Recursos didácticos

The literary character of the Bible inspired not only an altered theological methodology but arguably enabled literary romanticism to define its central creeds about the world-

constituting power of language. In herstudy of the evangelical press, Candy Gunther Brown also notes that literary responses to the multifarious challenges to the Bible that had emerged since the early 1700s began to produce something resembling a unique epistemology in the nineteenth century. For the romantic writers, she observes,

the distinction between Word and words, sacred and secular, worldly and otherworldly, Holy Spirit and human spirit, broke down. Rather than

understanding the Bible as a self-authenticating Word inspired by the Holy Spirit, romantics averred that the Bible and other texts were similarly authoritative to the extent that they expressed an inspired poetic vision. (44)

As I mentioned before, Stephen Pricket traces the beginnings of the romantic literary endeavor back to Biblical scholarship as well. “It is hardly surprising,” he writes, “that through [Robert] Lowth’s influence the Bible was to become for the Romantics not merely the model of sublimity,

but also a source of style and a touchstone of true feeling” (Words 109). Lowth animates German theologians, such as Johann David Michaelis, to pay attention to Biblical language, particularly that of the OT. Michaelis’s work, in turn, inspires Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Gottfried Eichhorn to develop their higher critical theories, which then feedback British Bible studies (Prickett, Words 115). However, higher criticism is not well received in England; in fact, it was “not only felt to be unchristian, it was un-English, unpatriotic, and politically dangerous” (Prickett, Words 116). This Anglo-Saxon resentment may have been the reason why Melville, while comprehending the intellectual value of higher criticism, could not consent to it

emotionally. While higher criticism thus did not find firm footing in England either, Prickett also notes it transformed literary outlooks on Scripture: particularly the OT,

ceased to be read as though it spoke with a single omniscient dogmatic voice, and began instead to be read as a dialogue, with a plurality of competing voices. At the same time, what had been universally accepted as an essentially polysemous narrative, with many threads of meaning, was narrowed into a single thread of story, which was almost invariably interpreted as being ‘historical.’ (Prickett,

Origins 108)

In the arena of literature, Blake, rather than Coleridge or Wordsworth is the first to develop Lowth’s insights into a cohesive aesthetic program. He deems the OT “The Great Code of Art” (qtd. Prickett, Words 116) in The Laocoon (1820), and “sets the primary, artistic, authority of the Bible in place of Aristotle’s secondary, critical, authority” (Prickett, Words 117). Moreover, “Lowth’s analysis of Hebrew poetry in terms of parallelism had [. . .] made it possible for Coleridge, like Shelley, to think of ‘poetry’ in terms of mental dialectic characterized by an intensity of thought and feeling rather than by any particular rhetorical arrangement” (Prickett,

Words 118). Coleridge’s subsequent assessment of Biblical language, arguing that, “language is not seen as something that can be created ab initio [. . .] it constitutes rather a collective and

cultural context within which human beings come to consciousness and self-discovery” (Words

34, emphasis added). He asserts the inherently heuristic character of Biblical language. Writers of the American Renaissance that read widely and curiously crafted original responses to the multifarious challenges the new age presented to religious hermeneutical traditions. Hence the cliché view that American literary romanticism as a mere rehash of European romanticist ideas is out of place here. Religious thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson had been thoroughly infected with what detractors such as Andrews Norton once diagnosed as the ‘German disease’ of higher criticism, and rabidly devoured the new historical method of reading the Bible. Moreover, the Transcendentalists in particular regarded European idealism as a means of revolting against what Perry Miller calls the “business of civilization” (670). However, historical studies that consider American religion and its literary outgrowths as merely derivative of European intellectual traditions—incidentally this was Norton’s charge against the Transcendentalists—often fail to address the more complex American engagement with European religious skepticism in the specific post-revolutionary context of United-States republicanism and economy.36

Besides British literary criticism, and German neology, American Romanticism receives its intellectual grounding through Scottish Common-Sense philosophy in that it reacts against Lockean and Humean empiricism. And obviously, Herman Melville was not the only one

sensitive to the epistemological shifts this genealogy carried with it: Emerson prominently lashed out against remnants of dogmatism and mysticism in Unitarian religious practice in his

controversial essay on the Lord’s Supper (1832) and his more widely received Divinity School

36 _{In the theological arena, Emerson and his Transcendentalists represented one extension of a group of}

liberal thinkers who borrowed freely from German neologism, which conservative leaders like Norton derided as blasphemous (Miller 672). And yet Miller sees the transcendentalists as the representatives of an “American provinciality” that saw itself at an intellectual disadvantage over against a “European sophistication with which it was not entirely competent to deal” (672).

Address (1838). Like Evangelicalism, Transcendentalism is an intellectual, if somewhat inconsistent, rejection of evidentialist principles in that it seeks an unmediated relation with divinity based on intuitive rather than rationalist faculties (Holifield 204). Primary movers of the movement, such as Emerson, William Ellery Channing, and Orestes Brownson, explicitly put their literary experimentations within the continuity of theological methodology. Those religious liberals minding social reform, like Lydia Maria Child, were sensitive to the increasing rift between science and religion and hoped for reconciliation of the two approaches within one unified epistemology. Child held out hope for “a science concerning the nature of the Divine Being, and the relations of human souls with him” throughout her career as a writer (qtd. in Turner 14). And while her supplication became a staple sentiment in the late nineteenth-century fiction, it was by no means the only literary response to the various critical attacks on the Bible.