The Perils of Human Exceptionalism: Elements of a Nineteenth-Century Theological Anthropology 1666900192, 9781666900194

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Historical Prologue
The Human Design in Natural Theology
Friedrich Schleiermacher and a Theology of Intuition
Darwin’s Decentering of Humanity
The Anti-theologians
The Hard-Headed Science of Humanity
Social Christianity and Social Humanity in an Inhumane World
The Natural World and the Human
Perils of the Soul in Nineteenth-Century Thought
Original Sin, Degeneration, Theology, and Science
William James Seeks to Save Religious Experience
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

The Perils of Human Exceptionalism

The Perils of Human Exceptionalism Elements of a Nineteenth-Century Theological Anthropology Dennis L. Durst

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Durst, Dennis L., author. Title: The perils of human exceptionalism : elements of a nineteenth-century theological anthropology / Dennis L. Durst. Description: Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022014218 (print) | LCCN 2022014219 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666900194 (Cloth : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781666900200 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Theological anthropology—Christianity—History of doctrines—19th century. | Theological anthropology—History—19th century. Classification: LCC BT701.3 .D875 2022  (print) | LCC BT701.3  (ebook) | DDC 233—dc23/eng/20220512 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014218 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014219 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Introduction

1

Chapter 1: Historical Prologue: What Is Man That Thou Art Mindful of Him?

13

Chapter 2: The Human Design in Natural Theology

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Chapter 3: Friedrich Schleiermacher and a Theology of Intuition Chapter 4: Darwin’s Decentering of Humanity Chapter 5‌‌‌: The Anti-theologians





45 67



87

Chapter 6‌‌‌: The Hard-Headed Science of Humanity: Phrenology and Religion 109 Chapter 7: Social Christianity and Social Humanity in an Inhumane World 125 Chapter 8: The Natural World and the Human: The Transcendentalists 145 Chapter 9: Perils of the Soul in Nineteenth-Century Thought: Metaphysics and Morals

165

Chapter 10: Original Sin, Degeneration, Theology, and Science



187

Chapter 11: William James Seeks to Save Religious Experience



205

Conclusion

217

Bibliography Index

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247

About the Author



253 v

Introduction

DEFINING HUMAN EXCEPTIONALISM In this book the theme of human exceptionalism is central, though like human nature itself, exceptionalism is somewhat elusive in definition. I suggest the following definition. Human exceptionalism is the conviction that human beings are made in the image of God, as ensouled bodies, integrating intellectual, emotional, social, psychological, and moral dimensions of human life into a flourishing whole, and are different in kind from nonhuman creatures. Each component of this definition received various degrees of challenge in the nineteenth century. The task of defining human beings as exceptional involves identifying various elements of the human person. This has often been the task of theology as Christian thinkers have sought to account for the paradoxical elements that seem to permeate human experience as the generations unfold. On a theological account, the human person is exceptional because humanity is created in the image of God, is comprised of a union of body and soul, is set apart from other living species by a unique inner balancing of reason and emotion, is possessed of individual dignity along with social responsibility, and yet remains vexed by a state of moral estrangement from its Maker. The dimensions of the exceptional human include an awareness of our capacity to reflect the divine, a distinction between a body and a conscious inner identity and awareness, often labeled the soul; a realization of value that obtains for both self and others, and a persistent frustration of efforts to flourish and experience harmony with God and the rest of humanity due to moral failure. In the nineteenth century the intellectual world underwent a series of renegotiations of these claims to an exceptional status on the part of humans. Authority figures in theology began to sense their authority eroding, whereas authority figures in the sciences began to see their authority expanding. 1

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Introduction

Some intellectuals accepted the changing definitions of the human such that the physical began to assume a more central role, as the spiritual dimension became subordinated to it. The life of the mind and reasoned religious arguments that had taken the form of doctrines or dogmas, handed down from past generations, underwent reassessment through the elevation of the experiential and intuitive components of the human inner life. The individual and social dimensions of human existence came to be recalibrated as social responsibility and individual initiative ebbed and flowed and many yearned for social reforms. Human moral life, including inner experiences of duty, guilt, shame, regret, and the desire for redemption or even salvation, continued even as those terms were redefined. At the same time, the plausibility structure of theological and doctrinal efforts to answer and meet that desire underwent a profound weakening in the transatlantic world. Progress in human self-awareness is a laudable goal, and advances have sometimes been made. I cannot escape, however, a sense of an overall fragmentation in the human condition. Theology used to be a resource to which many turned for solace or answers to the tragic side of life. If one can say that such an exceptional view of the human as described above was widely embraced at the birth of the nineteenth century, by the end of that century such an account was greatly reduced in its cultural authority, especially among the shapers of modern thought. My interest is in the historical and theological changes over time that occurred as many intellectuals called into question traditions concerning human nature. ELEMENTS OF EXCEPTIONALISM There were challenges to the belief that humans are made by a Maker. Many elites began to defend the view that we appeared on the scene by purely naturalistic means. Traditional accounts of creation, often grounded in the Christian scriptures, came under dramatic reassessment. Apart from the existence of the divine, the “image of God” ideal applied to the human became tenuous. Students of the human body increasingly assimilated the human as a whole to the rest of the biological order. The existence or the character of any human soul distinct from the human body was discussed with varying conclusions. Whether an account of the human interaction with the divine should be primarily rooted in the empirical investigation of human embeddedness within the physical world, or in terms of human material conditions, or in terms of mental intuitions, became a source of debate within and between philosophy, biology, psychology, and theology. Various disciplines emerged to study such elements of the human person and developed and deployed new methods of investigation.

Introduction

3

Approaches known as natural theology and intuitionism emerged as rival approaches, each posing challenges to the perceived probity of traditional theological dogmas. Efforts to locate many of the complex personality features of individuals by studying the regions of the physical brain or the shape of the human skull gained widespread fascination in phrenology, then experimental psychology. Debates over whether humans should find their essence in individual thought and achievement or in social relations and reforms crossed disciplinary and class lines, leading to projects espousing either Christian or secular socialism. Movements toward greater social inclusion of women and enslaved persons in the full flourishing of humanity was a phenomenon that had deep cultural as well as theological ramifications and used the rhetoric of the soul in new ways. I understand such rhetoric as a defense of human exceptionalism against reductions of women and the enslaved merely to their embodied state. New theories about human origins and observations of physiological similarities to nonhuman creatures led to sorting out what did or did not set humans apart from other biological organisms. Discussions of the human predicament were still carried out under the terms of original and actual sin, but also of degeneration theory. Religious experiences displaced dogmatic formulae as the central concern of the religious life. Rather than undergoing an easily discernible rise and fall, human exceptionalism confronted a multitude of perils. Debates over the above features of the human character and experience occurred in several locations and between many authors. Rather than science simply besting theology at every turn, the dominant motif of the conflict theory of science-theology relations, both scientists and theologians grappled with, rethought, debated, refined, and reshaped their views as they engaged in conversation and a contest of ideas. Alterations in theology were not merely imposed from without, but also betook of internal engagements within Christianity, and both within and between defenders of various denominations. At first I sought to pinpoint the “fall” of exceptionalism beginning with the publication of Darwinian assessments of human nature. This approach proved to underestimate the varied, sometimes subtle voices in the discussion, as well as the way debates tend to play out. I discovered agents, episodes, and trends where traditional theology encountered alternative or rival accounts of what it meant to be human. These accounts tended to focus on parts or aspects of the human in ways that could appear, at least to the theological eye, to be distortive. Such transformations of perspective could be the product of multiple disciplines contending in the arena of public discourse to get new ideas considered. Divergent accounts of the human could also be a feature of differing methods. The methods of biology naturally attended to biological changes in bodies, and comparatively assessing the structures of various organisms, especially building upon animal experimentation in the laboratory

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Introduction

or the field. The methods of psychology focused upon the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors of individual human agents. The methods of sociology or social criticism engaged with human interaction in groups rather than primarily as individuals. Accounts of human failure began to identify this with hereditary degeneration. Theology, by contrast, has historically tended to seek to give holistic accounts, and is totalizing in its mindset. Other disciplines criticized theology as overgeneralized, too vague, and especially too attentive to invisible factors such as God or a spirit or a soul. These can seem to those outside the discursive framework of theology as special pleading, as speculation, and as merely unscientific in character. The challenge then became to pursue a theology sensitive to the concerns of other disciplines, selectively appropriating or acknowledging new insights, while remaining an authentic theology. By the early twentieth century some internal theological divisions began to break out in quite public ways as whole Protestant denominations split into modernist and fundamentalist factions. Many sociological factors were involved, but so were ideological ones. These engagements were then complicated by challenges from outside the fold of faith by those who were skeptics, whether atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, or those whom the orthodox deemed heretics. Among scientists were many who were traditionally pious. In the fold of theologians were a few who sought a dismantling of fundamental elements of their own received traditions. Complexity reigns when the inner and outer, the individual, institutional, and societal forces at play begin to receive their due attention. Grasping all the threads in the knotty rope of theological anthropology in the transatlantic world of the nineteenth century has proven daunting. This book holds some of the major strands, while others remain to be untangled.1 REMARKS ON THE STATUS OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY IN HISTORY The historiography of the relationship between science and theology is a weighty and growing body of literature. Two dominant approaches to this relationship are conflict and complexity. Conflict, the older of the two approaches, has functioned for many as a “given” when thinking about the truth-claims proffered under the disciplines labeled “science” and “theology.” This has especially been the case in much of the twentieth century as academic disciplines and specializations proliferated. Stakeholders in the various sciences and diverse approaches to theology have set forth viewpoints on how the world functions, and how human beings function within that world.

Introduction

5

Much of the relevant literature in the history of science has focused on the trope of “science-and-religion.” Only more recently has “science-and-theology” begun to receive needed attention. Historian Peter Harrison has warned against insisting that either science or religion has a metaphysical “essence” so that they can be said to either “be” or “do” something independent of human historical actors or institutions embedded in various cultural situations. He further disavows any suggestion “that doctrinal commitments play no legitimate role in religious life or that religious beliefs should be regarded as ‘non-cognitive.’” Harrison insists too that the opposite error be avoided. In speaking of religion the historian must beware lest “propositional claims” whereby religion and science are compared leads to an essentialist treatment concerned “solely with their cognitive content.”2 Sensitivity to the historical climate and even personal factors in a given historical figure’s life produces a fuller account of various factors in his or her views. Since the nineteenth century Christian doctrinal commitments served a role in undergirding the recurring perception of conflict between science and religious beliefs. This proved true especially in their formalized forms known as theology or dogmatics. For Harrison, a by-product of the Enlightenment insistence on “the supremacy of rational authority” was the creation of religion as a discrete idea, and particularly “its archetype, ‘the Christian religion.’”3 Upon the complicated role of theology in dialogical or cross-disciplinary discourse stands Harrison’s warning: “Religious dogmas do not comprise the totality of the religious life; neither do scientific theories embody all that there is to the scientific enterprise.”4 By the early twentieth century, while what counted as science was still debated, wide agreement existed on what should be excluded. Aesthetics, ethics, and theology were perceived as too value-laden to be objective and were placed outside the increasingly authoritative category now often simply labeled as “science.”5 The interplay of dogmas and experiences, and how to weigh both, rose to the fore. Resisting the temptation to turn again to a simple conflict between two perceived combatants named “science” and “theology” will be necessary to understand such dynamics. One of the problems faced by any fundamental belief, then and now, is that a surgical effort is required to keep “dogmas” from hardening into a mere “dogmatism,” whether discussing a particular theologian, scientist, or other mere mortal. In one of the Bampton Lectures delivered in 1867, Anglican Edward Garbett (1817–1887) admitted: “Dogmatism has become a term of reproach, and, in our modern sense of the word, rightly. We express by it the habit of mind which in an over-confidence on its own individual powers is disposed to depreciate the judgment of other men, and to assert personal opinions with confident arrogance as certainly and indisputably true.” In the mind of this British divine, dogmatism stood quite distinct from dogma itself. He defined dogma as: “a revealed truth and

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Introduction

for ecclesiastical formulas so far, and so far only, as they truly express the mind of God in His Word.”6 Sometimes a given dogma in history proved less an issue, on deeper investigation, than the way that dogma was deployed amid ecclesial or church-state power dynamics at work. Creeds are one matter, what we do with them quite another. Moving beyond defining dogmatism other matters beckon. What weight can discrete dogmas still bear in the modern world? What is the role of changing levels of cultural authority for scientists or theologians in either upholding them, revising them, or challenging them? Can science itself ever become a form of dogmatism? In this enterprise, a studied awareness that dogma clung to merely for psychological safety or for the satisfaction of exerting power against an ideological opponent is a dogma misconceived. Dogma that has enduring mettle, and heuristic value over multiple generations, may become more firmly established in the end. In this book, the idea of humans having been made in the image of God, while a dogmatic claim, could serve as a category of belief more fundamental than dogma, and as the grounding from which sprung other beliefs about the human. The conflict model of the science-theology nexus often involves worldview-oriented approaches to the study of the world, namely naturalism and supernaturalism. Naturalism is the assumption that no reality exists beyond that natural order accessible to the human senses (or extensions thereof such as microscopes) or measurable through such tools as mathematics and chemistry. Naturalism undergirds social and cultural shifts away from religion and toward the secular. Theology has traditionally been more at home with supernaturalism, the idea that some mind or power beyond nature is needed to account for nature itself. Supernaturalism is the belief that the natural order is nested within a broader supernatural order. Theistic supernaturalism espouses the conviction that a divine entity or entities do, to varying degrees and in diverse ways, have causal impacts upon phenomena within the natural order. This book is mainly concerned with relevant beliefs found in the form of theism known as orthodox Christian monotheism. An increasing embrace of naturalism led to some forms of secularization. As John Hedley Brooke has noted, “Definitions of secularization usually refer to the displacement of religious authority and control by civic powers that usurp the functions formerly undertaken by religious institutions.” Secularists object to dogmatism wedded to public power. The definition of the secular is not exhausted by mere power however. “The word also connotes a loss of plausibility and credibility affecting beliefs held within religious traditions.”7 As it turns out, however, the number of theological beliefs that are directly opposed by the modern scientific method is lower than commonly assumed. As Brooke observes, “most scientific knowledge has no, or very little, bearing on beliefs held within religious communities.” Further, “religious affiliation,

Introduction

7

and the sense of self-identity it may confer, can be completely unaffected by advances in the sciences.”8 On many previously conflicted points, clearer accounts of natural causes and effects can lead to agreement and consensus between scientific findings and relevant theological beliefs. Univocal agreement on how to define or limit either nature or the supernatural is elusive within the twin discourses of science and theology. Supernatural causality need not necessarily always employ means that defy scientific investigation. The supernatural may use that natural order in such a manner that the scientific method still provides a vital explanatory role. Theological distinctions between abrupt and gradual introductions of divine causal factors, or between primary and secondary causes, have mitigated the conflictual nature of scientific and theological accounts of reality. Multilayered accounts of causality may be investigated in an open-minded and comparative fashion. The exaggerated elements of conflict, as well as the notable incompleteness of the conflict thesis, therefore, has led to more recent, significantly revisionist investigations into historical sources, and has yielded an alternative outlook: the complexity thesis.9 Geoffrey Cantor argues that a binary conflict between science and theology is additionally inadequate because complex struggles between and even within historical figures existed. The fact that many in the early nineteenth century were both clergymen and natural philosophers or physicians fascinated with the natural world and medicine must be born in mind.10 The internal dialogue between these varying roles within such individuals was, at times, conflictual, and arguably also complex. If one falls back on the conflict metaphor, the clergyman scientist could theoretically be at war with himself. One might suppose this happened occasionally. Yet one might further suppose that strategies of internal reconciliation and peacemaking were more often the norm. Complexity and conflict may therefore become mutually informing approaches. Nineteenth-century church leaders took two approaches to the rise of the authority of scientific accounts of natural history. The first was natural theology, the second was intuitionism. In this book natural theology and intuitionist theology took very divergent paths. Such arguments broke out into open public rifts, exacerbated by the variety of publication options available to promulgate new or controversial ideas. Such ruptures did not take wide institutional form until the conservative and progressive church adherents sought control of the institutional structures of their denominations in the early twentieth century. The seeds of these fissures were often planted in the nineteenth century. Layered onto these internal dynamics in the hearts and minds of human agents were external and cultural factors. The roles played by natural philosophers or, by the latter half of the nineteenth century, “scientists,” as they were

8

Introduction

now called, were becoming more culturally prestigious. Many scientists saw their cultural authority rise as the century unfolded. This led to an emboldening of key players to challenge older traditionalists and the dogmas they cherished and defended. Still, whatever degree of conflict existed, it cannot any longer merely be crudely put as a simplistic conflict between “science” and “theology.” This book is not about all of science and all of theology. It is about some of the fundamental elements of the human that gained discussion and currency among a variety of thinkers in the nineteenth century. The field of study is historical theological anthropology, forged in an interdisciplinary matrix. The subject at hand is human exceptionalism and how that theme fared at the interface of scientific and theological accounts of the human.11 OVERVIEW Chapter 1 explores contours of theological anthropology by means of a very brief historical theological journey among some key thinkers who reflected on what it means to be human during the first eighteen centuries of the Christian era. Special attention will be trained on those who interacted with natural philosophy (the older analogue of modern science) as it impinged on the human condition. I selectively survey a few major figures in the history of Christianity who insisted that the human was created in the image of God and that as such moral obligations were thus prescribed. Here the reader finds some major themes that have emerged in history when humans have reflected theologically upon their estate by engaging with what they could glean from the study of the created natural world in conversation with a strong commitment to scripture as divine revelation. Chapter 2 navigates how natural theological anthropology developed in the early nineteenth century. After William Paley we see a series of natural theology publications, especially the Bridgewater Treatises of the 1830s. Here I survey treatise authors Thomas Chalmers and William Whewell for their discussions of humanity and its relationship with the natural order, applying insights from science and philosophy. The chapter will also consider secondary texts that offer an assessment of the results of theologians looking to the natural sciences for aid and support in a century when scientists began to distance themselves from theological constraints on their investigative assumptions, motivations, methods, and conclusions. Human exceptionalism was imperiled when scientists began to question the uniqueness of humans as the paragon of supernatural design, even as natural theologians had already made significant concessions to science as a partner they expected to undergird and harmonize with theological ideas.

Introduction

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Chapter 3 examines the alternative route forged by the theological intuitionism of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher sought to redefine theology to establish it as a modern discipline clearly set apart from the natural sciences and from ethics. In reacting against the excesses of enlightenment rationalism, Friedrich Schleiermacher sought a corrective by locating Christianity’s core within a feeling of absolute dependence upon the Absolute. This could perhaps shield religion from the acids of modernity and allow the cultured despisers of Christianity to find a place for faith. Faith thus turned toward the subjective as part of a broader fascination with the inner workings of the human psyche. Schleiermacher and those who followed his lead therefore offered a theological conversational partner for philosophy and then psychology. However, theology was so radically redefined that its influence on accounts of the union of the physical and the mental began to fade. Chapter 4 explores the impact of Charles Darwin’s 1871 Descent of Man, including both positive and negative reactions. A few of his prominent defenders and detractors in the transatlantic religious world will come in for discussion. The varied Protestant responses to Darwin, represented by Asa Gray and Charles Hodge illustrate the complexity of the religion and science interchange particularly on the origins of humanity. Darwin’s Catholic interlocutors St. George Jackson Mivart and John August Zahm were willing to accommodate natural origins of the body but sought to preserve supernatural origins for the soul. Darwin’s religious defenders, keen on melding his views into a theistic evolutionism, strove to maintain human exceptionalism, but diluted Darwin’s ideas in that process to accommodate them to the religious public. Chapter 5 introduces the reader to the anti-theologians, most notably Ludwig Feuerbach, Auguste Comte, Edward Tylor, Henry Maudsley, and Friedrich Nietzsche. They worked both from within and from without to render theology a purely human, and ultimately flawed enterprise. Feuerbach sought to show that theology was nothing more than a projection of human self-worship. Comte undertook to create a radically new religion of humanity. Tylor saw much of religion as a relic of the primitive childhood of humanity. Maudsley described religious experience as a disordered mental condition. Nietzsche castigated theology as a blatant deception of humanity that must be destroyed. All shared the view that theology was a human enterprise without ultimate divine sanction. The anti-theologians all saw Christianity itself as an unfortunate detour in history which demanded a modern course correction. They sought a cultured humanity freed from the shackles of a theological account. In so doing, they undermined a traditional metaphysical as well as theological foundations for human exceptionalism. Chapter 6 treats an issue often omitted from the science-theology story, namely, phrenology. By mid-century, science was turning to cranial shape

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Introduction

and size as a means of assessing human intellectual capacities as formulated by Franz Joseph Gall and Johann C. Spurzheim and promoted and popularized by figures including George Combe and Orson Squire Fowler. Efforts by phrenologists to win over religious traditionalists while granting phrenology explicit authority over theology contributed to its instability. The exceptional human mind was increasingly seen as a mere brain with highly complex personality traits simplistically localized to specific regions of the brain. The procedure thus blended human exceptionalism with physical explanations of mental phenomena, including religious veneration. Chapter 7 studies the social Christianity in an inhumane world. Not content with the individualistic emphases of industrialism, men and women used theological tropes to undergird calls for social change. The human could no longer be seen as the isolated individual sometimes valorized in the enlightened past. With rising urbanization, the problems of social order and social organization led to studies of social humanity. Christian Socialism under Anglican theologian Frederick Denison Maurice sought to mitigate the greater cruelties of industrialization by the founding of the Working Men’s College in Great Britain. Conventions of activist American women offered a defense of the full humanity and social participation of women in public life, by theological reinterpretation and argumentation. Human exceptionalism was not merely to be seen in individual achievements and initiatives, but socially. Washington Gladden sought to reform society through the implementation of the social gospel. Chapter 8 concerns the natural world and the human place in it. Transcendentalists promoted both the beauty of nature and the practice of introspection as a way of connecting the human to the divine. William Ellery Channing gave a progressivist account of the image of God. Ralph Waldo Emerson promoted notions of the divine that removed its personal character in favor of an impersonal oversoul. Theodore Parker defended a transcendental approach to theology. Groundwork for a rise in environmental consciousness grew through the impassioned writings of Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. The beauty of nature as a symbol of creation may be discerned in the writings of poets, as disillusionment and doubt became increasingly central. The shift toward an impersonal divine order eroded the possibility of the human person reflecting one social God in three persons as held by traditional trinitarian Christian orthodox theology. Chapter 9 surveys the status of the soul, and the ways diverse figures deployed soul-language to various purposes. Efforts to maintain the unique human individual soul as a locus of human exceptionalism underwent several challenges. Metaphysical and moral accounts of the soul took different paths. Metaphysical accounts of the soul as a substance distinct from the body gradually gave way to experimental studies of the mental life. From soul to

Introduction

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mind, and from mind to brain, the inner life of humans underwent a process of naturalization. Various theologies of the soul were debated among Protestant theologians. Theologians such as Charles Hodge and John Miley, however, held to the creation of each individual human soul, as a substance distinct from the human body, and thus sought to buttress a diminishing human exceptionalism. William Shedd embraced traducianism. Moral arguments utilizing the rhetoric of the soul made clear the social consequences of reducing the human person to a mere body. Enslaved persons insisted that they were not merely bodies, but persons with souls desiring agency and dignity. This awareness provided them with a theological or philosophical basis for social reform and liberation. Slave narratives affirmed the full humanity of persons of color and insisted that this humanity warranted treatment better than that accorded mere beasts. Chapter 10 offers a discussion of original sin in the transatlantic context. Even in a sinful state, humans are unique, due to the moral element in human nature. The standard Christian account of moral failure, themes of original and actual sin, came under sustained redefinition. Notions of human degradation began to be promoted not merely in terms of the traditional debates over original sin, but in the terms of degeneration theory, wherein even sin could be redefined and recast in scientific terms. By century’s end, degeneration thinking had a significant impact upon assessments of the human. Victorian optimism began to wane as society fragmented, and criminologists and other elites began warning the public of a rise of a degenerate underclass. Humanity was now no longer seen by many elites as a unified story of God’s smiling providence, but a divided race with good and bad stock. Chapter 11 treats the ideas about religion held by William James, founder of American psychology. For James religious experience, not theological dogma, was the centerpiece of human attempts to connect with the divine. James sought to rehabilitate the importance of religious experience as a topic worthy to be investigated by science. Experiential religion was central. Any residual theological dimension in James’s project was secondary. His Gifford Lectures, published in 1902 as Varieties of Religious Experience, indicated the fundamentally fragmentary nature of the subjective and intuitive element in religion. After James, many in the twentieth century would revel in pluralism for its own sake, moving beyond mere tolerance and into uncritical acceptance of individual accounts of the inner life. Fragmentation was the fruit of the nineteenth-century’s radical reconstruction of theological anthropology. Human exceptionalism was imperiled by a reduction to the vagaries and vicissitudes of its experiential and intuitive status. The book concludes with a consideration of some efforts toward reintegrating elements of the exceptional human.

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NOTES 1. Time, word count, human finitude, and disciplinary constraints kept me from exploring some vital areas such as the historical Adam, human sexuality, debates over free will, and sustained attention to the afterlife also characteristic of the nineteenth century. Of the making of books there is no end. 2. Peter Harrison, “‘Science’ and ‘Religion’: Constructing the Boundaries,” in Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives, ed. Stephen Pumphrey, G. N. Cantor, and Thomas Dixon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 34. 3. Ibid., 36. 4. Ibid., 39. 5. Ibid., 28. 6. Edward Garbett, The Dogmatic Faith: An Inquiry into the Relation Subsisting between Revelation and Dogma (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1870), 15. 7. John Hedley Brooke, “Science and Secularization,” in The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion, ed. Peter Harrison (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 104. 8. Ibid., 108. 9. See Peter M. J. Hess, “God’s Two Books: Special Revelation and Natural Science in the Christian West,” in Bridging Science and Religion, Theology and the Sciences Series, ed. Ted Peters and Gaymon Bennett (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003), 123–40; James G. Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 9–11; Jon Roberts, “Myth 18: That Darwin Destroyed Natural Theology,” in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 161–69; James Turner, “The Late Victorian Conflict of Science and Religion as an Event in Nineteenth-century Intellectual and Cultural History,” in Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives, ed. Stephen Pumphrey, G. N. Cantor, and Thomas Dixon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 87–109. 10. Geoffrey N. Cantor, “What Shall We Do with the ‘Conflict Thesis’?” in Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives, ed. Stephen Pumphrey, G. N. Cantor, and Thomas Dixon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 281–98. 11. For a current interdisciplinary effort to understand human uniqueness, see J. Wentzel Van Huyssteen, Alone in the World? Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 270–325.

Chapter 1

Historical Prologue  What Is Man That Thou Art Mindful of Him?

This chapter centers on two issues in history prior to the nineteenth century: the image of God and its implications on the origin and nature of the soul. A brief look at the biblical tradition is followed by voices drawn from church history. In the history of Christian thought, this chapter selects thinkers who sought to interact with natural philosophy, that is, major figures of their own time who studied the natural world in an effort to account for the human place in it. Many of these figures took human exceptionalism for granted, holding that humans are made in the image of God, and that the human soul was the primary locus for that image, while the body subserved the flourishing of the soul as believers underwent transformation through their faith in God. THE IMAGE OF GOD IN THE BIBLE The classic text in scripture and foundational to all subsequent discussion of the concept of humanity in God’s image is Genesis 1:27 (NIV), “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” The familiar Latin theological term for this concept is the imago Dei. Other passages of scripture indicate that even with sin infecting the human family, the imago Dei remains in force. For example, in the postdiluvian narrative, God invokes the imago Dei when instructing Noah concerning the punishment for homicide. Because of the elevated moral status of human beings, the penalty for ending the life of another human was severe: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man” (Genesis 9:6, NIV). Whether the expression is prescriptive 13

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or merely descriptive, the sobriety of taking another human life was bound to the divine purpose for humanity as the image of God. Numerous passages intimate the dignity that attaches to human persons not because of their achievements, but because of the dignity of the one whose image they bear. The psalmist rhetorically asked, “What is man that you are mindful of him,” continuing that humanity is made “a little lower than the heavenly beings,” and “crowned with glory and honor” (Ps. 8:4–5, NIV).1 One nineteenth-century commentary on the eighth psalm held that the image of God language of early Genesis, and echoed in Psalm 8, made the human “nearly a divine being,” and “the lord of all things, the lord of all earthly creatures.” The eighth psalm evoked the dominion of the human, and reprised the opening chapter in Genesis. In both loci, God placed humans over beasts, fish, and birds. “Man is a king, and not a king without territory; the world around, with the works of creative wisdom which fill it, is his kingdom,” the commentator declared, noting that, “The enumeration begins with the domestic animals and passes on from these to the wild beasts—together the creatures that dwell on terra firma.”2 In the New Testament, the advent of Jesus, confessed by Christians to be the Messiah, and identified as the quintessential expression of the imago Dei, added depth to this picture (2 Corinthians 4:4; Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3). To the Corinthians, Paul indicated that the human is “the image and glory of God” (1 Corinthians 11:7 NIV); and that Christians are continually being transformed into the likeness of Christ through the agency of the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18). James urged Christians to refrain from cursing each other because humans are created in the likeness of God (James 3:9). The imago Dei thus served not just as an abstract doctrine for New Testament authors, but a practical guide to the moral treatment of other human beings. Samples of ways this image was developed and rearticulated in the patristic era, the medieval period, the Renaissance, the early scientific revolution, and the eighteenth-century era known as the Enlightenment, round out this chapter. THE IMAGE OF GOD IN THE CHURCH FATHERS The early church apologist Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–200 AD) stressed that the dignity of humanity is exalted due to our solidarity with the logos (word), namely the incarnate Son of God. And then, again, this Word was manifested when the Word of God was made man, assimilating Himself to man, and man to Himself, so that by means of his resemblance to the Son, man might become precious to the Father. For in times

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long past, it was said that man was created after the image of God, but it was not [actually] shown; for the Word was as yet invisible, after whose image man was created, wherefore also he did easily lose the similitude. When, however, the Word of God became flesh, He confirmed both these: for He both showed forth the image truly, since He became Himself what was His image; and He re-established the similitude after a sure manner, by assimilating man to the invisible Father through means of the visible Word.3

One implication of this statement was that the image of God does not have to be something visible or detectable to human eyes for the image to be real, or to have moral force in human experience. Another factor was the elevation of human dignity through the incarnation (becoming flesh) by God the Son, in His assuming of human nature, as itself a saving act of transcendent power and love. Irenaeus famously stressed the distinction between image and likeness. The likeness (“similitude”) of the human person to God was lost through sin, which is a departure from the original moral perfection provided at creation. The image however is not lost through sin. The human, even in an unregenerate state as an imperfect being who has sinned, is still “possessing indeed the image [of God] in his formation, but not receiving the similitude through the Spirit; and thus is this being imperfect.” Image thus refers to the human as “being,” whereas likeness refers to the human as a moral agent. Irenaeus went on to describe how the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity in trinitarian theology, sanctifies the saved person, making him or her complete and spiritual, thus restoring the lost similitude to God.4 The image of God is something inherent in the very formation of the human as a union of body and soul. If the image would disappear, the human qua human would also disappear. By contrast, the likeness can be lost, but also restored to humanity through the regenerative activity of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian believer. In context, the emphasis of Irenaeus and his theological anthropology was upon the transformation of sinners into spiritual, blameless, and righteous persons. Other passages in Irenaeus refined an understanding of the qualities that characterize the image of God. As David Cairns has observed, “man’s freedom and rationality here mentioned are for Irenaeus at least a dominant part of the image of God which cannot be lost by sin, although the rationality . . . is compatible with a failure to be truly reasonable.”5 Aside from the ethical application of the imago Dei offered by the church fathers, some addressed the larger question of what qualities are implicated in this theological doctrine. Interaction with philosophy raised the stakes for their articulation of a theological anthropology. Beyond the ethical admonitions to be like God in moral character, metaphysical considerations of the

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ontology of the human rose to the fore. The core question became: In what ways can the human nature be said to reflect the divine nature? Gregory of Nyssa (c. 330–395 AD) was a Christian philosophical theologian significantly influenced by neo-Platonic thought. His treatise On the Making of Man offered an extended theological anthropology laced with the insights into human physiology espoused by the physician Galen (129–c. 216 AD). Gregory sought to show that the human imago Dei is not fully divine, while also not to be identified with the animal aspects of the human body. For Gregory, human nature is a “mean” between the divine and animal natures. Gregory connected the image of the divine to “the rational and intelligent element, which does not admit the distinction of male and female.” Gregory insisted that the male/female distinction represents our common bond with animals, and is therefore a function of embodiment and an addition to the divine image rather than an inherent component of that image. For Gregory, the divine image transcends the male/female bifurcation that humans and animals share. Gregory set forth the moral implications of humanity’s creation in God’s image, namely, that humans are an expression of God’s goodness. Gregory perceived the phrase “in the image of God” as a shorthand for a lengthy list of good gifts provided to us by God. Gregory argued that “if the Deity is the fullness of good, and this is his image, then the image finds its resemblance to the Archetype in being filled with all good.” Human freedom from necessity, as the prerequisite to the exercise of genuine virtue, stands preeminent in the goods inherent in the imago Dei.6 Gregory blended the metaphysical and ethical accounts of human nature while attending to the capacities of the human body through the science of medicine. On the issue of ensoulment, or the instilling of the immaterial soul in the material body, Gregory rejected both the preexistence of the soul, as in the Platonic tradition, and the creation of the soul at some point temporally after the creation of the body. For Gregory, a creation first of one part and then the other would imply an imperfection in God’s creative power. Gregory argued for the presence of the soul even when clear visual evidence may prove wanting. When there is no manifestation of a soul, its presence endures in a potential and concealed way. Just as the body starts out small, correspondingly so it is with the soul. A root or seed may be hidden or have hidden properties latent within them, so it is with the subtle presence of the soul.7 The body is a divinely bestowed gift, with many wondrous powers. Its interaction with the soul is subtle, but both dimensions must be accounted for in a robust account of what it means to be human.

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THE IMAGE OF GOD IN THOMAS AQUINAS In his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274 AD) made a distinction between the various ways that aspects of the human person reflect the image of God. Thomas accentuated the mind of man as the central way human beings express God’s image. “While in all creatures there is some kind of likeness to God, in the rational creature alone we find a likeness of ‘image’ . . . whereas in other creatures we find a likeness by way of a trace.” Humans reflect the divine in various ways including, but not limited to, the ability to communicate, to love, and to will. “So we find in man a likeness to God by way of an ‘image’ in his mind,” he concluded, “but in the other parts of his being by way of a ‘trace.’”8 Thomas thus enunciated a more holistic conceptualization of the image by noting activities that parallel divine action and are traces of the divine in humans as body and soul. While the mind remains in a privileged position in his analysis of the image of God, other parts of the human being also (in a more attenuated sense) show traces of the divine. Communicating, loving, and willing are traces of the divine that flow from the mind that transcends the purely animal. Yet these activities in the human arena occur in an embodied way. God is not an embodied being, but human embodiment becomes a way of “tracing” divine activities like communication. Communication between purely spiritual beings would not require a tongue or hands, for example, but some such instruments are needed for humans, who are not purely spiritual, to communicate. Whereas many other theologians contended that only the soul was relevant to the image of God, for Thomas Aquinas trace reflections of God exist even in the human embodied state. He represented a shift away from the dominant neoplatonic attitude which viewed the body with an ambivalence bordering on disdain. When it came to the relationship of soul and body, Thomas leaned heavily on “The Philosopher,” Aristotle. He drew upon Aristotle’s statement that the soul is the form of the body. Aquinas described the soul as “the first thing by which the body lives.” The soul is the primary way that we perform the various operations of life. “For the soul is the primary principle of our nourishment, sensation, and local movement,” he asserted, adding, “and likewise of our understanding.” Just as was the case with the image of God in human beings, Thomas Aquinas understood the soul foremost in terms of the mind. “Therefore this principle by which we primarily understand, whether it be called the intellect or the intellectual soul, is the form of the body.”9

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THE IMAGE OF GOD IN THE RENAISSANCE The Renaissance in Modern Europe was a time of the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman writings from the pre-Christian past. Beginning in late fourteenth-century Italy, then spreading over Europe in the next two hundred years, this phenomenon set the stage for intellectual and social shifts in virtually every category of human experience.10 Independent scholars, operating outside the control of the church, tended to concentrate on human beings as having an elevated status. Some did so out of Christian convictions regarding human dignity. Others elevated humans into a godlike status in defiance of Christian norms. One key treatise by a Christian humanist was penned by Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola (1463–1494), a leading member of the Platonic academy founded by Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) in Florence. In his “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” we find the optimistic humanism often associated with the Renaissance. This text represents the Maker as addressing Adam directly. Adam is told he is given no “endowment properly your own,” so that he may select his own gifts through his own “judgment and decision.” While the natures of all the other earthly creatures place restrictions on them, Adam is assured that he is not impeded by the same restrictions, but by his own free will he may “trace the lineaments of your own nature.” In the majestic plural, God proclaimed: “We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.”11 Not all Renaissance Christian humanists viewed humanity so anthropocentrically. John Calvin, often described as a co-founder (with Luther) of the Protestant Reformation, was himself a product of the Renaissance. While most subsequent critics of Calvin focused on his doctrine of the total depravity of humanity after the fall; Calvin’s theological anthropology of the imago Dei in Adam deserves attention as well. In Calvin’s Institutes, he held that the image of God is in the human soul, not in the body. Calvin focused on Adam as the original image-bearer; and on Christ as the image-restorer in those who from eternity were elect unto salvation. The restoration of the image through Christ was a restoration of moral holiness via divine grace: Therefore, as the image of God constitutes the entire excellence of human nature, as it shone in Adam before his fall, but was afterwards vitiated and almost destroyed, nothing remaining but a ruin, confused, mutilated, and tainted with impurity, so it is now partly seen in the elect, in so far as they are regenerated by the Spirit. Its full lustre, however, will be displayed in heaven. But in

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order to know the particular properties in which it consists, it will be proper to treat of the faculties of the soul.12

For Pico and others of the more optimistic strain of Renaissance Christian humanists the goodness and dignity of humans was accentuated. For Calvin and most of the Protestant Reformers, volumes were written on how the image of God was sullied by sin, and needed supernatural grace to bring about a moral restoration and manifestation of the image of God. Within a century, the scientific revolution began to reshape reflection upon and study of human nature, and of this development theologians had to take account. IMAGE OF GOD: SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION AND MODERNITY In the wake of Galileo’s use of the telescope to begin to fathom the vastness of the universe, Christian intellectuals began to rethink the place and scale of humanity within that vastness. One believing natural philosopher stands out during the early years of the scientific revolution, namely, Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). Pascal, who from childhood was fascinated by the mathematical structure of reality, exemplified the bewilderment that attended new discoveries of the very large and the very small: For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up.13

Pascal went on to describe humans as the mean between two extremes, and thus doubly limited. This was not for Pascal cause for despair toward the human. Instead, “he may perhaps aspire to know at least the parts to which he bears some proportion.” Nonetheless, this insight can be gained only by knowing the whole and the parts in relation to the whole. Pascal rejected a materialist reading of human nature, writing: “there being nothing so inconceivable as to say that matter knows itself.” Pascal understood humanity as a duality, namely, “we are composed of two opposite natures, different in kind, soul and body.”14 Pascal noted the mysteriousness of the composite human condition, stating: “Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation

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of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.”15 Much of human misery Pascal ascribed to pride and all the moral and social defects spawned by it: He lamented, “He who does not see the vanity of the world is himself very vain.”16 Humans were mysterious not merely in their place in the scale of nature, but also in their propensity for failure and sin. JOHN RAY AND DAVID HARTLEY ON THE HUMAN DESIGN Cambridge-educated John Ray (1627–1705) wrote treatises on botany, zoology, and natural theology. After a long and prolific career as a botanist, establishing the concept of “species” that would become so central to scientific endeavor after his era, Ray incorporated scientific findings into his 1691 work, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation. This tome set forth many of the arguments employed by future natural theologians. Ray believed in a harmonization of the study of nature with theological themes, and often framed arguments in such a way as to refute “atheistical” denials of a divine Creator. He interpreted “the make and constitution, the order and disposition, the ends and uses of all the parts and members of this stately fabrick of heaven and earth” as the most “palpable and convincing argument of the existence of a Deity.” He described God as “some intelligent Architect, or Engineer” whose observable artistry and skill “do as much transcend the effects of human art, as infinite power and wisdom exceeds finite.” From such works, Ray was confident that he could “infer the existence and efficacy of an omnipotent and all-wise Creator.”17 Ray also urged students of divinity to devote themselves to the study of nature, including the more laborious aspects of this work. In particular, he singled out the study of human physiology to be of great value. “I do not see but the study of true physiology may be justly accounted a proper, or propaideia preparative to divinity,” he wrote, employing the ancient Greek term for a foundational education. “But to leave that,” he continued, “it is a generally receiv’d opinion, that all this visible world was created for man; that man is the end of creation; as if there were no other end of any creature, but some way or other to be serviceable to man.” For Ray, this was an inadequate way of construing the human place in nature. He countered a common view, held by Descartes and others, that animals are mere automata or “machines and puppets” merely serviceable to humans. For Ray “this opinion seems to me too mean, and unworthy the majesty, wisdom, and power of God; nor can it well consist with his veracity.” Rather, Ray’s study of the abundance of flora and fauna on earth led him to aver that “there are infinite other creatures

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without this earth, which no considerate man can think were made only for man, and have no other use.”18 Ray’s stance was to bring a dose of humility to the human posture toward the rest of creation, stating, “For my part, I cannot believe that all things in the world were so made for man, that they have no other use.”19 In the larger context, Ray offered several warnings against the human sin of pride, or anthropocentrism relative to the other creatures. Anticipating later recognitions of earth’s biodiversity, Ray pointed out that “there are many species in nature, even in this sublunary world, which were never yet taken notice of by man, and consequently of no use to him, which yet we are not to think were created in vain,” though such may prove of use to future generations. The theological import of studying these mysterious creatures via “our wits and understandings” is that they provide an occasion for “admiring and glorifying their and our Maker.”20 With respect to the human body, Ray explored multiple phenomena as evidence of the wisdom of the creator in crafting the human frame. First, he noted the erect posture of the human body, “which is a privilege and advantage given to man above other animals,” while also noting many shared features between the bodies of humans and other animals. Secondly, humans can see distances relative to other creatures (at least creatures of the land). Thirdly, humans are not designed for quadrupedal locomotion, as indicated by length of limb and features of arm and leg joints. Fourthly, the human pericardium surrounding the heart is fixed to the diaphragm “in the midriff” whereas it is not so fixed in other creatures. All these features Ray interpreted as providential design whereby the Creator framed the human to breathe freely in an upright posture.21 More than a century later, the basic framework of such an approach was still employed, with the benefits of the broadening of the scientific study of earth’s largesse, in books of natural theology. By the middle of the eighteenth century, a physician named David Hartley (1705–1757) combined the fruit of his research into the human nervous system with theological apologetics. Because he would not subscribe to the Anglican doctrinal standard, The Thirty-Nine Articles, Hartley could not follow in his father’s footsteps as an Anglican priest. Instead he pursued medical research, but his fascination with integrating science and theology found expression in 1749. With the publication of Observations on Man: His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectation, Hartley unfolded his theory of vibrations. In this he was giving a theistic interpretation to what David Hume was concurrently framing as skepticism, namely, the philosophy of empirical sensationism. Vibrations in the nervous system of the human body established ideas in the human mind by the association of felt stimuli with associated notions in the mind.

