universe”

[7] Mathesis – Greek root word for the English “mathematics”; Deinos, Greek for “that which is terrible and wonderful simultaneously”

[8] Logos – Greek for “word, language or idea”, represented here as the mechanism of communication between humans

[9] Greene, David, and Richard Lattimore. "Oedipus the King." Sophocles I - Second Edition. 1942. Reprint. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1991. 9-76. Print, p. 24 : 341 (emphasis added).

[10] Tragoida – Greek for “goat song” and a form of worship for Dionysus, the god of both revelry and “tragedy”

[11] Nomos – Greek word approximating “all forms of human convention, including law, custom and cultural norms”

[12] Greene, David, and Richard Lattimore. "Antigone." Sophocles I - Second Edition. 1942. Reprint. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1991. 9-76. Print, pp. 164 : 75, 183 : 555.

[13] Ibid. p. 178 : 450

[14] Ibid. p. 209 : 1265, 1270

[15] Metaphysis – Greek meaning “after or above physis”, used here to reflect the concept of the “supernatural”

[16] Ha-Shoah, meaning “great calamity” and the Hebrew analog to the Greek word holókauston (“holocaust”); aporia – Greek meaning “impassible”

[17] Celan, Paul. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. 1952. Reprint. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. Print, p. 227.

[18] I used the word “chiastic” to illustrate an “x”-shaped relationship between two contradictory forces; Kairos – Greek for festal time; Chronos – Greek for chronological time

[19] Matthew 4:20, Matthew 17:27, Luke 5:6

[20] Schwergewicht – German for “heavy weight” or “the heaviest of weights”

[21] Deuteronomy 10:19; Use of the word “other” in this passage is a revised translation of the Hebrew ger, meaning “alien, foreigner, outsider”

[22] I use the word “ethical” here, not in the original Greek sense of “habit” or “habitat”, but in the post-modern and popular sense of ethics as “a personal mode of conduct that governs interpersonal relations”

[23] Baldwin, George W. A Political Reading of the Life of Jesus. New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2006. Print.

[24] Matthew 19:18-19; Use of the word “other” in this passage is a revised translation from the Greek plesion, meaning both “friend” and “any other person”

[25] Celan, Paul. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. 1952. Reprint. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. Print, p. 367.

[26] Skeptron – Greek word meaning “stick, staff or scepter” as seen, perhaps, with both Oedipus and Moses

[27] Bold lettering superimposed in this sentence to emphasize the presence of the German word deut in Celan’s poem having the triple meaning of “bits” or “parts”, “German” and “Deuteronomy”

[28] I use the word “anthropocentric” to denote a worldview that places the human being as central in the world

[29] Polis – Greek for “city”

[30] Matthew 5:45; the words “just” and “unjust” are translated from the Greek dikaios and adikos, respectively