From Edwards to Baldwin: Heterodoxy, Discontinuity, and New Narratives of American Religious-Literary History

Fifteen years after his essay "Jonathan Edwards to Emerson" materialized in the New England Quarterly in 1940, Perry Miller was so perturbed by the popularity of its premise that he crafted a disclaimer to preface its republication in Errand into the Wilderness (1956). "There is no organic evolution of ideas from Edwards to Emerson," he inveighed. "That would obviously be a silly version of how ideas get transmitted, even in so confined a laboratory as New England then was" (184). Yet, the Edwards-to-Emerson narrative, "silly" or not, misconstrued as it may have been, has nonetheless served for almost seventy years as a centralizing architecture of early American literary history. Even scholars who delight in rich complication resort with relief to the alliterative, economic Edwards-to-Emerson paradigm, especially when they are assigned to face a lecture hall of undergraduates for whom these writings and their times are remoter than Jesus Himself. Without Edwards-to-Emerson, how exactly does one get from what Michael Colacurcio has described as the resolutely "Godly letters" of the New England Puritans to the dew-dappled, paganistic metaphysics of Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson? By way of Charlotte Temple? Thomas Jefferson? Diedrich Knickerbocker? (The answer may in fact be Elhanan Winchester and Hosea Ballou, but neither of them appears in the Heath Anthology.)

Miller acknowledged the utility of his thesis in the undergraduate classroom, but of his fellow scholars he expected more. For the very point of the original essay, he clarified, was to urge us all to go deeper, to detect behind theological controversies "the basic continuities that persist in a culture" (185). According to Miller, that persistent continuity from Edwards to Emerson was the face-to-face encounter between the mind and the material universe, even as the quality of the encounter itself transformed from confrontation to the apprehension of a correspondence. And so, as the story goes, a Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God goes into the woods and a century later emerges Man Thinking. How so? In his 1956 preface, Miller very quietly acknowledges the discontinuity that subsidizes this narrative of "basic continuities": somewhere along the way, it seems, the "concept of original sin" "evaporated" (185).

Evaporated? A provocative word, and a bit reductive, yes, but was not that part of his point? That American studies needed scholars both judicious and bold, who because they did their doctrinal homework and read the fine print of the orthodox theological treatises that bored others to tears earned the right to craft compelling narratives about continuities underlying the entire culture? Perhaps, the true power of Miller's "From Edwards to Emerson" is not only its exemplary methodology but its redemption of continuities from discontinuities, its salvific narrative of American secularization. For Perry Miller gave us the gentlest and most elegant way of telling the children that at some point even the best and brightest Puritans could keep it up no longer, that they stopped believing what their grandfathers believed, and that it was, finally, really, okay because it gave us literature. In this way, in this essay, Miller was our Matthew Arnold, revealing how a nation of Hebraists became Hellenists. In addition, what of those Protestants who were not hardy or muscular enough to make this secularizing transition? Miller left it to his protégé Ann Douglas to describe the fate of disestablished Puritan clerics and pietistic mothers marooned in the nineteenth century: that is, "feminization," or the prison-house culture of sentiment.¹

It is not our fault that we have been trained in a very different age, reading our Perry Miller, as we should, but also learning from postmodernists to be suspicious of master narratives, learning from postcolonialists to see history not as a pageant of inevitable continuities but a series of discontinuities and disasters, and learning from Foucault to see truth as the history of an error. Is it thus still possible to believe that sometime between the Revolution and 1800, secularization dawned evenly on the eastern seaboard of the US, drying up the concept of original sin wherever...