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Hartley was sensitive to the charge that his doctrine of vibrations could undermine the substantial soul, and made efforts to assure his readers that his views did not transgress this theological tradition. He pled with the reader, that “if he admits the simple case of the connexion [sic] between the Soul and Body, in respect of sensation, as it is laid down in the first Proposition; and only supposes, that there is a change made in the medullary substance . . . the doctrine of vibrations, as here delivered, undertakes to account for all the rest.” He later added that his theory could neither prove nor deny the immateriality of the soul.22 Hartley combined in a unique fashion detailed medical theorizing, apologetics, and natural theology. Chapters on the being and attributes of God, or arguments that miracles could be harmonized with natural religion, assimilated Hartley’s work with other efforts of Protestant natural theology. Such an emphasis on moral duty in concert with natural theology was expected in this era, as the popularity of Joseph Butler’s work in the previous decade attested.23 Hartley offered a detailed account of the physiological features of pleasure and pain, then related his findings to Christian morality. The inclusion of such material along with his accentuation of physical stimuli in the role of creating thought made Hartley’s work stand out for its uneven if daring approach to melding natural philosophy with theology. CONCLUSION Theological anthropology in natural philosophy and the Christian tradition combined during the early modern period, and shapers of modern thought saw theology and natural philosophy as harmonious. This collaboration began to crack in the debates over Deism beginning with the late seventeenth century. Deists often still conceived of humanity as reflecting a divine artificer, even if they held such a figure at considerably greater distance from daily human life, and reduced divine-human interaction, when compared with orthodox theologians. With the eighteenth century, natural philosophers increasingly focused on giving a naturalistic account of what it means to be human. David Hartley tried to integrate naturalism with supernaturalism, but many in the same era embraced naturalism as a worldview, not merely a methodology. Students of nature included encyclopedists of a decidedly skeptical bent, such as Voltaire (1697–1778), Denis Diderot (1685–1759), and heretical former Catholic priest Jean Messlier (1664–1779). Unitarian chemist Joseph Priestly (1733– 1804) still had a limited place for God, but only by placing all religions on the same plane and disposing of miracles in Christian orthodoxy such as the virgin birth of Christ.24 French mathematician and philosopher Julien Offray

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de La Mettrie (1709–1751) embraced a full materialism with its concomitant denial of the human soul. By the middle of the nineteenth century, German physiologist, science popularizer, and philosopher Carl Vogt (1817–1895) could proclaim: “Even man is neither a distinct creature, formed in a special manner, and differently from all other animals, nor provided with a special soul and endowed with a divine breath of life—he is only the highest product of a progressive natural selection, and descends from the simious group standing next to man.”25 Shifts in academic understanding of natural history in the early nineteenth century, with the rise of biblical criticism, alongside revolutionary reconstructions of social life, made the science-theology alliance a series of painful renegotiations. Natural theologians could narrow their arguments or make them more modestly focused on isolated cases of design in nature, hoping gaps in understanding would not be filled by purely naturalistic explanations. Intuitionists could try to insulate theology from science by granting science and theology autonomous realms in which to operate with independence. At times something akin to a truce could be reached, but such a truce came at significant costs that only the long gaze of historical perspective can begin to critique. As the nineteenth century would unfold, human exceptionalism encountered many perils. It is a complex story. To some elements of this story our narrative now turns. NOTES 1. The New Revised Standard Version renders it more inclusively as: “what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” 2. C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament in Ten Volumes: Vol. 5, Psalms, trans. James Martin (1867; reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), 154–55. 3. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V.16.2. Christian Classics Ethereal Library, accessed April 8, 2021. http:​//​www​.ccel​.org​/ccel​/schaff​/anf01​.ix​.vii​.xvii​.html. 4. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V.6. Christian Classics Ethereal Library, accessed April 8, 2021, http:​//​www​.ccel​.org​/ccel​/schaff​/anf01​.ix​.vii​.vii​.html. 5. David Cairns, The Image of God in Man (New York: Philosophical Library, 1953), 76. 6. Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Making of Man,” trans. William Moore and H. A. Wilson, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 5, Gregory of Nyssa, Dogmatic Treatises, Etc. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), 405. 7. Ibid., 421–22. 8. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.93.6, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, accessed April 8, 2021. https:​//​www​.newadvent​.org​/summa​/1093​.htm​#article6.

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9. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.76.1, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, accessed April 8, 2021. http:​//​www​.newadvent​.org​/summa​/1076​.htm. 10. See by way of introduction, Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Part V, The Renaissance: A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304–1576 A.D. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953), 77–86; Albert Rabil, Jr., “Humanism: Renaissance,” New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (2005) 3:1029–33. 11. Pico Della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. A. Robert Caponigri (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, 1956), 7. 12. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 15:3–4, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, accessed April 8, 2021. http:​//​www​.ccel​.org​/ccel​/calvin​/institutes​ .iv​.i​.xvi​.html. 13. Blaise Pascal, “Misery of Man without God,” in Charles W. Eliot, ed., The Harvard Classics, vol. 48: Blaise Pascal: Thoughts, Letters, and Minor Works (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1938), 28. 14. Ibid., 31. 15. Ibid., 32. Here Pascal quoted Augustine as stating the same perennial quandary in Latin. Later he wrote of his inability to forgive Descartes for reducing God’s role to merely that of setting the world in motion, p. 34. 16. Ibid., 63. 17. John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, 11th ed. (Glasgow: Robert Urie and Co., 1744), 35–36. 18. Ibid., 152. 19. Ibid., 153–54. 20. Ibid., 154. 21. Ibid., 188–89. 22. David Hartley, Observations on Man: His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectation (London: Leake and Frederick, 1749), 111, cf. 536. 23. Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, 2nd ed. (London: J. and P. Knapton, 1736), Books III–V. 24. See John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 206–57. 25. Carl Vogt, Lectures on Man: His place in Creation, and in the History of the Earth (London: The Anthropological Society, 1864), 449.

Chapter 2

The Human Design in Natural Theology

The definition of natural theology has remained stable over the centuries, but the characteristics of the definitions of “reason” and “revelation” have shifted. An 1840 encyclopedic entry defined the field as “a theological system framed ‘entirely out of the religious truths which may be learned from natural sources, that is, from the constitution of the human mind, and from the phenomena of the mental and material universe.’”1 Notwithstanding the specificity of this definition, the uses to which natural theology has been put have been diverse. Such have ranged from a limited application and cautious use to a highly optimistic employment of arguments based on scientific observation and applied to the divine. At times natural theology became entwined with apologetics, a field devoted to defenses of traditional Christian doctrines. Such an approach could be rather reactionary relative to the perceived threats, for example, of skepticism, Deism, and atheism. Seventeenth-century natural philosopher Robert Boyle (1627–1691) endowed a series of sermons in a 1691 bequest, “for proving the Christian religion,” and combating a long list of opponents under the rubric of “infidels.” If Boyle had his way, the sermons were not to be used to enflame tensions between the various Christian sects.2 The eighteenth century saw the rise of several able natural theologians. The connections of natural theology to moral theology were made plain by Joseph Butler (1692–1752) in his famed Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature, published in 1736. Placing natural theology within a broader defense of both revealed and natural truth, Butler was contending against those who thought that all meaningful knowledge about religion could be obtained by a study of nature, using natural reason. Alister McGrath describes natural theology as “the idea that there exists some link between the world we observe and another transcendent realm.” This idea involves both imagination and an implicit anticipation of a better 25

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realm beyond this one. Such an appeal “is not purely emotional or aesthetic; it has the potential to offer a framework for intellectual and moral reflection on the present order of things.”3 That framework would come to be challenged both on intellectual and on moral grounds by the midst of the nineteenth century. The cogency of efforts to ground human exceptionalism in divine design would depend on whether scientists in the relevant fields could point to a satisfactory naturalistic explanation for the appearance of design. Prior to 1850, it was commonplace for theologians and natural philosophers to seek reconciliation between ancient biblical texts and new developments in natural philosophy and science. The two-books approach held the book of nature and the book of scripture in two hands, and each with reverence and esteem. Yet with anomalies between geological discoveries and literal interpretations of the Pentateuch beginning to become evident, theologians and commentators began to address science within their theological writings. One historian has observed: “Both groups—leading Christian scientists and theologians—were concerned that the book of nature should not be at variance with Scripture and, in coming to terms with the apparent ‘cognitive dissonance,’ a variety of harmonization schemata were put forward.” A cottage industry of harmonizing works began to pour forth from the presses. Texts treating geology often included a section harmonizing newer theories about the history of the planet with “the biblical accounts of creation and deluge.”4 After mid-century, however, some of the authors of the controversial tome Essays and Reviews in 1860 criticized “plans of conciliation” as standing “at variance with each other and mutually destructive.”5 I give attention in this chapter to aspects of theological anthropology implicitly or explicitly developed within natural theology during the period. The interplay of scientific and theological terminology would experience significant strains as time wore on. The chief figure to whom natural theology grants an archetypal position was William Paley. PALEY’S NATURAL AND MORAL THEOLOGY IN INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT Raised in a family of multiple generations of Cambridge alumni, William Paley (1743–1805) showed an early affinity for mathematics, in 1761 earning the highest honor in mathematics at Cambridge. He became a fellow at Cambridge in 1766, obtaining his MA and continuing to teach and write for the next decade. William Paley was ordained an Anglican priest in 1767, and the next year his life was comprised of preaching and teaching. From 1771–1775 he served in a prestigious preaching position at Royal Chapel, Whitehall.



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Paley began to lecture on ethics over the next decade, and this work resulted in his landmark textbook, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, published in 1785. From 1782 until his death in 1805 he held the position of archdeacon in the church of England, and ambitious friends urged him to strive for a higher churchly title, in which Paley had little interest. From 1785 he was chancellor of the diocese of Carlisle, a job comprised of numerous ecclesiastical administrative duties. Paley’s work of Christian apologetics, A View of the Evidences of Christianity, was published in 1794. He completed his doctorate in divinity at Cambridge in 1795. Skeptical voices had long sought to redefine theology, and to domesticate it under the guidance and limitations posited by natural reason and natural philosophy. American Thomas Paine declared in 1780: “That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology.” Revealed theology, such as derived from traditional readings of the Bible, could be relegated to the status of unreliability. “As to the theology that is now studied in its place, it is the study of human opinions and human fancies ‘concerning’ God,” Paine insisted. “It is not the study of God himself in the works that he has made, but in the works of writings that man has made; and it is not among the least mischiefs that the Christian system has done to the world that it has abandoned the original and beautiful system of theology . . . to make room for the hag of superstition.”6 Against this backdrop, Paley’s Natural Theology was published just three years before his death. Whereas skeptics assumed that science (then known as natural philosophy) was their friend and best weapon against traditional faith, Paley saw it as a repository of evidences for the veracity of that very faith. Even in his lifetime it went through nine editions. The work became standard reading in the Cambridge curriculum, even staying on one reading list until 1920.7 Paley represented an optimistic evidentialist strain of Enlightenment Anglican apologetics. He used analogies between human inventions and organisms in nature to argue for a divine design detectable in nature. The most often-cited instance of this strategy was Paley’s opening analogy: a comparison between a stone and a watch discovered on an open field. The discovery of a stone, due to its simplicity, would occasion no speculation about its origins. The discovery of the watch, according to Paley, would by contrast lead inevitably to an inference to an intelligent designer or watchmaker. The key concept here was “contrivance,” which McGrath describes in retrospect as “a system of parts arranged to work together for a purpose, manifesting both design and utility.” The more complex the system, the more evidence it offers of design.8

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Paley provided detailed arguments for a divine intelligent designer for all the organs of sense. To these he added analyses of a menagerie of cleverly constructed creatures commonly found in nature. While Paley spent little energy on attempting to prove that human minds mirror the divine mind, his argument rested on the assumption that the divine mind and the human mind are alike in their operations. Despite the commonplace theistic idea that the latter is limited, and the former is not, Paley reposed confidence in his argument strategy. This analogical method had a long and honored pedigree, running in previous centuries through the British Protestant apologetic tradition.9 For Paley, the Deity was, like human beings, a personal being, not merely a natural law, a force, or a mechanistic process. In the following passage Paley preempted any notion of vitalism, (a view more popular by the end of the nineteenth century) namely, of the self-organizational self-sufficiency of matter: CONTRIVANCE . . . proves the personality of the Deity, as distinguished from what is sometimes called nature, sometimes called a principle: which terms, in the mouths of those who use them philosophically, seem to be intended, to admit and to express an efficacy, but to exclude and to deny a personal agent. Now that which can contrive, which can design, must be a person. These capacities constitute personality, for they imply consciousness and thought. . . . They require a centre in which perceptions unite, and from which volitions flow; which is mind. The acts of a mind prove the existence of a mind: and in whatever a mind resides, is a person.10

The power of his argument by analogy required that mind and matter be seen as closely cooperative in the phenomena of the natural world. The physical world is continually suggesting such analogies, and this “manifests the extent of that intelligent power which is acting in nature” as well as this design’s fruitfulness, variation, and aptness made accessible to human observers.11 Paley was writing in the wake of European Enlightenment denials of divine providential care in the daily sustenance of creation. As one historian has observed, Paley was not merely aiming to show God as a designer, but to demonstrate, as the subtitle of his book indicates, the “attributes of the Deity.”12 Deists, such as John Toland (1670–1722), had insisted that true Christianity is not mysterious and that rational people need only believe truths gleaned from the scientific study of nature itself. Specific religious beliefs about God’s character were removed by the accounts of the Deists. Apart from sacred text, an explanatory gap appeared between the bare existence of such a creating mind and those specific attributes thought to inhere in the personal Deity whose mind the world expressed.



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As with many Christian apologists, Paley sought to justify one fundamental attribute of the deity: God’s benevolence in the face of the problem of evil. The predicament of suffering had become an especially vexing one for Christian apologetics after the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and French skeptic Voltaire’s (1694–1778) popular and scathing satire Candide lampooned the notion of a benevolent Deity directing human affairs.13 Paley frankly admitted, “Of the origin of evil no universal solution has been discovered; I mean no solution which reaches to all cases of complaint.”14 Paley then undertook to articulate several principles under an analysis of the problem of evil within the concept of general laws. He held to the following ideas. It is advantageous for the universe to proceed from general laws. General laws often “thwart and cross one another.” From such clashes “frequent particular inconveniences will arise.” It must be allowed therefore that “some degree of these inconveniences take place in the works of nature.”15 Paley next proceeded to appeal to current human ignorance of the big picture. He noted that “the general laws with which we are acquainted are directed to beneficial ends.” Those laws of which humans are ignorant “cannot be of importance to us as measures by which to regulate our conduct.” He suggested that the turning aside of such inconveniences from human experience may not accord with “a presiding and benevolent will without incurring greater evils than those which will be avoided.” Paley offered that such a discussion “serves rather to account for the obscurity of the subject than to supply us with distinct answers to our difficulties.”16 Paley insisted those causes of apparent evil that strike humans as irrational must “lie deeper in the order of second causes, and which on that account are removed to a greater distance from us.”17 Paley offered several rationales for the persistence of evil. Imperfections are arranged in gradations in nature. Gradations are not self-evidently evil. “No class can justly complain of the imperfections which belong to its place in the scale.” This is because the scale of nature itself reflects divine wisdom and goodness.18 Finiteness of resources is a reality. Humans have adjusted to this fairly well.19 Bodily pain serves a positive good as a warning system, as evidenced by frostbite victims, in whose case it was the absence of pain that led to greater problems. The pains of life are usually temporary, and the easing of pain is itself a form of pleasure, which can then become gratitude toward others who help assuage it.20 Mortal illnesses help reconcile humans to their inevitable death and to value life while they still have it. Death itself is part of the natural order and is necessary. We are separated from the brutes in that we can mourn. By becoming like the brutes we could escape grief, to be sure, yet the cost would be too high, namely, the loss of the unique mental powers that experience suffering.21

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Free agency of humans is itself liable to abuse. Sparing humans suffering subverts their very nature. Removing freedom in order to remove pain is too costly. Such would forestall benefits flowing from freedom such as morality, virtue, merit, accountability, and reason itself.22 The human condition is probationary and designed to forge and improve character.23 Christianity is not only a blessing but also a trial, and religion grants resources to help produce the desired character by drawing the mind by struggle toward a perfected future state.24 These propositions on the possibility of suffering rendered humans exceptional in their capacity to experience pain in its mental form of suffering, as well as to utilize the challenges of life as tests for self-improvement. For example, while animals may undergo measurable responses that register pain, the concept of suffering requires the additional human capacity to reason and reflect upon the possible meanings that attach to the experience of pain. Efforts to harmonize suffering with a rational account of benevolent design would be a recurring feature of natural theology. Paley referred to varied forms of suffering and evil with the term “inconveniences,” to downplay questioning of benevolent design in nature. There was also a possible sociocultural reason for this approach. As one historian has noted, “Natural religion performed an important ideological function from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. It served as one of the vehicles whereby the governing elites of Britain confirmed the social status quo.” Like Paley’s moral arguments adduced here, “They argued that the existing society reflected the rational harmonies of nature and therefore reflected the laws of nature.”25 Thomas Malthus’s (1766–1834) Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) eventually disenchanted Charles Darwin and discredited in his eyes Paley’s natural theological account of the problem of evil. Nature’s fecundity swamps and outstrips available resources, and leads to shortages, violence, and starvation. “Malthus’ vision casts a potentially dark shadow over Paley’s smiling face of nature.”26 Later figures, including evangelicals and populist radicals who spent extended time with the poor and the underclass in the grip of the Industrial Revolution, would describe their plight as more than “inconveniences.” Later scholars have debated the relative misery of the Industrial Revolution in statistical terms, but existentially at the time enough suffering existed to produce social unrest and a ready readership for sympathetic treatments of the poor in the novels, for example, of Dickens and Disraeli.27 In the coming decades, dissatisfaction would arise from those who, with increasing education and deepening awareness of the disparities, would not remain satisfied with a harshly striated society. Amid the burgeoning accumulation of scientific investigations and “facts” often collected by assiduous clergymen like Paley in this era, theists could no



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longer afford to engage in theological arguments philosophically abstracted from either the natural or the social world. The human person was part of both orders, even if still enthroned as the pinnacle of creation in the minds of many churchmen of the era. This privileged position began to give way in the view of many elites, however, as first geological discoveries, and then the evolutionary controversy, struck Europe and America like a tidal wave. In his classic work A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues that the shift away from religious and toward a secular worldview turns not just on scientific but more fundamentally upon ethical considerations. If, as materialism holds, the world is ultimately impersonal, then the demands of a personal God to evade activities that seem pleasant, natural, or innocent, struck some thinkers as an imposition of a primitive and immoral mindset upon a modern world. Taylor writes that the “moral outlook of modernity . . . calls on us to rise to a universal standpoint” of impartiality. The goal is to “rise above and beyond our particular, narrow, biased view on things, to a view from everywhere, or for every man.”28 As theologian Claude Welch has discerned, morality served as the main component that even the severest critics of revealed religion in the Enlightenment wished to retain for the modern age. For eighteenth-century skeptics, the core of religion, an element they believed could still be supported by a study of nature, was the moral law. Reductively, therefore, “the genuine elements in the Bible are the moral truths taught by Christ.” Such were on this view reconfirmed by natural reason. In the “radical strain of Deism” there was a suspicion that “the church . . . was filled with superstition, pious fraud, and invention, the constructs of priestcraft.” This appeal to moral indignity had by Darwin’s day long formed a component of the intellectual critique aimed at churchmen founding morality upon revealed religion.29 Treatises on natural theology developed not merely a philosophy of design in nature, but a grand moral argument for the compatibility of nature’s ways and God’s demands. This moral dimension has been, as Taylor suggests, underappreciated in the arguments over natural theology. THOMAS CHALMERS AND A THEOLOGY BOTH NATURAL AND MORAL By the time Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847) wrote his most important work on natural theology, he had already carried out a full public life as a churchman. As part of the Evangelical Awakening in the Church of Scotland, Thomas Chalmers became pastor of one of the leading churches of Glasgow in 1815. His interest in the intersection of science and theology may be seen in his Astronomical Discourses where he tied findings in astronomy with biblical

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teachings. From 1823 to 1828 Chalmers held the chair of moral philosophy at St. Andrews. In 1828 he took the chair of divinity in Edinburgh, and during this teaching appointment he was instrumental in the formation of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843.30 His efforts to mediate between various factions in the Church of Scotland indicated his ability to move in various circles. One account of his life and influence states: “His preaching, social concern, parish experiments, and interest in Bible societies and missions made him famous in Britain, well known in North America, and respected in France.” After his death in 1847, throngs of people from across the spectrum of Scottish society attended his funeral.31 Chalmers’s selection to open the series says something about the regard with which he was held in natural theological circles. With a cumbersome title typical of the age, Chalmers offered British society reassurances that the created order was also a moral order. On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man ran to two volumes. Given his position as a clergyman, it is unsurprising that the tome reads at times like an extended sermon, even if a philosophical one. He promoted not merely individual morality, but social morality as well. For Chalmers, morality was inherently social. He wrote: “But, born as man obviously is for the companionship of his fellows, it must be evident that the main tendencies and aptitudes of his moral constitution should be looked for in connection with his social relationships, with the action and reaction which take place between man and the brethren of his species.”32 A concern to show the social utility or usefulness of his theory reflected the rising concern for utility in philosophical circles at the time. The utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), who had died the previous year, was growing in popularity. Bentham’s 1789 work, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation framed much of the debate over morality for the early nineteenth century. There also remained an older tradition of “theological utilitarianism” associated with figures such as Richard Cumberland (1631– 1718), Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671–1713), and John Gay (1699–1745) with whom Chalmers could more readily identify.33 For Chalmers, the more circumstances that must coincide to produce a useful outcome the greater the reduction of the probability of their occurring by chance. Such layering of phenomena increased their evidentiary value as signs of design.34 Using analogical reasoning, Chalmers compared the divine and human minds. Chalmers noted two dominant and rival views of the mind current in 1833. The first saw the mind as a “congeries of different faculties,” including memory, conscience, judgment, and will. These faculties are separate and “each for the discharge of its own appropriate mental function or exercise.” The second view of the mind held it to be “a simple and indivisible substance,



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with the susceptibility of passing into different states.”35 Thus the whole mind, not just its parts, is involved in remembering, judging, willing, and passing into states of the intellect or emotion, “according to the circumstances by which at the time it is beset, or to the present nature of its employment.” Here mind was still implicitly distinct from “brain,” a distinction that would later become and remain an area of significant debate. Chalmers bridged the gap in reassuring his readership: “Now, in either view of our mental constitution there is the same strength of evidence for a God.”36 The key for both views was, again, to show their usefulness to achieving their designed ends. Chalmers saw as self-evident the conclusion that “the parent cause of intelligent beings shall be itself intelligent.” This was not demonstrable by logic, he admitted, but “carries in the very announcement of it a challenging power over the acquiescence of almost all spirits.”37 The “almost” gave away more, perhaps, than Chalmers hoped, as the next few decades would show. A proposition that would receive increasing criticism stood at the heart of Chalmers’s argument, namely, that blind and unconscious matter cannot evolve the phenomena of mind. He asserted that the almost universal consent to this commonplace belief serves as the very ground of natural theology.38 To be sure, there was certainly a very long pedigree to the power of teleological thinking, as Etienne Gilson has surveyed.39 In the rapidly changing world of the nineteenth century, however, appeals to “almost universal consent” would come to have diminishing value as British intellectual circles began to fragment. Chalmers was not merely aiming to show the bare existence of a designing God. He was also at pains to forge natural arguments for the divine attributes, “and more especially his power, and wisdom, and goodness.”40 Chalmers was not unaware of denials of the divine goodness in the form, as he instanced, of the poisonous serpent’s tooth in nature, whose bite could inflict torture and death. He conceded, “Did we confine our study to the material constitution of things we should meet with the enigma of many perplexing and contradictory appearances.”41 Seeking to turn the enigmatic features of nature’s findings into a boon, Chalmers offered that the complexity of secondary causes simply shows the elaborate quality of God’s workmanship. In his discussion of morality and conscience as evidences within the human for a divine designer, Chalmers used the watch analogy, with a departure from Paley’s approach. Chalmers wrote: “Amid all the subsequent obscurations and errors, the original design, both of a deranged watch and of a deranged human nature, is alike manifest; first of the maker of the watch, that its motions should harmonize with time; second, of the maker of man, that his movements should harmonize with truth and righteousness.”42 Here he appealed not to the orderly and proper functioning of the watch to unveil a natural theological purpose. It was its breakdown and its nonfunctioning that

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evinced a function that should be, but is not. Chalmers offered the sermonic notion that human brokenness is evident in humankind’s departure from truth and righteousness. He produced an extensive discussion of a universal possession of all humanity: the human conscience. Using the way of analogy, Chalmers described the conscience as the governor of all the other faculties of the human personality. This governor, representing the higher authority, is always on the side of virtue. Conscience enables a human to reason to “a supreme judge and sovereign who placed it there.” It appears to be merely a mystical intuition, but is not that. Not far from the Enlightenment valorization of reason as the measure of beliefs, Chalmers affirmed: “Yet the theology of conscience disclaims such mysticism, built as it is, on a foundation of sure and sound reasoning.”43 Allied to the tradition of natural religion, natural reason sought universal principles as the surest ground upon which to found beliefs. Chalmers moved his discussion into the universal orbit by admitting that amid pagan societies, though often obscured, conscience is still present. Other cultures have notions of justice, for example. For Chalmers “this is not a local or geographical notion. It is a universal feeling—to be found wherever men are found, because interwoven with the constitution of humanity.”44 Chalmers held that the Deity has inscribed the law of conscience upon “the tablet of the human heart, or on the tablet of natural jurisprudence.” Connecting this more firmly to theology, he added that such “must have been transcribed from the prior tablet of His own nature.”45 Chalmers offered a chapter on the pleasures of virtue over against the miseries of vice. He expounded the power and operation of human habits. Strangely enough, his argument could echo elements of his fellow—Scot David Hume’s moral sensibility approach to discerning vice and virtue.46 Using the metaphor of taste, Chalmers forged an aesthetic argument, emphasizing “the sweetness of virtue” over against its mere utility and contrasting with “the bitterness of evil.”47 Perhaps one gets a faint glimpse of the Romantic era and its focus on the passionate embrace of beauty as background to this turn of argument. Chalmers represented a long tradition of clergyman scientists who delved into natural theology to assure harmony between the “two books” of nature and scripture. The next figure to be examined, also an author in The Bridgewater Treatises, accentuated the ethos of the scientist more than that of the clergyman. He took up the vocation we today would call the philosophy of science. His name was William Whewell.



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WILLIAM WHEWELL’S THEOLOGICOSCIENTIFIC ANTHROPOLOGY William Whewell (1794–1866) was one of the key individuals responsible for elevating the status of science in early Victorian England. He helped establish the prestigious British Association for the Advancement of Science. He followed in the footsteps of an earlier clergyman-scientist of great note, Robert Boyle (1627–1691), in his participation as a fellow of the British Royal Society. Indeed, the word “scientist” in its late modern meaning, was coined by Whewell in 1833 or 1834.48 Known for his wide-ranging interests, he would eventually publish across the scientific spectrum, as well as offering treatises ranging from moral and political philosophy to educational reform. Whewell, who once contemplated following his father’s example in taking carpentry as a vocation, transcended his humble Lancashire roots by earning a “poor scholarship” at Trinity College, Cambridge University. He finished with his BA in 1816, achieving second in his class. The next year he succeeded in earning a prestigious fellowship at Trinity, launching a long career at Cambridge. The breadth of his interests and acumen may be seen in the varied professorships under which he was subsequently employed. Teaching a broad range of subjects from mineralogy to moral philosophy, Whewell was a polymath who wrote treatises across the intellectual spectrum. Whewell showed proficiency in foreign languages as evidenced by his translations of Plato and Goethe. His biographer Richard Yeo observes: It is fairly well known that Whewell was one of the most argumentative of the Victorians. It is less often noticed that he exploited the full range of media available to nineteenth-century authors—books, reviews, pamphlets, addresses, lectures and sermons—and the result was that his methodological and epistemological reflections on science were associated with theological, moral, biographical, and historical preoccupations.49

At Cambridge Whewell interacted with several figures who would assume significance in later British intellectual life. Leading astronomers, philosophers, and poets were among his confreres. In a campus group that discussed the poetry of Coleridge, the utilitarian thought of Jeremy Bentham (1748– 1832), and the natural theology of William Paley, Whewell began to hone arguments that would inform his prolific publishing career.50 In 1833, Whewell published his Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology. Like the work by Chalmers of the same year, this book was in the famous Bridgewater Treatise series, commissioned in 1829 by a wealthy Earl of Bridgewater, to underwrite publications aimed to exhibit wisdom and goodness of the Deity in the created order. Far from

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evincing a disdain for science, the project was meant to reassure the religious public that scientific research bore no threat to traditional Christian beliefs. As one historian has observed, “Science was on the cusp of emerging as a respectable profession during Whewell’s lifetime, but it was still a small enterprise dominated by churchmen and aristocrats in need of justification and defense.”51 Whewell’s opening chapters in Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology delineated the relevance of terrestrial, celestial, and scientific law features of the universe to the enterprise of natural theology. Having established the broad parameters of the topic, Whewell turned to an exploration of “Man’s Place in the Universe.” He intoned: “The mere aspect of the starry heavens, without taking into account the view of them to which science leads us, tends strongly to force upon man the impression of his own insignificance.”52 Discoveries via the telescope had allowed the human mind to contemplate the possibility of untold numbers of worlds where sentient life might exist, and this only increased the sense of human smallness in the grand scheme of the universe. Even limiting one’s investigations to earth, the human is only one of myriads of complex creatures of all sizes and shapes that partake of life. “We find, therefore, that the Divine Providence is, in fact, capable of extending itself adequately to an immense succession of tribes of beings, surpassing what we can imagine or could previously have anticipated,” Whewell wrote, adding, “and thus we may feel secure, so far as analogy can secure us, that the mere multitude of created objects cannot remove us from the government and superintendence of the Creator.”53 Some skeptics toward God’s existence had used the vastness and complexity of the known world as an argument that no intelligence could account for or superintend it all. Whewell held that such an assumption underestimates the vastness of God’s intellect. If humans could make needles and pyramids, both greatly out of proportion to the size of humans themselves, why should the creation of the microscopic order or the solar system be a problem for God? Whewell pointed out that the difference in scale between the sun and a mite’s claw pales in comparison to the difference between the Creator and the creature. He found “absurd” the belief that “we have discovered the universe to be too large for its ruler.”54 Like Paley, Whewell drew from the ordered and law-governed organization of the mechanical world, “the system of inert matter” an analogy to the organized rational and moral life of humanity. He found it strange for anyone to believe “the rational faculties and moral tendencies of man should belong to no systematic order, should operate with no corresponding purpose.”55 He lived in an era of facts, taxonomically organized, to produce and inhere within orderly systems that held explanatory power. This power could then



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be harnessed as humans developed technology to tame nature and make it subservient to mind. Whewell explored the proposition that “Law implies Mind.” Modern science operates by laws, “in which we consider” the appearances of the universe “as reducible to certain fixed and general laws.” Science has applied itself to the effort to adapt the various laws to one another, “and their fitness to promote the harmonious and beneficial course of the world.” Wherever we discover laws in nature, they “agree in a remarkable manner” with such concepts as “Divine Power, Goodness, Superintendence,” as well as “the views of the Supreme Being, to which reason, enlightened by divined revelation, has led.” For most people, according to Whewell, recognition of the existence of a law “connecting and governing any class of phenomena implies a presiding intelligence which has preconceived and established the law.”56 Building on connectedness between the “laws of the material world with an intelligence which preconceived and instituted the law,” Whewell worked through the steps necessary to confirm such a nexus. He started by defining a general law as “a form of expression including a number of facts of like kind.” Though the facts are themselves disparate, laws are how the facts are related to one another in the intellect. “The law once apprehended by us, takes in our minds the place of the facts themselves, and is said to govern or determine them,” he reasoned, “because it determines our anticipations of what they will be.” He next ruled out any other explanation for this “than by supposing also an intelligence by which these relations are contemplated, and these consequences realized.” From the notion of intelligence in the abstract, his next move was to assert that such governance by general laws can occur in no other way than “by conceiving an intelligent and conscious Deity, by whom these laws were originally contemplated, established, and applied.”57 Whewell spent several pages critiquing the “mechanistic view” of scientists and mathematicians who espouse skepticism toward the role of a Deity in the world. He developed this argument in a section entitled “deductive habits.” Whewell observed that both mathematics and logic “develop and extract those truths, as conclusions, which were in reality involved in the principles on which our reasonings proceeded.” The starting principles themselves however must be derived from outside mathematics or logic. Such could “generate no new truth,” and thus “all the grounds and elements of the knowledge which, through them, we can acquire, must necessarily come from some extraneous source.” Sources for such first principles included human experience, human understanding, growth of convictions, reason, systematic or unsystematic methods and procedures, speculations on morals and politics, and notions of the beautiful and the right. If such lacked mathematical precision that was no reason to excise such factors from the common deposit of human knowledge.

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For Whewell, speculations were necessarily less clear and conclusive than mathematical deductions. Yet it was from the former that man’s “imagination, his practical faculties, his moral sense, his capacity of religious hope and belief, are to be called into action.” The person who relied only on deductive reasoning was “liable to miss the roads to truths of extreme consequence.”58 The use of mathematics, imagination, morality, and religion all comported with a belief in human exceptionalism. Such abilities were different in kind from the capacities of nonhuman animals. At least since Aristotle, natural philosophy had wrestled with the implications of the idea of “final causes” or teleological factors in explaining earthly phenomena. Whewell added a chapter “On Final Causes” to this lengthy discursive tradition. He addressed certain criticisms of design drawn from the scientific literature of his own day. The first objection he surveyed was the contention that we can only argue from effects to causes when we have a clear notion of such causes drawn from analogical reasoning. We have a repository of knowledge of human design from past and present objects that have been designed by humans in an observable way. Yet since the universe has no corollary with which to compare it, skeptics, such as David Hume, had asserted that we cannot infer design, purpose, or an artist for this universe.59 Whewell insisted that the analogy works. Observation of other humans as designers must be traced back to an original human designer, via a finite regress, whereupon the same questions of source rises yet again. The problem of other minds later became an important debate in the philosophy of religion. If one cannot deny other human minds, which must be inferred at some point, and cannot be strictly proven with certainty, then one can see in the universe the suggestion of a God with personality and purpose, the ultimate unseen “other mind.” Whewell presented the belief in a “wise and good Being thus governing the world” as held with various degrees of fervor in the modern age. But it was a belief “entertained and cherished by enlightened and wellregulated minds in all ages,” and in Christianity the “pervading and ruling principle of the action of many men, and of whole communities.” Abstract and general speculations that prescind from the factual arena can weaken it, but “it grows stronger by an actual study of the details of the creation,” Whewell added with confidence.60 Whewell challenged the famous atheist mathematician Marquis de Pierre Simon Laplace (1749–1827), who had famously told Napoleon that he had no need for the hypothesis of God to make his system work. Upon a close reading of Laplace’s works, Whewell detected that Laplace had used language that bordered upon the teleological. This suggested Laplace had merely replaced “God” with the vague abstraction of “nature.” The idea of final cause thus remained even in Laplace’s thought, his anti-theological protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.



