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Appendix a Empiricism and Evangelicalism 1 Appendix A Empiricism and Evangelicalism: A Combination of Romanticism T he twin pioneers of transatlantic revivalism, John Wesley (1703– 1791) and Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), absorbed and spiritual- ized the sensationalist epistemology of John Locke (1632–1704) and then passed along to the nineteenth century their empirical idiom of evangelical expression. As a direct as well as indirect result of this com- plex process of cultural osmosis, such British Romantics as William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats could conceive of the physical senses as por- tals to epiphany and not just as analogies of spiritual insight. As an illustrative Anglo-American trio of late-Romantic writers, Thomas Carlyle, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson contin- ued to blend what Wordsworth called “the language of the sense” with what Coleridge, anticipating the fin-de-siè cle apprehension of art as religion, and vice versa, called “poetic faith.” 1 Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), herself as much of a late-Romantic as of a Victorian- American (anti-Romantic) or pre-Modern poet, also gravitated toward the amalgamation of scientific method with the varieties of religious experience.2 Like her precursors and contemporaries on the high- to late-Romantic arc of literary history, the ark back and forth across the Atlantic, Dickinson grew more apt to expect truth, joy, and grace, like Locke, Wesley, and Edwards, than like Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud to suspect consciousness as false. Thus, as distinct from Euro-continental Romanticism of either a French rationalist or a German idealist stripe, Anglo-American Romanticism generated language at once empirical and evangelical. For example, this local habitation of the long Romantic Movement from the late eighteenth to the second half of the nineteenth century 176 Appendix A perceived rather than deduced or intuited “whatsoever things” were true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and “of good report” (compare Phil 4:8). On the one hand, in a skeptical turn, this binational brand of Romanticism proclaimed a twofold imperative—namely, Trust in Experiment! Test Religion! On the other hand, with guileless receptiv- ity Romantic Anglo-America could also dwell in the possibility of the spiritual sense, perhaps even reimagining as worth a try in an “age of wonder” (Holmes) the warm heart of faith. At any rate, so radi- cally immanent were both the philosophy and the religion of eigh- teenth- to nineteenth-century Anglo-America that English-speaking Romanticism stayed grounded, for better or worse, in spiritual as well as in natural experience. To be sure, if one may read back-in-time Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase for the proper relation between science and religion in the twentieth century, the empiricism and the evangelicalism of Romantic Anglo- America could seem to be “non-overlapping magisteria.” Moreover, if one may apply to the shortcomings of religion Keats’s language for the limits of the creative imagination or of “poetic faith,” faith could scarcely move mountains “so well / As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf” (compare Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale” [1819], lines 73–74). Nevertheless, Anglo-American Romantic writers anticipated that through dust and heat but for better not worse, faith in experience would lead to an experience of faith. Experience and faith emerged from this climate, this transatlantic weather, as “Contraries” that did not so much clash or meld as produce “progression” (witness Blake’s dialectical terms in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [1790–1793], Plate Three). Instead of nihilistic unbelief, constructive skepticism informed all that the Anglo-American century from 1770 to 1870 found resonant in “the burthen of the mystery,” and in mystery itself (Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” line 38). This appendix, having epitomized the series-to-date, can now signal how this book differs from previous installments in this ongoing proj- ect in Anglo-American cultural poetics. Without precluding a future study of Dickinson’s spiritual experience per se, the present, sixth vol- ume of this historical, interdisciplinary approach to English-language Romanticism constitutes a strategic drawing back from the emphasis in Volume 5 on Dickinson’s experience/faith fusion. Of course, her perennial human yearning for transcendence drew her toward dialectic in the first place. 