The Theology of Solitude: Edwards, Emerson, Dickinson

The name I have chosen to give my theme, "the theology of solitude," refers to an old and multifaceted interpretation of the Christian vocation. We encounter this theology in gospel narratives of the wilderness temptation of Jesus, in the life of St. Anthony and the hermits of the Egyptian desert, or in the famous opening scene of Pilgrim's Progress, when Christian takes sin-burdened flight from the city, ears covered against the appeals of his family, and crying out "life, life, eternal life." The theology of solitude, in short, names one pole in the tensive oscillation between the active life and the contemplative life that so sharply marks Christian understandings of human orientation toward the Absolute.

But, of course, the form of the contemplative life is always specific to a historical context; and so my illustration will come from New England, during a century that stretches from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. The story begins with the Puritan minister and theologian Jonathan Edwards on the eve of the Great Awakening, a time in New England when the active life predominated Protestant piety, when "true virtue" sought to harness human wills to the divine will, as its unswerving purposes made themselves manifest in Scripture and providential history. Within this agonistic interpretation of the human pilgrimage, Jonathan Edwards cultivated the theology of solitude in order to carve out a space and a purpose for the vocation of contemplation, reflection, and study. He employed solitude to order the active life toward God.

My illustration will end in the nineteenth century, with the essayist and orator Ralph Waldo Emerson and the poet Emily Dickinson, during a time when skepticism about the Christian providential history was dissolving the narrative framework that had supported earlier ideas of the self and the purpose of each individual human life. This challenge to inherited conceptions of vocation caused these nineteenth-century intellectuals to reconsider the relationship, in Emerson's phrase, between "society and solitude."

Despite the contrast in "world picture" that I imply between the eighteenth and nineteenth-century versions of the theology of solitude, I also wish to underscore three continuities in its development. First, there was the emergence in the eighteenth century of "nature" as the favored location of religious solitude. The earlier devotional writing of seventeenth-century New England had, of course, commended private devotions and "secret prayer." But in representing the solitary encounter with God, seventeenth-century writings by Roger Williams, Edward Taylor, or Anne Bradstreet typically derived images of devotional seclusion from the "house well ordered, swept, and garnished" and the "closet" of prayer. ¹ When they did employ symbols of nature, it was usually nature transformed by human agency: "husbandry spiritualized" as in the grafting of fruit trees in an orchard, or the "tastes" of a meal, or bridal imagery of sexual relations transformed into marriage covenant. By contrast, nature untouched by husbandry was for these seventeenth-century authors the wilderness of religious danger and privation, as in Mary Rowlandson's famous captivity narrative The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682). By the eighteenth century, however, the New England countryside had itself become domesticated, and the pasture began to replace the closet as the preferred meditative locale. Agricultural expansion and Indian subjugation had made swamp and field safe places for a Jonathan Edwards--as child and adult--to cultivate the theology of solitude.

But physical accessibility does not, of itself, explain the shift from house to nature as the definitive mental and physical landscape for meditative solitude. Without attempting at this point to describe causal connections or historic alternative connotations of "nature," this heightened valorization of nature in the eighteenth century consolidated shifting ideas of God, altering aesthetic sensibilities, and sharper contrasts between agricultural and commercial societies that figured nature as refuge rather than as threat. ² Thus was born what critic Leo Marx once...