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Whewell offered caution in the invoking of final causes in the normal course of explanation of physical phenomena, such as the weather. The scientist would not describe rainfall as “watering the earth” for human benefit when exploring “the laws of evaporation and condensation.” He cited the religious early modern scientist Robert Boyle as cautioning against proving one theory of lunar phenomena true and another false as “better fitted to the convenience of mankind.”61 Whewell rehearsed Bacon’s analogy of final causes to the “vestal virgins” of ancient Greek religion. Such were indeed “dedicated to God, but barren.” Whewell added that such a “barrenness was no reproach” to final causes, “seeing they ought to be, not the mothers but the daughters of our natural sciences.” Reflecting the gendered norms of the time, as this was the decade that would begin teen Queen Victoria’s reign, this view of final causes was “not by imperfection of their nature, but in order that they might be kept pure and undefiled, and so fit ministers in the temple of God.”62 Carving out distinct domains for science and natural theology in Whewell marked a subtle shift away from Paley. Paley was satisfied with a straightforward analogy between human and divine contrivance, while Whewell qualified this in important ways. For Whewell, God’s work was not merely in making creatures in a manner analogous to an inventor building a mechanical contrivance. More broadly, God was: “the author of the laws of chemical, of physical, and of mechanical action and of such other laws as make matter what it is; –and this is a view of which no analogy of human inventions, no knowledge of human powers, at all assist us to embody or understand.” For Whewell, science may disclose certain “modes of instrumentality” used by the Deity. Notwithstanding this, it is impossible to conceive divine actions by mere analogy to human ones. Knowledge and the agency of the Divine being “pervade every portion of the universe, producing all action and passion, all permanence of change.” The laws of nature “are the laws which he, in his wisdom, prescribes his own acts.” He cited Newton’s disciple, Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), to the effect that God’s action can be either immediate or mediated by some other created cause. Under this conception, Clarke had ruled out the notion of “the power of nature” independent of God’s will.63 Whewell credited his contemporaries, Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) and Sir John Herschel (1792–1871), with concurring in this pervasive view of divine providence. What this pan-causal notion of divine action in the world would set up was an enduring and vexing problem for natural theology. For if we investigate nature with an unblinking eye, we must see much animal pain, even when the actions of humanity are not factored in. When we turn to investigate human cruelty toward other humans, and its attendant suffering, the problem of evil begins to assert itself into the rather idyllic portrayal of divine action in the world favored by Paley and Whewell. Gradually, the mere intelligence of the

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Deity would not be the central point under discussion, but the divine morality and goodness. Soon after Whewell’s time, skepticism and the erosion of respect for religion would not be kept at bay in the British milieu.64 In the decades surrounding Whewell’s treatise, social conditions were dire. “Between 1815 and 1850 England really did grapple with a combination of grave problems,” writes historian Robert Tombs. “Explosive population growth peaking in the 1810s–1820s, serious food shortages caused by climatic turbulence, uncharted economic and social change,” he cites as evidence of a vexing social situation. This was combined as well with “unprecedented financial pressures and new epidemic diseases.” Life expectancy in 1841 was 41.7 years. Deep divisions were becoming evident in society, covering “politics, economics, science, social-relations and not least theology.” he notes.65 Within a few years of Whewell’s treatise, Europe would be convulsed by violent revolutions across several countries. Famine would ravage Ireland. Cholera, syphilis, smallpox, and tuberculosis with their horrors still awaited cures. Penicillin was a century away. Thus, a cumulative burden of suffering, along with the capacity of cheap newsprint to make it a daily reality at the breakfast table, would steadily erode the cheery confidence in the blessings of providence still plausible, at least within high church Anglican circles, in Whewell’s time. HISTORICAL ASSESSMENTS OF NATURAL THEOLOGY In the post-Darwinian era, natural theology lost its scientific persuasiveness according to historian James Turner. “The loss of scientific knowledge of God would not necessarily have proved devastating, save for one fact. Religious leaders had, since Newton, insisted on linking science and God.” In other words, natural theologians had accepted the authority of science, both implicitly and explicitly, in grounding their theological claims. “Natural theology had invested huge sums of confidence in scientific knowledge,” and this, in retrospect, was a risky strategy. “If it now turned out that science could give no knowledge of God, the question had to be asked whether knowledge of God was possible at all.”66 Historian of science John Hedley Brooke has offered an alternative assessment. Much of the erosion of confidence in natural theology stemmed from German Philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and his critique of the classical arguments for the divine existence, including the design argument. Thus, it was not strictly science, but rather epistemology to be cited in undermining the natural theological project. Divine design could be invoked only if other alternative explanations had been exhausted, and in Kant’s time they had not. “The supreme deficiency of physico-theology, according to Kant,



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was that no matter how much wise artistry might be displayed in the world, it could never demonstrate the moral wisdom that had to be predicated of God.” For Kantians, the role of God most secure in a scientific age was not as designer, but as moral lawgiver. Morality, not design, was the way to harmonize faith with enduring reason, in a manner not dependent on changing empirical facts or discoveries.67 This made philosophically grounded moral duty, rather than natural theology, a firmer foundation for Christian faith to theologians and churchmen influenced by the idealist or intuitionist tradition. A second feature of the history of science that severed science from the authority of natural theology was its innovative character. Scientific specialization played a large role in such changes of fortune. “On one level, natural theology was not so much destroyed by science as eased out of scientific culture by a growing irrelevance.”68 A third feature of this erosion of the authority of natural theology, and mentioned above, was its ideological ties to the political and social status quo. Social reformers, many quite pious, were by the 1820s and 1830s challenging the natural theological assumption that social inequities in British society were merely a reflection of the divine will. The account of divine benevolence in such arguments grew rather strained against the pervasive challenges of the industrial underclass.69 CONCLUSION The natural theological account of humans as designed purported to place human exceptionalism on firm ground not just theologically but in terms of the emerging authority of modern science. While Natural Theology heavily emphasized the divinely mirrored human intellect in its attempt to apply theology to the science and culture of its time, other figures were equally concerned with another major component of human nature: the intuitive dimension. The Romantic era stood in a rather stark contrast to the concerns, approaches, and mentalities of figures like William Paley and the Bridgewater authors. If the Enlightenment was to be complete, it had to involve not merely the mind but the felt dimension of the inner life. For this rising theological tradition, the externalist claims of evidences in nature had to be integrated more holistically into the impulses and feelings, the deepest intuitions, not merely of individuals, but of cultures. Thus, for Romantic theologians, the divine became more permeating, immanent both in the revivalism of the evangelicals, and in the heart-yearnings in the verse of the Romantic literati. The main figure to embrace and integrate these various strands of early nineteenth-century culture and experience into a progressive theology was the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. To his theological anthropology we now turn.

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NOTES 1. Jonathan R. Topham, “Natural Theology and the Sciences,” in The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion, ed. Peter Harrison (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 59. 2. Ibid., 64. 3. Alister E. McGrath, Darwinism and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology, The 2009 Hulsean Lectures (Malden, MA: University of Cambridge Press, 2011), 12. 4. Nicolaas A. Rupke, “Christianity and the Sciences,” in The Cambridge History of World Christianities c. 1815–c. 1914, ed., Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 165. 5. John W. Parker, ed., Essays and Reviews (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1860), 211. 6. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (London: Freethought, 1880), 26. 7. The foregoing summary is a distillation of insights from James E. Crimmins, “Paley, William,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 42:445–51. 8. McGrath, 92–93. 9. Thomas Aquinas had employed analogy, and its biblical use is found in Romans 1:20; 2:14–16; and in Psalms 8 and 19. 10. William Paley, Natural Theology; Or, Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity: Collected from the Appearances of Nature, 1809, 12th edition, (London: Printed for J. Faulder), 408. 11. Ibid., 546–47. 12. Keith Thomson, Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 234. 13. See Mark Molesky, This Gulf of Fire: The Great Lisbon Earthquake, or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason (New York: Vintage, 2016), passim; Voltaire, Candide, Norton Critical Edition, 3rd ed., (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), passim. 14. Paley, 492. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 493. 17. Ibid., 494. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 495. 20. Ibid., 497–98. 21. Ibid., 501. 22. Ibid., 511. 23. Ibid., 528, emphasis in original. 24. Ibid., 530, 534. 25. Frank M. Turner, European Intellectual History: From Rousseau to Nietzsche, ed. Richard A. Lofthouse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 105. 26. Ibid., 110.



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27. Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 437–40. 28. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 363. 29. Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century: Volume 1, 1799– 1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 37, 39. As Frank M. Turner writes: “Darwin’s argument against the presence of an omnipotent, concerned creator was as often as not a moral rather than a scientific argument,” European Intellectual History, 120; cf. Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation: Or, the Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature (New York: Garland, 1978), passim. 30. Kenneth Scott Latourette, The Nineteenth Century in Europe: The Protestant and Eastern Churches, Christianity in a Revolutionary Age: A History of Christianity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), 403–7. 31. John Roxborogh, “The Legacy of Thomas Chalmers,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 23 (October 1999), 173, 175. 32. Thomas Chalmers, On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man (London: William Pickering, 1833), 8. 33. Julia Driver, “The History of Utilitarianism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed December 13, 2019. https:​//​plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/win2014​/entries​/utilitarianism​-history​/. 34. Chalmers, 13–14. 35. Ibid., 32–33. 36. Ibid., 34. 37. Ibid., 36. 38. Ibid., 37. 39. Etienne Gilson, From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species, and Evolution, trans. John Lyon (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1984), passim. 40. Chalmers, 38. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 74. 43. Ibid., 77. 44. Ibid., 79–80. 45. Ibid., 84. 46. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1777), Fullbooks, accessed April 8, 2021. http:​//​www​.fullbooks​.com​/An​-Enquiry​-Concerning​ -the​-Principles​-of1​.html. 47. Chalmers, 104–8. 48. John Van Wyhe, “William Whewell (1794–1866), Gentleman of Science,” The Victorian Web, May, 2008, accessed August 2, 2018. http:​//​www​.victorianweb​.org​/ science​/whewell​.html.

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49. Richard Yeo, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain, Ideas in Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 9. 50. The foregoing biographical sketch was gleaned from Edrie Sobstyl, “William Whewell (24 May 1794–6 March 1866),” in Dictionary of Literary Biography 262: British Philosophers, 1800–2000 (New York: Thomson Gale, 2002), 295–303, and David B. Wilson, “Whewell, William,” New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Noretta Koertge (New York: Thomson Gale, 2008), 7:279–83. 51. Sobstyl, 300. 52. William Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics: Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (London: William Pickering, 1836), 279. 53. Ibid., 283–84. 54. Ibid., 287–88. 55. Ibid., 290. 56. Ibid., 295–96. 57. Ibid., 300–301. 58. Ibid., 336–38. 59. Ibid., 344. 60. Ibid., 346–47. 61. Ibid., 353–54. 62. Ibid., 355–56. 63. Ibid., 361–62. 64. Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, Canto Original Series (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 161–266. 65. Tombs, 431, 434, 436. 66. James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 187. 67. John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 279–80. 68. Ibid., 298–99. 69. Ibid., 304.

Chapter 3

Friedrich Schleiermacher and a Theology of Intuition

As Romanticism sought to displace Rationalism in the early decades of the nineteenth century, theologians and philosophers began to grapple with the role of such deeply human and aesthetic capacities in discerning the dignity and purpose for which humans exist. For this the mere intellect was not nearly the whole picture. With Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the centrality of the intuitions, often translated as feelings, in religious life and theology was established. To many of his critics, this caused the pendulum to swing too far away from the role of reason that had become intertwined with theology during the Enlightenment era. One interpreter states that “One may think of intuition as the objective side of experience, the action of the world on us. Feeling, for Schleiermacher, is not emotion or an aesthetic category. Feeling is the subjective side, the change in us that occurs because of contact.”1 The challenge for the reader and interpreter of Schleiermacher is that his use of terms such as “the Absolute” to describe God or the divine invited a wide range of speculations about the divine nature. The impact of this widening of theology beyond the bounds of orthodox accounts of the divine upon theological anthropology was to heighten human intuition at times to the detriment of the cognitive content of the Christian faith. Truth-claims are very difficult to establish and adjudicate when specific attributes of the divine are sublimated to the rather impersonal realm of “the Absolute.” BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH On the continent at the same moment in history as Anglican natural theology’s flourishing, an approach to theology that could not have been more alien to the natural theology of Paley was emerging. The Pietist Movement, and its eighteenth-century expression in the Christian experimental society 45

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of Herrnhut under the leadership of Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf (1700– 1760), had a profound impact on Prussian theology and society in the subsequent periods of Enlightenment and Romanticism. It was in this community that a bright lad named Friedrich Schleiermacher spent a formative portion of his youth. Schleiermacher was born in 1768 to a family of Reformed preachers. In 1783 his parents agreed that he along with his sister and his brother should be enrolled in the Moravian boarding school at Niesky.2 The experience of Moravian piety, blended with intensive study, as well as the optimism in human nature promoted by the Enlightenment, contributed to a unique mind who blended into his worldview elements of all three, though the blending would be incomplete and uneven in character. The ideal of combining orthodox evangelical faith with a spirit of tolerance and openness, as one can see with the benefit of hindsight, was difficult to maintain during the German Aufkärung, when ancient pieties often gave way before the challenges of science and rational skepticism. Moravian theology was conservative, and “their emphasis upon personal, inward experience as against formal conformity to external doctrinal norms, was to be an important ingredient in that loosening of intellectualism which, on the philosophical and cultural level, was to mark the end of the Enlightenment.”3 In Moravian school he experienced a religious conversion, embracing the love of the Savior that was emphasized in the heart-religion of the Pietist tradition. Yet while in seminary, the precocious Schleiermacher began to entertain doubts about the orthodox interpretations of his upbringing. He dropped out and enrolled at Halle, once a bastion of Pietist teaching, but by this era a center of rationalism under the influence of philosopher Immanuel Kant. Over his lifetime, Schleiermacher had many publics. Beside his authorial endeavors, he served as a hospital chaplain in Berlin. With the rise of the newly established University of Berlin, he became a founding member of its Theology Department from 1810, and served there throughout his later life. He also was famed for his command of the pulpit, serving as preaching pastor of Trinity Church from 1808 until his death in 1834. His ordination was with the Reformed church, which would join with Prussian Lutheranism in the Evangelical Church of the Union, founded by King Frederick William III. The king and the theologian both promoted an effort in 1817 to unite the Reformed and Lutheran churches of Prussia. INTELLECTUAL CONTEXTUALIZATION The eighteenth-century emphasis in all fields of intellectual endeavor exalted reason to such a degree that it is commonly called the Age of Enlightenment.

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The field of theology underwent adjustments to this intellectual culture in a variety of directions. The focus on natural theology, or deriving truth-claims from natural philosophy and the study of the natural order saw development as traced in chapter 2 above. The beginnings of biblical criticism, rooted in seventeenth-century developments in comparative philology as well as comparative religions, took a toll on the cultural authority accorded to sacred writ in some prominent intellectual circles. Some scholars have described the eighteenth-century erosion of the authority of scripture in terms of a shift from a status as “scripture” to a reduced status as “text.” Immanuel Kant taught and wrote at what had once been a center of Pietism, the University of Halle. Kant’s rigorous rationalism led him to abandon or radically rethink natural theological arguments rooted in medieval theology, including the ontological, cosmological, and design arguments for the existence of God. By pure reason God’s existence could be neither proven nor disproven. A place for the divine was preserved, however, in Kant’s recasting of the divine as a transcendental ideal. The clearest, most universal manifestations of such ideals were in the ethical realm, taking the form of an unshakable sense of universal and pervasive human ethical duty. This universality is not limited to space but extends even beyond time. Timeless duty formed a pathway by which Kant could defend the notion of the immortality of the soul in which said duty inhered. Kant postulated the Supreme Being as the needed guarantor of the moral good. Specialized components of the Christian faith, most notably Christ, the visible church, and pure religion all undergirded moral duties. Such duties were to be ascertained by reason rather than emotion, therefore emotion played a very minimal role in Kant’s system.4 It was at this latter point that the distinction between Kant and his pupil Friedrich Schleiermacher would become most apparent and acute. According to one comparative study, unlike Kant’s account, Schleiermacher rooted morality in religious faith, or God-consciousness, whereas Kant rooted religious faith in morality.5 The beginnings of the fragmentation of a theological account of human exceptionalism may be seen in Schleiermacher’s separation of religion as intuition from the cognitive dimension of religious doctrine. Here we give particular attention to the implications of his thought for a theology of human nature. REACTIONS TO ON RELIGION: SPEECHES TO ITS CULTURED DESPISERS Rising to the challenge of offering a path back into religion for those who had concluded it was worthy only of modern disdain, Schleiermacher addressed people of high culture who were on friendly terms with him, but not with his

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church. He did this by his influential On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, first published in 1799. Early in the work, a moment of testimony occurred in which Schleiermacher personalized the deep meaning of religious experience drawn from his own pietistic upbringing. He realized that this would have little persuasive power for his skeptical friends. He also noted that “there stands precious little in holy books” that could compare to the inner and direct individual experience of authentic religion.6 Much of On Religion therefore concerned the removal of intellectual and cultural obstacles to authentic belief, and the making of a case for a radically internalized sensitivity to this newly conceived, purified, and authentic religion. He at times adopted a plaintive tone. “I do not wish to arouse particular feelings that perhaps belong in its realm, nor to justify or dispute particular ideas. I wish to lead you to the innermost depths from which religion first addresses the mind. I wish to show you from what capacity or humanity religion proceeds, and how it belongs to what is for you the highest and dearest.”7 Schleiermacher often agreed with the cultured despisers in their criticisms of the official church and its dogmas, including theologians’ overly cozy embrace of philosophy. Like them, he decried dogmatic theology when it was used to uphold systems of social inequity and hypocrisy. None of these distortions, however, represented true religion for Schleiermacher. At the end of the first speech, he put the matter clearly regarding religion: “It springs necessarily and by itself from the interior of every better soul, it has its own province in the mind in which it reigns sovereign.” Religion thus provided a motive power to produce nobility and excellence from deep within the human person.8 In the second speech, Schleiermacher was at pains to show that genuine religion cannot be reduced either to metaphysics or to ethics. Such had been the enterprises of certain forms of dogmatic theology, or of Enlightenment philosophy after Kant. The cultured despisers of religion were not therefore despising actual authentic religion, but instead rejecting a mere shadow of the underlying reality. “Religion must indeed be something integral that could have arisen in the human heart, something thinkable from which a concept can be formulated about which one can speak and argue,” he wrote.9 This answered in the negative the question of whether religion should be construed as pure emotion without cognitive content, a criticism Schleiermacher had encountered to the first edition of the work. At the same time, religion cannot be bound to the forms it has taken in the past, either dogmatic or moral, but must break free of these. “Religion’s essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling,” he stated.10 Religion became, for Schleiermacher, a form of “childlike passivity” reposed in a kind of “quiet submissiveness” that in its positive form comprises “the sensibility and taste for the infinite.”11

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Intuition stood for Schleiermacher as “the highest and most universal formula of religion on the basis of which you should be able to find every place in religion.” He described this as “an influence of the intuited on the one who intuits,” through its own “original and independent action” that the human nature must recognize.12 This intuition steadfastly resists systematization, and thus systematic schemes (metaphysics, ethics) cannot capture the kind of intuition that is central to true religion.13 A major motif in Schleiermacher’s On Religion is the interplay of intuition and feeling. Many commentators have failed to keep the two distinct in criticizing his work, but though they are intertwined, they are distinct. “Finally, to complete the general picture of religion,” he proclaimed, “recall that every intuition is, by its very nature connected with a feeling,” and yet “intuition never predominates so much that feeling is almost extinguished.”14 The effort to codify religious intuition into lasting forms, such as dogmas, has resulted in a mere caricature of its authentic form. Schleiermacher employed some vivid illustrations of the contrasts between dogmas and religious intuitions. For instance, they are mere body parts rather than a breathing human body. They are dried flowers compared with freshly blossoming living flowers. Such criticism could be applied not merely to Christian dogmas, but even to efforts to worship nature itself. Romantic as he was, for Schleiermacher nature worship departed from true religion. Such was a temptation of the literary movement in which his friends were fervent participants.15 Studies of science, the arts, history, even the marvels of the individual personality, helpful as they may be, are no substitute for authentic religion. These provide uplifting moments that tempt the modern individual merely to settle for them as an alternative to religion. Yet “in a certain sense your personality embraces the whole of human nature,” and the person who has gotten back to true religion “no longer needs a mediator for some intuition of humanity, and he himself can be a mediator for many.”16 Immediacy was thus a vital ingredient in establishing the authenticity of a religious experience. By the third speech, Schleiermacher waxed prophetic. He resisted current reductionist theories of psychology that took materialist, associationist, and physicalist approaches to the inner life of the human person. In reaction to these, “a religious person has surely turned inward with his sense in the process of intuiting himself,” while leaving such externalizing approaches to the experts in those fields. Such an account of intuition he admitted mirrored the mystical tradition of religious adherents throughout history.17 Schleiermacher did not despair of a future in which science and religion could cooperate, however. He concluded: “Physics will boldly put into the center of nature a person who looks around himself in order to perceive the universe, and will no longer tolerate his amusing himself fruitlessly and dwelling upon individual, small features.”18 As the rest of the century trended more and

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more toward the utilitarian, materialistic, and fragmented in the intellectual circles frequented by academicians and other cultured despisers, this hope would be realized only rarely. The difficulty of defining the core terms of Schleiermacher’s project, as seen in scholarly efforts to grapple with his thought, is the subject of our next section. THE FEELING OF ABSOLUTE DEPENDENCE: VARIOUS INTERPRETATIONS Many interpretations have been placed upon Schleiermacher’s key description of the encounter of the human with the divine, with implications for the resulting theology. Due to the subtle character of Schleiermacher’s writings, as well as changes of emphasis depending on audience or time of writing, these interpretations often clash. The first looming issue is a question of interpretation from German to English. Gefühl is the term often inadequately rendered as “feeling” in English translations. Since it is a pivotal term, perhaps a linchpin term, in grasping Schleiermacher’s intended message, taking the time to look at the varied interpretations offered here may be of some value to the reader. Evangelical historical theologian Geoffrey Bromiley observed in the 1980s that for Schleiermacher religion needed no other independent source of justification. Per Bromiley: “If no assured starting point for it can be found in God and revelation, an adequate alternative is the religious sense which is an inalienable part of humanity.” Schleiermacher sought out pure religion unalloyed with anything of a lower order of reality. Dogmas or doctrines, the standard tools of theology, stood for him well below this pure religion. These resulted from and expressed, at least originally, the contemplation of feelings. Doctrines are born of reflecting upon the genuine experience pure religion provides, yet must not be conflated therewith. Theological categories like miracle, inspiration, revelation, grace, and others are varied expressions of the inward intuition. Authentic as experienced, they need no historical validation. Doctrines function as “shadows of our religious emotions.”19 Post-liberal theologian Hans Frei considered Schleiermacher in his influential Types of Christian Theology. He devoted one of his five “types” to the thought of the Berlin churchman. Important for Frei is the distinction in Schleiermacher between theology as a second-order didactic language, and religious experience as a first-order language. Frei conceived of the first-order “internal expressions of the universal human condition . . . the feeling of absolute dependence” as becoming wedded to cultural forms of its expression. The content of the feeling in the Christian faith is referred to “the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth.” Doctrine is therefore “a

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relatively frozen didactic form” that can never be greater than “a temporary expression for one’s own times.”20 Schleiermacher remained optimistic that the inner and outer dimensions of theology could be harmonized in such a way that no breach between the theology of the academy and the theology of the church would be necessary. Even theology and philosophy, though autonomous, could be correlated with a positive reciprocal reinforcement.21 Catholic theologian Hans Küng colorfully points out part of the origin story of On Religion. At his twenty-ninth birthday celebration Friedrich’s friends challenged him to publish a book, expressing a new vision for religion, by his thirtieth birthday. This audience tended to treat religion in an ambivalent way. He recognized in their attitude that “it wavered between affirmation and rejection, assent and mockery, admiration and contempt.” Out of this circle of friends came the audience in the book’s subtitle, namely “Cultured Despisers” of religion.22 Under Küng’s reading of Schleiermacher, religion “is about the heavenly sparks which are struck when a holy soul is touched by the infinite,” or an “immediate seeing and feeling,” or “the infinite which is active in all that is finite.” Schleiermacher perceived God as “the eternal absolute being that conditions all things” rather than a being outside or behind the world. Therefore, “God in the modern understanding is the immanent-transcendent primal ground of all being, knowledge, and will.” Eventually, in his mature theology, The Christian Faith, his wording took on the oft-repeated phrasing of “religion as the feeling of absolute dependence.”23 Later refinements of this duality may be adduced. Rather than being precognitive or anti-cognitive in character, the German term Anschauung, or intuition, meant the immediate (or unmediated) presence of the divine as subject rather than object. “Schleiermacher argues that intuition is the product of an action on us by something external to us,” yet not reaching the elusive “thing in itself.” Intuition is “the objective side of experience, the action of the world on us,” whereas “feeling is the subjective side, the change in us that occurs because of contact.”24 Explaining which beliefs in Christianity are essential as well as rationally defensible was the task of apologetics, but Schleiermacher pressed for some redirections in that discussion. According to Küng, in moving away from Enlightenment-oriented rational argumentation, Schleiermacher insisted that “religion is essentially an experience; that is, a lived experience.” External inputs such as “information, doctrines or a doctrinal corpus, moral or social patterns, traditions or communities” may not be construed as foundational to such experiences. Here religion is direct contact with a unique reality, not mediated by concepts nor by moral demands. He would insist that “religion is essentially and ultimately demarcated from any other relationship with reality within human experience.” Schleiermacher could agree with the cultured

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despisers of Christianity in an important way. Both he and they deplored something that went by the name of religion, but was not authentic religion. This was “dogma and usages—only the husks and not the kernel, a mere echo and not the original sound.” In this he was critiquing much that was revered in the church from the historical development of theology. He also sensed that Immanuel Kant had recently gotten religion wrong by intertwining it too fundamentally with moral duty. For Schleiermacher, religion stood apart both from known dogmas and performed duties, while still undergirding the totality of human selfhood.25 Theologian Roger Olson has observed that Schleiermacher defended religion “against the common misunderstandings that it is little more than dead orthodoxy or authoritarian moralism that stifles individual freedom and alienates people from their humanity.” The work of Schleiermacher provided a clear dividing line in modern Protestant thought between “orthodox traditionalists,” who saw his books to be “a capitulation to the antisupernatural spirit of the Enlightenment”; and “progressives” for whom he opened “a liberation from outmoded authoritarian dogmas to a truly modern form of Christianity relevant to contemporary culture.”26 Surveying the history of theology, theologian Gerald Bray has offered another interpretation of Schleiermacher. The key term for Bray is “piety.” This, a “devotional commitment that reflected the presence of the deity in one’s life,” might be expressed by various ideas. Such a religion was not amenable to being taught, but rather beheld or observed in the lives of pious persons. Schleiermacher rejected reducing religion to “just an abstract idea in the mind.” Religions suffered declining cultural authority because they “had been corrupted by dogmatists who tried to tie everything down,” per Bray. This was just as lamentable as the opposite error, namely, “nominal adherents who went through the external motions” without grasping “their inner meaning.” When it came to doctrines, such as the fourth-and fifth-century conciliar conclusions about the trinity, Schleiermacher resorted to historicizing the doctrine. Schleiermacher believed, in Bray’s view, “the formulas canonized by the great councils of the early church became dated and lost their relevance” with the passage of time. Noting unresolved elements in Schleiermacher’s approach to the trinity, Bray demurs. “It was an apparently humble approach to take, but of course it was really a rejection of the ancient orthodox tradition, with nothing to put in its place.”27 Annette G. Aubert has observed that “In the nineteenth century, new dogmatics that abandoned long-established starting points of Protestant prolegomena were offered in response to rigid scholasticism, with pioneering dogmatic works appropriating suitable themes linked with the new sciences.” The proximate source of this objectionable material was Protestant scholasticism, primarily what Schleiermacher saw as obsolete “seventeenth-century

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systematic textbooks of the post-Reformation era.”28 As a close reading will show, Schleiermacher was not reluctant to select dogmas for critique from any era of Christian history. Scholarship has also investigated the reception of On Religion from the time of its publication to the late twentieth century. The very fact that Schleiermacher’s On Religion has been read and reviewed by such a wide and interdisciplinary audience shows the work’s influence. A fivefold typology may be discerned in the history of interpretation. First, there are readers who have concluded “he shaped my life, even though now I know he is basically wrong.” This model insists that even those with profound disagreements appreciate Schleiermacher’s probative analysis of the problems besetting a modern theology. Among the more famous is Karl Barth, whose theology opposed Schleiermacher, but who treated him with reverent tones. A second model insists “his pantheistic view of religion is more Spinozist than Christian, more naturalistic than theistic.” This was the initial reaction of conservative churchmen, and even some of his own academic colleagues, to the project. A third model avers that “he is too caught up in Romantic subjectivity to develop a stable philosophical position.” Granting the benefit of the doubt to him means seeing that his ideas were forged of his reaction against a stale and ossified form of dogmatics, a logic-chopping approach to theology that would likely strike even the modern evangelical or other Christian traditionalist as too rigid. The fourth model assesses his work more positively, in that, “his suprarational definition of religion defines the numinous in ways that shape the field of Religious Studies.” Similarities to comparative religionist Rudolph Otto’s work in the early twentieth century may be shown. The fifth and final model of the reception of On Religion comes from literary theory: “his involvement in Romantic literary theory effectively grounds the individual’s reflective self-consciousness within a prereflective awareness of the world.”29 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND THE PROBLEM OF DOGMATICS The 1830 edition of Schleiermacher’s most influential theological treatise, The Christian Faith, engaged more deeply with dogmatic theology. Here he identified dogmatics as a stage in the overall “affective self-consciousness” of the Christian believer. Inward feeling eventually achieves expression via speech, using concepts “sufficiently definite for communication.” Only at this stage can “real doctrine” emerge. Out of doctrine “‌‌‌‌the utterances of the religious consciousness come into circulation in the wider world.” Expression

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of doctrine can be “natural or figurative” and can treat the object of its focus “directly” or “by comparison and delimitation.” In any of these modes, it remains doctrine.30 The question remained, however, whether doctrine could ever measure up in experiential terms to the poignancy of the present moment of intuition, the feeling of absolute dependence upon the Absolute. The mature Schleiermacher had more positive affirmations of a role for dogmatics in The Christian Faith than what one would expect from studying On Religion three decades earlier. The earlier work was targeted to an audience of cultured despisers of Christian theology, whereas the latter was aimed at Christian preachers, theologians, and a religious public. Echoes of the concerns of the earlier can still be detected in the latter, but clear development, if not in a conservative direction, at least in a more cautious one, may be discerned. A major theme of On Religion emerged in Schleiermacher’s claim that “doctrines in all their forms have their ultimate ground so exclusively in the emotions of the religious self-consciousness, that where these do not exist the doctrines cannot arise.” Doctrines differed from dogmas here, in that the former could reflect the inner life that originated them, whereas the latter underwent a notable distancing from that inner life. The next section title reflected this distinction: “‌‌‌‌Dogmatic propositions are doctrines of the descriptively didactic type, in which the highest possible degree of definiteness is aimed at.”31 Schleiermacher illustrated the doctrine/dogma distinction by means of Christ’s own proclamation. “The essential thing in His self-proclamation was that He had to bear witness regarding His ever unvarying self-consciousness out of the depths of its repose, and consequently not in poetic but in strictly reflective form.” For Schleiermacher, Christ alone held a “true objective consciousness of the condition and constitution of men in general, thus instructing by description or representation.”32 Here is a glimpse of his theological anthropology, namely, that Christ’s own self-understanding informed his knowledge of all humanity. His mind alone was true and unalloyed with self-deception, while the rest of humanity has an imperfect form of self-consciousness. A Protestant scholastic tendency toward definiteness in dogmatic propositional thinking led to assimilations of dogmatic language to scientific exactitude. Schleiermacher utilized the term “science” (Wissenschaft), which meant something different from its later usage in science-and-theology disputes. The classic understanding was science as disciplined knowledge, ordered by logic and consistency of articulation. Such discipline could be applied to various objects, including God, and thus science in the traditional sense included theology in its orbit. Standard definitions of theology routinely referred to it as a “the science of God.” This language can complicate the sorting out of science

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(in its later meaning) from theology (identified with religious dogmas) as the nineteenth century progressed. The term “science” came to displace, in learned discourse, the classic discipline of “natural philosophy.” Even here, such transitions were not clear-cut or neat divisions of intellectual life. Many thinkers still sought to be polymaths, expostulating in various areas of expertise. The clergyman scientist figure was well known. Dogmas and experiences of the Absolute, separated rather strongly in On Religion in 1799, were drawn closer together in The Christian Faith by its second edition in 1830. For Schleiermacher dogma emerged from originating experiences or “moods.” “For dogmatic propositions never make their original appearance except in trains of thought which have received their impulse from religious moods of mind.”33 A newer translation renders this phrasing: “That is to say, originally dogmatic propositions never arise except in trains of thought to which religious mentality has provided the impetus.”34 The choice of “mood” versus “mentality” illustrates the challenge of translating the Berlin theologian into clear English. Schleiermacher frequently drew the reader back to the regulative or normative function of “religious moods” or “religious mentality,” i.e., the immediately experiential dimension of faith. Past modes of thought, such as a medieval-style speculation, could not achieve the status of true dogmatics. “The Evangelical (Protestant) Church in particular is unanimous in feeling that the distinctive form of its dogmatic propositions does not depend on any form or school of philosophy.” Schleiermacher looked forward to a time when speculative dogmatism would have to be severed from the study of religious affections, to protect the latter.35 This did not mean that the communication of religious self-consciousness could abandon “fashioning for itself the didactic form of expression.” It must indeed work out this form of expression “into the greatest possible lucidity.”36 It is difficult not to read this, however, as a retreat, be it ever so slight, from the original separation of the didactic and the experiential elements that Schleiermacher’s earlier work, On Religion, had so assiduously sought to achieve. In a nod to a more traditionalist strain in the later Schleiermacher was his criticism of those “many theologians” he perceived as assigning dogmatic theology to “a pretty low level” and asserting “that there must stand above it another and higher theology” that would show forth “the essential truths of religion.” Even if these critics could insist “ecclesiastical doctrine of any time and place is mere opinion,” due to its errors, Schleiermacher responded that “there is nothing else superior to it in the realm of Christian knowledge, except the purer and more perfect ecclesiastical doctrine which may be found in some other period and in other presentations.”37 Deeper reading in Schleiermacher shows his preferable “other period” is in the future rather than the past. His view is progressivist. Moving forward over time,

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dogmatic theology would undertake the work of purifying as well as perfecting its doctrine. Schleiermacher situated himself between extremes by adding: “We could not agree with those other theologians who make Dogmatics the whole of Christian theology, and who thus regard all the other branches of theological study, Scriptural Exegesis and Church History . . . as merely auxiliary sciences to Dogmatics.” Schleiermacher added that dogmatics, by drawing its vocabulary from philosophy, tends to “provoke irrelevant controversy,” and often serves to “rather hinder than advance the theoretic development” of the field.38 Here, instead of “philosophy,” the newer translation offers “wisdom concerning this world.”39 At least one later nineteenth-century definition of dogmatic theology stressed its integrative function along with biblical, historical, and systematic theology, retaining confessional considerations, but with less of the intuitive dimension prized by Schleiermacher.40 SCHLEIERMACHER AND THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY Theological anthropology, or the study of the human through reflection upon the nature and purposes of the divine, occupied a substantial portion of both volumes of The Christian Faith. Human nature could not find satisfaction merely in rationalistic forms, whether expressed by propositional creeds of Protestant scholastic thought, or in the truncated terms of a mere natural religion that had been chastened by Enlightenment rationalists. Human nature as divinely constituted demanded an immediate experience of the Absolute, first for the individual and then for the religious community. Schleiermacher situated humanity and notions of original perfection in the context of the original perfection of the world. This perfection stood in its primary relation to God due to its divine origin. The implantation of “God-consciousness” in humanity from the beginning remained a central concern for Schleiermacher. Humanity’s relation to its environing world also was orchestrated “to serve toward the awakening of God-consciousness.”41 The embodied state itself is instrumentally utilized by the human spirit (Geist) for interaction with the world. The body becomes “the spirit’s organ and its medium of self-presentation.” Further, the body becomes the medium by which the world’s effects make their impact upon the human spirit. In this vision of an originally perfect world, therefore, the human experiences “a living connection with everything else.”42 Such rhetoric brings again to the fore the organic approach to human life in the world central to the Romantic movement, vitally nurturing Schleiermacher’s cultural and intellectual formation.

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The vibrancy of the human interaction with the world, though mediated through a body, still reflects in some fashion the divine sovereignty or omnipotence. Humans gain a “sense of human dominion” and experience an awakening of “consciousness of divine causality,” an “activity of spirit being viewed as a likeness of divine omnipotence.” Here Schleiermacher’s footnote cited Genesis 1:26, 28, in which humans were portrayed as created in the image and likeness of God, and having dominion over the earth.43 Schleiermacher unfolded the inter-relationship of multiple dimensions of the human. The physical, spiritual, and communal dimensions received treatment connecting early Genesis to his central motif of God-consciousness. He noted that the physical dimension is the influencing ground of human spiritual or mental life. Spirit becomes soul in the human body. Again, the focus was not a substantive soul with an ontological nature, but rather that which mediates divine-human contact. Through the body the soul could influence the external world, but also be influenced by it in turn. Here Schleiermacher foregrounded his coming extensive ethical discussions.44 For Schleiermacher, consciousness of the divine is subtly interwoven with external nature. This occurs as the human intellect reflects upon experiences of the external world. Through such experience, the human spirit gains consciousness of its interconnectedness with both God and that world.45 This experience in later humanity, in the progeny of the original humans, led to the broken and problematic aspects of the human condition. Failure to appreciate the “all-around connectedness of all being” led inevitably to human error.46 The ultimate ground of the interpersonal dimension of the human was the interaction of the believer with Christ as Redeemer. Of all the various metaphors for the atonement, Redeemer was central for Schleiermacher. This interaction between believer and Redeemer forged “a stage of perfection” wherein “God-consciousness can be transmitted from the Redeemer outward and through him to the redeemed.”47 Schleiermacher anticipated, therefore, a vital role for the Redeemer-Christ, developed later in The Christian Faith, as central to his theological anthropology. From the time of human creation, a capacity for redemption had been already present in the earliest humans, unbeknownst to them, in anticipation of and answering to the coming of the Redeemer.48 Schleiermacher stated that even if the early Genesis narratives about human nature were to be considered historical, much development of the human was presupposed in the accounts themselves. Several dimensions of the human stood ready-made or inherently present in the Genesis portrayals of the first pair. The original human appeared in the text already possessing the ability to speak, which in turn assumed a state of consciousness. God-consciousness was presupposed in the portrayal of God’s interaction with the humans in Genesis two. In this portrayal, the divine agent assumed bodily form and

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utilized an audible voice. Genesis described human actions such as naming the animals, and experiencing the innocent absence of shame in the presence of nakedness. These descriptions struck Schleiermacher as too imprecise, and he regarded such elements as problematic and lacking in useful contextual development.49 His theological anthropology resisted grounding in overmuch reliance upon the ancient biblical text. Schleiermacher noted the problem of historical probity in the text due to the lack of time measurements. While holding to original perfection, he later questioned, due to its sociological character, a description of Adam and Eve in terms of original righteousness.50 He further took the biblical account of the humanity of the earliest humans as incomplete due to the absence in it of a normal childhood developmental process. This led him to conclude (echoing the second-century theologian Irenaeus) that the adults here were childlike, namely, “grown up children.” The origin story therefore frustrated Schleiermacher’s historical demands by its dissimilarity to the ordinary forces impelling human development and socialization.51 Traditional dogmatic theology had supplied what was lacking by assuming innate human capacities already present in the first humans. These Schleiermacher labeled as “instinct.” Here dogmatic theology had assumed the first state to be analogous to a later developed state of the human. But for him this move was unsatisfactory, to wit: “an absolutely first state cannot be imagined at all.”52 Schleiermacher concluded, with a degree of skepticism: “Thus, we have no occasion to set forth my faith-doctrine that would treat of the first human beings as its object.”53 The reader is thus confronted by a pattern, namely, the ancient or primitive text cannot meet the exacting philosophical, historical, and theological demands of Schleiermacher. On the one hand this served to chasten overly-strict dogmatic philosophical theologizing based upon such texts, a chastening he was eager to embrace. On the other hand, from a more traditional or orthodox handling of the texts, there would be no way such ancient texts could possibly measure up to such demanding strictures, given their original purposes within the life situation of ancient Israel, genre, and other historical factors. While the Bible still had some value in Schleiermacher’s reconstruction of the theological task, in one recent account of academic shifts in post-Enlightenment scholarship, Israel’s history played a reduced role. According to Michael C. Legaspi, “Schleiermacher’s religion, with its negative attitudes toward Judaism, assigned no value to ancient Israel understood on its own terms.” Berlin theology “left little room for a classical Israel.”54 Universal conclusions for progressive modern life were more important than the particularities and patient contextualization of the ancient scripture.