3 Still, she rarely hesitated to apply Ockham’s razor to what was not absolutely required to explain the case at hand. Scarcely ever did her blessed rage for order foreclose her aesthetic choice to stick with physical evidence. She more often tended to migrate from Appendix A 177 evangelical training to empirical discipline than tried to reconcile the two on any paradoxical, counterintuitive, or oxymoronic ground of providential chance, on the one hand, or of random grace, on the other. The emphasis of the present book lies less on the empirical thesis and the evangelical antithesis of her poetic synthesis (for that case, though, see Chapter 4 of Brantley Experience and Faith ) than on the more philosophical and scientific than religious flow of her literary conversation. Hers was not so much the destination of system as the journey of method. Appendix B Locke and Wesley: An Essence of Influence D oes the great principle of empiricism—namely, that one must see for oneself and be in the presence of the thing one knows—extend to evangelicalism? Does each of these -isms operate along a continuum joining emotion to intellect? Does one of these methodologies link the external to words through ideas of sensation as though perception were mediation? Does the other link the external to words through ideals of sensation as though grace were perception? If empiricism refers to direct impact from, and includes immediate contact with, objects and subjects in time and place, does evangelicalism entertain the similarly reciprocating notions that religious truth is concerned with experiential presuppositions, and that experience itself need not be nonreligious? Yes, since John Locke’s influence on John Wesley and Wesley’s Locke on Wesley’s followers can constitute the twofold case in point. This nexus of thought and feeling connected the sense-based rea- son of British empiricism to the spiritual sense of immediate, if not traditional, revelation. This mode of philosophy and of theology morphed the analogy between sense perception and spiritual sense into experience/faith continuum, and perhaps even into experience- faith identity. Wesley spread this state-of-the-art word of natural to spiritual efficacy throughout his parish, the world. Thus his trans- atlantic revival became an experiment in life force and took on the forceful life of an experiment. His all-encompassing alignment of the Enlightenment with heart religion laid the groundwork for proexpe- rience heart leaps of Romantic Anglo-America, and shows to this day how different from neoclassical evangelism is its science-averse off- shoot in the twenty-first-century reaches of the post-Modern world. 180 Appendix B It may be helpful, in this appendix, to summarize those previous arguments of this series that pertain to Wesley’s immersion in Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). Wesley, after all, will figure prominently in this book about how Emily Dickinson’s experience/faith dialogue favored experience at the expense of, though with continuing respect for, faith. Locke’s rational empiri- cism galvanized Wesley to express the ineffable occurrence of sense- like grace through the language of sense-based method. It was as though natural and spiritual experience could be one and the same. Besides being scriptural, classical, and colloquial, Wesley’s prose was pervasively philosophical. His rich and strange but readable hybrid, his composite thought nameable as philosophical theology, harked back to British empiricism, and leaped forward to evangelical practice in the nineteenth-century Anglo-American world. Here, preliminary to the analytical as well as chronological con- centration on Wesley’s decisive decade of the 1740s, is a narrative overview of his empirical study. In 1730, intrigued by an obscure fol- lower of Locke, Peter Browne, bishop of Cork and Ross during the 1720s and 1730s, Wesley abridged Browne’s Procedure, Extent, and Limits of Human Understanding (1728), a theologizing of empiri- cism. In 1763, Wesley published his condensation of Browne’s work in Wesley’s anthology of science, A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation: or a Compendium of Natural Philosophy , which formed one of Wesley’s many educational enterprises. In 1781, Wesley wrote annotations to Locke’s Essay , and published them, with extracts from the Essay , in Wesley’s serial for his followers, The Arminian Magazine , during 1782–1784. Thus generations of laity encountered empiricism per se as well as empirical evangelicalism. It is especially significant that Wesley took women seriously as philosophical and theologi- cal discussion partners, encouraging their abilities as did few of his contemporaries. Well before, long after, and as catalyst of his strange warming of the heart at a quarter to nine on the evening of May 24, 1738, in Aldersgate Street, London, Wesley was steeped in Locke’s sense- based theory of knowledge. A spiritual watershed of English cultural life, Wesley’s conversion had as much to do with the tabula rasa of Wesley’s mind, and hence with the times and places of Wesley’s sense experience, as with the state of his soul.
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