American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era through the Twentieth Century

2. The Nineteenth Century: From Theology to Scholarship

2 47 The Nineteenth Century From Theology to Scholarship John Adams’s discovery of William Jones in 1817 and his distant relative Hannah Adams’s publication of the fourth and final edition of her celebrated dictionary in the same year occur at a critical moment in the history of the American Orient. Both Adamses looked to the authority of mythographic scholarship to support their own presuppositions about the value of traditional Christianity.Their presuppositions could not have been more unlike, however, the elder Adams finding fodder in the mythographers for his conviction that the young nation he had helped create still faced threats from organized religion, the younger one finding—in the mythographic analyses of Jones, Maurice, and the rest—confirmation of both the singularity and the superiority of the Christian faith. Only one year later, in 1818, the theological ground shifted when Unitarian leaders in New England began to learn more and more about the Hindu East, not only from books by British Weir_MAIN_Pgs 1-256.indd 47 4/21/2011 9:31:45 AM 48 T H E N I N E T E E N T H C E N T U R Y orientalists like Jones and his colleague Charles Wilkins but also from reports by missionaries in India who had firsthand contact with Brahmin intellectuals. These theological interests came to the fore as political meanings receded and the literary value of newly translated (or newly arrived) Hindu classics slowly began to be appreciated. Neither John nor Hannah Adams was particularly appreciative of, say, the Bhagavad-Gita as epic literature, nor, for that matter, were the Unitarian churchmen who succeeded them. Indeed, even the great figures of the American Renaissance who helped to establish a national literature, notably Emerson and Thoreau , did not really focus on the aesthetic import of the Asian texts they read so avidly, contenting themselves mainly with theological meanings. The basic observation that Hinduism was valued for theological rather than literary reasons at the beginning of the nineteenth century is not so simple as it seems. After all, the interest that John Adams took in Hindu literature was likewise theological, but in Adams’s case the mythographic tradition dictated that there was really no meaningful difference between literature and theology when it came to Hinduism: literature was nothing more than the allegorical husk that the mythographer stripped away to reveal the theological truth lying behind the epic poem or the tragic drama. And for the enlightened philosophe, theological truth was political falsity, nothing less than the means whereby priests and kings, whether Asiatic or European, maintained their power and constrained the rights of men. Once the Revolution restored and assured those rights in America, the mythographer’s unmasking of the politics behind the theology no longer had so urgent a purpose. Hence, it is not surprising that the Hindu faith was regarded in a different light in the early decades of nineteenth-century New England. No longer could it be dismissed for political reasons, since those reasons no longer obtained. But to say that Hinduism was taken more seriously as a substantial theology is not to say that it was universally tolerated. On the contrary, the antiquity of the Hindu faith raised questions about the historical validity of certain biblical assertions, so much so that some New England divines felt an obligation to make reasoned arguments against the religion of India. Others, however, were sensitive to key theological universals that they shared with their Hindu brethren half a world away. I The growth of Unitarianism in New England runs parallel with emerging awareness of Indian religion. Time and again, the “religious intelligence” sections of Unitarian periodicals alert their readers to the possibility that rational religion has a counterpart in Hinduism or in other Eastern “sects.” Weir_MAIN_Pgs 1-256.indd 48 4/21/2011 9:31:45 AM F R O M T H E O L O G Y T O S C H O L A R S H I P 49 As in so many other areas, the basis for this understanding lies in the work of Charles Wilkins and William Jones. Wilkins’s translation of the Bhagavad-Gita (1785) frequently, and possibly intentionally, represents the Hindu faith in language that echoes the vocabulary of religious dissent in Great Britain. Dissent places a premium on the doctrine of salvation by faith, not works, since “works” include not only...