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The fundamental notion of the image of God in the human received interrogation in The Christian Faith. Schleiermacher espoused once again great uncertainty over whether this phrase meant that the human had an “advantage over the other creatures in the Mosaic narrative.” He rejected a pantheistic interpretation of the image of God, which was a common criticism he himself had received based on his earlier writings, including the first (1821) edition of this work. He saw the other alternative, that of something bodily in God reflected in the bodies of humans, as an excessively anthropomorphic theology. Here arose an important hermeneutical principle in Schleiermacher. When biblical expressions “do not appear within a purely didactic context” they ought not be imported into dogmatic language “without further examination.” He sided with many theologians, including the unorthodox Socinians, in arguing that the language of the “image of God” was primarily about relating the human to “molding and dominating” the natural realm, and not a statement about the inner nature of human beings.55 This anticipated a shift from a substantive to a functional account, where the dominion component of human nature garnered support from some biblical exegetes.56 This also stands in rather marked contrast with the highly exacting dogmatic debates over the other major theme in early Genesis treated by Schleiermacher: sin and its origins. ON ORIGINAL AND ACTUAL SIN On original sin, Schleiermacher insisted that the original perfection of humanity is not thereby threatened, and that sin is merely to be construed as a “distortion of nature.” This objection crystallized in his discussion of the terms “original sin” and “actual sin,” a standard distinction in dogmatic theology. In actual sin, the term was, in ordinary usage, “posited of a person’s own actual deed.” In the phrase “original sin,” the term “original” is unproblematic in that sin is construed as a species problem. But the word “sin” is not the same concept in “original sin” as that which is found in the phrase “actual sin.” Original sin is not about the actual deeds of humans other than the first humans. He defined original sin in terms of “the inherited constitution of the acting subject that co-conditions the actual sins of every individual and has done so prior to any deed.” On this bifurcated use of “sin” in both categories, Schleiermacher stated: “Hence, an alteration of these inexact terms, which are not at all to be found in Scripture, is greatly to be desired.” He couched this with caution, urging that “the task ought to be carried out only by gradual adjustments” so as not to sever the doctrine from history or to foster misunderstanding.57

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In a rare section in which Schleiermacher cited dogmatic formulae to frame his points came his reflections upon original sin. Here the presence of sin prior to individual existence, coupled with a total incapacity for good and the need for redemption was stressed. He offered the reader quotations from: The Augsburg Confession of 1530, the Saxon Confession of Melanchthon of 1551, the Gallican Confession of 1559, The Second Helvetic Confession of 1566, and The Anglican Articles of Religion of 1571. The 1530 document described humans as born with sin, “a disease or original fault that is truly sin,” that damns the unbaptized. The 1551 document by Melanchthon portrayed the human as “a wretched mass without God and without righteousness.” The French dogmatic text of 1559 averred that the human “can in no wise approach [God] by his intelligence and reason.” In this the human “has no other liberty to do right than that which God gives him.” The Second Helvetic Confession of 1566 went further, as the human is “unable to do or even think anything good,” and the unregenerate person “has no free will for good, no strength to perform what is good.”58 Schleiermacher unfolded the problems or tensions created by this confessional tradition in terms of the doctrine he had already established, namely, original perfection. He warned against a doctrine that would undermine the human capacity to receive redemption, or obfuscate the human distinction from mere beasts. He eschewed the even more radical removal of human nature itself. He sought to preserve human receptivity or “a living internal acceptance of grace.” He reminded the reader of those preachers who continually call upon others “to receive God’s grace in themselves.” He thus affirmed that “one must still admit that some residue of its original goodness has to remain in human nature continually” despite even a worsening of the condition of sin.59 He cautioned against interpreting human depravity to such a degree that even notions of public or civic good would be undermined in society itself.60 In a section treating original sin as “collective act or collective fault of the human race” along with the concomitant need for redemption, he cited no fewer than ten Protestant confessions emerging from the period of 1530 to 1577. The sensitive issue of original sin and its effects even in children was briefly treated. Actual sin proceeds inevitably from original sin, and in this the dogmatic formulae insisted that it exists “in children and the unborn as well, even if it has not exactly emerged in them yet.” Schleiermacher admitted, however, that “it has probably never been seriously doubted that they are not yet sinners in that same sense and degree as are those in whom actual sin has already become constant.”61

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NATURAL THEOLOGY VERSUS THEOLOGY OF INTUITION In chapter 2, I treated natural theology as it was emerging in Great Britain at the same time as Schleiermacher’s writing of The Christian Faith. The natural theologians of the same era focused most of their attention on human features as designed and purposeful in functional terms, as well as some moral considerations. Schleiermacher was much more focused on the relationship between the human and the Absolute, with the design component only faintly in view, and the problem of sin receiving much deeper consideration. This divergence of method was fundamental to later strains in Protestant approaches to the problems raised for theology by the sciences in the wider academic arena. Natural theology sought evidences in the external world to affirm theological tenets such as the existence of a divine designer and humanity as the product of designing providence. Schleiermacher sought to carve out a distinctive arena for religious experience that resisted any effort that might reduce its claims to the truncated terms of scientific categorization. If we return to On Religion, his passionate insistence on the irreducibility of religion to the natural sciences or ethical duties was a plea for the uniqueness and enduring integrity of his new theology. Yet in his book on theological method, Schleiermacher would be at pains to create a theology that would not interfere with, let alone object to, the findings of natural science. “There are those who can hack away at science with a sword,” he complained, or “fence themselves in with weapons at hand to withstand the assaults of sound research and behind this fence establish as binding a church doctrine that appears to everyone outside as an unreal ghost to which they must pay homage.” His main objection to such fencing activity was his fear it would erode faith even further. “The complete starvation from all science, which will follow when, because you have repudiated it, science will be forced to display the flag of unbelief,” warned Schleiermacher.62 I would suggest that while his approach to theology was a child of the Romantic movement, his view of the natural sciences remained the child of the Enlightenment. Natural theology would risk making religion subservient to the vocabulary of the investigation of physical phenomena, even if unintentionally. Schleiermacher’s approach would struggle to impress on the cultured despisers that the human, accentuating subjective experience, remained in contact with an objective reality about which human science could make authoritative claims. If natural theology could be too easily absorbed by science, intuitionist theology could take flight from the physical, and its tethering to the factual realm become increasingly tenuous. Thus in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the die was cast for an emerging conflict between the natural

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theological approach and the intuitionist approach to the science-theology nexus, including how it pertained to what it means to be human under divine influence. Each of these approaches, in its own way, had the unintended consequence of subjecting human exceptionalism to peril, the first by a latent reductionist empiricism, the second by a speculative intuitionism. Schleiermacher placed his emphasis so strongly on the experience, or the feeling or intuition of absolute dependence upon a mysterious “Absolute” that others picked up this element and extended it further. Nineteenth-century accounts of dogma eventually came to portray it as worse than a merely outworn or distorted form of genuine religious experience, with some lingering antiquarian interest. The rhetorical contexts in which the term dogma would be deployed increasingly framed it as the outright enemy of authentic religion. As arguments unfolded over time, experiential, subjective, intuitive modes of religion were valorized, and dogmatic forms were demonized.63 In Schleiermacher, dogmatic confessions were at least occasionally a dialogical partner; for later intellectuals, dogmas became an enemy. Any surviving doctrine trended more and more in the direction of experience and away from dogmatic, confessional, or at times even rational constraints. Desire for consistency, or a coherent public theology with the potential to be transmitted as the “deposit of faith,” increasingly faded from cultural authority. An admixture of admiration and alarm at such trends stimulated various responses, including the Oxford and broad church movements in the British context, mediating theologies in the German milieu, as well as both transcendentalism and progressive orthodoxy in the American setting.64 Rejection or total purgation of dogma was not Schleiermacher’s original intent in the second edition of The Christian Faith. Note above his chiding of those who would completely demote or dismiss dogmatics. He sought to be the moderate voice between radical skepticism and doctrinaire dogmatics. He was a teacher of theology and a preacher, committed to the task of transmitting the precious kernel of spiritual nutrition (albeit minimally defined) to his posterity. History stands replete with the unintended consequences of potent ideas. In later chapters, I return to the influence of intuition in portrayals of what it means to be human. CONCLUSION Both scientific and theological approaches tended to foster and perpetuate the anthropomorphic turn begun in the Enlightenment. As one historian notes: “The upshot of these developments was that the understanding of the divine became a form of historical understanding of how our aspirations, hopes, fears, and raw beliefs are formed.” This trend can be seen as “a naturalization

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of non-propositional understanding of the world,” with the result that it brings in its wake “a historicization that has a powerfully reductive cutting edge.” Such a process eroded propositional knowledge of the world, opening the door to “an aestheticized humanist conception of the aims and meaning of life.”65 Some scholarship insists that Schleiermacher only meant to give priority to the affective dimension without thereby alienating it from thought.66 I am convinced that loss of human exceptionalism often was an unintended consequence of nineteenth-century developments. The potential for an imbalanced approach to theological anthropology, in which the cognitive and the affective dimensions of religious life for humans slowly drifted apart, was now on hand. By century’s end such divergences, abetted by the fading of the natural theological approach, yielded a fragmented human personality, with the spiritual, emotional, physical, and social dimensions under increasingly specialized and reductionistic scrutiny. Theology would face two possibilities, namely, to bear an enduring role in putting the fragmented human back together again into an integrated whole, or to accentuate further the trend toward fragmentation.67 NOTES 1. Theodore Vial, “Anschauung and Intuition, Again (or, ‘We Remain Bound to the Earth’),” in Schleiermacher, the Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology: A Transatlantic Dialogue, ed. Brent W. Sockness and Wilhelm Gräb (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 46. 2. Keith Clements, Friedrich Schleiermacher: Pioneer of Modern Theology, The Making of Modern Theology, ed. John de Gruchy (London: Collins, 1987), 15. 3. Ibid., 12. 4. The foregoing is a brief distillation of James C. Livingston, Modern Christian Thought, 2nd ed., vol. 1: The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), 49–69. 5. Scott R. Paeth, “Feeling, Thinking, Doing: Ethics and Religious Self-Consciousness in Kant and Schleiermacher,” Philosophy and Theology 28 (2016), 311–29. 6. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. Richard Crouter, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8–9. 7. Ibid., 10, 11. 8. Ibid., 17. 9. Ibid., 21. 10. Ibid., 22. 11. Ibid., 22–23. This kind of rhetoric led G. F. W. Hegel to mock Schleiermacher with the claim that elevating such dependent feelings implied that a dog would be, on such an evaluation, the best Christian.

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12. Ibid., 24–25. 13. Ibid., 26–29. 14. Ibid., 29. 15. Ibid., 33. 16. Ibid., 41. 17. Ibid., 64. 18. Ibid., 70. 19. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Historical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1978), 362–65. 20. Hans Frei, Types of Christian Theology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 35–6. 21. Ibid., 37–38. 22. Hans Küng, Great Christian Thinkers, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press LTD, 1994), 165. 23. Ibid., 166–67. 24. Vial, “Anschauung and Intuition,” 45–46. 25. Küng, 174; cf. Sergio Sorrentino, “Feeling as a Key Notion in a Transcendental Conception of Religion,” in Schleiermacher, the Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology: A Transatlantic Dialogue, ed. Brent W. Sockness and Wilhelm Gräb (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 98, 103, 108. 26. Roger E. Olson, The Journey of Modern Theology: From Reconstruction to Deconstruction (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013), 133. 27. Gerald Bray, God Has Spoken: A History of Christian Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), 1068–69. 28. Annette G. Aubert, “Protestantism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought, ed. Joel D. S. Rasmussen, Judith Wolfe, and Johannes Zachhuber (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 508. 29. Richard Crouter, Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 250, cf. 51–64. 30. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, vol. 1, English translation of the 2nd German edition (1830), edited by H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 76–77. 31. Ibid., 78. 32. Ibid., 79–80. 33. Ibid., 81–82. 34. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christian Faith: A New Translation and Critical Edition, vol. 1, trans. Terrence N. Tice, Catherine L. Kelsey, and Edwina Lawler, ed. Catherine L. Kelsey and Terrence N. Tice (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2016), 123. 35. Christian Faith, vol. 1, 1963 ed., 82–83. 36. Ibid., 86–87. 37. Christian Faith, vol. 1, 2016 ed., 137. 38. Christian Faith, vol. 1, 1963 ed., 92–93. 39. Christian Faith, vol. 1, 2016 ed., 138.

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40. For example: “Dogmatic or doctrinal theology includes both the doctrine and ethics of Christianity in their scientific arrangement, with their apology and defence [sic]; in it doctrine as taught in Scripture, and dogma as taught in the Church, are one. Systematic theology may be said, more or less, to include all these: it takes the system of doctrine as its basis, but illustrates it from history, and verifies it by Scripture. It has this peculiarity, that, while the other three may be independent of any particular standard, every work on systematic theology more or less bears the impress of one confessional stamp.” William Burt Pope, A Compendium of Christian Theology: Being Analytical Outlines of a Course of Theological Study, Biblical, Dogmatic, Historical, 2nd ed. (New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1881), 27. 41. Christian Faith, vol. 1, 2016 ed., 344–45. 42. Ibid., 347. 43. Ibid., 349. 44. Ibid., 357–8. Within later discussion of the soul and “original righteousness,” he differentiated the “higher soul” or God-consciousness from the “lower soul” or the connection of the human with the rest of physical creation, 376. Even with this distinction in mind, “the first real state of humankind could not have been one of sin,” 377. 45. Christian Faith, vol. 1, 2016 ed., 358. 46. Ibid., 359. 47. Ibid., 361. 48. Ibid., 374. 49. Ibid., 365–66. 50. Ibid., 367, 373. My emphasis. 51. Ibid., 368–69. 52. Ibid., 369. 53. Ibid., 370. 54. Michael C. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 158. 55. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, vol. 1, 2016 ed., 373. 56. An oft-cited element is the practices of Egyptian and Mesopotamian religions, wherein the temple images of deities were conceived as manifestations of their presence. Mesopotamian religion briefly conceived of the king as the representative of the divine. Yet “in Israel, according to Genesis 1, the image of God was not confined to the king but was extended to humans in general.” Humans thus hold rule over creation in representation of God. See Hans Schwarz, The Human Being: A Theological Anthropology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), 23. 57. Christian Faith, vol. 1, 2016 ed., 416–17. For an overview of the development of the doctrine of sin in the Western theological tradition, see Schwarz, 177–266. 58. Ibid., 418–19. 59. Ibid., 421–22. 60. Ibid., 423–24. See below in chapter 10 a discussion of original sin and its interpretation in the nineteenth century. 61. Ibid., 428.

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62. Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher, On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr. Lücke, AAR Texts and Translations 3, ed. James A. Massey, trans. James Duke and Francis Fiorenza (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981), 60–61. 63. James G. Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 51, 69, 7, 91, 94, 97, 138, 165, gives multiple examples of influential thinkers who took this posture toward theological dogmas. For Schleiermacher’s specific influence on this development, cf. 75, 159. For a description of shifts away from orthodox, dogmatic theology at, for example, Oxford University at the end of the nineteenth century see Daniel Inman, The Making of Modern English Theology: God and the Academy at Oxford, 1833–1945 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2014), 196–206. 64. Olson, Journey, 213–94. According to Ungureanu, 138–39, “Influenced by German idealism and romanticism, Broad Churchmen stressed the importance of religious experience, feeling, and intuition over claims of theological dogmatism. While members of the Church of England, they nevertheless believed that various doctrinal positions, which had long been considered essential to the Christian faith, needed to be modified or even abandoned in the light of modern thought.” 65. Stephen Gaukroger, The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739–1841 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 309, cf. 344. 66. See Wayne Proudfoot, “Immediacy and Intentionality in the Feeling of Absolute Dependence,” in Schleiermacher, the Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology: A Transatlantic Dialogue, ed. Brent W. Sockness and Wilhelm Gräb (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 27–37. 67. For a cogent and concise introduction to the debates over the cognitive dimension of Schleiermacher’s theology, see Walter E. Wyman, Jr., “The Cognitive Status of the Religious Consciousness: The Nature and Status of Dogmatic Propositions in Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre,” in Schleiermacher, the Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology: A Transatlantic Dialogue, ed. Brent W. Sockness and Wilhelm Gräb (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 189–202.

Chapter 4

Darwin’s Decentering of Humanity

No theological anthropology could escape the changes in social attitudes toward what it means to be human that occurred by the influence of Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Much mythology has arisen and fallen over the decades in public discussion of Darwin, and his name has often been reduced to a hollow shibboleth shouted rather than understood. A generation ago, James R. Moore noted the surprising closeness of some elements of Darwin’s thought to positions held by orthodox churchmen, and his distance from his most enthusiastic Christian promoters in liberal theological circles. In this, Darwin’s assessment of humanity bordered on misanthropy relative to the homage paid to the human form by Paley and Whewell. Moore observed: “Darwin portrayed a world in which mankind is the latest and noblest species to be evolved, but by no means the ultimate species for which all things have inherently come into existence.” Darwin’s defenders included many who saw evolution as leading to a triumphant culmination in humanity, and thus as evidence of optimism and progress. Progressive optimism was a rather un-Darwinian interpretation of Darwin. Surprisingly, Darwin and Christianity shared certain core assumptions, namely, “the world is a real historical place; its events are a meaningful and unrepeatable sequence; its purpose includes human beings but is not fully realized in them.”1 One prominent Darwinian has come to acknowledge what some theists had long claimed: that Darwinism in many ways has taken on the trappings of an alternative religion. Especially within presentations of Darwinian thought at popular level, as Michael Ruse has noted, “there was something we can properly speak of not just as a revolution in science but as a religious revolution, whether you want to speak without qualification of Darwinism as a religion or more cautiously of Darwinism as offering a new, secular religious perspective.”2 67

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DARWIN AND HUMAN DESCENT To uncover the sources of such dramatic trends, we must investigate the ideas of Charles Darwin regarding human nature. Darwin’s notebooks as early as 1838 indicated his disgust with Whewell’s exalted view of humanity. Darwin saw belief in human special creation as presumptuous and self-admiring, especially given Spanish and British enslavement and massacre of persons of other races. Invoking the virtue of humility, Darwin held his own belief that man was “created from animals” to be more circumspect as well as more accurate than special creation.3 Darwin started a series of notebooks on “man” in 1838, or “mind” or even “materialism” (the notebook is simply labeled “M”). One historian has observed that the notebooks offered insights into Darwin’s later claims of the continuity between humans and the lower animals. “In this connection, Darwin made many notes on animal intelligence, animal language, and animal emotions—all aimed at showing that the gulf between man and other animals is not unbridgeable.”4 By the 1870s Charles Darwin made such views plain and public, writing in The Descent of Man that a time will come when “it will be thought wonderful that naturalists, who were well acquainted with the comparative structure and development of man and other mammals should have believed that each was the work of a separate act of creation.”5 Central to objections to his ideas was the exceptionalism of the human mind. Darwin averred, “Of all the faculties of the human mind, it will, I presume, be admitted that Reason stands at the summit.” This point brought to focus the debate as to whether a theistic interpretation of Darwin could succeed. The immediate criticism of the Origin, as well as Descent, focused on moral implications for society. This critique held that the rapacious and passionate activity of other species would undergo naturalization within human social life. Darwin preempted that fear to some degree by noting: “Only a few persons now dispute that animals possess some power of reasoning,” adding that, “animals may constantly be seen to pause, deliberate, and resolve.”6 Darwin had long sought to conquer “the citadel itself,” i.e., the human mind. Still, he realized, and was sometimes troubled by, the drift into a materialist philosophy that his understanding of mind could unleash upon the world.7 Even his most ardent agnostic defender, “Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), would candidly admit: Anthropomorphism has taken stand in its last fortress—man himself. But science closely invests the walls; and Philosophers gird themselves for battle upon the last and greatest of all speculative problems—Does human nature possess any free, volitional, or truly anthropomorphic elements, or is it only the cunningest of all Nature’s clocks? Some, among whom I count myself, think that



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the battle will for ever remain a drawn one, and that, for all practical purposes, this result is as good as anthropomorphism winning the day.8

In his conclusion to Descent, Darwin treated the moral sense of humans with a modicum of respect, citing advancement of reasoning powers, as well as sympathies cultivated by habit, example, and reflection. He even predicted that one day tendencies toward virtue may become heritable, hinting at the influence of Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) upon his thinking. Acknowledging widespread belief in God, Darwin resisted the use of this factual sociological observation to serve as an argument for God’s existence. Darwin saw belief in God not as the product of nature, nor based on evidence drawn from nature, but because of “long-continued culture.”9 By Darwin’s influence natural theology in public education over the ensuing years would give way before the more secular and empirical approaches of cultural anthropology, comparative religions, and psychology. Two clashing strains of historical interpretation of Darwin’s relation to natural theology have emerged in the historiography of recent decades. Darwin believed that natural selection could displace the concept of design in older natural theological writings. Darwin had nonetheless early in his career said that William Paley’s work had influenced him. This has led historians to ask if natural theology was completely worthless to Darwin, or if it retained some lingering positive impact on the train of his thought. Was Darwin a reformer of design language, crafting a new and more limited and chastened form of natural theology in which natural selection played a leading role, but still subject to laws that may have been originally created? Or was Darwin a “Romantic naturalist,” whose emotions were swept away by exotic locales, flora, fauna, and even human cultures, in an experience that led him into a kind of worship of nature itself? Whichever interpretation one takes, religion was in neither case completely foreign to him.10 Alister McGrath has drawn three lines of connection and contrast between Paley’s argument and Darwin’s. Paley saw the created world as static while Darwin saw the world as constantly changing. Paley did not have an explanation of fossils and their relation to extinctions, Darwin did. Further, Paley had no real role for chance, whereas Darwin’s theory depended on a hefty dose of it for catalyzing a higher order of organization. Paley also used conventions for deducing conclusions from evidence that were already beginning to be challenged. “Paley’s assumptions about the nature and interpretation of evidence were about to be called into question.”11 Darwin’s criticisms were just one part, and a rather late aspect, of a broader reassessment of Paley’s arguments, and usage of evidential reasoning, already happening in both science and theology.

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The varied religious responses to Darwin make for a complicated picture, far more interesting than the now discredited thesis of the eternal warfare of science and religion. Many scientists at first resisted Darwin’s theory, and some prominent theologians were among his most enthusiastic boosters in the decades following the publication of On the Origin of Species. The trend in recent history of science is to look into local sociocultural-religious factors in the reception or rejection of Darwinism, to show the fine-grained nature of the arguments and reasons for or against his acceptance in a given place.12 During the latter decades of the nineteenth century the friendship between science and natural theology “dissolved in stages,” according to one account, and “to attribute this decline to Darwinism is probably inadequate as an explanation.” Prior to 1900, many harmonizers sought to retain teleology and final causation by formulating a “theistic evolution” with the divine hand much more in the background than at the forefront of natural history.13 A mediating figure, with feet firmly planted in both the scientific and the religious worlds, was the need of the hour, if Darwin’s views were to take hold in what was still a religiously oriented transatlantic world. One figure who fulfilled this role was Asa Gray. ASA GRAY AND THE MIDDLE WAY On the moral question, Darwin’s friend, Asa Gray (1810–1888) reasoned that suffering and sacrifice detectable in nature were simply the necessary price of progress and could be harmonized with divine providence in a general way. The struggle for life was thus interpreted as “a good in disguise.”14 Many religious writers however warned that Darwin’s naturalization of moral acts as mere “adaptive behavior” would lead to dire societal consequences and moral collapse, a point even made privately by Darwin’s wife. These critics could not embrace an “evolutionary ethics” lacking transcendent guarantee.15 Darwin needed a conservative religious defender to shield him from accusations of fomenting social immorality and anarchism. This defender was his friend and confidant, Harvard’s illustrious botanist, Asa Gray. Raised within a Scottish-Presbyterian family in New York, Asa Gray showed intellectual prowess at a young age. After graduating from medical school in 1831, he shifted his focus to botany, a field he would come to dominate in America, authoring at least four lengthy and influential treatises on the topic. Shortly after coming to Harvard in 1842, he established what would eventually become the department of botany, where he taught natural history and directed the Botanical Gardens for three decades. While at Harvard he was unable to find a Presbyterian congregation, so he joined the Congregational church, where he spent many years teaching Sunday School.



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Working in an environment by then strongly Unitarian, and in a liberalizing Congregationalist denomination, Gray “remained a moderate Calvinist and an adherent of the fundamental doctrines of evangelical Christianity.”16 Gray had a fascination with theological debates and their intersections with the science of the day. At first scandalized by the notion of evolution, encountered in Robert Chalmers’s Vestiges of Creation in the mid-1840s, Gray gradually began to incorporate such ideas into his thinking, and to challenge the fixity of species. By 1855, Gray and Charles Darwin were regularly exchanging notes due to their shared interests in plant life and the challenges of classifying flora.17 Gray interacted with Darwin in person during a trip to England in 1851, sparking a lengthy friendship and scientific collaboration. One of a mere handful of people to see a draft of On the Origin of Species prior to its publication in 1859, Gray’s correspondence with Darwin led to a challenging and refining of Gray’s ideas about change in nature. He ultimately became the ideal promoter of Darwin’s ideas in an American context. In the first place, Gray’s notions of speciation and variation among plant species seemed rather dull and harmless relative to the “man and monkey” tropes in the transatlantic press and its breathless treatments of Darwin’s ideas. Thus, Gray was unlikely to serve as a lightning rod of controversy. Secondarily, Gray was a devout Protestant Presbyterian church-goer. In the atmosphere of a pious America (with zealous chaplains preaching revivalist sermons in the camps on both sides during the Civil War), Gray’s reassurances of the possibility of harmonizing Darwin’s doctrines with religious beliefs in a Creator aided some in building tolerance toward the new science. In October of 1860, The Atlantic Monthly published Asa Gray’s essay, “Natural Selection Not Inconsistent with Natural Theology.” In truth, the article devoted most of its space to the scientific nuances of natural selection, and relatively little to natural theology. Still, Gray’s knowledge of biblical nomenclature and his clear and winsome writing style enabled him to couch the troubling notions of Darwin in terminology acceptable to many religious readers. He admitted that Darwin’s theory held the strong suggestion that “the evolution of the human no less than the lower animal races out of simple primordial animal” long ago. But he added that Darwin was firmly against spontaneous generation, and furthermore “accepts a supernatural beginning of life on earth, in some form or forms of being which included potentially all that have since existed.” Spontaneous generation was a standard strategic theory of origins employed by sheer materialists, rationalists, and skeptics, i.e., the intellectual foes of conservative and traditionalist believers. So perhaps Darwin, posed by Gray as an “enemy of my enemy,” could become surprisingly acceptable.

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Gray also accepted the possible harmonization of special creation with “variation and natural selection.” Since Paley, natural theology had assumed fixity to be an essential component of the created natural order, and variation was often described as more apparent than real, or within strict limits. Whereas Paley had illustrated design via a watch, Gray adverted to the illustration of a boat. “Minor alterations and improvements” may be added by the boat’s owner, as he “adapts a new rig or a new rudder to an old boat,” Gray reasoned. Adaptation and intelligent planning could thus co-exist, and variation could be harmonized with design. Then, using a biblical allusion, he quipped “‘Like begets like,’ being the great rule in Nature, if boats could engender, the variations would doubtless be propagated, like those of domestic cattle.” Old boats would be modified, and thus evolve into various forms of watercraft over the generations. Poorer boats would “go slowly out of use, and become extinct species: This is Natural Selection.” Dramatically new designs such as steam-driven boats might resemble “Specific Creation.” For Gray these were not mutually exclusive.18 While Darwin appreciated Gray’s efforts to smooth the way toward public acceptance of his views, compromises with religious audiences did not set well with Darwin’s most loyal, overtly anti-religious followers.19 Further appeals to the language of Genesis allowed Gray to make a faith-friendly case for “secondary causes” operant in natural processes. “Agreeing that plants and animals were produced by Omnipotent fiat does not exclude the idea of natural order and what we may call secondary causes. The record of the fiat—‘Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed,’ etc., ‘and it was so’; . . . seems even to imply them.”20 To admit that certain creatures came about through designed laws rather than by immediate creation was to Gray not inherently “atheistical.” Gray concluded that “to deny that anything was specially designed to be what it is, is one proposition; while to deny that the Designer supernaturally or immediately made it so, is another: though the reviewers appear not to recognize the distinction.”21 For Gray, science only deals with secondary causes, or natural causes. Thus, the purely scientific terms of description of the “derivation of species” could be the same whether the scientist was an atheist or a theist. The difference would only appear if the debate should be carried higher, to “primary cause,” and at that point, Gray noted, it would become a philosophical question.22 For Gray, the question of an intelligent “First Cause, the Ordainer of Nature” remained the same as it had been before Darwin and would not be disturbed by adopting Darwin’s hypothesis. The old debate between the believer and the skeptic remained, namely, “whether organic Nature is a result of design or of chance.” The reader may notice the capitalization of Nature, in imitation of Darwin’s practice. For Gray, “variation and



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natural selection open no third alternative,” being concerned only with how results came about.23 Playing to his American audience, Gray took a subtle shot across the pond: “The English mind is prone to positivism and kindred forms of materialistic philosophy, and we must expect the derivative theory to be taken up in that interest.” Indeed, Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) promoted Darwinism along materialist lines, sometimes to the discomfort of Darwin himself, who by temperament evaded controversy. Gray, by contrast, counseled a cautious optimism toward harmonization, urging that “The wiser and stronger ground to take is, that the derivative hypothesis leaves the argument for design, and therefore for a designer, as valid as it ever was.”24 Not all Ivy League Protestants would share Gray’s optimism, however, especially Princeton’s Charles Hodge. CHARLES HODGE ON DARWIN The loss of faith widely noted in Britain during this period was not as stark in North America. Coping strategies relative to evolution were quite diverse in religious circles, and the reception of the theory in the United States among the clergy varied widely. By the 1870s as scientists began more clearly to align with Darwin, the debate shifted toward theology once again. Those who opposed Darwinism could point to the remaining scientists who questioned the theory, or parts of it, though this was a thinning group. Missing swaths of the fossil record, the gulf between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom (intellectual and cultural), the moral sense, inadequacies in natural selection, and limits on variation rounded out the catalog of objections.25 Princeton Seminary’s lion of Calvinist orthodoxy, Charles Hodge (1797– 1878) in his 1874 What is Darwinism, found much with which he objected in Darwin’s thought. Beyond his conviction that Darwinism clashed with scripture, Hodge also adverted to scientific facts. These included the fixedness of species observable in nature: as “species continue; varieties, if left alone, always revert to the normal type. It requires the skill and constant attention of man (selective breeding) to keep them distinct.”26 Here Hodge tried to turn one of Darwin’s favorite analogies, a comparison of artificial and natural selection, against him. Hodge also pointed to the stasis of many species in the fossil record, uncertainties of the age of humanity, the sudden appearances of new species in the past, and the sterility of hybrids. He reached his negative conclusion: “The Grand and Final Objection,” or the absence of design. “The grand and fatal objection to Darwinism,” asserted Hodge, “is the exclusion of design in the origin of species or the production of living organisms.” In the denial of design, followers of Darwin “array against themselves the

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intuitive perceptions and irresistible convictions of all mankind—a barrier which no man has ever been able to surmount.”27 Hodge concluded that the theory, though perhaps not Darwin himself, was virtually atheistical. Making God a mere originator of matter or a living germ millions of years ago nearly consigned God “to non-existence.”28 To Hodge, Darwin’s marginalization of the Creator was similar to the work of the Deists of the eighteenth century, and susceptible of the same objections launched against them by Christian apologetics. Back in England, however, an Anglican churchman was ready to revise natural theology itself in an effort to ease pious fears of Darwin’s views. KINGSLEY’S PROJECT: REHABILITATION OF NATURAL THEOLOGY By the 1870s, Anglican Divine Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) could write, “But that the religious temper of England for the last two or three generations has been unfavourable to a sound and scientific development of natural theology, there can be no doubt.”29 With Kingsley natural theology, for lack of a better word, evolved. Kingsley published a preface on natural theology to a collection of sermons based on a paper he had read at Sion College in 1871. He admitted the topic was “just now somewhat forgotten,” and had problems that needed pointing out. Still, he not only believed that natural theology was possible, but also that “it is most important that natural Theology should, in every age, keep pace with doctrinal or ecclesiastical Theology.” Writing as “an orthodox priest of the Church of England,” Kingsley avowed that the natural theology taught by the Anglican church was “eminently rational as well as scriptural.”30 Kingsley countered an objection to natural theology that he had heard from other churchmen, who held that natural theology was “useless, fallacious, impossible; on the ground that this Earth did not reveal the will and character of God, because it was cursed and fallen; and that its facts, in consequence, were not to be respected or relied on.” Kingsley tested this view against scripture, and found it to be flawed, citing evidence that the creation was basically good rather than merely cursed.31 One aspect of that goodness was its capacity to bear true testimony to its past development. Kingsley expected from natural theology and science a common set of assumptions. These included permanent natural laws flowing from “a God whose character is consistent with all the facts of nature, and not only with those which are pleasant and beautiful.” Such laws as well as scripture reveal not merely a God of love, “but of sternness; a God in whose eyes physical pain is not the worst of evils . . . visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, making the land empty and bare, and destroying from off it man and beast.”32



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Kingsley also saw in both science and scripture the importance of heredity, and even of distinctions of races. Jarring indeed was his claim that scripture speaks “of races; of families; of their wars, their struggles, their exterminations; of races favoured, of races rejected; of remnants being saved, to continue the race; of hereditary tendencies, hereditary excellencies, hereditary guilt.”33 His labeling of them as “tremendous and painful facts” offered little to mitigate their sting. Kingsley remonstrated with critics from within science who denied any overarching purpose or final cause in the universe. He conceded that: “The existence of a designing God is no more demonstrable from nature than the existence of other human beings independent of ourselves; or, indeed, than the existence of our own bodies,” moving away from earlier notions of “proofs” of God. He hastened to add, however, that “like the belief in them, the belief in Him has become an article of our common sense.” The bare “fact that we can discover and comprehend the processes of nature,” was for Kingsley decisive.34 He sought to reassure the “modern scientific man” of the value of final causes. Here he offered distinct domains, doubtless as a survival strategy for theology. For the scientist final causes are not legitimate, but for natural theologians they are essential. Kingsley admonished his scientific contemporaries: “your duty is to find out the How of things; ours, to find out the Why.” He added a call for scientific training to be given to clergymen as a part of their candidacy for ordination.35 He insisted to his scientific interlocutors, “If there be evolution, there must be an evolver.”36 To his religious readers, Kingsley pled regarding scripture that “the How . . . of Creation is nowhere specified. . . . What a kind includes; whether it includes or not the capacity of varying—which is just the question in point—is nowhere specified.”37 This strategy, the separate domains approach, had many attractions for Kingsley and others, to immunize theology from many of the acids of modernity then operant in British society. Yet Protestants in the transatlantic world were not the only Christians grappling with Darwin’s revolution. Another set of Christian responses to Darwin emerged within the folds of the Roman Catholic Church. CATHOLIC SCIENCE AND DARWIN: THE WORKS OF MIVART AND ZAHM English language historiography has often emphasized Protestant thought in exploring the negotiations of cultural authority between science and theology in the Victorian era. The Catholic contribution has often been cast into shadow.38 By the late nineteenth century, Catholic intellectuals were exploring the concept of the evolution of animals and even the human body itself

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in treatises designed to calm the fears of theologians in the Roman church. For these theistic evolutionists, so long as the soul or mind was kept clearly distinct from the body as a product of direct creation, Darwinism could be accommodated. For conservative spokesmen, the theory of evolution was a speculation either quickly dismissed, or vigorously contested as dangerous. The preservation of the uniqueness of the human mind, and by implications the soul, remained an intellectual and pastoral concern for Christians across the liberal/conservative spectrum amongst clergy, professors, or scientists. Many Catholic scholars attempted to foster a friendly posture toward the scientific enterprise, especially in continental Europe. There were some five international conferences of Catholic scientists between 1888 and the end of the century. At some of these conferences, a conservative core called for a declaration that Catholics were obligated to combat evolution. But others urged “that scientific issues should be freely discussed.” No consensus was reached on the evolution question.39 Many churchmen and scientists sought to harmonize the new theory with Christianity via what became known as “theistic evolution.” This term could cover a wide range of harmonization strategies. For some, God’s presence was reduced to the status of initiating first cause followed by a quasi-deistical detachment from the processes of history. For others, a divine interventionist nudge occurred, albeit rarely, in the shaping of natural history. For still others, God instilled power into the material world, seen as the operation of secondary causes. Creation provided the seeds, but evolution was the natural flowering of those seeds. For many, evolution, whatever its details, gave evidence of a progress of human history interpreted with optimism. This chapter is rounded out by a consideration of two major figures in Catholic circles who embraced evolution, but denied the contention of Darwin’s inner circle that this had undermined the creation of the human soul. St. George Jackson Mivart (1827–1900) was born to Evangelical Protestant parents but converted to Catholicism in 1844. A student of Huxley, Mivart eventually wrote to challenge Darwin’s central tenet of natural selection. Darwin took him seriously, so much so that Mivart’s criticisms shaped the sixth edition of On the Origin of Species. A lecturer at St. Mary’s Hospital school of medicine in London, he wrote widely on both scientific and religious topics. His falling out with Huxley when he could no longer embrace natural selection in 1869 pained Mivart deeply. The rift grew when he published a negative review of Darwin’s Descent of Man in 1871.40 Mivart’s most important book on the topic of evolution appeared as On the Genesis of Species in 1871. This was a clear word play on Darwin’s 1859 magnum opus. Chapter 2, “The Incompetency of ‘Natural Selection’ to account for the Incipient Stages of Useful Structures,” outlined Mivart’s central critique of Darwin’s theory. Mivart’s arguments in this chapter were



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based in his own study of the structures Darwin had set forth as evidence of gradual change via natural selection. Mivart also cited research in the relevant scientific literature of the time. Mivart remained unconvinced that natural selection could be the main explanatory cause for such diverse phenomena as: the structure of the body of giraffes, the heads of flat-fishes, whale bones, the infant kangaroo, the larval development of Echinoderms, the hood of the cobra, the rattle of the rattlesnake, the ear, eye, and voice of humans, the variety of orchids, and the behavior of ants. With no ulterior reason to dissent from natural selection “if only its difficulties could be solved,” Mivart was still convinced of “the inadequacy of Mr. Darwin’s theory to account for the preservation and intensification of incipient, specific, and generic characters.”41 In the chapter “Theology and Evolution,” Mivart considered the religious implications of aspects of Darwin’s thought. On the question of whether evolution or Darwinism was at all relevant to theology, Mivart distinguished two camps of persons animated by such a discussion. The first are those “zealous for religion indeed” but who “identify orthodoxy with their own private interpretation of Scripture,” and form opinions “destitute of any distinct and authoritative sanction on the part of the Christian church.” The second set of interlocutors held “men hostile to religion, and who are glad to make use of any and every argument which they think may possibly be available against it.”42 This group preoccupied Mivart’s attention in the balance of the chapter. To counter Herbert Spencer’s agnostic approach to the question of the divine involvement and design of creation, Mivart rehearsed anew Paley’s watchmaker argument for design in nature. Before criticizing Darwin’s portrayal of creation, Mivart sought to define the term carefully. “In the strictest and highest sense, ‘Creation’ is the absolute origination of anything by God without pre-existing means or material, and is a supernatural act.” To this Mivart added the “secondary and lower sense” of the term creation, namely, “the formation of anything by God derivatively; that is, that the preceding matter has been created with the potentiality to evolve from it, under suitable conditions, all the various forms it subsequently assumes.” This “natural action” needed to be set apart from “His direct, or, as it may be here called, supernatural action.”43 In addition to these standard categories, Mivart formed a third category of creation for phenomena involving secondary causes while going beyond the purely physical. This approach held the use of laws to create as: “purely natural, but more than physical,” and on Mivart’s view “may be conveniently spoken of as hyperphysical.”44 To quell religious misgivings toward the natural operation of secondary causes in creation, Mivart quoted from St. Augustine (354–430 AD), St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), and Francisco De Suarez (1548–1617) to defend secondary causation as a principle long-noted within theology.45 The

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carving out of a domain for divine action that is direct, and distinct, from divine action more subtle or indirect, served an apologetic role in fending off thoroughly materialistic accounts of human nature itself. Mivart was trying to preserve human exceptionalism. Human nature and its preservation in relation to divine purpose was central to Mivart’s thought. This may be illustrated by a later passage in which Mivart quoted a famed scientist: “Man has not only escaped ‘Natural Selection’ himself, but he is actually able to take away some of that power from nature which before his appearance she universally exercised.”46 To defend his third or “hyperphysical” account of creation, Mivart cited Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), co-founder with Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Wallace would later turn against Darwin’s denial of divine intervention in the world. To Darwin’s dismay Wallace would even embrace a form of spiritualism. Darwin was further unnerved by the alliance of Mivart and Wallace to protect a role for the supernatural, even via the subtleties of natural law, in accounting for biological phenomena.47 Mivart was deeply troubled by his alienation from those who had once been his friends: Darwin’s inner circle.48 Darwin’s sixth edition of the Origin sought to answer Mivart’s critique point for point. He sought to prove partially formed and gradual forms of organs were not absurd but could serve a survival function different from their eventual function. Whereas Mivart demanded fully formed parts for survival value, Darwin insisted on evolution’s accident-prone gradualism and fortuitous co-optation of suboptimal parts in natural history. The point of division between Mivart and Darwin most often highlighted in the literature came with Mivart’s critical review of The Descent of Man shortly after its publication. On the point of human relationship to an animal ancestry, Mivart sought out a middle ground. “We maintain that while there is no need to abandon the received position that man is truly an animal,” he conceded, “he is yet the only rational one known to us, and that his rationality constitutes a fundamental distinction—one of kind and not of degree.” This was a fundamental departure from Darwin’s insistence on a thoroughgoing thesis of common ancestry, up to and including the human mind.49 Human exceptionalism was important to Mivart, but irrelevant to Darwin. The concluding paragraph of Mivart’s review contains the rhetorical flourish that exacerbated the chasm between him and the purist Darwinians. “Mr. Darwin’s errors are mainly due to a radically false metaphysical system.” He warned that these would lead to “injurious effects” especially upon “too many of our half-educated classes.”50 A prominent Darwin biography indicates the rift between Darwin and Mivart became remarkably bitter. “Mivart’s benign relationship with his



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master had turned poisonously sour, with Darwin convinced that Catholic fanaticism was at root,” this work claims.51 The Catholic Church’s eventual denial of the sacraments to Mivart complicates the picture further. It appears this actually stemmed from Mivart’s writings on the doctrines of hell, scriptural inspiration, and the virgin birth, not on the evolution question.52 The irony of history is that Mivart eventually was severed from the very church whose teachings, challenged by some of his fellow-scientists, he had been willing to defend. “Mivart was neither a skeptical scientist nor a hostile clergyman, but a deeply religious biologist and lay-theologian,” according to one account. Mivart’s main conflicts were personal and rooted in differences of interpretation of scientific data that caused a rift between himself and his erstwhile friends. Such conflicts arose amid his struggle to “reconcile the traditions he held dear with the truths of Darwinism he could accept.” He was not “against science or against the Church but squarely between them both.”53 Other thinkers in the Catholic fold were able to maintain more critical distance. Prominent among Roman Catholics embracing theistic evolution was John Augustine Zahm (1851–1921), chairman of the science department at the University of Notre Dame. Zahm published several books on religion and science, many of which were received with favor at the Vatican. Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903) even conferred an honorary doctorate upon him in 1895. At least one work was brought under investigation for doctrinal suspicion but was never officially placed on the Index of prohibited books. In 1893, Zahm set forth his arguments for the compatibility of the Catholic faith and modern science, including a particular interpretation of evolution that was theistic in character. A typical passage illustrates how the biblical and scientific findings could be harmonized. “Creation, in its primary and strictest sense,” intoned Zahm, “is the origination of something without pre-existing material. But, besides this primary or absolute creation,” he added, “there is also a secondary or derivative creation, which obtains, for instance when God, after having created matter directly, gives to it the power of evolving under certain conditions into all the various forms it may subsequently assume.”54 This interpretation was designed to show that evolution was not merely proprietary to atheism or agnosticism. It also committed Zahm to a looser treatment of the biblical texts so as to allow for gradual rather than instantaneous creative events. Such a strategy was increasingly employed by both Catholic and Protestant commentators. As the earth could “bring forth” on its own power, following the wording of Genesis 1, so it could do so “according to divinely preordained laws, of natural forces on matter.”55 “As to the Church,” Zahm confidently affirmed, “she has never pronounced on the matter, and there is not . . . a single definition that declares, even by implication, that evolution is opposed to faith.”56

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The lengthiest chapter of the book upheld Catholic contributions to science, to prove “that Catholics were always originators and pioneers in every branch of invention and discovery.”57 Emboldened by such an impressive history, in his chapter “Dogma and Scientific Dogmatism,” Zahm went further. He urged that no denomination had such exacting requirements for truth, including scientific truth, as the Catholic faith. Zahm proclaimed that its doctrines fostered science and shielded modern thought from many errors.58 Zahm identified the errors of Haeckel, Huxley, Tyndall, and Darwin in mingling an atheistic metaphysic with the inductive findings of science. For Zahm, an atheistic or materialistic version of evolution was a rehashing of more ancient forms of skepticism in new guise.59 Zahm declaimed against “modern science” of this skeptical variety as “a fuming, frothing, vaporing gushing of words, and an incoherent syllabling and mouthing of names, as dauntless in its effrontery as it is persistent in its attempts to hoist and foist itself into the elevated and sacred shrines of true science and true philosophy.”60 Zahm’s concluding chapter, “Friends and Foes of Science,” critiqued Protestantism for undermining true science. Zahm, like many Catholic apologists, drew a straight line from Luther to nineteenth-century atheism.61 Zahm challenged two highly popular books that argued the incompatibility of the Catholic church and science. He attacked J. W. Draper’s History of the Conflict between Science and Religion (1874), and Andrew Dickson White’s more pointedly anti-Catholic essays published as A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896).62 Both books were highly successful in the USA and Europe and posed a threat to Zahm’s project of harmonizing Catholicism and true science. Emboldened by the favor of Pope Leo XIII, Zahm published Evolution and Dogma in 1896, first in Italian and French versions. This book was denounced by conservative clergy to the Congregation of the Index in November, 1897. The most vociferous critics were the Jesuits who advised Leo at the Vatican. For a time, this opposition had a chilling effect on Catholic scientists, forcing occasional retractions over a period of about fifteen years, from 1896 to 1909.63 Zahm and his supporters energetically and successfully opposed the publication of an official decree of condemnation of his book in Rome.64 Evolution and Dogma sought to harmonize evolution with such theological greats as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.65 Zahm was not an interventionist, and he avoided the term “miraculous” for the developments seen in organic evolution. Details of natural history were derivative or “secondary creation,” which, for Zahm, was “not, properly speaking, a supernatural act.” Divine activity in the natural realm is “concurrent and overruling,” operating instead “by and through the laws which He instituted in the beginning, and which are still maintained by His Providence.”66



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On the creation of humanity, as well as the exceptionalism of the human, Zahm came out at basically the same point that Pope John Paul II (1920– 2005) would embrace nearly one hundred years later. While the body could arise out of nonhuman origins, the soul was specially created by direct divine causation. “As to the soul of man we can at once emphatically declare,” Zahm penned, “that it is in nowise evolved from the souls of animals, but is, on the contrary, and in the case of each individual, directly and immediately created by God Himself.”67 This was Zahm’s defense of the direct divine origin of the human soul. He went on to reject explicitly the transmigration of souls and traducianism.68 This harmonization of evolution with Christian theological reflection by stressing duality of body and soul brought more of a postponement than a resolution to the debate over the existence and nature of the soul. By it Zahm sought to carve out a space for freedom of scientific thought and to reduce frictions between the scientific and theological enterprises.69 At the heart of the debate over evolution in religious circles was the notion of the animal origin of humanity. In his chapter, “The Simian Origin of Man,” Zahm painstakingly delineated the lines of argument necessary to satisfy both scientists and theologians. A section treating the “missing link” cited the skepticism of noted anatomist and anthropologist from Germany, Rudolph Virchow (1821–1902). Zahm averred that Virchow “will not be accused of bias toward theism.” Nonetheless, in repeated public appearances, the anthropologist had asserted “there is as yet not a scintilla of evidence for the ape-origin of man, and that even the hope of discovering the missing link is something that does not find any warranty in the known facts of anthropology.”70 On Zahm’s reading, Virchow was able to show that various inconclusive proposals by evolutionists of the most proximate simian species to humanity illustrated their confusion as those “who see the missing link in their dreams.”71 Zahm explored the origin of the human soul. He surveyed positions of some church fathers, such as Origen’s preexistent souls, Tertullian’s traducianism, and Augustine’s vacillation on a precise theory of the soul’s origins. Zahm sided with Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, along with the Catholic catechetical tradition that held to a direct creation of each human soul. While “creationism has never been formally defined as a dogma of faith,” Zahm regarded it as “one of those truths which constitute a part of revealed doctrine, and, a portion, therefore, of the original deposit of the Christian faith.”72 What remained, then, was a discussion of the origin of the human body relative to the proposal of a genetic relation to other animals. “Was the body of the first man,” Zahm queried, “the progenitor of our race, created directly and immediately by God, or was it created indirectly and through the operation of secondary causes?”73 He noted that Catholic dogma permitted the evolution of various plants and animals. “May we now extend the Evolution

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theory so as to embrace the body of man, and allow that it is now exception to the law which, we may admit, has obtained in the Evolution of all other forms of terrestrial life?” Zahm wondered.74 While sharing Virchow’s skepticism toward the discovery of a missing link, Zahm did see the demand for scientific consistency as a matter of import. “There is nothing in biological science that would necessarily exempt man’s corporeal structure from the action of this law,” he conceded. The burning question for persons of religious faith, and Catholics in particular was therefore: “Is there, then, anything in Dogma or sound metaphysics, which would make it impossible for us, salva fide, to hold a view which has found such favor with the great majority of contemporary evolutionists?”75 Here Zahm cited Mivart’s work of some twenty years earlier, indicating that despite some clerical denunciations, Pope Pius IX had made him a doctor of philosophy, an award conferred by the conservative Cardinal Manning. Since the views could be harmonized with the teachings of the Church Fathers as well as the “formal definitions of the church,” and were matters of science rather than theology, evolution could be accepted by persons of faith.76 Mivart’s middling position, also embraced by Zahm, was the direct divine creation of the soul, along with a body created “indirectly or by the operation of secondary causes.”77 He admitted such a view would confront objections from biblical exegetes or metaphysicians, but Zahm affirmed these difficulties could be surmounted. Indeed, for twenty-five years such theories had been discussed in and out of the church and had not yet been deemed heretical or prohibited.78 In his concluding reflections Zahm admitted no problem as a practicing Catholic scientist with the central concept of evolution. He allowed that either natural selection (Darwin and Wallace) or environment (Lamarck and Cope) could be the driving engine of the changes observed in the natural world. He now saw such theories as advancing the science of biology, and allowed the role of evolution in marshalling facts that had been incoherent to previous eras. For Zahm, evolution must presuppose the creation of the world from nothing, but also its creative potentialities in place at its origin ripe for development. Regarding humanity, Zahm saw evolution placing mankind in a place of nobility, the pinnacle of a long process of development from a humble start. CONCLUSION Paley constructed, then Darwin deconstructed, natural theology. The vicissitudes of history have not been kind to the natural theological project, though it has experienced something of a renaissance in the early twenty-first



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century, particularly as theologians have come to grips with Big Bang cosmology, and discussions of the anthropic principle and the fine-tuning of the universe have become resources for apologetic arguments. As the nineteenth century wound to a close, however, natural theology seemed rather old hat for many, both in science and in theology, compared to the excitement generated by debates over natural selection and the mysteries of heredity. The citadel of human reason remained a powerful argument for something more than a mere animal origin for someone as exalted as the human person with all her gifts and powers. Even Darwin had acknowledged as much, at least privately. As many theologians sought either to counter or to adapt to Darwin’s conclusions, other intellectuals sought to dismantle or radically reshape theology itself, both from within and from without. To these anti-theologians and their anthropologies our discussion now must turn. NOTES 1. James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 308. 2. Michael Ruse, Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 281 cf. Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears, rev. ed., (New York: Routledge Classics, 2003), 33–39. 3. Moore, 316–17. 4. Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, Together with Darwin’s Early and Unpublished Notebooks (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), 180. 5. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (New York: American Home Library, 1902). Reprint of 2nd ed. (1874), 45. 6. Ibid., 107. 7. Gruber, 180–81. 8. Thomas Henry Huxley, Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews (New York: D. Appleton, 1883), 163–64. 9. Darwin, Descent, 700. 10. John Hedley Brooke, “Darwin and Victorian Christianity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, ed. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 192–213; cf. 196–98. Darwin’s loss of faith was not merely due to science. He struggled with the morality of the doctrine of eternal punishment after the death of his father, and he was crushed by a sense of injustice in the death of his 10-year-old daughter. His notebooks and letters show that the notion of design never ceased to have at least some attraction for him.

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11. Alister E. McGrath, Darwinism and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology, The 2009 Hulsean Lectures (Malden, MA: University of Cambridge Press, 2011), 100–103. 12. See David N. Livingstone, D. G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll, eds., Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially chapters 4–8. 13. Nicolaas A. Rupke, “Christianity and the Sciences,” in The Cambridge History of World Christianities c. 1815–c. 1914, ed., Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 172. 14. Jon Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine in America (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 134. 15. Ibid., 114–16. 16. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, 271. 17. William E. Phipps, “Asa Gray’s Theology of Nature,” American Presbyterians 66 (Fall 1988), 167–68. 18. Asa Gray, Darwiniana: Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism, ed. A. Hunter Dupree (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 77–78, cf. John H. Lienhard, “Asa Gray,” Engines of our Ingenuity, accessed April 8, 2021. https:​//​www​.uh​.edu​/engines​/epi1975​.htm. Boats of whatever shape are already designed by known acts of intelligence, making the argument somewhat less compelling to those already skeptical of it. 19. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 532–35. Huxley and Spencer had little patience with courting religious favor. 20. Gray, Darwiniana, 107. 21. Ibid., 113. 22. Ibid., 119. 23. Ibid., 125. 24. Ibid., 144. 25. Roberts, Darwinism, 93–95. 26. Charles Hodge, What is Darwinism? And Other Writings on Science and Religion, ed. Mark A. Noll and David N. Livingstone (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1994; originally published 1874), 145. 27. Ibid., 152–53. 28. Ibid., 155. 29. Charles Kingsley, Scientific Lectures and Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1890), 316. 30. Charles Kingsley, Westminster Sermons: With a Preface (London: Macmillan, 1881). 31. Ibid., ix–x. 32. Ibid., xii–xiv. 33. Ibid., xvi–xvii. 34. Ibid., xx. 35. Ibid., xxi. 36. Ibid., xxii–xxiii.



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37. Ibid., xxvi. 38. To redress misconceptions regarding Catholics and science during this period, see Don O’Leary, Roman Catholicism and Modern Science: A History (New York: Continuum, 2006), 48–51. 39. John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, Cambridge History of Science Series (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 299. 40. Mariano Artigas, Thomas F. Glick, and Rafael A. Martinez, Negotiating Darwin: The Vatican Confronts Evolution, 1877–1902 (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 2006), 238–40. 41. St. George Jackson Mivart, On the Genesis of Species (London: Macmillan, 1871), 61. 42. Ibid., 244. 43. Ibid., 252–53. 44. Ibid., 253. 45. Ibid., 263–65. 46. Ibid., 285. 47. Desmond and Moore, Darwin, 569–71. 48. Artigas, Glick, and Martinez, 242; cf. Desmond and Moore, 582–85. Darwin wrote to a colleague that Mivart’s book Genesis of Species was “producing a great effect against Natural Selection, and more especially against me.” T. H. Huxley attacked not only Mivart’s science, but even his theology and especially his use of Augustine, Aquinas, and Suarez as proto-evolutionists. 49. Cited in David L. Hull, Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 381–82. 50. Ibid., 383. 51. Desmond and Moore, 590. 52. Artigas, Glick, and Martinez, 264–65. 53. Moore, 121. 54. John A. Zahm, Catholic Science and Catholic Scientists (Philadelphia, PA: H. L. Kilner, 1893), 25. 55. Ibid., 27. 56. Ibid. This is also confirmed more recently by the Vatican archives research of Mariano Artigas, Thomas F. Glick, and Rafael A. Martinez, 4. 57. Zahm, Catholic Science, 55–117; cf. 112. 58. Ibid., 121. 59. Ibid., 129–46. 60. Ibid., 160–61. 61. Ibid., 163–84. 62. Ibid., 179, 198. 63. Barry Brundell, “Catholic Church Politics and Evolutionary Theory, 1894– 1902,” The British Journal for the History of Science 34 (March 2001), 94. 64. Artigas, Glick, and Martinez, 124–26.

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65. John A. Zahm, Evolution and Dogma, reprint ed. (Hicksville, NY: Regina Press, 1975), 280–304. Artigas et. al. criticize this set of arguments as “weak” (128). 66. Ibid., 305. 67. Ibid., 345. On October 22, 1996, Pope John Paul II, building on the cautious yet open position of Pope Piux XII on this matter, stated: “It is by virtue of his eternal soul that the whole person, including his body, possesses such great dignity. Pius XII underlined the essential point: if the origin of the human body comes through living matter which existed previously, the spiritual soul is created directly by God.” John Paul II, “Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: On Evolution,” EWTN, accessed April 8, 2021. https:​//​www​.ewtn​.com​/catholicism​/library​/message​-to​-the​ -pontifical​-academy​-of​-science​-on​-evolution​-8825. 68. Zahm, 346–49. The theology of the soul and traducianism will be treated below in chapter 9. 69. On an insistence upon the creation of the soul in Catholic thought today, see John O’Callaghan, “Evolution and Catholic Faith,” in Darwin in the Twenty-First Century: Nature, Humanity, and God, ed. P. R. Sloan, G. McKenny and K. Eggleson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 269–98. 70. Zahm, Evolution and Dogma, 340–41. 71. Ibid., 343–44. 72. Ibid., 348. 73. Ibid., 349–50. 74. Ibid., 350–51. 75. Ibid., 352. 76. Ibid., 353–54. 77. Ibid., 356. 78. Ibid., 358.

Chapter 5‌‌‌

The Anti-theologians

On the European continent radical solutions to the tensions between science and theology were under consideration, solutions that would further erode the independence and cultural authority of theology as a discipline. Human exceptionalism had for much of European history been rooted in the doctrine of the creation of humans in the image of God. As the general theological framework that undergirded that doctrine began to weaken, the exceptional status began to weaken as well. Was belief in God necessary to the upholding to human uniqueness, dignity, or exceptionalism? This question may not be amenable to a simple answer, but the doubts about traditional answers marked a shift in perspective on the human in intellectual circles. This chapter is an examination of those voices most intent on undermining the authority of traditional theology. Such a movement also involved such thinkers in forging alternative accounts of what the meaning of human existence might be, and they represented a wide spectrum of disciplines. The crumbling of the confidence in natural theology’s use of science to buttress traditional beliefs was not merely imposed upon theology from without. At least one prominent theologian willingly abetted the process. His name was Ludwig Feuerbach. LUDWIG FEUERBACH NATURALIZES THEOLOGY Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) was born in Bavaria, and studied theology at Heidelberg and Berlin. Influenced toward the discipline of philosophy by his mentor G. F. W. Hegel, he received his doctorate at Erlangen in 1828 and spent less than a decade teaching. His published criticisms of Christianity in the early 1830s got him dismissed from the faculty by 1836. With a degree of independence due to family wealth and income from his writings, Feuerbach spent many years writing about religion and philosophy. In 1848 and 1849, during the revolutionary foment convulsing Europe, he lectured independently at Heidelberg. His critiques of Hegelianism allied him with Marx and 87

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Engels, and like them he spent many years attacking religion as an illusion or a dream appropriate only to a bygone era. In the 1850s he devoted himself to the study of natural science, and published Theogonie in 1857. After his wife’s business interests failed in the 1860s, and after suffering several strokes, Feuerbach died in relative poverty in 1867.1 Few authors exemplify the shift from theocentric to anthropocentric theological anthropology more clearly than Ludwig Feuerbach. The key terms of natural theology, such as providence and creation, underwent a radical transformation in his work, The Essence of Christianity, first published in German in 1841, and whose 2nd edition was translated into English in 1855. Reflecting the philosophy of Idealism regnant in Germany at this stage, Feuerbach wrote: “Providence is the conviction of man of the infinite value of his existence, a conviction in which he renounces faith in the reality of external things; it is the idealism of religion.” The subjective turn was central to a radical reframing of the human factor in theology itself, but for Feuerbach this was problematic. “Faith in Providence is faith in one’s own worth, the faith of man in himself,” he insisted. He expressed the internal monologue that allegedly occurs within the believer: “God concerns himself about me; he has in view my happiness, my salvation, he wills that I shall be blest; but that is my will also: thus, my interest is God’s interest, my own will is God’s will, my own aim is God’s aim, –God’s love for me nothing else than my self-love deified.”2 On creation, Feuerbach averred that: “The point in question in the Creation is not the truth and reality of the world, but the truth and reality of personality, of subjectivity in distinction from the world.” Idealism held that the fundamental reality is within the mind, in the form of ideas, and that the external world is at best secondary in importance. The blending of the human and divine assumed center stage in Feuerbach’s view: “The point in question is the personality of God; but the personality of God is the personality of man freed from all the conditions and limitations of Nature.” The created order, “like the idea of a personal God in general, is not a scientific, but a personal matter; not an object of free intelligence, but of the feelings.”3 Using Hegelian dialectic as a point of departure, Feuerbach sought a synthesis between personalism and pantheism, yielding a result that could transcend both. His criticism was caustic, as when he called upon theologians to “exchange your mystical, perverted anthropology, which you call theology, for real anthropology.” He urged such contemporaries to “admit that your personal God is nothing else than your own personal nature, that while you believe in and construct your supra-and-extra-natural God, you believe in and construct nothing else than the supra-and-extra-naturalism of your own self.”4 Feuerbach could turn the classical arguments of natural theology for the existence of God against themselves. He argued that “His existence being proved, God is no longer a merely relative, but a noumenal being . . . a being



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external to us, –in a word, not merely a belief, a feeling, a thought, but also a real existence apart from belief, feeling, and thought.” This distancing or shift away from the subjective toward transcendence, held a danger. “But such an existence is no other than a sensational existence,” he urged, “i. e., an existence conceived according to the forms of our senses.” The power of the phrase “no other than” indicated the ultimate reductionism of Feuerbach’s critique. “He does not exist for me, if I do not exist for him; if I do not believe in a God, there is no God for me.”5 These statements illustrated Feuerbach’s larger lifelong project: reducing religion and theology to anthropology, “the study of concrete embodied human consciousness and its cultural products.”6 He aided in constructing an ideological bridge from the more theologically oriented G. F. W. Hegel (1770–1831) to the anti-religious Karl Marx (1818–1883) in the development of the idea of religion as essentially an oppressive illusion. Objectivity simply vanished from theology, replaced by a divine humanity, with the option to cease belief in the reality of the deity of tradition and dogma. Feuerbach’s thought was a hard sell in a Europe that still retained strongly vested institutional confessions and saw episodic revivals of religious fervor. Yet at the other end of the ideological spectrum a movement to reshape religion in the human image was already afoot in France, the home of revolutionary ideas. If Feuerbach worked from within the theological guild to reconstruct it along radically humanist lines, Auguste Comte continued the enterprise as an outsider seeking to construct a new religion to displace the old. This was at its core a religion of humanity, an enthronement of woman and man that could recapture its exceptionalism and yet do so without reference to a divine origin. Such an enterprise would also attempt to reconstruct theology and religion through the tools of modern science, interpreted through philosophically naturalistic assumptions. AUGUSTE COMTE AND THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY Born in Montpellier, France at the end of the eighteenth century, Auguste Comte (1798–1857) announced to his parents as a teen that he had abandoned belief in God. In a Catholic royalist family this was no small admission. He studied advanced sciences at The École Polytechnique from 1814–1816 encountering the thought of Pierre Laplace, and fascinated by the Analytical Mechanics of Joseph Lagrange (1736–1813). After a political shakeup at the school and his resultant expulsion, Comte began to study political philosophers such as economist Adam Smith (1723–1790) and skeptic David Hume (1711–1776), as well as the writings of Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794)

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whose progressive account of history would later influence Comte’s own views of sociological change over time. Comte saw the work of the French Revolution as inadequate and incomplete. He applauded its attack on Roman Catholicism, but faulted it for failing to create a positive alternative to the old religious order. A new religion, grounded in a scientific priesthood, was the dream of Comte’s system of social reorganization. Eerily similar to French Revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre’s (1758–1794) attempt to create a new secular religion with its own sacerdotal forms and secular saints, Comte too envisioned a new, albeit kinder and gentler, anthropocentric faith-system. According to one account, Comte “appointed himself the high priest of a new religion of humanity,” with its own calendar of saints and a new catechism.7 A look at Comte’s Catechism of Positive Religion of 1858 reveals the specific contours of Comte’s vision. Comte sought out a moral order every bit as reliable as the natural order with its laws such as the law of gravity. Yet in tension with this desire for certitude, he also espoused its superiority over theology precisely because of its gradual modifications and improvements, over against the “immutability” that had become, in his view, the downfall of theology.8 Certain core principles recur in Comte’s catechism: the inevitability of progress, the lawlike constraints on human freedom imposed by the material world, and the inherent sociality of human endeavor. Not entirely dissimilar to the Catholicism he had rejected, Comte espoused a hierarchical arrangement for society. His time-honored chosen rhetorical device, the dialogue, took the form of “the priest” addressing a woman he calls “my daughter.” The use of a female interlocutor befitted his new systematic rearrangement of societal structure. At the top of the order, he placed “the sex in which affection prevails” i.e., womanhood. Then came the “contemplative class, that is, the priesthood,” otherwise known as “the theoretical class” responsible for “systematic education.” Finally, at the bottom of the social hierarchy, Comte arranged “the active class.” This “decrease in dignity” for the active or proletariat class was in his view compensated by an “increase in independence” and by their serving as the “necessary basis of the whole economy of the Great Being.”9 Comte further elaborated this new hierarchy as “the moral providence exercised by women,” followed by “the intellectual providence vested in the priesthood,” by which he meant academicians or scientists, along with “the material providence of the patriciate.” Last of all, the entire system required for its fulfillment “the general providence of the proletariat.” Comte assured the reader: “With this complement we perfect the constitution of the admirable system of human providence.” Progressivism will prevail, and “thus all



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the powers of man, each according to its nature, are made to conduce to the preservation and improvement of Humanity.”10 Several observations germane to the perils of human exceptionalism emerge in this brief discussion of Comte’s new religion of humanity. First, the apparent feminization of Comte’s system still maintained social stereotypes about the prevalence of affective or emotional elements in what Comte regarded as the feminine ideal. Thus, the full humanization of the female remained something of a false promise. Next, Comte completely humanized the classic theological doctrine of providence, indicating an optimism about the powers of modern science. Furthermore, his capitalization of the term “Humanity” reified it into a metaphysical condition akin to a divine status, continuing the trend exemplified by Feuerbach. Finally, while his affirmational statements about the essential role of the proletariat bespoke an aura of progressiveness, this active group stood at the bottom of the hierarchy in Comte’s vision of a positivist society. Comte sought to displace the Christian theological distinction between nature and grace, setting forth a modification of phrenologist Franz Josef Gall’s localization of higher functions within the physical human brain. While aware of Gall’s shortcomings, Comte nonetheless believed that Gall had enabled a reinterpretation of the tension between nature and grace. Now the internal conflict of humans was opposition between the instinctual and intellective portions of the human brain. This was no minor matter to Comte, as evidenced by his proclamation that Gall’s research provided an “indestructible basis” for the new positive religion. Declaring his purpose to use the insights of phrenology, he wrote: “I proceeded to construct my systematic theory of the brain and the soul.”11 Especially in his later life, secondary accounts widely concede that Comte was susceptible of flights of fancy. He was overly optimistic about the demise of organized religion, or the possibility of making an overt religion of his positivistic account of science. A substantially different alternative found development across the Channel. A more empirical, historical, and slightly less ideological approach to human nature and religion underwent development in the newly forged field of anthropology. EDWARD BURNETT TYLOR AND THE PRIMITIVE SOUL By the end of his career, Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) had the distinction of serving as the first professor in the newly minted field of Anthropology in Britain at Oxford University. His journey began as a Quaker youth. Many biographical sketches have presumed his church affiliation barred him from

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attending university in the Anglican-dominated England of the 1840s, but this has been recently challenged.12 Fortuitously, concerns with his physical well-being led to his journey to America in the mid-1850s. From there he joined an expedition to Mexico designed to study ancient cultures via archaeological investigation and comparative ethnology. Though he lost his faith, the lingering Quaker ethos of concern for marginalized peoples may have motivated Tylor’s desire to study ethnic groups who had suffered under colonial rule.13 He published his account of this journey in 1861. A robust and generalized study of historical anthropology, Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization saw print in 1865. In this work Tylor set the foundations for an evolutionary view of cultural development, accentuating the shift from primitive to more sophisticated civilization along a gradualist path of development. In this early work, the reader can see mirrored the natural historical methods of Darwin. Tylor’s articulation of this approach reached full flower in his massive two-volume Primitive Culture in 1871, the same year as the publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man.14 The lengthier second volume was devoted almost entirely to the evolution of religion as a cultural phenomenon. It focused on various aspects of animism, and developments that emanated forth and were transformed through human experience from ancient cultures until the modern era. Unlike contemporary materialist ethnographers who were denying that religion was important to early human cultures, Tylor could find very few niches of early societies where religion was absent. He also criticized those who used their own modern religious sensibilities to cast aspersions on earlier forms of belief. He sought to cultivate empathy with the past in the study of cultures foreign to one’s own.15 Tylor treated the rise of the doctrine of spirit beings, as well as their role in ancient explanations of biological phenomena such as illness. His account surveyed apparitions and ghosts, notions of soul transmission and the afterlife, funerary rites, the state of the postmortem dead, possession, fetishism, idol worship, demons, plural forms of nature-worship, and the shift from polytheism to monotheism. Throughout the treatise a schematic view emerged of an evolutionary development from lower, primitive forms to higher, more sophisticated forms of belief regarding the spiritual or nonmaterial realm. The following passage crystallizes Tylor’s thought on the soul and its development, and serves here as a representative sample of the modernist leanings of his perspective. He described some races in terms of their savagery, yet was impressed that “the general doctrine of souls is found worked out with remarkable breadth and consistency.” Some tribal folk religions held that animals had souls, and did so based on “a natural extension from the theory of human souls.” In animism plant life and even the inanimate material



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of their environment partook of soul in a lesser fashion. He concluded that “as we explore human thought onward from savage into barbarian and civilized life, we find a state of theory more conformed to positive science, but in itself less complete and consistent.”16 Tylor’s thought was heavily influenced by the positivism of August Comte.17 His evolutionary perspective on development of cultures from lower to higher was both explicit and implicit. Terms like “savage tribes” and the distinction between “barbaric and cultured nations” were commonplace Victorian science. One historian well describes the attitude of the era: “Europeans were adult moral beings with a developed religion; savages were childish immoral beings with a primitive religion or else with no religion at all.”18 Reflective of the secularizing trends noted elsewhere in this book, Tylor too admitted that: “The soul has given up its ethereal substance, and become an immaterial entity, ‘the shadow of a shade.’” As such, study of the soul inevitably became “separated from the investigations of biology and mental science, which now discuss the phenomena of life and thought, the senses and the intellect, the emotions and the will, on a ground-work of pure experience.” Tylor candidly observed: “There has arisen an intellectual product whose very existence is of the deepest significance, a ‘psychology’ which has no longer anything to do with ‘soul.’” The location of the study of the soul had historically been relegated to “metaphysics of religion” so as to furnish intellectual arguments for “the religious doctrine of the future life.” Vestiges of animism remained in the modern world. “Yet it is evident that, notwithstanding all this profound change,” he opined, “the conception of the human soul is, as to its most essential nature, continuous from the philosophy of the savage thinker to that of the modern professor of theology.” Tylor joined together in a rather tactless fashion, “in an unbroken line of mental connexion, the savage fetish-worshipper and the civilized Christian.” He regarded the divisions between the world’s great religions and sects trivial or “superficial in comparison with the deepest of all religious schism, that which divides Animism from Materialism.”19 Tylor took a dim view of theological reflection on the soul by the year 1871. Tylor saw his field of anthropology not as merely a theoretical and descriptive one, but a utilitarian and prescriptive one. In his conclusion he wrote: “Now it is the practical office of ethnography to make known to all whom it may concern the tenure of opinions in the public mind, to show what is received on its own direct evidence, what is ruder ancient doctrine reshaped to answer modern ends, and what is but time-honoured superstition in the garb of modern knowledge.”20 Theology was for Tylor a problematic source of just such “superstition.” As Larsen has noted, “Sprinkled throughout Tylor’s works are comments on

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how theology or priests thwarted scientific advances.”21 On Tylor’s view, if any doctrine was found to be “transmitted from an earlier to a later stage of religious thought, then it should be tested, like any other point of culture, as to its place in development.”22 A Victorian privileging of the present, wherein history’s arrow always pointed toward the triumph of the modern mentality, is here exemplified. The changing of religious beliefs to fit this vision became Tylor’s lifelong project. His last and unfinished manuscript was titled The Natural History of Religion, finally abandoned around 1901.23 Skepticism toward the value of theology was present not merely in anthropology, but also in the medical field. As noted throughout this book, challenges to theology were arising in various disciplines as they jockeyed for cultural authority in the nineteenth century. The study of mental illness in Great Britain, as well as efforts at institutional reform, involved a shift into experimental methods grounded in naturalistic assumptions. Henry Maudsley exemplified this approach, and treated religion and theology with an extra dose of disdain. HENRY MAUDSLEY AND THE CLINICAL ATTACK ON THEOLOGY The power of subjective religious experiences had long been part of the appeal of religious belief. In a scientific age, greater scrutiny was brought to bear on such experiences. Deeper understandings of chemical reactions within the human body enabled clinicians to explain both physiological and psychological phenomena that earlier ages had readily attributed to divine intervention. Physicians working with the mentally disturbed, particularly those who exhibited what was being coined as “religious mania,” were especially concerned with exposing to the public what they discerned to be pious fraud, or chemically based explanations for such behavior and symptoms. Henry Maudsley (1835–1918) was positioned well to publish his opinions on such matters. Maudsley was physician to the Manchester Asylum in England, then professor of medical jurisprudence at University College from 1869 to 1879. Maudsley’s writings ranged widely among a host of interests. He was a pioneer in the study of “mania,” grounded in his three years as superintendent of the Manchester Royal Lunatic Asylum from 1858 to 1861.24 A vocal critic of the existing asylum system of care for mental patients, Maudsley was “intellectually the dominant alienist of his generation, and someone who possessed a European-wide reputation.”25 Maudsley jumped into the fray of religious controversy with his 1886 publication Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings. This tome elided genuine religious experience with mental health and chemistry so profoundly that



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genuine religious experience, if it existed at all, was shunted to the margins of modern life. His opening chapter, “Natural Defects and Errors of Observation and Reasoning” set forth his methodology. Subsections treating “fallacies of coincidence in reasoning,” and “fallacies of coincidence in observation” surveyed and critiqued past research into religious psychological phenomena. A section on “The Favorable Conditions of Superstition” observed of the ineffectiveness of prayer, the modern effect of the loss of faith. “So through the ages it has come to pass that faiths have been slowly extinguished and gods have died; for faiths do not, like bubbles, burst, but stealthily, like clouds dislimned, lose their lineaments and gradually disperse.”26 After a chapter surveying the failures and inadequacies of past habits of observation to adequately explain religious phenomena, Maudsley turned to a chapter on the theme of imagination. Here he concluded that the shift of theology into pantheism, particularly in German theology, was tantamount to atheism. “When a personal Deity has gradually dislimned, evaporated into formless mist,” he averred, “and finally melted away into impersonal absolute, naturally the difficulty for mankind will be how to love It which is no longer Him, and to pray to It as to Him.” In part this shift occurred because of the oft-noted problem of affirming a deity both personal and infinite, and his assumption that a deity cannot simultaneously be both. Maudsley wrote that “human nature as it has painfully evolved itself through the ages is the acknowledged and all-sufficient divinity of the disciples of Auguste Comte.” Maudsley then queried: “But is it a natural procedure or an actually achievable feat, to fall down in adoring love and reverence of the absolute, and to invoke its support in suffering, its counsel and help in time of need?”27 Further chapters drew upon his experience and research into distortions of the mental life, with a special eye to the religious dimension of the life experience of those troubled of mind. Here the reader finds treatments of Hallucinations, Mania, and Delusion, and a section distinguishing Natural and Supernatural Religion. In Part III, “The Attainment of Supernatural Knowledge by Divine Illumination,” Maudsley sought to dismantle the claims of religious persons to supernatural or divine revelation, insight, or experience. He surveyed “Ecstatic Intuition,” “Ecstasy of Feeling,” “Intuition of the Heart,” “Isolation of Spiritual Knowledge,” and “Theology and Metaphysics.” Special attention to Maudsley’s section entitled “Theological Illumination” touched on the divine-human relationship so central to our analysis of human exceptionalism. Maudsley went at the heart of the role of religious experience: the love of the divine being for the individual supplicant. He saw it as nigh impossible for “a concrete and finite being” as small as a human “to experience a real feeling of love for an infinite, eternal, and incomprehensible Spirit.” Such a love can only be experienced with an object of love “with more of substance

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to provoke relish of feeling than an infinite Spirit” omnipresent and invisible. Thus, Maudsley returned to the dissimilarity between a personal and an impersonal God. Here he raised the conundrum of theology: “An infinite personality is not really a consistent notion to the natural understanding of the natural man—it is a contradiction in thought and in terms, like a square circle or a finite infinite.” He ruminated on the “perplexing dilemma” of the religionist, “that, in order to love the infinite, he must make it personal, and in order to make the personal infinite, he must divest it of personality.”28 Humans have tried to resolve this dilemma by reducing the divine to the form of idols, which in turn has led to a “reaction toward purity,” in reformist movements. Is the religious ecstasy of divine love grounded in an objective reality, or “a mere subjective state with the counterfeit of such meaning?”29 Maudsley’s embrace of the latter answer became clear in the terms with which he treated such experiences in the ensuing pages. The reveries of St. Theresa became the “so-called mesmeric or hypnotic state” or “trance-like states of ecstatic rapture.” This “state of special nervous exaltation, very like the state of divine ecstasy, can be engendered without any other than a simple physical significance,” he assured his modern readership.30 A treasure-trove of clinical terms were cast by Maudsley toward such experiences. These included: “psychosis,” “the effects of opium,” “acute mania,” effects analogous to “the inhalation of nitrous oxide gas,” the effects of “haschisch” [sic]; as well as “self-magnetization.”31 On the psychological dimension of spiritual ecstasy, Maudsley offered the modern explanation of: “an induced neurosis.” This phenomenon was “a certain order of nerve-centres or nerve-tracts” in which the religious adherent “is thrown into a state of extraordinary ultra-psychological activity, of almost delirious or convulsive character.” He followed this diagnosis up with “a sort of molecular dislocation or disjunction of their natural connections being produced, they are put into a state of induction in which conduction is blocked,” resulting in a “delirium of function” separating the person “from the ordinary operations of reason and will.” Maudsley concluded: “Such is the ravishing effect of the supernatural influx on the special nerve-tract.”32 Maudsley attacked both the infallible authority of the Roman Catholic church, and the infallible Bible with its interpretation by private judgment of Protestantism. To Maudsley, the latter was “the consecration of anarchy.”33 Maudsley’s overall strategy was a coupling of a scientific or quasi-scientific explanation for religious experience, with an effort to undermine traditional understandings of religious authority, irrespective of whether that authority took Catholic or Protestant forms. The range of Maudsley’s explanations for the experiences of religious supplicants represented anything but a clinical precision. His prose manifested a certain desperation for an adequate naturalistic explanation. If hypnosis



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does not work, try a drug-induced state. If such religious mental states are not the result of neurosis, perhaps epilepsy will suffice. If “acute mania” is not a strong enough term, then conjecture outright “psychosis.” It is little wonder that such multiply contradictory etiological speculations were unable to disabuse the pious of their beliefs that it is possible some mortals occasionally have an objectively real experience of the divine. Such experiences had been, after all, quite diversely described over nineteen centuries of religious literature. Clinical explanations of religious experience represented one growing approach to attempts at medicalizing and biologizing the religious experience, as an exercise in naturalistic reductionism. Another even more radical method turned toward a complete rejection of the religious impulse, and not as merely misguided and childish, but as positively evil. While his influence was greater in the twentieth century than the nineteenth, his anti-theological project was arguably the most strident of them all. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE SUPERMAN OF ANTI-THEOLOGY Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) offered his version of anti-theological anthropology with the first edition of Human, All too Human, in 1878. Scholars see the work as a pivotal moment when Nietzsche broke from the academic world. In his exile from academia he laid the groundwork in outline form for his later famous ideas as an independent essayist. The aphoristic style of the work is reminiscent of Pascal’s Pensées, though he would be in essence the ideological anti-Pascal. Here the valorization of science as the pinnacle of humanity’s grasp on reality, the scathing critique of religion, and of Christianity in particular, and the relation of art to culture and society are dominant themes. The sheer breadth of Nietzsche’s interests and passions make him a fascinating, as well as bewildering figure. One account of his major works, spanning the period from The Birth of Tragedy to Twilight of the Idols, identifies in his writings the following fields: culture and education, philosophy, ethics, literature, poetry, art, music, science, religion, national and international culture, politics, psychology, interiority, and even spirituality.34 Not satisfied to describe or even challenge modern Western culture, Nietzsche’s vision was transformational. The destruction or trans-valuation of cherished values was a passion that drove his work. His polemics against religion represented at best a very selective reading of religion, picking and magnifying only those elements he found most objectionable and unmodern.

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According to a recent biographer, the context of the writing of Human, All Too Human, was a painful period in Nietzsche’s life, both physically and emotionally. “He described it as a monument to a crisis. Its subject is the human condition. Reason is its lodestar. The language is not violent, didactic, boastful or obscure but personal, lucid, and elegant,” writes Sue Prideaux. “It is probably his most lovable book.”35 While lovable is an adjective that may be rare in descriptions of Nietzsche, its brief, pithy, aphoristic style makes the book at least memorable. This style was not a mere affectation. It was a necessity, given the migraine headaches and stomach distresses bedeviling Nietzsche’s life with ferocity and frequency during its writing.36 Additionally, his relationship with one of his most notable mentors, the famous composer Richard Wagner, stood in shambles. “Not only was it the crisis of an ideological breach with Wagner,” insists Prideaux, “but also the crisis of disgust at his past ten years of scholarship.” Nietzsche was disillusioned with his own field of expertise: philology. That field was frankly too constrictive for his protean cast of mind. A new urgency took hold of his intellectual journey. He was now “in search of the free spirit, the man whose existential hunger can be satisfied despite the absence of the ideal, or the divine.”37 He sought to break free from multiple ostensible bondages. Once liberated from the thicket of belief, Nietzsche found himself in the labyrinth of unbelief. As historian Frank Turner has pointed out, “by the mid-1870s Nietzsche had come to the conclusion that influenced all of his later work. For the first time in its history humankind would have to confront in the most radical manner the fact that it dwelt in a godless universe.” For Nietzsche this was not a merely intellectual exercise. “For him the prospect of a godless universe meant a supreme turning point in the moral history of humankind,” namely, “that human beings would be compelled to posit values that could have no relationship to higher or transcendent things.”38 The passions aroused by the rejection of the divine in modern Western life revolved around moral assumptions and considerations as much as intellectual arguments. In this same period, most notably with The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche was trying to discern where Western thought had gotten off course. In investigating the Greeks, he rejected Socrates and Plato, especially their assumption that the world was comprehensible and ultimately good. Reason’s conquest of nature was a misguided quest, given that reality defies our full knowledge and control. In the ancient debates between Democritus and Plato, Nietzsche sided with Democritus’s atomism, with its similarities to modern science. Plato had been taken up too much into Christian theology, for Nietzsche the worst system of illusions. Democritus was only the penultimate figure from ancient Greek thought in Nietzsche’s view. For him this place of privilege was reserved for the mythic figure of Dionysius who stood out as the symbol of what the apex of man’s



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cultural aspirations ought to be. This ancient deity was utterly uninhibited by traditional morals, an ethos constantly underlying cultural restrictions and ready to burst out in a joyful frenzy. He had even published a seminal essay, “The Dionysian Worldview,” defending such notions in 1870.39 Only out of the creative energies of artists inspired by the Dionysian vision, and unshackled by traditional, religious, and bourgeois morality, could a new and revitalized culture be reborn. In summing up the message of The Birth of Tragedy, theologian Stephen N. Williams draws the connections: “At the end of his life, Dionysus is opposed to the Crucified. Dionysus is the principle of Anti-christ. Dionysus is Nietzsche.”40 Though the product of human imagination, for Nietzsche Dionysus served as the idealized figure for the unconquerable anthropocentric expression of a conquering hero unshackled from cultural expectations and norms. This took the form of his own articulation of a new anthropology in a book focused on a newly construed humanity. ALL TOO HUMAN In the 1878 preface of Human, All too Human, Nietzsche confronted the detractors of his previous writings. He noted they had accused him of causing the reading public to distrust morality, and of operating a “School for Suspicion” as well as of contempt. Others had described him as courageous or daring. Nietzsche himself readily described himself as the foremost person to look into the world with suspicion, and “every bit as much, to speak theologically, as an enemy and challenger of God.”41 Nietzsche eschewed the traditional distinction between morality and immorality, and thus regarded such criticism as missing his point. For him, life “wants deception, it lives on deception.” He sardonically embraced labels such as “the old immoralist and birdcatcher.” He exulted, “I am speaking immorally, extra-morally, ‘beyond good and evil,’” thus reinscribing one of his favorite refrains.42 The human spirit longs to become a free spirit, but the process of doing so became for Nietzsche a “great separation,” sudden and shocking like an earthquake, and devastating to the sensitive soul. Such a process involves conflicting emotions, such as “a hatred of love” a desecration of what had recently been worshiped, a mixture of shame and jubilation. This great separation “is also a disease that can destroy man, this first outburst of strength and will to self-determination, self-valorization, this will to free will.”43 This newly freed person, the modern man, is wracked with subversive questionings. “’Cannot all values be overturned? And is Good perhaps Evil? And God only an invention, a nicety of the devil? Is everything perhaps ultimately false?’” Such questions and the answers reached may have often subjected

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the modern human to a threatening and strangling loneliness.44 This state finally gives way when the free spirit accepts the loneliness as the price well paid for becoming master of the self. The answer comes thus: “You had to become your own master, and also the master of your own virtues. Previously, your virtues were your masters; but they must be nothing more than your tools, along with your other tools.”45 Nietzsche’s acceptance in this work of a scientistic reductionism is seen in his opening chapter, “Of First and Last Things.” For example, he averred: “All we need, something can be given us only now, with the various sciences at their present level of achievement, is a chemistry of moral, religious, aesthetic ideas and feelings.”46 Humanity and its faculty of knowledge has evolved. In fact, for Nietzsche, “everything essential in human development occurred in primeval times,” and from those early developments, humanity “probably hasn’t changed much more” in the past four millennia.47 He held that “there are no eternal facts, nor are there any absolute truths.” Though perhaps a mere rhetorical flourish, this proposition itself was stated in absolute form. Nietzsche reveled in the advances of science. He held as one of its primary roles the dispelling of misunderstandings and falsehoods in the past. He dispatched as repositories of knowledge a disparate list including astrology, misunderstood dreams, metaphysics, even language as a truth-bearer. He neutered metaphysics, seeking to render it harmless for the future. “As soon as the origins of religion, art, and morality have been described, so that one can explain them fully without resorting to the use of metaphysical intervention at the beginning and along the way,” he proclaimed, “then one no longer has as strong an interest in the purely theoretical problem of the ‘thing in itself’ and ‘appearance.’” Religion, art, and morality fail to offer access to the essence of the world.48 As to the limits of language, he averred that language is merely “the first stage of scientific effort.” Yet he appeared to reject “the belief in found truth” and to insist that humanity’s “belief in language” has “propagated a monstrous error.” He similarly and with brevity dispatched logic and mathematics as failing to correspond precisely “to anything in the real world.”49 According to one historian, “For Nietzsche, science was not genuine knowledge. Science was conventional or useful knowledge. . . . It did not and could not result in final knowledge.”50 This approach was pragmatic, in large part because of his aversion to metaphysics. For this reason, as one intellectual biographer notes, Nietzsche rejected obsessions with origins, particularly as represented in Platonic forms. “Meaning, significance, and truth do not lie at the beginning or the end. Reality is everything that is in flux. And we ourselves are also in flux.”51 In doing away with metaphysical essences so central to philosophy, Nietzsche used the familiar trope of the distinction between the essence and



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the appearance of a painting. For Nietzsche, both Kantians and critics of Kant “overlook the possibility that that painting . . . has gradually evolved, indeed is still evolving, and therefore should not be considered a fixed quantity, on which basis a conclusion about the creator (the sufficient reason) may be made, or even rejected.”52 Nietzsche turned to science and its progress to deal with the problem of essence and appearance. “That which we now call the world is the result of a number of errors and fantasies, which came about gradually in the overall development of organic beings,” he proclaimed, “fusing with one another, and now handed down to us as a collected treasure of our entire past—a treasure: for the value of our humanity rests upon it.” The “thing in itself” will turn out to be void of meaning.53 “For Nietzsche human nature is truly indeterminable,” concludes one analysis of Nietzsche’s place in nineteenth-century thought. “Human beings must determine it, and Nietzsche found all of the ideologies to which his generation appealed inadequate to the task.”54 This notion of self-determination was threatened by another major component in Nietzsche’s thought: the rejection of human freedom. Because nature is determined, humans cannot reasonably be held responsible for the effects of their actions, for the actions themselves, for the motives that drove the actions, or for the nature that produced the motives. “Ultimately, we discover his nature cannot be responsible either, in that it is itself an inevitable consequence, an outgrowth of the elements and influences of past and present things.”55 Safranski offers an interpretation of this point, namely, “the antinomy of freedom implies that it is experienced from a dual perspective.” My inner experience is one of freedom, but my intellect tells me that “everything is causally determined.”56 On this reading, only in retrospect do I perceive my choices as having been determined. For the ostensible defects of religion, Nietzsche saved his strongest language. To reach a high level of education, for example, man must “get beyond superstitious and religious concepts and fears,” including belief in “heavenly angels or original sin.” The educated person must stop “talking about the soul’s salvation.” Such abandonment of theological themes partook of a “level of liberation,” after which the modern person must “still make a last intense effort to overcome metaphysics.” He nevertheless insisted that there were at least some historical and psychological justifications for philosophy and its metaphysical notions. He could even admit humanity’s “greatest advancement” and “finest accomplishments” came from metaphysics.57 The modern human can choose to carve out an eternal role for science. This was not to be taken as an absolute foundation, as he noted that the “truest allies” of science “must be doubt and distrust.” In some areas of science, however, there can arise “the sum of indisputable truths, which outlast all storms of skepticism and all disintegration.” Such truths then “can in time

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become so large . . . that one can decide on that basis to found ‘eternal’ works.”58 Later he would add a pragmatic argument for science. This was due to the rigors of its methodology, “for the scientific spirit is based on the insight into methods, and were those methods to be lost, all the results of science could not prevent a renewed triumph of superstition and nonsense.”59 While at pains to preserve the notion of progress as a live possibility, Nietzsche perceived that this must come about by sustained human intention and engagement. Human effort loomed large because of the abandonment of the notion of divine providence, so pivotal to the natural theologians. “Since man no longer believes that a god is guiding the destinies of the world as a whole,” or that “the path of mankind is leading somewhere glorious,” he cautioned, “Men must set themselves ecumenical goals, embracing the whole earth.” This will not come because of a “conscious overall government,” but through the discovery of “knowledge of the conditions of culture.” This must surpass older forms of knowledge, serving “as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals.”60 Philosophy could not merely subsist as a substitute for religion. Something more radical was, in Nietzsche’s estimation, required. The very needs to which religion was previously thought to answer, must themselves be eradicated. These needs “are not unchangeable.” He here mocked the “Christian anguish, the sighing about inner depravity, concern about salvation,” as mere “errors of reason” that “deserve not satisfaction, but annihilation.” These assumptions are merely “acquired needs, temporally limited, based on assumptions that contradict those of science.” To mitigate the anguish of this process, Nietzsche proposed art, and not metaphysics, as a religion substitute that can ease “a heart overburdened with feelings.”61 The anti-theological underpinnings of Nietzsche’s thought are laid bare in several blunt aphoristic statements scattered throughout Human, All too Human. Really, one cannot represent the experiential dimension of reading Human, All Too Human without providing some samples of such staccato and sardonic sayings. Here are a few salient ones: “What thinking person still needs the hypothesis of a god?” “But who worries about theologians these days (except the theologians)?”62 “For out of fear and need each religion is born, creeping into existence on the byways of reason.”63 “Christianity, on the other hand, crushed and shattered man completely, and submerged him as if in deep mire.”64



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“Assuming that he believes at all, the everyday Christian is a pitiful figure, a man who really cannot count up to three, and who besides, precisely because of his mental incompetence, would not deserve such a punishment as Christianity promises him.”65 “In each ascetic morality, man prays to one part of himself as a god and also finds it necessary to diabolify the rest.”66 “Christ, on the other hand, whom we like to imagine as having the warmest of hearts, furthered men’s stupidity, took the side of the intellectually weak, and kept the greatest intellect from being produced.”67

Such quotations could be multiplied across Nietzsche’s broader corpus, a fact long acknowledged by even the most casual readers of his works. What was the origin of such consistent antipathy toward theology? Jesuit historian Frederick Copleston offered the following theory: “As far as theology is concerned, there is no need to bother about such fables. Nietzsche’s hatred of Christianity proceeds principally from his view of its supposed effect on man, whom it renders weak, submissive, resigned, humble or tortured in conscience and unable to develop himself freely.”68 More recently, Claude Pavur has suggested that Nietzsche’s disdain toward Christianity was rooted in his embrace of humanism, or the “truly human,” not in, as often claimed, some nihilistic anti-humanism.69 For others, Nietzsche required a life-affirming, Dionysian overcoming of the morality of the herd. “For Nietzsche that involved essentially an elitist aristocratic morality.” His was a casting off not merely of Christian morality, but all moralities then popular and found by him to be unacceptably bourgeois.70 In Thus Spake Zarathustra, the protagonist cried out, “Well! Take heart! Ye higher men! Now only travaileth the mountain of the human future. God hath died: now do we desire—The Superman to live.”71 Was the character of Zarathustra urging all to aspire to be such “higher men”? Or was he merely appealing to a highly motivated elite? In urging the higher men to reject the religion of the marketplace, he mocked the populace who insisted “there are no higher men, we are all equal; man is man, before God—we are all equal.” To this, Zarathustra protested, “Before God!—Now, however, this God hath died. Before the populace, however, we will not be equal. Ye higher men, away from the market-place!”72 If this is true, then it seems inescapable to conclude that when God dies, human equality also dies. Theologian Jan-Olav Henriksen has done a comparative analysis of Schleiermacher and Nietzsche, both of whom were intensely focused on the subjective search for authenticity in freedom. Schleiermacher insisted that to get to freedom, one had to relate one’s self-consciousness to some

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Other. This relation was one of dependence. Any “experience of freedom is related to a prior experience or feeling of dependence, so that freedom is something that a subject only can unfold and express on the basis of being determined by something else first.” In fact, in a comparison of Nietzsche and Schleiermacher, Henriksen argues, “the feeling of dependence is constitutive also to the experience of the self as a free subject.”73 Yet for Nietzsche, the Other promulgated by religion is a lie, and “freedom is thus to be acquired in the overcoming of dependence.” The aim of the human is precisely the overcoming of “any element of dependence upon other, as this is a sign of weakness, or increases the danger of being determined by others than ourselves.”74 The subjective turn that was for Schleiermacher a discovery of freedom through dependence on the absolute Other, in Nietzsche became a fierce independence bordering on utter solipsism. Intuition was valued by both thinkers, but led to radically different conclusions with respect to human nature and purpose. Human, All Too Human is best described as an anti-theological anthropology. Humans are on their own in a cold and heartless world. All received verities must be torn down and destroyed so we may construct a new set of values. Such a system can allow the weak to be crushed and the truly strong and noble to rise unfettered to impose their will on the rest. Perhaps Nietzsche’s death of God was more of a sociological claim, that the God (as proclaimed in late-nineteenth-century Europe) was dead, than an ontological claim about the mortality of an actual once-existent deity. As some have noted, Nietzsche rejected efforts to modernize God and make God the guarantor of either rationality or morals, as had been attempted variously by Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and D. F. Strauss. When he asserted “God is dead,” he was targeting the optimistic God of progressive modernism. Even the utopian interpretations of Darwinism gaining ground in his era, namely, the promise of upward evolution and human progress, came under his critique. Thus, “To Nietzsche the God of his time, that is the God created by the Christians (the God of progress in history, the God of morality and proven by rationality), was dead. The consequence of this death (atheism) is nihilism.”75 Such a critique draws comparisons with theistic existentialist Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). The open contempt with which Nietzsche regarded theology, including theologies prior to post-Enlightenment theology, clearly hindered him from allowing a substantive corrective role for the wisdom of the deep Christian past. For Nietzsche, tying human progress to religion and its tropes was the problem, not the solution. Even his sympathetic biographer asks, “What happens when man cancels the moral code on which he has built the edifice of his civilization? What does it mean to be human unchained from a central



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metaphysical purpose?”76 The grounding of human exceptionalism was transforming into a relativistic and reductionistic sea of shifting sand. CONCLUSION The anti-theologians sought to reconstruct a view of human nature on naturalistic grounds. Perhaps God was merely a human invention, as held by Feuerbach. Theology was a primitive and childlike holdover from a religious past in the account of Tylor. Maybe there was the possibility of a human-centered new religion built by the tools of positivism, as promulgated by Comte. If one followed Maudsley, religion and theology could be explained away as a mental disease. Perchance theology and religious piety were merely a cruel sham, a hoax worthy of destruction, as held by Nietzsche. Theology, whose propositions had long undergirded the ideal of human dignity through the doctrine of the image of God with an exceptional human soul, was under assault. Could the unique quality of the human endure such trends? By the end of the century, this question became quite acute in character. One set of thinkers sought explanatory power of human purpose not merely from the emotions of the psyche, nor from frontal attacks on theology, but from the very contours of the human skull. They were known as the phrenologists. Efforts to blend their insights with religious or theological themes faced significant challenges, as explored in the next chapter. NOTES 1. Hayden V. White, “Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 3:190–92. 2. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 2nd ed., trans. George Eliot (New York: C. Blanchard, 1855), 143–44. 3. Ibid., 145–46. 4. Ibid., 147. 5. Ibid., 257–58, 262. Haunting are the words that conclude this chapter: “Belief in God is wrecked, is stranded on the belief in the world, in natural effects as the only true ones.” 6. Jere Paul Surber, “Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas,” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd ed, ed. Robert Audi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 307. 7. Bruce Mazlish, “Comte, Auguste,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 1:176. 8. Auguste Comte, The Catechism of Positive Religion, trans. Richard Congreve (London: John Chapman, 1858), 268–69.

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9. Ibid., 233. 10. Ibid., 237, 239. 11. Ibid., 253. Gall’s phrenology is treated below in chapter 6. 12. Timothy Larsen, “E. B. Tylor, Religion and Anthropology,” British Journal for the History of Science 46 (2013), 468. 13. Ibid., 470. 14. According to Sir Edmund Leach, this work “soon acquired the status of a sort of bible of British cultural anthropology, particularly with regard to everything relating to the study of primitive religion.” Sir Edmund Leach, “Anthropology of Religion: British and French Schools,” in Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, vol. III, eds. Ninian Smart et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 221. 15. Edward Burnett Tylor, Religion in Primitive Culture, vol. 2 of Primitive Cultures (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 4. 16. Ibid., 84. 17. Larsen, 473. 18. Leach, 222. 19. Tylor, Religion, 85–86. 20. Ibid., 531. 21. Larsen, 477. 22. Tylor, Religion, 536–37. Tylor’s lifelong and pervasive anti-Catholicism is treated in Larsen, 471–72. 23. Larsen, 478. 24. Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain 1700–1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 254. 25. Ibid., 318. 26. Henry Maudsley, Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings (London: Keegan, Paul, Trench & Co., 1886), 43. 27. Ibid., 142, emphasis in original. 28. Ibid., 320. 29. Ibid., 321. 30. Ibid., 322. 31. Ibid., 322–27. 32. Ibid., 330–31. 33. Ibid., 328. 34. Claude Nicholas Pavur, Nietzsche: Humanist, Marquette Studies in Philosophy 15 (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1997), 86. 35. Sue Prideaux, I am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche (New York: Duggan Books, 2018), 172. 36. “Between 1877 and 1880,” “his health was quite precarious. There were regular bouts of terrible headaches, vomiting, dizziness, and painful eye pressure,” sometimes bringing “almost total blindness.” Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 178. 37. Ibid., 175, cf. 179. Nietzsche himself noted that he could only work in brief spasms, sketching his thoughts in pencil in several small notebooks. “I have to steal



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the minutes and quarter-hours of ‘brain energy’ as you call it, steal them away from a suffering brain,” he wrote to a friend in October of 1879. 38. Frank M. Turner, European Intellectual History: From Rousseau to Nietzsche, ed. Richard A. Lofthouse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 258–9. 39. Safranski, 65–67. 40. Stephen N. Williams, “Behind Nietzsche’s Anti-Christianity: Wagner, Tragedy and the Greeks,” Evangelical Journal of Theology 19 (2010), 116. 41. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 4. 42. Ibid., 5. 43. Ibid., 6. 44. Ibid., 7. 45. Ibid., 9. 46. Ibid., 14. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 18. 49. Ibid., 19. 50. Turner, European, 261. 51. Safranski, 171. 52. Nietzsche, Human, 23. 53. Ibid., 24. 54. Turner, European, 265. 55. Nietzsche, Human, 43. 56. Safranski, 176. 57. Nietzsche, Human, 27. 58. Ibid., 29. 59. Ibid., 264. 60. Ibid., 30–31. 61. Ibid., 32. 62. Ibid., 33. 63. Ibid., 79. 64. Ibid., 85. 65. Ibid., 86. 66. Ibid., 95. Note the similarity to Feuerbach here. 67. Ibid., 145. 68. Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy: Vol. VII, Modern Philosophy, Part II, Schopenhauer to Nietzsche (New York: Image Books, 1965), 179. 69. Pavur, 108. 70. Turner, European, 264. 71. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (New York: The Modern Library, 1905), 320. 72. Ibid.

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73. Jan-Olaf Henriksen, “Feeling of Absolute Dependence or Will to Power? Schleiermacher vs. Nietzsche on the conditions for Religious Subjectivity,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 45 (2003), 317–18. 74. Ibid., 322–23. 75. André J. Groenewald and Johan Buitendag, “Who is the ‘God’ Nietzsche Denied?” Harvard Theological Studies 61 (2005), 159. 76. Prideaux, 379.

Chapter 6‌‌‌

The Hard-Headed Science of Humanity Phrenology and Religion

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the existence, status, and individuality of the human soul came under considerable reassessment at the interstices of theology and science. Religious views inherited from the past, including the notion of an immaterial mind in concert with, or in alienation from, a material body, became harder to defend as the study of brain function advanced within science. The birth of the field of psychology, literally, “the study of the soul” came into its own as a discrete discipline precisely as a positivistic and materialistic assessment of the human was reaching its ascendancy, particularly in Europe. A gradual series of shifts took place, wherein the soul was equated with the mind, which in turn was increasingly reduced to the physical brain and its functions. This chapter shall explore phrenology as one of the trends influencing changes in the status of the soul over this period. The rise of phrenology, which sought to make conclusions about human personalities through the examination of bumps on the skull and the shape of the underlying brain, held court for much of the middle part of the century. The psychology of religion shifted as elites migrated away from perceiving religious beliefs as various forms of an intellectual assent to propositional theological truth-claims, and toward internal and subjective religious experiences as the focal concern of religious piety. Phrenology is a case where secularization was not a simple and unidirectional shift into materialism, but rather a reshaping and distorting of theology through the assumptions of an increasingly popularized version of a new science. While early founders of phrenology such as Gall and Spurzheim sought to ground its scientific claims in a mainly materialistic account of the human brain, later popularizers of phrenology, such as Combe and Fowler, found themselves needing to broaden 109

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its appeal. This broadening dynamic required interaction with religious categories, with theological assumptions at play in American culture, and with religious promoters of many social reforms with which phrenology became increasingly allied. Its association with populist quackery in the minds of more sophisticated, academically trained specialists, led to its eventual demise as a science. PHRENOLOGY: FROM GALL TO SPURZHEIM Phrenology gained a large following during the middle years of the nineteenth century. It is dismissed now as a pseudoscience, but this term “pseudoscience” can itself be problematic, since it seems implicitly to remove science from history, and to label as science only what the current generation believes. Because something is no longer regarded as science does not mean it was not so regarded in its own time, even if for a few decades. One recent study of the concept of pseudoscience acknowledges that a bright demarcation line between science and pseudoscience remains elusive. “Nineteenth-century phrenologists and twentieth-century parapsychologists believed that they were doing legitimate work”; this study observes. “It was mainstream scientists and later scholars who decided that they were not.” Furthermore, “phrenology can be understood as part of an intellectual revolution: the turn toward naturalism.”1 At times this naturalism was not merely methodological, but metaphysical, an ironic turn in a field that sought to eschew metaphysics. An attempt to avoid the label “pseudoscience” does not, however, mean that the study of past science will not induce discomfort. Phrenologists sought to assess individual human intelligence, as well as personality features, by examining the bumps on the skull. Franz Josef Gall (1758–1828), a German doctor, worked in conjunction with his protégé, John Gaspar Spurzheim (1776–1832) who made the public aware of the theory and spurred its rise in popularity. Five core principles of phrenology included the following notions: 1.  Mental acts are brought about by the physical brain, including its shape and its functionality. For Gall this was a materialistic process devoid of spiritual factors. 2.  The brain is a complex collection of faculties. Gall identified twenty-seven distinct faculties; other phrenologists would identify more. 3.  Each faculty is localized in a different region of the brain and is amenable to being studied by science. 4.  Mental activity causes an increase in the size and shape of the brain, features which were taken by phrenologists to indicate varying levels of intelligence.



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5.  Early childhood development causes the skull to solidify over the brain. Scientists can develop the skill of examining cranial shape and bumps in various locations on the skull, on the assumption that skull size corresponds to brain size and intellect.2 Franz Joseph Gall, while the founder of phrenology, was not its most famous promoter. One account describes him as: “an eccentric physician in late eighteenth-century Vienna.” Gall’s foundational ideas were not original, as he was influenced by philosophers such as Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) and Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), and medical researcher Georg Prochaska (1749–1820). Gall took the ideas of “cerebral localization” and “the innateness of mental faculties” and rearranged them into a system for reading mental features from the contours of the human head. He sought to discern nature’s enduring ways and move discussions of human nature onto firm scientific footing.3 Naturphilosophie, popular in European intellectual circles was organic not atomistic, blending elements of Romanticism and Idealism, as well as scientific and literary conceits. Gall’s collection of 300 human skulls and 120 plaster casts attracted interest throughout Germany by 1802. A certain public sensationalism accompanied displays and study of the skulls of notorious murderers, which sought to show how their behavior could have been predicted by cranial bumps. Gall was convinced that the “deep order of Nature” should be sufficiently manifest to serve as an empirical science, “the doctrine of the skull.” He disapproved of labels that would nevertheless forever be associated with his name, “phrenology” and “craniology,” taking hold of public consciousness by 1815. Despite such reticence, by the 1820s these monikers were in common use and gaining adherents in many locales.4 In 1804 Gall made a fateful decision, one which he would one day come to rue. This was the hiring of a youthful understudy to assist with the work of dissection: Johann Gaspar Spurzheim. Spurzheim accompanied Gall on a celebrated tour of several nations on the European continent where Gall spread his new doctrines. During this period Gall’s lectures were wellattended, and “Gall became one of the most famous men in Europe,” as he met many dignitaries and received gifts and accolades from the European literati.5 Such acclaim was not to last, however. In 1806 the British Monthly Magazine criticized Gall’s science as “an impudent piece of quackery.” The Tory Gentlemen’s Magazine followed suit, this time emphasizing religious objections to Gall’s views, accusing him of fostering impiety. More serious for Gall’s reputation as a scientist was the hostility expressed in the pages of The Medical and Physical Journal in 1807.6 A highly ambitious man, Spurzheim began to part company with Gall in 1809, and took the mantle of promoter and defender of phrenology upon

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his own shoulders. Traveling to Britain in 1814, boxes of skulls in tow, Spurzheim began to deliver Gall’s lectures and to perform public dissections in promotion of the new science of phrenology. He claimed to be co-author of the doctrines, rather than Gall’s mere assistant. This claim has almost no credence in the German historiography of Gall’s work, and its popularity appears to have been a British phenomenon. A study of Spurzheim’s private letters show that fame and wealth, rather than nobler notions of social reform, shaped his true motives.7 Spurzheim published his own interpretation of phrenology in 1815, as The Physiognomical System. Reviews critical of his methods and conclusions were swift and biting. His most inveterate critic was Edinburgh physician John Gordon (1786–1818), who published his own A System of Human Anatomy that same year. An acrimonious war of words ensued, culminating in Gordon’s presence at one of Spurzheim’s public brain-dissections in July of 1816. Followers of Spurzheim claimed the event was a triumph, and many of Gordon’s own students abandoned him after the event. Their rivalry continued in the review literature until Gordon’s death.8 Spurzheim’s interpretation of phrenology had allowed for change in brain shape through education and other environmental factors, an idea not unlike the doctrine of acquired characteristics of his French contemporary Lamarck in the field of zoology. Gall had espoused a stronger biological determinism than his pupil, holding that the shape of the skull indicated fixed traits resistant to reform. But over time, Spurzheim sought to expand the application of phrenology, “to problems of education, penology, religion, and other nonanatomical concerns.” In fact, moving away from Gall’s materialism, Spurzheim merged science and religion, preaching that phrenology would reveal a divinely ordained law of nature.9 GEORGE COMBE POPULARIZES PHRENOLOGY During the Edinburgh tour, Spurzheim recruited Scottish reformer and philosopher George Combe (1788–1858) who enthusiastically helped spread the teachings of phrenology in Europe and North America. In a conversation later reported by Combe, Spurzheim had once requested to have his own skull preserved “as evidence of my natural dispositions,” adding that “posterity will judge by it whether I am a quack and a Charlatan.” Combe informed his readers that the departed phrenologist’s skull and brain indeed were “locked up in an iron safe” at the Phrenological Society of Boston.10 Spurzheim was so revered in Boston, that upon his death while on tour in America, his funeral was held in that city and attended by some 3,000 mourners. A minister, John Pierpoint, penned an “Ode to Spurzheim,” which was sung by the Handel and



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Haydn Society of Harvard. Evidence of the easy, if incongruous, elision of religion and science during this period, is found in its lyrics: “Nature’s priest, how true and fervent was thy worship at her shrine! Friend of man, –of God the servant, Advocate of truths divine.”11 Criticism of phrenology intensified in the 1820s, as shown in the writings of Thomas Stone (1793–1854), a medical student who would become president of the Edinburgh Medical Society. He argued that phrenology degraded man to a mere automaton with no control over his own conduct.12 Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869), of Thesaurus fame, cited brain-injury research as an empirical basis for rejecting phrenology.13 The editor of the influential Edinburgh Review cogently criticized phrenology for reducing the indivisible immaterial mind to a divided material brain. He lambasted the new system for its “dogmatism and arrogance.”14 Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856) of the University of Edinburgh waged a sustained war in the Scottish press against phrenology. He argued that the teachings of phrenology would “lead inevitably to Fatalism, Materialism, and Atheism,” and would reduce humanity to “moral brutalism.”15 Perhaps it was such criticisms, as well as Combe’s insatiable thirst for scientific authority, that prompted him to publish his popular treatise Constitution of Man considered in relation to External Objects in 1828. The book sold a thousand copies in a single week. This was a harbinger of the appeal that would contribute to the longevity of phrenology on the public scene, especially in North America, even long after the relevant experts had undermined and challenged its scientific claims.16 This comparison of Gall, Spurzheim, and Combe, exposes some differences in their underlying philosophies, especially in the nature-nurture debate. Spurzheim’s interpretation of phrenology had allowed for change in brain shape through education and other environmental factors. Gall had been a biological determinist, indicating the shape of the skull showed fixed traits not amenable to reform. Social reform and broadening the appeal of phrenology formed the central concerns of Combe. Combe was able to bridge the worlds of science and religion through his nominal status as a member of the church of England, and his willingness to veil his growing religious skepticism. In Edinburgh, at the height of the popularity of the movement, Combe edited the Phrenological Journal from 1832–1847.17 His faculty psychology identified some thirty-five distinct faculties of the human brain, including the likes of “philoprogenitiveness” (the tendency to pamper and spoil children).18 Combe announced that “the moral sentiments have been bestowed on us by the Creator,” a remark recorded in the context of his critique of slavery. Such moral sentiments “revolt against cruelty and injustice in every form; they are the voice of Divinity speaking

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within us.”19 Social reform was becoming a familiar path to public notice in the transatlantic world between 1830 and 1860. Despite such religious comments, Combe sought to keep religion and science distinct. He reported a conversation with a Virginia clergyman, who said he would reject any science not congruent with the Bible, but would accept phrenology if only he and Combe shared the same religious creed. Combe remonstrated with the cleric, stating that he based his phrenology “solely on the accordance of my doctrines with nature.” He added that “my own religious opinions have no more connection with these facts than the faith of a professor of mathematics has with the truth of the propositions of Euclid.”20 Yet Combe protested too much. In the conclusion of his Address to the American People, delivered some thirteen times during his sojourn in the United States, he proclaimed: “It is God who has established the facts which I now explain to you, and what he has appointed can never fail.”21 Both theological and biological approval of phrenology, so important to its public promotion, became increasingly less important to him. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Combe’s religious beliefs steadily declined. He did battle with evangelicals who, in the 1820s, had joined phrenological societies in the hopes of harmonizing Christianity with the new science. Other pious voices began to speak out against phrenology. According to De Giustino, “theologians and obscure country pastors all felt obligated to warn their people of the danger.” In truth the battle was not new, but a renewal of older fights with forms of Enlightenment skepticism and Deism, and “the special danger of phrenology was that it combined all the old features of irreligion under the mantle of a new scientific philosophy.”22 In contrast with religious supporters and detractors, Combe saw natural law as a virtual “new god.” He and his allies in 1830 made an official motion in the Edinburgh Phrenological Society to exclude any discussion of theology from the activities of the society except for where nature demanded it.23 Still, Combe’s writings show that nature demanded it a great deal. References to “Creator” and “The Divine” recur throughout his corpus, usually in affirmative usage. Perhaps Combe sought to dampen criticism of his views by addressing religious concerns regularly in his works. Ascertaining the genuine beliefs of past actors is indeed the work of some speculation on the part of later generations. One student of Combes’s thought has observed that Combe believed “God had endowed human kind [sic] with faculties to discover the arts, sciences, and natural laws.” Through such secondary sources of truth, “the physical, moral, and intellectual nature of human beings was open to investigation,” including establishing the pathways of right conduct.24



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PHRENOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC RACISM One element of phrenology in the American context troubling to Combe was its use in justifying slavery. The assumption that the size and shape of the skulls of African-Americans evinced a mental inferiority along with a fitness for hard physical labor was a feature of the scientific racism of figures such as Alabama physician and racial anthropologist Josiah C. Nott (1804–1873), Egyptologist George R. Gliddon (1809–1857), and physician and anthropologist Samuel George Morton (1799–1851). Morton’s 1839 work Crania Americana separated the human race into Caucasian, Mongolian, Malay, American, and Ethiopian categories. It even contained an appendix on phrenology by Combe, who promoted Morton’s book.25 Nott argued that blacks and whites were separate species, and the former were inferior and thus fitted for slavery. Nott and Gliddon published Types of Mankind amid fervid debates over abolitionism in 1854, seeking to present social stratification as an immutable scientific fact, thus underwriting a justification of American slavery through science.26 Some who studied crania of various races were mainly engaging efforts to locate human exceptionalism, via an ostensibly objective reading of physical phenomena available to an empirical science of measured human skulls. Scientists of this persuasion thought that brain studies in phrenology could one day displace the older metaphysical notion of a more mysterious immaterial human mind. One investigation suggests that “the racialization of the head was integral to the early nineteenth century concern to ‘biologically’ determine the human’s unique and exceptional status.” The goal of this science was not primarily to grant privilege to social structures such as slavery, but to “establish a materialist notion of intelligence” and to “specify an anatomical index, and measure, of ‘the human.’”27 Josiah Nott especially reveled in angering clerics by denying the scientific value of biblical data, especially its use to argue the unity of the human race.28 One biographer points out that: “to Nott it was essential to knock down any religious belief that blacks and whites were brothers and sisters under the skin.”29 The intersection of Nott’s scientific racism and phrenology emerged in his 1843 essay, “The Mulatto a Hybrid.” Here he invoked scientific authority based on medical research, insisting that “It is well settled by anatomists and physiologists that the brain of the Negro compared with the Caucasian is smaller by a full tenth, that its nerves are larger, the head differently shaped, the facial angle less, and the intellectual powers comparatively defective.”30 Some skull-measurers were driven by racialist motives, but not necessarily all. During his tour of America in the late 1830s, George Combe, reflecting wide sentiment in the United Kingdom, pointedly excoriated American

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slavery as a “cruel injustice . . . perpetrated on the Negro race,” and “a canker on the moral constitution of the country, that must produce evil continually until it is removed.”31 The use of racialized science to justify slavery was therefore not a necessary interpretation of phrenological approaches to the measuring of humans. However, it did get taken up into that orbit irrespective of objections like Combe’s, both intellectual and social reformist. In any case, his awareness of his guest status in America likely made him unwilling to beat too ardently the drum of abolitionism in his public lectures.32 Combe’s Constitution of Man, first published in 1828, went through multiple editions, the last of which appeared in 1847. Here Combe addressed religious themes more fully than the earlier editions, doubtless in part due to criticisms from religious quarters. The book emphasized “natural law,” whose violation results in a “pre-ordained natural consequence which Man can neither alter nor evade.” Combe referred not to “punishment,” as this carried connotations he did not care for. He was at pains to domesticate religion under the auspices of natural law, arguing that “religion operates on the human mind in subordination, and not in contradiction, to its natural constitution.” Bad living conditions, such as poor hygiene, harmful work environment, and poor diet negatively impinge on the nervous system and the brain. The impact of these environmental factors is “to blunt all the higher feelings and faculties of the mind,” and result in “impediments to holiness.”33 Recognizing the societal import of religion, Combe assured his readers that “active religious feelings dispose a man to venerate, and submit himself to, those moral and physical laws instituted by the Creator, on which his own happiness and that of society depend.” Unimpressed with the numerous sermons in his day designed to reduce human vices, Combe insisted that religion had to become “wedded to a philosophy founded on these laws.”34 Combe later identified the higher sentiments or feelings of human morality with the brain faculties identified by the methods of phrenology. Such features separate humans from the lower animals. Benevolence, veneration, hope, conscientiousness, and intellect, with their interactions, received his painstaking treatment. Veneration, a looking up “with a pure and elevated emotion to the beings to whom it is directed, whether God or our fellow-men” could contribute to virtues such as humility and submissiveness. “God is its highest object,” he assured his readers.35 Further, “benevolence, veneration, and conscientiousness are distinguishable as the moral sentiments.” As such, they could become excessive and abusive, leading to, for example, superstition or “excessive scrupulosity.” But when harmonious in collaboration, and directed by the intellect, they conduce to the benefit of other beings.36 Combe’s other comments on veneration seemed to offer comfort to any religious detractors, especially those already relying on natural theology. “I have assumed the existence of God as a fact capable of proof,” he asserted. “If we find wisdom



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and benevolence in His works, unchangeableness and no shadow of turning in His laws, harmony in each department of creation,” he added, “then we shall acknowledge in the Divine Being an object whom we may love with all our souls.”37 While Combe’s use of religion in the promotion of phrenology was ambivalent, the same could not be said of our next subject. O. S. FOWLER BLENDS NATURAL THEOLOGY AND PHRENOLOGY Orson Squire Fowler (1809–1887), self-described Practical Phrenologist established a Phrenological Museum in Philadelphia in 1838. He served as the editor of the American Phrenological Journal in the 1840s, relocating the organization to New York in 1842. Along with a brother and brother-in-law, he established a small print empire known as the publishing house Fowler and Wells. The business sold thousands of texts as well as charts and plaster casts of crania. The Fowlers later expanded their social reform interests to embrace temperance, vegetarianism, and sex education.38 Cheap print and increasingly efficient mail delivery allowed their pamphlets and books to spread across the nation.39 The third edition of his cumbersome tome, Natural Theology and the Moral Bearings of Phrenology and Physiology sought to harmonize the ancient Christian scriptures with the new findings of phrenology. An odd historical moment of bridging between two dissimilar disciplines exposed cracks in the natural theological and phrenological projects. On the surface, the mending of fences appeared to be underway in Fowler’s harmonizing of science and religion, though with a decided accent on the authority of the former rather than the latter. Fowler insisted that his first love was “the science” when he was charged with being merely greedy for money. But the detractors of phrenology attacked its scientific credentials, labeling it “pretended science,” or “science falsely so called.”40 One study of the phenomenon of religious phrenology names several thinkers who, while dissatisfied with Calvinist evangelicalism, sought to harmonize phrenology and a newer, more liberal religious ethos. Their work sought to build a bridge between spiritual features of the mind and various regions of the physical brain purportedly revealed by phrenology.41 Fowler showed no lack of confidence in the veracity of phrenology. In triumphalistic language he declared: “Phrenology is also now every where [sic] becoming a subject of all-absorbing interest; and well it may, for it is founded in Truth. It must, it will prevail. It is a demonstrative science.”42 Similar expressions of confidence abound in this self-published volume. In a turn away from the harmonizing traditions of other natural theologies, Fowler proclaimed regarding phrenology: “So great is its moral power, that it will

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prostrate and ride over whatever religious doctrines, forms, or practices conflict with it. If even the Bible could be found to clash therewith, then would the Bible go by the board.”43 Fowler hastened to reassure his readers that they could expect nothing but harmony between phrenology and the morality or theology of the scriptures. His first line of evidence was the confidence that the human tendency to be religious is “‌‌‌‌‌‌demonstrated by Phrenology, in its showing that a large portion of the brain is appropriate to the development of the moral and religious organs.”44 In what must be described as a homiletical moment, Fowler proclaimed, “Ye who would return from your wanderings and be delivered from your thralldoms and your errors, follow the beacon light of truth hoisted by Phrenology. It will clear up all difficulties. It will solve all moral problems.”45 To bypass religious controversies and denominational divisions, Fowler urged that all theology be founded upon natural theology, or the study of natural religion. He called for children to be taught natural religion as the rational foundation before they are taught the Bible.46 The moral nature of human beings was, for Fowler, “part and parcel of Phrenology.” The moral features of the human constitution could be pinpointed with precision in a particular region of the brain, and thus science could undergird morality by confident reference to physical position, size, and function of its moral location.47 Moral laws would draw humans inexorably to the moral lawgiver, and such laws could be studied by a moral science every bit as assured as facts studied by physical science.48 The moral organs, for example, “are all located together in a kind of family group, upon the top of the head.” From there they were to draw the nature of the human person upward in an ennobling direction toward spiritual veneration of the divine. In Fowler’s account, the moral organs are absent in dogs and other nonhuman creatures. Whereas Charles Darwin would soon downplay distinctions between humans and canines, Fowler emphasized the distinctions. Thus one form of exceptionalism, that separating humans and other creatures was maintained by Fowler. Yet the spiritual dimension of the human was rendered by the phrenologists more and more explicable in physiological terms, thus unbalancing human exceptionalism. In trying to harmonize science and religion, Fowler effectively contributed toward the secular drift of science by wedding religion to a passing scientific trend. He made “the standard of the nature of man,” assumed to be perfect and as God had made it, the standard by which all creeds and practices should be measured. “To suppose otherwise,” he warned in terms familiar from natural theology, “is to arraign the workmanship of the Deity.”49 He even set forth a “Short Catechism” of phrenological doctrines, whereby creedal differences within Protestantism could finally be transcended and overcome.50



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Fowler sought to show that his version of phrenology was not a veiled materialism. “Man has a soul—a spiritual essence—which sees without eyes, hears without ears, operates disembodied, and connects him with heaven, and with God,” he intoned, articulating a commonly held dualism. The spirit of the human person was one of the faculties identified by phrenology. This then served for Fowler as concrete evidence of other spirits, of immortality, and even of God as spiritual being.51 If Fowler’s blending of spiritual and material causes seems in retrospect bewildering, popularization of phrenology in an American landscape seemed to require it. Phrenology’s cautious and research-oriented founders Gall and Spurzheim would have been hard-pressed to recognize the science they had founded in the new generation represented by Orson Fowler’s showmanship with its commingling of religious piety with phrenology. THE INSTABILITY OF PHRENOLOGICAL RELIGION The efforts of Combe and his followers to study and revere Nature led to an increasing practical embrace of materialist leanings. This eventually eroded alliances among a wide range of religiously motivated intellectuals who had been at first enthused about phrenology. There existed in the 1830s and 1840s an active and zealous group of self-described “Christian Phrenologists” who sought to harmonize phrenology with a range of traditional Christian doctrines. Combe and his followers stood ill at ease with such a compromise however. His 1847 edition of Constitution of Man disavowed traditional Christianity and the Bible as outworn and disgraced. While virtually all phrenologists forswore overt atheism, many embraced agnosticism either in public or privately by the 1840s. “Convinced that supernatural religion was finished, they removed themselves to the peculiarly narrow and lonely ground between indifference and atheism, where they awaited more tolerant times,” as one historian observes.52 Notwithstanding Combes’s and Fowler’s harmonizing rhetoric, over time any blending of religion and phrenology gave way to biology’s increasingly materialistic methodology. Mind would increasingly be reduced to mere brain. Scientific insight from brain features would be correlated to skull features, or to chemistry, or to external behavior determined by environmental cues. As we shall see in chapter 9, this was part of a larger shift toward experimental psychology and reductionist accounts of the mind. The reading of skulls led at times to unjust applications of phrenological insights to human social relations. Josiah Nott, especially, scoffed at the biblical idea that all humans were a single species going back to Adam. He was not alone, as Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) held polygenist

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(multiple origins of the races) views, though Agassiz, a Unitarian, retained a notion of divine creation as the source of original separate human races. Yet the human exceptionalism of one race, the human race, was undermined. Scientific racism used phrenology at times to assimilate non-Caucasian races to animals, to grant a natural justification to hierarchy of races in human society. Attempts to reduce human mental processes to physiological factors such as brain development and cranial shape stood ill at ease with the acceptance of nonmaterial factors such as spirituality. The careful balancing of the physical and the spiritual, the body and the mind, necessary for a robust human exceptionalism, was upended. Religious phrenology was a short-lived aspect of an unstable science. Efforts to establish human exceptionalism on a firm foundation would have to look elsewhere. CONCLUSION The ways in which science and religion were blended in the discourse of Christian phrenologists deserves exploration, as it often had all the potential of mixing oil and water. Religious traditionalists faulted phrenology for undermining “human freedom, since thought, volition, and emotion were merely actions of the brain.” The human person was thus reduced to the status of a machine, eroding standard accounts of personal responsibility. Further, the doctrine was seen by traditional religionists as undermining “original sin and total corruption,” instead rendering the human “godlike, with no need for spiritual guidance.”53 Reduction of human personality to skull shape and brain regions represented a peril to human exceptionalism for these critics of phrenology. Phrenology is a case where the natural theological impulse, to blend science and religion to bolster the cultural authority of one or the other, held a strong appeal. While science and religion, then and now, are sometimes described as living in a state of contrast, if not outright conflict, there is a countervailing factor often at work. One historian of such trends notes that the “impulse to harmonize natural and divine truth” by such methods tends to “obscure scientific boundaries rather than strengthen them.”54 Secularization was never simply imposed upon religion from without. Flirtations with a science of fleeting popularity, such as found in Christian phrenology, eventually eroded the religious claims that had been associated with the changing science of the skull. While phrenologists focused on humanity in the concrete realm of human crania, they still used abstraction to a high degree. In their extrapolation from individual skulls to generalizations about the mental acuity of whole races



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and populations, their reach exceeded their grasp. Alliances with religion required some phrenologists such as Combe and Fowler to strip away vestiges of historical and theological dogma, and thus to redefine religion. Only by the faithful giving up many beliefs that were precious to them could they embrace phrenology as a new scientific religion. A few did so, but most of the pious were, in the long run, unmoved by religious phrenology’s beckoning. The individualized approach to human problems had a very concrete symbol in phrenology: the human skull. Phrenologists thought the origins of social problems could be localized to certain regions of the brain, and that education in phrenology could improve social morals. Other religious figures sought to solve human problems not by studying the human brain, but by studying and improving uniquely human social and economic conditions in the context of modern human interaction and commerce. To that part of the story of human exceptionalism our narrative now devotes its attention. NOTES 1. David K. Hecht, “Pseudoscience and the Pursuit of Truth,” in Pseudoscience: The Conspiracy Against Science, ed. Allison B. Kaufman and James C. Kaufman (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018), 7, 9. On the state of neuroscience after phrenology, see Michael L. Anderson, After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014), 302–3. 2. Nadine Weidman, “Phrenology,” in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005), 4:1806. On his exposition on the human faculties, see Franz Josef Gall, On the Functions of the Brain And Of Each Of Its Parts: with Observations on the Possibility of Determining the Instincts, Propensities, and Talents, or the Moral and Intellectual Dispositions of Men and Animals, by the Configuration of the Brain and Head (Boston, MA: Marsh, Capen & Lyon, 1835), 6:145–81. 3. John Van Wyhe, Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 13–15. Capitalization of “Nature,” indicative at times of a status tantamount to a God-substitute, follows a recurrent practice in the primary literature. 4. Ibid., 16–17. 5. Ibid., 19. 6. Ibid., 25–26. 7. Ibid., 29–32. See 37–39 for Gall’s objections to Spurzheim’s interpretations of Gall’s research. 8. Ibid., 44–50. 9. Sherrie Lynne Lyons, Species, Serpents, Spirits and Skulls: Science at the Margins in the Victorian Age (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009), 71. 10. George Combe, Notes on the United States of North America During a Phrenological Visit in 1838–1841 (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1841), I:135.

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11. John D. Davies, Phrenology Fad and Science: A 19th-Century American Crusade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 17–18. Notice Davies and the term “fad” which functions like the aforementioned term “pseudoscience” and illustrates shifts in historiographical consciousness over the last few decades in the history of science. 12. Van Wyhe, 78–79. 13. Ibid., 80–81. 14. Ibid., 84–85. 15. Ibid., 86. 16. David de Giustino, Conquest of Mind: Phrenology and Victorian Social Thought (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975), 29. 17. Weidman, 1807. 18. Combe, Notes, I:xx–xxii. 19. Ibid., 159. This is not to say Combe was an egalitarian. His Constitution of Man, 1847 ed., explored national differences of intelligence, see 107–110. 20. Ibid., 163. 21. Ibid., 2:353. 22. De Giustino, 113–14. 23. Van Wyhe, 108. 24. Lyons, 78. 25. See the discussion of many of these figures and their interactions regarding race in Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 81–119; and Robert E. Bieder, “The Representations of Indian Bodies in Nineteenth-Century American Anthropology,” American Indian Quarterly 20 (1996), 165–80. 26. See Edward Beasley, The Victorian Reinvention of Race: New Racisms and the Problem of Grouping in the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 2010), 14; Michael M. Sokal, “Morton, Samuel George,” in American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 15:961–3; Reginald Horsman, “Nott, Josiah Clark,” in American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 16:538–39. 27. Kay Anderson and Colin Perrin, “Reframing Craniometry: Human Exceptionalism and the Production of Racial Knowledge,” Social Identities 19 (January 2013), 90–103, cf. 95. 28. On major figures in the debates between monogenism (unity of the human race) and polygenism (separate species of superior and inferior humans), see Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 121–67. 29. Reginald Horsman, Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician, and Racial Theorist (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 100; cf. Kidd, 144–46. 30. Ibid., 88. 31. Combe, Notes, 1:158. 32. Fabian, 98.



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33. George Combe, The Constitution of Man: In Relation to the Natural Laws (New York: Cassell, [1847] 1893), 10. 34. Ibid., 22. 35. Ibid., 45. 36. Ibid., 46. 37. Ibid., 54. See 143–44 for further positive comments by Combe on God as creator and moral lawgiver, using language that mirrored standard natural theology texts of the period. 38. “The Fowler Brothers,” Center for the History of Medicine at Countway Library, Onview Digital Collections and Exhibits, accessed April 8, 2021. https:​ //​collections​.countway​.harvard​.edu​/onview​/exhibits​/show​/talking​-heads​/the​-fowler​ -brothers. 39. “By 1840, books, newspapers, and periodicals were pouring from the press under the aegis of publishers and editors concentrated in the Northeast and reaching readers throughout the Republic . . . [t]he early republic inaugurated an ‘Age of Print.’” Robert A. Gross, “Introduction: An Extensive Republic,” in A History of the Book in America, vol. 2, An Extensive Republic: Print Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelly (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 4. 40. Daniel Patrick Thurs, Science Talk: Changing Notions of Science in American Popular Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 23. 41. Christopher G. White, Unsettled Minds: Psychology and the American Search for Spiritual Assurance, 1830–1940 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 20–38. 42. O. S. Fowler, Religion, Natural and Revealed: Or, the Natural Theology and Moral Bearings of Phrenology and Physiology: Including the Doctrines Taught and Duties Inculcated Thereby, Compared with Those Enjoined in the Scriptures: Together with the Phrenological Exposition of the Doctrines of a Future State, Materialism, Holiness, Sin, Rewards, Punishments, Depravity, a Change of Heart, Will, Foreordination, Fatalism, Etc., Etc., 3rd ed. (New York: O. S. Fowler, 1844), vii. Emphasis here and hereafter in the original. 43. Ibid., viii. 44. Ibid., 16. 45. Ibid., 18. 46. Ibid., 22–23. 47. Ibid., 34. 48. Ibid., 41. 49. Ibid., 40–45. 50. Ibid., 67–69. 51. Ibid., 95, 103. 52. De Giustino, 130, 132–33. 53. Davies, Phrenology, 150–51. 54. Thurs, 24.

Chapter 7

Social Christianity and Social Humanity in an Inhumane World

Many social reformers began to see the Enlightenment project of exalting individual human reason and individual human rights as omitting a fundamental dimension of humanity: its inherent and inevitable social character. Transatlantic social reform movements, connected to the life of the urban working men, and the increasing of public roles for educated women, found a growing voice. Theologians participated in such conversations, thus enabling religious values to contribute to a cultural consciousness of reform and social change. Yet theology was not above criticism, and many urged changes in fundamental beliefs inherited from the past. This chapter explores the thought of Frederick Denison Maurice, theological tropes in the nineteenth century women’s conventions, and the social gospel of Washington Gladden. The Industrial Revolution occasioned profound changes in social relations. In Great Britain, a class system that had been continually in a state of management and negotiation came under criticism in a sustained manner even by those who traditionally benefited from its structure. Persons with individual distinctness and unique aspirations found themselves in a state of community with others. Humans faced the challenge of balancing the yearnings of disparate individuals with the need for an orderly and peaceful social arrangement wherein the many could still live as one. Human exceptionalism meant a balancing of the individual and social concerns. Christian theological anthropology at times turns to the doctrine of the trinity as a model for the human society. In this doctrine, three distinct persons have sustained, from eternity, a fellowship characterized by harmony within one divine nature. If humans are created in the image of such a God, there exists an ideal of individual human personalities functioning together in a communion of persons flourishing within one integral human nature. In Victorian England such a vision was under considerable strain. The condition of workers making a living in the industrial system was exacerbated 125

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by a class consciousness that placed limitations on aspirations of the urban underclass to develop their minds and improve their material and spiritual conditions. Two perils to human exceptionalism hindered such aspirations. The first peril was found in the dehumanizing conditions of the factory. In the factory, the human often became akin to an inert cog within a giant, uncaring, and unfeeling machine. The humanity of such persons was imperiled by threats to both physical health and mental stability. The second peril to human exceptionalism was espoused by social reformers hostile to religion, and particularly to the Church of England. Secular reform reduced the problem of industrial life, and at times human existence itself, to its material or economic terms. This was represented by the movement toward a socialistic vision of life married to agnostic materialism. In such an approach, the church was construed as an enemy to the worker, as part an oppressive system. There were a few churchmen, however, who sought to chart a middle course between these two perils to human exceptionalism. Their experimental approach, Christian socialism, endured opprobrium from both traditionalists and secular revolutionaries. They represented a partial recovery of human exceptionalism, though the perils experienced by the social human outlived their efforts. FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE AND CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872) grew up the son of a Unitarian pastor. Departing from his father’s tradition occasioned some angst as he entered Trinity College, Cambridge at the age of eighteen. Reluctance to endorse the Thirty-Nine Articles, the linchpin of Anglican orthodoxy, inhibited Maurice for a time from receiving his degree. He shifted his attention to the urban conditions in London, where his writings promoted various social reform efforts in conjunction with literary figures of a more combustible sort. In 1830 Maurice, now able to accept the Anglican faith, entered Oxford, and was ordained in Warwickshire in the year 1834. A chaplaincy role from 1836 gave him time to lecture and develop his socially conscious form of theology. This was published as The Kingdom of Christ in 1838. The book received critique from various quarters, an early indicator that controversy would follow Maurice during much of his career. His professional interests shifted when he was elected in 1840 to the position of professor of English literature and history at King’s College, London. He settled into the role of professional theologian when King’s College formed its own theological school in 1846. Frederick Denison Maurice drew upon both ethical and biblical discourses to promote a democratizing Christocentric ideal in which humans were



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treated not merely as individuals but as inherently social. This commitment to theological sociality is a useful lens through which to view Maurice’s life and thought. He promoted human exceptionalism through and in concert with the exceptionalism of Christ as both Son of God and Son of Man, incarnate among and for all humans. The European revolutions of 1848, as well as economic conditions within urban England, stirred in Maurice and others a deepening concern for social conditions of the working poor. Along with John Malcolm Ludlow (1821– 1911), Thomas Hughes (1822–1896), and Charles Kingsley (1819–1875), he is often credited with founding the movement known as Christian socialism around this time. His work in the formation of The Working Men’s College in 1854, and the Queen’s College for Women thereafter, allowed him to promote social reform ideals in a practical and educational milieu. The years from 1848 to 1864 yielded several books on Old Testament, New Testament, and theological themes. In 1866 he was elected as Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge. During this period he developed theological themes within a conversation with social and moral philosophy. Maurice produced works like The Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven (1864) and The Conscience (1864). He worked out his concepts of moral and metaphysical philosophy in encyclopedic essays, as well as his book-length treatment, Social Morality (1869).1 The writings of Maurice that codified the ideals of Christian socialism included Politics for the People (1848), and Tracts on Christian Socialism (1850–1851). Though Maurice held many conservative political values, he promoted ideas that seemed subversive to some of his co-religionists. One Maurice scholar writes: “This subversiveness proceeded from a theological basis: a powerful and imaginative anthropology that conceived of all human beings as sharing in the infinite goodness of Christ, not the corruptive sin of Adam.” A revised view of human nature could result in social change not merely by elites, but included the efforts of the marginal. “In light of the solidarity of all in Christ, church affiliation, class status, gender, and the like were no barriers to an individual inaugurating the transformation of English society.”2 Maurice engaged in active conversation with the political movement of Chartism. Chartism, inspired by the uprisings on the continent, stemmed from conditions of the working poor in industrial England. Petitions had been presented to Parliament before, with little effect. Some chartists were militant in their posture, and the tensions of April 1848 in Europe were mirrored to a lesser degree in England. A large gathering sought to present a petition, allegedly weighing a ton, and boasting more than five million signatures. Chartists undertook a highly publicized journey toward Parliament. Expecting some half-million protesters, authorities conscripted 85,000 special constables to

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counter them. The military blocked bridges to shield Parliament from feared harm. A modest number of reformers became delegates who would transport the petition to the assembly. Speeches were interrupted by rain, and estimates of crowd size vary greatly. Several cabs were needed to transport the petition, which Parliament summarily rejected. One study notes that “many leaders were arrested over the next few months for public-order offences—but it was the end of Chartism as a coherent political campaign.”3 Chartists accused both Whigs and Tories in the 1840s of upholding a system of “excessive taxation, a dictatorial centralism, military repression, an oppressive and cruel poor-law policy, a desire to impose Established Church teaching in the factory districts, and, above all, class government in favour of the aristocracy.”4 This contextual matrix of economic and religious factors helps to frame ways that Maurice and others sought a strategy distinct from political Chartism. Maurice wanted a theological revolution to forestall a feared political one. After the April 10 crowd had dispersed, Maurice, Kingsley, and Ludlow put up signs expressing solidarity with workers’ concerns, promoting a Working Men’s College, along with pleas not to riot.5 From the eighteenth century forward, social reformers’ efforts to reduce masculine violence through a “respectable code of behavior,” had seen some successes in bourgeois life. Yet among the working poor in the Victorian era “the code of honor still prompted men to resort to violence in the heat of the moment to stage fistfights to resolve disputes.”6 A genteel figure such as Frederick Denison Maurice amid such rough-and-tumble company presents a fascinating figure. Maurice gained respect over time, given his posture toward the workers whose lives he sought to improve. Maurice’s lodging environs manifested “streets of significant poverty interspersed with the houses of the fashionable and affluent.” The clothing industry was in transition from the old ideal of the craftsman to a “debased” industrial sweatshop model. In several pamphlets Charles Kingsley and others decried this decline from “honorable” to “dishonorable” trade. Disaffected tradesmen became increasingly favorable to the Chartist political movement. By Europe’s revolutionary summer of 1848, tensions were high as one third of London’s skilled tradesman were unemployed, with all others enduring wage reductions.7 Anglican historian Owen Chadwick has acknowledged the concern of many clergy with such problems. “Priests and pastors of the slums cried for better houses, better drainage, better education, better laws about drink, or hours of work,” he observed.8 Those concerns seemed not to reach very many clergy, at lest in the eyes of the workers. One Chartist hymn of the time, for example, cried out: “Why starve we then? –ah? Why? Answer thou wicked priest, Who scarce will give us when we die the burial of a beast.”9



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Maurice took the appeal for improving the lot of the common laborer directly to the people he wished to reach, in his co-editorship from May to July 1848, of the penny newspaper Politics for the People. Maurice’s co-editor Ludlow expressed empathy with the Chartists on substandard wages. Yet for Ludlow, this was not to be remedied by Chartist means such as laws passed by Parliament, nor through violence. Ludlow saw mass meetings as a source of evil. Co-editor Charles Kingsley was also vocal in his rejection of the proposals of “the socialists.” Several efforts by Parliament in the 1830s and 1840s sought to root out long-lamented abuse of privileges in the Anglican Episcopacy, along with reforms to help underpaid parochial clergy. Some were going so far as to describe this as a renewed reformation. But debates between the high church Oxford movement and the activist evangelical wing meant that such institutional reforms were only one component of a complex set of tensions.10 Though the term “Broad church” as a third way was only coined in 1853, the moderating sentiment was latent within Maurice and others. Neither a purely institutional nor a merely devotional approach could form an adequate ethos for the church in the minds of these reformers. Several authors published works on this quandary in the 1830s and 1840s. Books such as Benjamin Disraeli’s (1804–1881) The Two Nations of 1845, and many popular works of Charles Dickens (1812–1870) may be adduced. Maurice’s friend and co-reformer Charles Kingsley wrote numerous editorials, essays, and books in this genre.11 Maurice understood Christ as the central exemplar by which human beings are interconnected and drawn together in social constructs such as family, church, and nation. For him this theological framing gave needed perspective to the plight of the urban working class. Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke novelized the struggle of a young tailor and aspiring poet to come to terms with a life devoted to defending the rights of the worker. In one chapter, the protagonist, Alton Locke, declaimed against the complicity of the clergy in perpetuating the plight of the worker. On social subjects, he described clerics “as ignorant, as bigoted, as aristocratic as ever,” targeting the lingering opposition of many English churchmen to a variety of proposed humane reforms of working conditions.12 Yet as the dialogue unfolded, Locke asked the workers if they thought‌‌‌‌ “the men of your own trade would heartily join a handful of these men in an experiment of associate labour, even though there should be a clergyman or two among them?” He responded, “I, for one, would devote myself, body and soul, to any enterprise so noble.”13 Kingsley’s prose seems maudlin in its calibrated pleading with workers to accept clergy as allies. But by rejecting some of the key policy demands of the Chartists Kingsley tended to blunt the overall efficacy of Christian socialism as a movement.

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By 1854, with the publication of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, the rhetoric of oppression and liberation had emerged in recurring tropes recognizable to a widening readership hungry for Dickens’s essays, then published as the custom, in weekly serial form. In a key scene, while giving an open-air speech, the labor activist cried out: Oh, my friends and fellow-sufferers, and fellow-workmen, and fellow-men! I tell you that the hour is come when we must rally round one another as One united power, and crumble into dust the oppressors that too long have battened upon the plunder of our families, upon the sweat of our brows, upon the labour of our hands, upon the strength of our sinews, upon the God-created glorious rights of Humanity, and upon the holy and eternal privileges of Brotherhood!14

Dickens’s invocation of “God-created” rights that are “glorious” led the reader naturally to an embrace of fraternal privileges in a reformed society not merely secular and temporal in scope, but “holy and eternal.” The literary context suggests that English culture was prepared for Maurice and friends to promote The Working Men’s College that same year. Maurice was happy when Tory churchmen criticized his efforts. He stated he was committed to the conflict, because “we must engage . . . sooner or later with the unsocial Christians and the un-Christian Socialists.”15 But for Maurice the engine of change was education, not merely parliamentary action. The latter was too fraught with divisiveness, too easily derailed by reaction. Education would enable working males to better themselves based on collective action within their reach, if church and wealthy benefactors could be brought to share his vision with financial support. The complicity of education in maintaining an unjust status quo was a concern for Dickens. A major character in Hard Times is Mister Thomas Gradgrind, hyperbolically portrayed as a steely, rationalistic schoolmaster who uses harsh discipline to prepare his students. His educational regimen aims to prepare them to survive within, as well as to perpetuate, an existing striated society rife with inequality, rather than to educate for any change to the status quo. Dickens himself has in later scholarship been criticized for raising the issues of injustice while proposing too little in terms of concrete solutions or programs to facilitate reform.16 Dickens and Maurice sought to promote a more just culture at mid-century, each using the abilities, skills, and platforms suitable to his respective vocation in literature or in theology. In any case, the 1850s were a time of “slow progress . . . until the appointment of the Newcastle Commission in 1858.”17 Maurice and his companions were thus filling a real need with the founding of the Working Men’s College. Among Christian socialists, Maurice was not that radical compared to his friends in the movement, at least in public. Though secular communist



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thinkers were producing atheistic literature at the same period, in the same city, it is unlikely these influenced the thought of Maurice. Karl Marx (1818– 1883) openly disavowed Christian socialism; Maurice saw it as essential to reform. One study of political trends of this period concludes that Maurice’s message “was a social message but also a theological one, in that it was a call for the projection of a socially concerned, undoctrinaire, living religion.”18 Once Maurice confided to his friend Ludlow that “some sort of Communism” could be acceptable as a description of their movement. To this Ludlow objected that the term “socialism” was the preferable one. The reason: Communism begins with things (i.e., materialism), whereas socialism, from the Latin for “ally or partner,” begins with persons, and could therefore only find proper expression in voluntary, rather than merely political, associations. By 1872, Maurice’s second edition of Social Morality discounted communism thus: “A Law attempting to create Communism or assuming Communism as its basis is a contradiction in terms.”19 Ludlow would later describe the fifty or so core members of the Christian socialists, many of whom formed the Working Men’s College, as a “band of brothers.”20 Yet although Ludlow would become editor of The Christian Socialist in 1850, a journal that became quite popular in reformist circles, by 1852 Ludlow had been ousted from leadership by activists who wanted to downplay the Christian element and melt into the larger, and more secular, co-operative movement then rising. Still, Ludlow had laid down significant groundwork for the social, if not the political, aspect of the overall movement.21 Literacy rates differed among the European nations, and with it varying degrees of cultural and literary improvement. Britain was relatively free of censorship compared to the continent, though perhaps not so free as France. One study reveals that “it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that most working-class English men and women could read and write.” In the year 1840, public marriage licensing records show that a mere third of all grooms and half of all brides could sign their names at the time of marrying.22 Such a plight may have added to the sense of urgency Maurice and his fellow-reformers held for education as a major arena of social reform. Most germane to shifting views of human exceptionalism in the nineteenth century, here at mid-century we see a reassessment of the human in social, rather than merely individual, terms. Maurice’s embrace of Christian socialism was theologically grounded in the notion of unselfishness, in turn founded in the ethos of Christ. He pled: “Men and women were made for each other and for God, and not for themselves.” In Maurice’s Social Morality, we find “Christ’s teaching addressed individuals,” but also “revealed human membership of a divine society, a kingdom.” Unitive terms such as “mutually dependent,” “interrelatedness,” and “fellow-creatures” fleshed out this

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passionate concern to overcome a pervasively shallow self-centeredness that Maurice perceived as harmful to English social life.23 As Maurice’s thought matured, he turned toward biblical texts, yet always with an eye to the modern implications of the ancient sources. In seeking out Maurice’s approach to the person of Christ as moral exemplar for modern humanity, an unexpected repository of ideas is his lectures on the Epistles of John. The lectures started out as a Sunday evening Bible class, and took a conversational tone at the outset. This material illustrates the rhetorical approach Maurice sought out when addressing the College of Working Men, accentuating the moral and practical over the systematic.24 For Maurice, the purpose of studying the holy scriptures is “to show us what is the ground of those affections, of that conscience, of that reason and will, which we have to do with because we are human beings, and which we must have to do with supposing there were no Scriptures at all.” Scriptures do not substitute for these four features of human psychology. But they do serve as “God’s revelation to us of ourselves, who are made in His image, and of Himself, who has made us in His image.”25 Here the theological anthropocentrism of Maurice’s approach, at least as a starting point, enabled him to seek common cause on the broadest terms. Maurice regarded the New Testament Epistles of John as the best resource for reaching working men, giving access to practical moral truth. The author of the epistle was one with whom Maurice’s students could identify as working men: “a fisherman who once mended his nets by the Lake of Galilee, and who was now dwelling, a grey-haired man, in the commercial city of Ephesus.”26 Maurice’s students were drawn from weavers who worked at low pay in the teeming industrial city of London, migrating to London from villages and smaller cities because of the availability of work. They met Sunday evenings because the rest of the work week was arduous. The hardening effects of such an environment made them pragmatic, and Maurice met them repeatedly on the ground of practicality. The special burden of the Christian regarding sin, and a yearning for purification from it, received Maurice’s attention. The inadequacy of outward forms of cleansing in the ancient rites of the Bible pressed upon the earliest disciples. “It was in themselves they felt the sin,” he urged. “Into the core of each man’s heart the poison had entered. What could eject it? What could make each man right? What could make society pure?”27 Note here the inevitable move from an individualized religious ethos to a needed social consciousness. In a gloss on the dictum “He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness until now,” Maurice returned to discuss bonds that tie humans together in ways that no mere code can do. “A code should not attempt to bind men as men together; it must fail if it makes the experiment.”



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The failures of Chartism as a political movement serve as the background of such a remark. “But there must be a bond between man and man; there must be a power to make that bond effectual, or the law concerning neighbours will be most imperfectly heeded.”28 Because Christ is “the Head and Brother of all men” then hatred is ruled out. “For us to hate our brother—to hate any man—is nothing less than to deny the man, the Son of Man; the common light of men.”29 The Johannine phrase “My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth,” also illumined his sociological milieu of modern cities. “That easy way of loving, by talking about love, was a way into which Christians might fall in Ephesus as well as in London, in the days of the Roman emperors as well as in the days of Queen Victoria,” Maurice noted. Failure to love in action is a form of hypocrisy, against which he warned his students. “Ask the God of love Himself to dwell in you,” he pled, “and to direct your thoughts and acts according to His will. You will not need dictators to tell you what the truth is, if the Source of all truth is leading you into it.”30 Maurice’s plea wound to a stirring call. “London working men must learn to adopt the daring tone of the Galilean fisherman. They must begin to affirm boldly, ‘God has taken us to be His children, seeing that we have that nature in which Jesus Christ died.” He believed his students upheld this standard in daily life, despite opposition from “all the philosophers, all the theological doctors, all the priests, all the rich, the easy and comfortable people in Christendom” who regarded them as fools.31 Historians have at times portrayed Maurice as too timid as a social reformer.32 A recent account asserts that “the well-meaning Anglican contribution to socialism did not do more than dent the political conservatism of the Church and clergy as a whole.”33 Yet one could argue that the principles he patiently and carefully implanted were seeds, not mature crops ready for the harvest. As one history of Anglicanism has noted, the Christian socialist movement “emphasized the corporate nature of faith,” they “saw social commitment as intrinsic to the incarnationalism of Christianity,” and over time “they were a major influence on the later Anglican tradition of social thought.”34 By seeking out a pedagogy to form a generation of laborers who were also devoted to the development of the mind, Maurice cultivated mature leaders for a lasting and systemic social reform to flourish in the future. While Maurice was focusing on the urban working poor, his most notable work was targeted at men. Across the Atlantic, there were several women expressing dissatisfaction with the contours of modern life and calling for greater inclusion. One major platform for the pleas of American women was the national suffrage convention movement. Their efforts at reform blended elements of human exceptionalism with feminine consciousness.

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WOMEN’S EQUALITY AND THE IMAGE OF GOD The seventeenth National Suffrage Convention was held in Washington, D.C. from January 20–22, 1885. In the massive four-volume History of Woman Suffrage, editor Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), along with the help of Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) and others, offered a detailed look at the various topics treated by the convention. In her 1885 address, Stanton confronted those who “declaim on the inequalities of sex,” and ostensible limitations on the abilities of women fully to participate in society. Using an illustration from science, she noted that regarding the phenomenon of magnetism, “these great natural forces must be perfectly balanced or the whole material world would relapse into chaos.” Her appeal to the rising authority of the natural sciences indicated a savvy rhetorical strategy. Moving from nature to society, Stanton held that the gendered dimension of society must be kept in balance, “to redeem the moral and social world from the chaos which surrounds it.” In a plea for the full inclusion of women in the exceptional human project, Stanton attacked the prevalent notion of separate spheres for men and women, proclaiming that “they may have separate duties in the same sphere, but their true place is together everywhere.” The agenda was, at its foundation, to bring this balance, namely, “to restore the equilibrium of sex is the first step in social, religious and political progress.” Resistance to this movement was futile. “If one-half the effort had been expended to exalt the feminine element that has been made to degrade it, we should have reached the natural equilibrium long ago,” Stanton proclaimed. In an implicit criticism of Catholic celibacy, she added that it was a “fatal dogma of the Christian religion” that men had to withdraw from “all companionship with women,” in order to “get nearer to God,” or to “grow more like the Divine ideal.”35 Like many women who would follow in her footsteps, a uniquely feminine consciousness of theological anthropology began to set the stage for social reform amenable to an expanded set of opportunities for women. A resolution by Clara Bewick Colby (1846–1916) stirred some controversy and generated much debate and discussion at the convention. An argument arose over traditional interpretations of the place of women within the original created order. The central concern of the resolution was to denounce “the dogmas incorporated in the religious creeds, derived from Judaism, teaching that woman was an afterthought in creation, her sex a misfortune, marriage a condition of subordination, and maternity a curse.” Colby urged the convention to condemn such dogmas as “contrary to the law of God as revealed in nature and the precepts of Christ.” The resolution pressed convention members to withdraw personal support from “any organization so holding and teaching.”



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Given the religious sensibilities, or at least the cherished traditions, of many in the room, this was an audacious proposal. More positively, the resolution also urged Christian ministers “to teach and enforce the fundamental idea of creation that man was made in the image of God, male and female, and given equal dominion over the earth, but none over each other.” She was criticizing the continuing authority of male clergy to sway ecclesiastical policies. She counseled that ministers should emphasize the “cardinal point of our creed, that in true religion there is neither male nor female, neither bond nor free, but all are one.” Stanton advocated for this resolution, noting that several denominations licensed women to preach, and that women had much freedom in leadership during the first three centuries of Christianity prior to the rise of the “Catholic hierarchy” who removed those privileges.36 The resolution “precipitated a vigorous discussion which extended into the next day.” Susan B. Anthony rose to oppose the resolution on the grounds that going back into the history of the problems faced by women or trying to resolve “any question of human rights by people’s interpretation of the Bible is never satisfactory.” Mary E. McPherson objected that the Bible did not ignore women. Rev. Dr. McMurdy insisted that there were women teachers among the Jews and in the early Catholic church, and that the Episcopal church “ordained deaconesses.” Another warned that “it would be a mistake to antagonize” the church just when it appeared to be accepting of women’s suffrage. Colby defended the resolution on the grounds that it was not opposed to the Bible itself, but to misinterpretations of it. She maintained that “This resolution avows our loyalty to what we believe to be the true teachings of the Bible, and the co-operation of the Christian ministry is invited in striving to secure the application of the golden rule to women.”37 Stanton rose again to defend the resolution, claiming that no world religion had ever made men subordinate to women, but had uniformly made women subordinate to men. She asked those assembled: “Have we ever yet heard a man preach a sermon from Genesis 1:27–28, which declares the full equality of the feminine and masculine elements in the Godhead?” In a tacit critique of homiletical praxis in American churches, she added: “they always get up in their pulpits and read the second chapter.” She critiqued St. Augustine for holding that woman is “the author of sin and is most corrupt.”38 Stanton then made an appeal to reform rather than to abandon theology. “People seem to think we have reached the very end of theology; but let me say that the future is to be as much purer than the past as our immediate past has been better than the dark ages.” In a play for Protestant solidarity against Catholicism, she concluded, “We want to help roll off from the soul of woman the terrible superstitions that have so long repressed and crushed her.” Such rhetoric betook of the assumption gaining prevalence in Victorian

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discourse that traditional views or dogmas were inherently superstitious. The report concluded with the terse observation, “Through the determined efforts of Miss Anthony and some others the resolution was permitted to lie on the table.”39 This exchange illustrates well the blending of conservative and progressive elements in nineteenth-century feminism and illustrates the diversity of its stakeholders. The position of Anthony and others resistant to such pointed critiques of traditional religion was not necessarily a betrayal of the progress envisioned by Stanton and others. As Carolyn Haynes has observed, “The Christian feminists reiterated the conservative ideals of separate spheres but not as an expression of subordination.” Anthony agreed with Stanton that the subordinating practices of many denominations were unjust and demeaning. Between the factions was a difference of opinion, however, on the proper strategy to redress this imbalance of power. “By assuming a public voice and leadership roles under the auspices of a church that forbade them entrance into the public sphere, these women reinterpreted the evangelical gender norms and simultaneously exposed them as privileged, constructed interpretations rather than innate, divinely decreed laws,” Haynes adds. “By unseating the church’s conservative authority within the confines of the church itself, they functioned as secret rebels.”40 Leaving aside whether these conventioneers would have characterized themselves in quite this way, the rise in female agency was quite visibly on display, even, and especially, through internal debates and disagreements in their ranks. The absence of simple or monolithic positions on a host of social issues discussed among convention participants manifested a strength rather than a weakness of the convention movement. Appeals to the image of God occurred in other speeches at the suffrage conventions. Zerelda G. Wallace (1817–1901) of Indiana mentioned it in her 1887 speech defending the “Woman’s Ballot a Necessity for the Permanence of Free Institutions.” Newspaper reports noted that “she looked a veritable queen in Israel and the personification of womanly dignity and lofty bearing.” Within the speech, she took up themes theological: “The purpose of divinity is enunciated in that it is said He would create humanity in His image.” This status was grounded in social concerns, in that “the purpose of the Creator is that the two are to have dominion; woman is included in the original grant.” Politically this had the following implication, in a part of the speech addressed to men: “Free she must be before you yourselves will be free. The highest form of development is to govern one’s self. No man governs himself who practices injustice to another.”41 Yet within a few lines, Wallace offered a revisionist interpretation of Genesis 3 and the fall. Far from causing Adam to fall, instead Eve “gave him an impetus toward perfection.” Eve “found him a moral infant and tried to teach him to discriminate between good and



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evil.” On her account, by eating the forbidden fruit Adam rose up rather than falling. “There is no moral or spiritual growth possible without being able to discern good from evil.” Having assumed the role of teaching men good from evil, “the responsibility rests upon woman to teach man to choose the good and refuse the evil.” Despite the elastic hermeneutic involved in this reading of the ancient text, the larger point was her application of this notion to social life. Women were to lead in the reforming of society. “Woman is a religious being; she is becoming educated; she has a high code of morals; she will yet purify politics,” Wallace announced. Indeed, woman has a God-given role “to redeem the race from superstition and crime,” and “to put her hand to the wheel of progress and help move the world.”42 To the editors of History of Woman Suffrage the pace of change in the religious arena could seem quite slow. At the 1900 convention statistics were used to illustrate this point. “Today 1,583 women are studying medicine,” noted Harriet May Mills (1857–1935) of New York, yet “not so full a measure of freedom has been won in law or theology.” The statistics told the tale. Mills lamented that “In 1897, 131 women were in the law schools, 193 in the theological schools, but women are still handicapped in these professions.”43 The yearning for professional recognition and upward mobility was continuing to manifest itself. While many women would make women’s suffrage their sole focus for societal reform, others would seek a wider agenda for transformational change in multiple arenas of social life. Theological reflection, even modified to include varied undercurrents of subversion, would play a role. Women joined the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union by the thousands. Women would oversee slum reform, hygiene reform, mentor young women in both motherhood and the skills of modern life and would participate in what would come to be called “the social gospel.” This story has been usually told through the predominant lens of key male figures in the movement. Still, the story of women’s participation in the social gospel, and the theological underpinnings of that participation, is increasingly being told, and a burgeoning literature is bringing their dynamism to light.44 They sought a role in elevating exceptional women to responsibilities of social leadership, yet often with a goal of elevating the dignity of society as a whole through their reforms. WASHINGTON GLADDEN AND THE SOCIAL GOSPEL Many reformers raised public consciousness of humans as social creatures, with needs for a more just and equitable society in which human dignity in its exceptional status might flourish. It became an international movement. In the American context, the rapid urbanization of the nation roused many clergy

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to writing and activism. A major founder of the social gospel was Washington Gladden (1836–1918). Raised in rural Ohio in the Congregationalist faith, Gladden was trained at Williams College, and eventually was ordained into the ministry in November 1860. Time spent in his first parish in Brooklyn, New York, was cut short. The stresses of the Civil War caused Gladden to experience a nervous breakdown. After a move to a smaller parish in Morrisania, New York, he studied much on his own and attended a few lectures at Union Theological Seminary.45 His reading of reform-minded theologians of the era kindled in Gladden a lifelong passion for a socially conscious form of Christianity. Local labor unrest sparked his interest in the relations between capital and labor, and the plight of the worker. Gladden left parish work for a time to edit The Independent from 1871–1875, devoting himself to exposing the government corruption of the Boss Tweed circle in New York City.46 “Social Gospelers generally rejected what they perceived as the individualism, the otherworldliness, and the harshness of the old faith,” writes one historian. “The overriding task of the believer was to realize his or her solidarity with all humanity in struggling for the kingdom here and now.”47 The dignity of human beings began, for Gladden, with their creation in the image of God. “To make every man see that, not according to some legal fiction, –not as the result of some possible pact or concession,–but according to the immediate and the everlasting fact, he is a child of God, made in the divine image, with all the possibilities and all the responsibilities of the sons of God.”48 Gladden chafed at the history of exegesis that magnified the distinction between human life in general and the regenerate life. “True, that in many texts the hostility of the unregenerate nature to God is emphasized,” he conceded, “but is it the real human nature that is characterized,” he queried, “or that artificial nature which has overgrown the true humanity?” With a rhetorical question, he pressed on: “Can we really assume it to be a fact of theological science that the filial relations of men to God have become so disturbed by sin that a legal process of restoration is necessary?”49 Christ was the exemplar, and in Gladden’s phrasing, “to all who think the thought of Jesus after Him, is the perfected and completed man.”50 In an essay “The Doctrine of Brotherhood,” with language more acceptable in the nineteenth century than the twenty-first, Gladden developed his theology of the kingdom in a social direction. Brotherhood flowed from Divine fatherhood. “If all men are the sons of God,” Gladden pled, “then it is plain that one man may not enslave another, nor oppress another, nor despise another.”51 The ideal of equal rights is the basis of modern democratic societies and permeates the laws of great nations, and the literature of civilization. He reasoned that the idea of equality “has taken possession of the mind of



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Christendom, and its ultimate victory over every form of social wrong is our reasonable expectation.”52 The notion of brotherhood is the ground of philanthropy and charity. As one analyst of shifting “meanings of manhood” has noted, “Zeal for becoming ‘my brother’s keeper’ came naturally to a generation of evangelical businessmen and other middle-class workers raised in a patriarchal household economy which integrated family life and labor relations.”53 Gladden appealed to this growing ethos. As historian Susan Curtis has observed, “In many ways, masculinity had become problematic in late-Victorian America. Middle-class culture, grounded in individual ambition and manly achievement earlier in the century, gradually had been transformed by the 1890s and early 1900s.” In her analysis of prominent male promoters of the social gospel she concludes: “Social gospelers reacted against the norms of individual responsibility and self-control because as young men, they had failed to live up to these ideals themselves.”54 The exemplar of the “new charity” was to be Christ himself. “Throughout his ministry He dealt with individuals, not with crowds,” Gladden wrote. “He was called the friend of publicans and sinners,” and furthermore “talked with them, walked with them, ate at their tables, knew the names of their children.” This picture of the incarnate Christ Gladden dubbed “The Elder Brother.”55 What would later be called incarnational ministry, or ministry of presence, existed here in seed form as articulated in Gladden’s critique of the “old charity” of a rather impersonal form of almsgiving. Care for the other, the love of neighbor, is of a piece with human exceptionalism, grounded in recognizing in the other who is suffering the continuing presence of the image of God, and even of the person for whom Christ demonstrated care during his earthly sojourn. The burden of Gladden’s essay “The One and the Many” was to craft a middle way between the extremes of individualism and socialism. “The exaggeration of solidarity, which underlies some theories of socialism, is quite as common as the exaggeration of individualism, and no less misleading” he exclaimed.56 The extreme individualist is a grain of sand, thus society is on that view a mere pile of sand. “A thoroughly consistent individualist is, of course, an anarchist,” he quipped. On the other hand, socialists deny the rights of private property, and for Gladden, “private property is the condition of the best social order.”57 The foundational principle of socialism, as perceived by Gladden, “seems to be that if men possess private property they will use it selfishly”; therefore socialists reject ownership of private property. This cure, in his view, would not be effective. For Gladden, the metaphor for all forms of socialism is that of the “chemical compound,” and one that is so volatile it “is likely to form a highly explosive mixture.”58

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As an alternative to the sand pile of individualism, or the chemical compound of socialism, Gladden recurred to the metaphor of St. Paul: the living organism.59 In the human body, “the parts have an identity of their own; each one of the many is one, but it finds its life in the life of the larger unity.”60 Gladden cited recent scholarship in the field of “social philosophy,” all emphasizing the organic model for modern society. Gladden’s own social philosophy may be summed up in several key points. He emphasized personalism, namely, a stress upon personal relations with God and with fellow-humans. The interpersonal nature of human existence is an antidote to individualism and its atomizing and narcissistic tendencies. Gladden also insisted that the “health and growth of the body depend upon the working in due measure of each several part.”61 He concluded the essay with the summation: The goal of human life “is not the upbuilding of one at the cost of the many, nor the absorption of one in the life of the many, but the perfection of one in the blessedness of the many.”62 By the first decade of the new century, Gladden applied the Sermon on the Mount not merely to Christians, but to all humans. In Christianity and Socialism, he insisted, “It is not the regenerate alone, but all who are made in God’s image, who come under the law of brotherhood. All human relations— domestic, economic, industrial, political—are founded on this fact, and must conform to it.”63 Gladden proclaimed “The Socialist proposes to enlarge the sphere of government until it covers almost the whole of human life.”64 In tension with this claim, however, Gladden later expended many pages exposing example after example of government corruption in municipalities across America over the previous decade.65 CONCLUSION Frederick Denison Maurice sought to make the life of the British worker more humane. After attempting to work with the political aims of the chartists, Maurice sought to educate the working males into the principles of a socially conscious Christianity for the modern world. He envisioned their full flourishing as humans and as members of society if they would embrace the example of the Christ who cared for the working man. Their struggles were not merely economic but also spiritual. Though economic factors were a part of his Christian socialism, Maurice resisted reductionism to this single factor. He sought to uphold human exceptionalism. The lingering problem would be how to keep individual initiative and dignity strong while promoting social reforms so intensively focused upon the social dimension of humanity. The women of the American suffrage movement sought to navigate the problem of inclusion not merely in society but also in leadership roles in



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the church. Here the feminine dimension of human exceptionalism became urgent. Robust debates among them showed that diversity of opinion was alive and well, and that negotiations of such changes were incremental. Yet many saw their own advancement not merely in terms of benefiting women but instead in terms of promoting and reforming all of society. The challenge remained to integrate a unique feminist sensibility with the larger project of elevating the whole of humanity. Washington Gladden saw the problems and corruptions of the Gilded Age in northeastern cities in the United States as his primary arena for reform. His contribution to human exceptionalism was seeking to balance individual and social aspirations. He upheld private property in principle, but his reforms involved placing much trust in human government, and high levels of taxation upon the wealthy. Christian socialism, at first promoted as a middle way between rapacious forms of capitalism and atheistic socialism or communism, faded in influence. Secular versions of socialism gained numerous adherents, but the movement became rife with fractures and infighting. Secular socialists never really saw theologians such as Maurice and Gladden as sufficiently radical. Socialism and traditional modes of Christianity would become alien to one another by the 1930s, and the failure to chart a more just way of life, or even a fruitful conversation, may still be seen in the polarizing political discourse of the twenty-first century. The human role in cultural and social life, reflected in the theological consciousness of these reform-minded thinkers, met various frustrations. Other modern citizens of the world began to question the costs of the civilizing task. Many began to focus on reconnecting not so much with their fellow-humans, but with the natural world. They promoted a reversal of the human alienation from the environment. Some counseled withdrawal from social life; others urged social reforms and activism. The next chapter briefly explores such trends in the movement known as American Transcendentalism. NOTES 1. “Maurice, Frederick Denison,” in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F. L. Cross (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 877–8, and “Maurice, (John) Frederick Denison,” in The Houghton Mifflin Dictionary of Biography (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 1033. 2. Paul Dafydd Jones, “Jesus Christ and the Transformation of English Society: The ‘Subversive Conservatism’ of Frederick Denison Maurice,” Harvard Theological Review 96 (April 2003), 206.

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3. Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (New York: Penguin, 2014), 455– 7. Tombs estimates the crowd in Kennington at anywhere from 15,000 to 150,000; A. N. Wilson pegs the number more specifically at 20,000, and the signatures not at the promised 5 million, but at 1,975,496. A. N. Wilson, Victoria: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2014), 139. 4. Jonathan Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 56. 5. Jones, 208. 6. John Tosh, “Masculinities in an Industrializing Society: Britain, 1800–1914,” Journal of British Studies 44 (April 2005), 334. 7. Jeremy Morris,‌‌ F. D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 151–52. 8. Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part 1. An Ecclesiastical History of England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 347. Cf. John Malcolm Ludlow, Progress of the Working Class, 1832–1867 (London: Alexander Strahan, 1867), 10. 9. Mike Sanders, “‘God is our guide! Our cause is Just!’: The National Chartist Hymn Book and Victorian Hymnody,” Victorian Studies 54 (Summer 2012), 694. 10. Morris, 7. 11. Ibid., 136. 12. Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke (London: Macmillan, 1876), 299. 13. Ibid., 301. 14. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (New York: Signet, 1997), 141. 15. Cited in John R. H. Moorman, A History of the Church in England, 3rd ed. (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1980), 356. 16. See several such criticisms surveyed in Alexander Welsh, Dickens Redressed: The Art of Bleak House and Hard Times (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 151–53. 17. Parry, 108. 18. Parry, 105. 19. Frederick Denison Maurice, Social Morality: Twenty-One Lectures Delivered in The University of Cambridge (London: Macmillan, 1872), 127. 20. N. C. Masterman, John Ludlow: The Builder of Christian Socialism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 72, 77, 150. 21. Ibid., 112–13. 22. David F. Mitch, “Interpreting the Rise of Literacy in Victorian England,” in The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England: The Influence of Private Choice and Public Policy (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 1. 23. Morris, 153–54. 24. Frederick Denison Maurice, The Epistles of St. John: A Series of Lectures on Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1857), 1–2. 25. Ibid., 13. 26. Ibid., 17. 27. Ibid., 49. 28. Ibid., 97. 29. Ibid., 99.



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30. Ibid., 211. 31. Ibid., 311. 32. Chadwick, Victorian, 360. 33. Sheridan Gilley and W. J. Sheils, eds., A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times to the Present (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994), 304–5. 34. Henry Chadwick et al., eds., Not Angels, but Anglicans: A History of Christianity in the British Isles (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2010), 228. 35. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1902), 57–58. 36. Ibid., 58–59. 37. Ibid., 60. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 60–61. 40. Carolyn Haynes, “Women and Protestantism in Nineteenth-century America,” in Perspectives on American Religion and Culture, ed. Peter W. Williams (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 303. 41. Stanton, 119. 42. Ibid., 120–21. 43. Ibid., 355. 44. See especially Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards and Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, eds., Gender and the Social Gospel (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003), passim. 45. Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 270. 46. Robert T. Handy, The Social Gospel in America 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 20–22. 47. James H. Moorhead, World without End: Mainstream American Protestant Visions of the Last Things, 1880–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 108. 48. Washington Gladden, Ruling Ideas of the Present Age (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1895), 22. 49. Ibid., 26–27. 50. Ibid., 27–28. 51. Ibid., 34. 52. Ibid., 35. 53. Clyde Griffen, “Reconstructing Masculinity from the Evangelical Revival to the Waning of Progressivism: A Speculative Synthesis,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, eds. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 187. 54. Susan Curtis, “The Son of Man and God the Father: The Social Gospel and Victorian Masculinity,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, eds. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 67. 55. Gladden, Ruling Ideas, 59.

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56. Ibid., 71. 57. Ibid. 76. 58. Ibid., 78. According to Handy, while rejecting the popular secular form of socialism, Gladden sought cooperation over competition in industry. Railroads, telegraphs, mining, and other urban public service industries should come under the ownership and control of government. Handy, 28. 59. Gladden, Ruling Ideas, 81. The metaphor of explosion echoes in labor history. The socialist leader Eugene V. Debs announced a railway boycott in 1894. President Cleveland sent 2,000 federal troops and over 5,000 federal marshals to end it, sparking widespread violent protests. See “Strikes,” in Encyclopedia of Chicago, accessed April 8, 2021, encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1211.html. 60. Ibid., 82. 61. Ibid., 94. 62. Ibid., 96. 63. Washington Gladden, Christianity and Socialism (New York: Eaton & Mains, 1905), 33. 64. Ibid., 142. 65. Ibid., 198–228.

Chapter 8

The Natural World and the Human The Transcendentalists

TO NATURE: ‌‌ will I build my altar in the fields, So And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be, And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields Shall be the incense I will yield to Thee, Thee only God! and thou shalt not despise Even me, the priest of this poor sacrifice. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, c. 1820 A MAN SAID TO THE UNIVERSE ‌‌ man said to the universe: A “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.” —Stephen Crane, 1899

This chapter explores how the view of human nature that upheld it as exceptional and transcendent gave way to the human viewed as merely one part or aspect of nature. The theological roots of the modern environmental movement, increasingly probed in depth by the secondary literature, shall also be considered as it pertains to theological anthropology. Figures both prominent and obscure in the orbit of the American phenomenon of Transcendentalism shall factor into this dimension of the perils of human exceptionalism. Recent scholarship has rediscovered the religious, and indeed theological, contours of early environmental thought. Even religious notions, such as 145

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salvation, helped to shape the posture of many thinkers toward the natural world. The importance of such concepts as nature’s intrinsic value, and the natural order as a repository of moral goods, stood “intertwined with theological discourse.”1 In the Victorian era, evangelical morality that had previously frowned upon passing the time via frivolous activities instead increasingly sought to “fashion a culture of recreation designed to bend sporting life to the moral project of Christianity.” This included appreciation of nature derived from hiking, fresh air, exercise, and team sports. Elite reformers also touted so-called “muscular Christianity” as a way to involve males in spiritual pursuits, countering their tendency to mere worldliness, while reinforcing gendered notions of the domestic sphere as feminine.2 One thread of historical investigation has uncovered the New England Presbyterian and Congregationalist roots of early environmental thought.3 The ethos of Calvinism and its attendant views of the natural world spread west to Pennsylvania and Western Virginia. Carolyn Merchant has pointed out the pervasiveness of biblical tropes over the ensuing decades: “The reinvention of Eden by a heroic Adam acting to improve a nature depicted variously as a virgin, fallen, or fruitful Eve is the mainstream story of most European Americans.”4 Yet by the 1840s, the older Puritan construal of divine validation of the social order gave way to a questioning of tradition by investigating the natural world.5 One mediation between traditional Protestant thought and transcendentalist reflection may be seen in New England Unitarianism. THE UNITARIAN ETHOS OF WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING New England Unitarianism grew in influence in America in the early nineteenth century. This form of belief held a fundamental ambivalence toward theology, alongside an emphasis on a renewed study of the New Testament. “The first historians of Unitarianism viewed it more as an ‘anti-doctrinal solvent’ than as a theological movement.” Later historians of the movement sought to explicate its purpose in terms of theological reform, while keeping theological treatises relatively brief.6 William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) offered his sermon, Unitarian Christianity, as a public theology outlining central tenets of Unitarianism. He held that revealed truth had to conform to human reason, and that the New Testament was primarily concerned with cultivating virtue.7 Channing embraced intuitionism as well as Baconian common-sense use of evidences in his theory of knowledge. On intuition he was very like the transcendentalists, but on the empirical defense of Christianity he was at odds with his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson.8 Therefore,

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while adjacent to the transcendentalist cause and in some ways sympathetic, Channing was not formally affiliated with the movement. Channing and his interpretation of human nature echoed human exceptionalism. In an ordination sermon of 1828, William Ellery Channing chose as his theme “Likeness to God.” Though a Unitarian, Channing included remarks on God as Father, while referring to the Son of God and to the Holy Spirit. He did not interpret these in the orthodox trinitarian manner. Still, it is important to note that in the early nineteenth century, theologians utilized a shared moral vocabulary, even when their terms received varying definitions. “Religious instruction should aim chiefly to turn men’s aspirations and efforts to that perfection of the soul which constitutes it a bright image of God,” Channing proclaimed. For Channing, the human likeness to the divine consists in “man’s higher or spiritual nature.” The tenor of his message was optimistic, with only brief mentions of the broken human condition of human sinfulness. On the image of God, he wrote: “It is only in proportion to this likeness that we can enjoy either God or the universe.”9 The connections between the human’s inner life and the beauties of her external environment were important to Channing. The divine likeness prepares the human to enjoy the universe, and in this the human is “brought into harmony with the creation; for in that proportion we possess the principles from which the universe sprung; we carry within ourselves the perfections of which its beauty, magnificence, order, benevolent adaptations, and boundless purposes are the results and manifestations.”10 To the charge that such insights imperiled the human by causing the vice of pride, Channing offered the example of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Describing him in traditional terms as “The Son of God,” he even added that Jesus was “the express and unsullied image of the Divinity,” and mingled “with men as a friend and brother, offering himself as their example, and promising to his true followers a share in all his splendors and joys.” Rather than assessing the attributes of God as revealed from above, Channing placed the source of knowledge of these in the human soul itself. “The divine attributes are first developed in ourselves, and thence transferred to our Creator.” Long before Feuerbach scandalized theology by insisting that humans have made God in their own image, Channing offered a similar insight, but as a point of celebration not as an impetus to skepticism. “The idea of God, sublime and awful as it is, is the idea of our own spiritual nature, purified an enlarged to infinity. In ourselves are the elements of the Divinity,” he averred.11 Channing was already in conversation with the thinkers who would develop the philosophy of transcendentalism, and proclaimed: “that unbounded spiritual energy which we call God is conceived by us only through consciousness, through the knowledge of ourselves.” He added: “God is another name

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for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth.”12 To the objection that humans learn about God by studying the universe, or natural theology, Channing offered a response. “It is by a kindred wisdom that we discern his wisdom in his works . . . We discern the impress of God’s attributes in the universe by accordance of nature and enjoy them through sympathy.” Even God’s infinity, which distinguishes the divine and human orders of being, has its echo in the human person, per Channing. “We believe in the divine infinity through something congenial with it in our own breasts . . . Thus God’s infinity has its image in the soul; and through the soul, much more than through the universe, we arrive at this conception of the Deity.”13 When Channing turned to the Holy Spirit, the fissure between Unitarian and Trinitarian thought was exposed. For Channing, the Spirit was not a person distinct from the Father as his trinitarian neighbors held. Instead, Channing rendered the Spirit as “a divine assistance adapted to our moral freedom, and accordant with the fundamental truth that virtue is the mind’s own work.” His anthropomorphic sublimation of the Spirit emerged in the following passage: “By the Holy Spirit, I understand an aid which must be gained and made effectual by our own activity; an aid which no more interferes with our faculties than the assistance which we receive from our fellow-beings; an aid which silently mingles and conspires with all other helps and means of goodness; an aid by which we unfold our natural powers in a natural order.”14 With Channing, creature and creator distinctions became blurred at multiple points. Anthropocentrism, while seeking to exalt the human may arguably result instead, as with the treatment of the Spirit in this section, in the demotion of the divine. In such a scenario, human exceptionalism encountered a peril, the peril of reflecting not God but merely a mirror image of the finite self, though dressed up with lofty rhetoric. Such a human self for Channing, at an ordinand’s celebration of the ministerial calling, sought to be content and secure. That security would ebb and flow with various challenges and assaults on the reality of the assurances of the divine-human nexus throughout the decades to unfold. THE TRANSCENDENTAL TURN Prior to 1830, generally taken to be the beginning of Transcendentalism as a movement, a cadre of persons with a similar mindset began to emerge in the vicinity of Boston, Massachusetts. According to one important account, individuals in this emerging movement “were critical of contemporary and religious and philosophical thought and had discovered in a novel body of European ideas a way to address this satisfaction.” Despite a significant

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variety in opinions among these thinkers, the banner under which they began to unite was “Transcendentalism,” a term coined around 1833. The manner of apprehending the world that united this group intensively focused upon “individual consciousness” rather than “external fact.” The meanings ascribed to this theory of knowledge differed among its adherents, but for the next half-century “more than anything else this emphasis on the primacy of self-consciousness defined American Transcendentalism.”15 By 1840 the quarterly entitled The Dial gave the movement a way to promote Transcendentalism. In 1841, former Unitarian minister George Ripley (1802–1880) founded the utopian community Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, giving followers a geographical center for retreat.16 Many of the movement’s key figures were fascinated by German idealist philosophy, and various organs took on the task of translating and disseminating Idealism to the public. Yet many of the founders of Transcendentalism were not philosophers, but disaffected Unitarian ministers and former ministers. A non-creedal religiosity of human-centered consciousness and experience began to be set forth as an alternative to, or as a critical commentator upon, the American religious ethos.17 A loosely affiliated group of like-minded individuals began to coalesce during the period of 1830–1860. Historiography often gives pride of place to the founding of this group to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). The transcendentalist moniker strains somewhat the concept of a “school of thought,” however, because of the breadth and diversity of viewpoints of the historical figures often associated with that term. Differences of opinion among these thinkers and free spirits may be observed on a whole host of issues. Notwithstanding these caveats, a few intellectual strands and influences may be seen as pertains to the question of human nature and human exceptionalism. The first major influence pervading the mentality of this group was the influence of German Idealism. This was not, strictly speaking, the highly technical Idealism of philosopher Immanuel Kant. This was a redefined philosophy melded with the quasi-Romantic and almost youthful experimentalism of the previous generation’s poets and essayists. Both German and British voices charmed Emerson and his friends. Literary figures such Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle provided inspiration. This form of Romanticism was not so much anti-religious as it was intent on forging a new series of channels through which religious impulses could flow.18 Another major inclination discernible among the transcendentalists was a reactionary ethos. In effect it was a two-stage reaction. Such was perceptible against the proximate religious milieu in which Emerson and his companions operated: New England. The first and strongest repulsion was against New England Calvinism, most clearly exemplified by the growth of the Unitarian

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denomination in the environs of Harvard. Apart from debates over the doctrine of the trinity were deep clefts over basic human nature. Was human nature totally depraved, or full of endless dignity and potential? Such debates spilled over from theological circles and into literature and other centers of culture-formation. Further, from within Unitarianism a secondary repulsion began to characterize the thought of Emerson and several other Unitarian clergypersons by the 1830s. Theologizing of any kind became subject to sustained critique. Thus, the free thought of the transcendentalists was even more radically free than the progressivist religiosity imbibed by anti-Calvinist Unitarianism. Transcendentalism grew not merely as the fruit of intellectual pursuits, but also social ones. In an era already marked by the proliferation of salons, as well as journals and newspapers aided by the freedom of the press within the New Republic, transcendentalists found a ready environment for the promotion of fresh ideas. Frederic Henry Hedge (1805–1890) established in 1836 a new gathering called the Transcendental Club. This secular conventicle existed for those fascinated with fresh ideas in philosophy, theology, and literature. THEODORE PARKER ON TRANSCENDENTALISM Theodore Parker (1810–1860) gave to Transcendentalism an explication in his 1850 essay on the topic. He expressed the need for transcendentalism amidst a fundamental problem in the philosophical field of metaphysics. For Parker, the main struggle was “to explain the facts of human consciousness.” He identified two major schools of thought on accounting for human consciousness: sensationism and transcendentalism. Parker argued against sensationism, or what might more commonly be called empiricism. Sensationists employed an inductive method. According to Parker, these thinkers make sense experience central to philosophy, in that the subject undergoes a sensation, reflects upon it, “and by reflection transform(s) a sensation into an idea.” By contrast, transcendentalism affirms “as its chief metaphysical doctrine, that there is in the intellect (or consciousness), something that never was in the senses, to wit, the intellect (or consciousness) itself.” Building upon faculty psychology, the transcendentalists held “that man has faculties which transcend the senses; faculties which give him ideas and intuitions that transcend sensational experiences.” Unlike empiricists such as John Locke (1632–1704), transcendentalists “maintain that the mind (meaning thereby all which is not sense) is not a smooth tablet on which sensation writes its experience, but is a living principle which of itself originates ideas when the senses present the occasion; that, as there is a

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body with certain senses, so there is a soul or mind with certain powers which give the man sentiments and ideas.”19 In Parker’s transcendentalist interpretation of religion, some traditional elements appeared. “Transcendentalism admits a religious faculty, element, or nature in man, as it admits a moral, intellectual and sensational faculty.” For Parker, faculty psychology played a significant role in accounting for human religiosity. The religious was implicitly included and on a par with other features of human nature. Further, it impinged on the other faculties, in that “this faculty is the source of religious emotions, of the sentiments of adoration, worship.” The religious faculty offers “consciousness of God” analogously to the senses, which give access to “consciousness of matter.” The faculty of reason intersects with religion in that “it gives us the primary ideas of religion, ideas which transcend experience.” Religion can incorporate both necessary and contingent truths, using both induction and deduction, intuition and experience, observation as well as testimony. Transcendentalism works “to give us politics which represent God’s thought of a state,” including all humans, with “each man free.” It seeks to give humanity “free goodness, free piety, free thought,” and “religion worthy of God and man,” while cultivating wisdom in word and work.20 The popular theme of liberty in the new republic emerged within Parker’s rhetoric of freedom. Even though Parker maintained the existence of the soul, in many ways he departed from traditional religion. Parker’s dramatic break came by means of his public denial of biblical inspiration and miracles, notably at his 1841 ordination ceremony.21 Parker’s transcendentalism separated from traditional religious thought, especially as expressed in theological doctrines. The subjective element was elevated in Parker’s call “to revise the experience of mankind and try its teachings by the nature of mankind; to test ethics by conscience, science by reason; to try the creeds of the churches, the constitution of the states by the constitution of the universe; to reverse what is wrong, supply what is wanting, and command the just.” Parker’s rhetoric took a strongly reformist turn, seeking a future including “a church whose creed is truth,” and “a church without tyranny.”22 Parker’s transcendentalism embraced “the spiritual world, the world of internal consciousness.” This world is governed by laws of the human spirit, “in virtue of which things are designed to take place so and not otherwise.” These laws for Parker were unchanging, “not made by men but only discovered by men.” Even amid such immutable laws, Parker maintained human freedom, in distinction from the determinism of mere matter. “Man is progressive and partially free,” and “there may be a will in the world of man adverse to the will of God.” In the exercise of this freedom “the laws of man’s spirit may be violated to a certain extent.” While the laws controlling matter depend exclusively on the divine will, “the laws of man depend for

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their execution also on the finite will of man, and so may be broken.”23 Such rhetoric bears some affinity with the tradition of natural theology, though with the theological element placed into passive abeyance, or reinterpreted with heavy elements of poetry. Self-consciousness was indeed central to transcendentalist thought, but it was still keenly aware of the self in particular settings, accentuating the connection of the perceiving self with the beauties of the external world. Poetry and prose dedicated to Nature (with the oft-noted capital “N”) began to proliferate in the nineteenth century. The two poems quoted at the top of this chapter serve to illustrate the sea-change that occurred between the early and latter decades of the nineteenth century. Is the material world a joyous altar connecting human and divine, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge held? Or is it an indifferent void, as Stephen Crane believed? The life and thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson wrestled with that tension. RALPH WALDO EMERSON AND HUMAN EXCEPTIONALISM Emerson began to study theology at Harvard Divinity School in 1824. Raised a Unitarian, his mother hoped that he and his brother would pursue a clerical vocation within that tradition, a path that he trod only until 1832.24 Upon reading Coleridge’s popular 1825 treatise Aids to Reflection, Emerson concluded that “God in us worships God.” Coleridge criticized theology with stern language: “This was the true and first apostasy—when in Council and Synod the divine Humanities of the Gospel gave way to speculative System, and Religion became a Science of Shadows under the name of Theology, or at best a bare Skeleton of Truth, without life or interest, alike inaccessible and unintelligible to the majority of Christians.”25 This frustration with theology, perceived as crushing the human spirit and offending the rational mind, also permeated the writings of the Transcendentalists. Emerson left the ministry after he became unwilling to administer the Lord’s supper due to its formalism.26 The loss of his wife and the grief that tore at his soul also contributed to his crisis of faith. By the time of the graduation address he gave in 1838 to Harvard Divinity School graduates, he had found numerous ways to alienate the Unitarian establishment. A younger generation of students and other literary figures began to frequent Harvard’s Transcendentalist Club, eager to study and debate the ideas of Emerson and others willing to challenge religious traditions of all stripes.27 In his book Nature, Emerson introduced his readership to the topic of demarcating Nature from that which transcends Nature. “Philosophically considered,” he opened his brief treatise, “the universe is composed of

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Nature and the soul.” Dual reality, long dominant in the Western mind, took on a more romantic nuance under the pen of Emerson. “Strictly speaking, therefore,” he continued, “all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE.”28 Dualism was overcome or tended to recede in Emerson at times. His rhapsodies on nature approached the pantheistic, such as in the following passage: “Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”29 For Emerson, this participatory theme rendered a human whose creativity partakes in the divine and the everlasting realm. “Nothing divine dies,” he assured his readership. “All good is eternally productive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.”30 Such words were reassuring in the age of invention, when human productions and industries followed the urge rapidly to reshape the received natural order of things in highly significant and permanent ways. One historical account of religion and environmentalism notes that Emerson saw the development of the train as a boon for naturalists, as it would enable travelers to see and become reconciled again with nature while they were conveyed through its beautiful landscapes.31 By 1844 Emerson was arguing that the “savage country” should be cultivated for human use, and become a garden, and even a veritable paradise.32 This would set him apart from his friend Henry David Thoreau. In his approach to religion, Ralph Waldo Emerson held intuitionist affinities with Schleiermacher, but without the explicit theological dimension. Emerson’s religion, if one could call it that, was personal and experiential, and unwilling to accept any past theology as authoritative. Emerson’s leading biographer explains that during the Harvard years he meditated on the sublimity of the immediate presence of the divine. Emerson held a waning interest in theology or dogma, and a growing yearning for “the immediate personal experience of religion.” This period also sparked a deepening desire for eloquence in religious discourse. He was influenced strongly by his English teacher, Edward Channing, brother of Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing.33 During the period in which Emerson authored Nature, he was deeply engaged in renewing the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism for a modern audience. Emerson’s focus on individual experience rendered him something of a modern Marcus Aurelius. The Stoic revival was foundational to the rise of transcendental thought, and Emerson was its vanguard. Richardson

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remarks that for Emerson the ideal realm is more real than the physical. “This is the mainmast of idealism and Emerson lashed himself to it for life.”34 Emerson’s 1841 essay on The Oversoul distanced his view of both the divine being and the human soul further from orthodox Christian moorings. In reflecting upon the individual living in society, Emerson focused on the commonality rather than the individuality of humans. Emerson’s own thought did eventually focus on significant figures in history, in the mode of “representative men.” In The Oversoul, the solidarity of humanity received even greater emphasis than mere representation. Here an implicit problem in discussions of human nature and human exceptionalism was made explicit. How can all the variegated examples of individuality in humanity still share a common human nature? Of what is this nature truly comprised? The corporate or shared dimension of the answer to this question drove Emerson away from individuated personality and toward the impersonal. “In all conversation between two persons,” he reckoned, “tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal, is God.” The one impersonal mind, or oversoul, connects all humans. Even in “trivial conversations with my neighbors,” Emerson quipped, “Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us.”35 As a study in the range of his thought, however, the power of the individual can be seen in one of Emerson’s most popular essays, Self-Reliance, published in 1841. Emerson wrote of the immediacy of the divine-human encounter: “The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.” This was written in the same era when Evangelical revivalist Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) was emphasizing human employment of the means of grace to procure both personal and societal transformation.36 For Emerson however, the past becomes valuable in the present moment. “Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away,” he proclaimed, adding that “means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour.” A robust presentism was evident when he added for emphasis: “Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.”37 In his criticism of creeds, Emerson struck a tone more dismissive than that which Schleiermacher had voiced. “All men’s prayers are a disease of will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect,” Emerson declaimed. Even new theological systems that attempt an updated vocabulary fell afoul of his ire. Such systems themselves “will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning,” he insisted.38 As we saw in chapter 3, for Schleiermacher, past dogmas, while not adequate to provide the individual with an absolute feeling of dependence upon the Absolute,

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at least still served a limited role in enhancing modern understanding of the development of past modes of belief. They could contribute aesthetic shaping to modes of worship. For Emerson, theology or prayer informed or inflected by religious creeds was worthy of contempt. The ethos of his work on heroic figures in history offers a window on Emerson’s implicit anthropology. This he made accessible by his essay Representative Men, published in 1850. Richardson writes: “Representative Men is Emerson’s major effort to reconcile the reality of the unequal distribution of talent with a democratic belief in the fundamental equality of all persons.” Emerson accepted equality in the long run, “because he believed in the adequacy of the individual, of each individual.” Humans who evince qualities of greatness do so because each one shows forth “the full flowering of some one aspect of our common nature.” Herein is explained the choice of the adjective “representative” over the more commonly employed “great” when describing famous individuals.39 Emerson was deeply read in Hindu and other eastern religious texts. During his brief editorship of The Dial, from 1842 to 1844, and with the help of Thoreau, Emerson edited a recurring series highlighting excerpts from various eastern religious texts.40 His 1856 poem “Brahma” announced: “The vanished gods to me appear, And one to me are shame and fame.”41 Apparent distinctions in life are illusory. Though the term pantheism was often used by traditionalists as an epithet or criticism aimed at various intuitionists, Schleiermacher and Emerson included, it is not clear that Emerson, at least, would have eschewed the identification. “Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul,” Emerson intoned. “The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God: yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable.” To get to this insight, however, humans must break the god of tradition and quit the God of rhetoric, to experience the presence of God as fire burning in the heart.42 Emerson helped to implant the ideals of the intuitionists, including Schleiermacher’s sense of the individual’s immediate experience of the divine, into the soil of New England. TRANSCENDENTAL TENSIONS: FULLER AND THOREAU Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) held an intense relationship with Emerson that resulted in the fruitful collaboration of editorship of The Dial, for the brief period of 1840 to 1844. During its short life, this organ became the chief effort to bring a unified voice to the diverse community of transcendentalists. Relinquishment of the editorship to Emerson in 1842 allowed Fuller to

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develop her twin philosophies of feminism and Romantic naturalism. For Fuller, the flourishing of true womanhood was central to the project of human exceptionalism. Margaret Fuller’s championing of women’s rights and her transcendentalist love of the natural world may be seen as connected. In her 1845 manifesto, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she chafed at the artificiality of restricting women to certain social spheres, separated from the world of men in a manner tending toward female disadvantage.43 To Fuller, such an arrangement was unnatural: “We believe the divine energy would pervade to a degree unknown in the history of former ages, and that no discordant collision, but a ravishing harmony of the spheres would ensue.” Both inward and outward freedom for women should be “acknowledged as a right, not yielded as a concession.” Her plea was not “to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded, to unfold such powers as were given her when we left our common home.”44 In her 1844 treatise Summer on the Lakes, Fuller found her walks in nature, and particularly among the women of the indigenous peoples, as a metaphor for transcending limits and experiencing freedom. “I say, that what is limitless is alone divine,” she rhapsodized, “that there was neither wall nor road in Eden, that those who walked there lost and found their way just as we did, and that all the gain from the Fall was that we had a wagon to ride in.”45 Rising above restrictions, particularly those that are artificial and built by society, was valuable to Fuller both as a transcendentalist and as a feminist. As one study of her contribution to the popular genre of travel narrative has noted, she brought many sensibilities together as she described her journeys. These included “the appreciative and the analytic, the intellectual and the aesthetic, the conventionally masculine and feminine.” Such elements allowed her work to expand beyond the conventions of the genre. “At its best, Fuller’s travel writing makes all these voices interact, thus expressing a subtle, complicated understanding of politics and culture, and of the American’s–and especially the American woman’s–relation to them.”46 Human exceptionalism had to create space for exceptional women, and to unleash their potential for self-betterment and result in the ultimate reform of society. The lure of the material world as the truly substantive reality was too much to resist for many as the century wore on. What would increasingly matter would not be the ethereal Emersonian spirit, but the material and social conditions that impinged on the human body. One who decided to return to nature in a rigorous fashion, and in ways that seemed positively antisocial, was Henry David Thoreau. For Thoreau nature was an ever-present, dangerous reality, not a mere abstraction to be debated in a comfortable parlor. Nature stood as a canvas upon which humanity had a moral, even a divine, duty to paint culture. Conquest, settlement, taming, fencing, and subduing,

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were themes widely accepted with little demur for much of the century. For this reason, the voice of Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), who sounds soothing and reasonable at a historical distance, to his contemporaries occasioned considerable unease. Indeed, his call for Civil Disobedience is often published in the same volume with his more serene Walden, illustrating the countercultural impulse of his work. One account of his life states that Thoreau was a quintessential outsider in all senses of the word, and “marginality was the theme of Thoreau’s life.”47 Though he was at a low in popularity in the 1880s, by the “countercultural 1960s and 1970s Thoreau was canonized as the greatest saint in the environmental pantheon.”48 Thoreau represents the Romantics, whose identification with nature was so deep they at times lapsed into anti-humanism. “The humanist, who typically cherished an elite sense of his own transcendent value,” observes another historian, “—especially in the superiority of his reason to mere animal instinct—was almost by definition an anti-naturalist.”49 Valorizing human cultural achievements and institutions, humanists earned the ire of lovers of the wild such as Thoreau. Thoreau’s understanding of religion was at times obliquely expressed.50 He could be quite critical of conventional religion. External features of the religion of Massachusetts, especially laws and customs designed to punish Sabbath-breakers, earned his special opposition. In his 1849 treatise A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers he wrote: “It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshiped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined.” This was a more socially oriented version of the criticism of theology leveled by Feuerbach in Germany earlier that same decade. “Men reverence one another, not yet God,” Thoreau continued.51 In an especially heated attack upon the natural theology of The Bridgewater Treatises, Thoreau declaimed of the Earl of Bridgewater: “What he calls his religion is for the most part offensive to the nostrils. He should know better than expose himself, and keep his foul sores covered till they are quite healed.” He quipped, “There is more religion in men’s science than there is science in their religion.”52 The lines separating the intuitionist from the natural theological approaches to the human study of nature were, in Thoreau, becoming clearer. By the time of his extended pilgrimage into an extended life in the wilderness, expressed in 1854 in the pages of Walden, we find a Thoreau who had mellowed somewhat on spiritual themes. Upon encountering a woodchuck, he wrote, “I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both.”53 This struggle between higher and lower impulses recurs a few times in Walden. “We are conscious of an animal in us,” he confided, “which awakens in proportion as our higher

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nature slumbers.” For Thoreau, this tension cannot be completely gotten rid of. “Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature.” Upon picking up the lower jawbone of a hog, Thoreau was confronted with “an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual.” Quoting the Confucian philosopher Mencius, as well as the Hindu Vedas, Thoreau acknowledged the struggle between the pure and the impure in human nature. “Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down,” he acknowledged.54 At times Thoreau even sounded positively monastic, almost a nineteenth-century St. Francis. “If you would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, though it be at cleaning a stable,” he urged. “Nature is hard to overcome, but she must be overcome.” He chastised Christians who were “not purer than the heathen.”55 Such passages indicated that Thoreau’s encounters with human nature had as much tendency to move him away from, rather than toward, a romanticized outlook thereupon. External nature could be ennobling, but the internal nature carried deep within Thoreau himself, and within all humanity, was tragically impure. Nevertheless, each individual was charged with bringing change through self-improvement, through a Kantian sense of duty. “Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships,” Thoreau proclaimed. “We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.”56 The duality of flesh and spirit was thus subtly subverted and then unified to the common cause of self-improvement. In describing his last winter at Walden, Thoreau was visited by “one of the last philosophers” of Connecticut. Thoreau described him as “A true friend of man; almost the only friend of human progress.” This figure undertook the task of “making plain the image engraven in men’s bodies, the God of whom they are but defaced and leaning monuments.” Walden and this philosopher “sauntered and talked, and effectually put the world behind us,” in freedom from institutional constraints. “Whichever way we turned, it seemed that the heavens and the earth had met together, since he enhanced the beauty of the landscape,” Thoreau rhapsodized.57 Whereas much of the Christian tradition had located the imago Dei in the soul rather than the body, for Thoreau the body itself was its locus. Defiant of existing categories, Thoreau’s religion was eclectic and ruggedly individualized. His enigmatic refusal to be fit into an inflexible system, either political or religious, remains a major source of his enduring fascination for later generations of seekers of meaning. CRITICS OF TRANSCENDENTALISM Critics of the movement were also not shy about pointing out perceived deficits. One traditionalist Unitarian expressed suspicion toward a movement that

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would “transplant German roots in an English soil.”58 Even those sympathetic to transcendental thought could note certain weaknesses. For example, in an otherwise positive 1837 review in The Western Messenger of Emerson’s 1836 opus Nature, Samuel Osgood (1784–1862) admitted: “The many will call this book dreamy . . . he has confounded his idiosyncrasies, with universal truth. All this may be. But it is not for the vulgar many to call such a man a dreamer.”59 Harsher still was the review of Francis Bowen (1811–1890) in the pages of The Christian Examiner, a traditional Unitarian organ. Moving beyond merely targeting Emerson’s essay, Bowen expanded his range of targets. “The writers of whom we speak, openly avow their preference of such indistinct modes of reflection, and justify loose and rambling speculations, mystical forms of expression, and utterance of truths that are but half perceived,” Bowen declared. Central to Bowen’s objections was the implicit theological anthropology of the transcendentalists. This anthropology echoed Plato’s disgust for the human body, and the limitations of the physical condition of humans. Bowen’s critique accepted the Platonic metaphor of imprisonment while placing a positive spin on it. “Granted that we are imprisoned in matter, why beat against the bars in a fruitless attempt to escape, when a little labor might convert the prison to a palace, or at least render the confinement more endurable.”60 The transcendentalists, in short, were too focused on that which is transcendent, and not sufficiently engaged with what is immanent. Of course, later transcendentalists were not so abstract-minded and otherworldly as Emerson. They became deeply immersed in social movements to emancipate slaves, press for women’s rights, and champion the poor.61 Transcendentalists took flak on their literary flank as well. Most notable among these critics were Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864). For these authors, the problematic elements in transcendental writing were “verbal obscurity,” “emotional reserve,” and “insubstantial treatment of the darker side of humanity.”62 Poe offered cleverly phrased derision. Letters to friends indicated Poe’s core objection was that the transcendentalists tended to believe in human perfectibility. He regarded the 1840s communal experiment of Brooks Farm, for example, as the foolish venture of a credulous sect.63 He also objected to what he saw as the transcendentalists’ merely utilitarian approach to art. For Poe the imagination is its own reward, for his detractors, art must serve human progress in some fashion.64 Hawthorne, sometimes grouped with the transcendentalists, was on key points an adversary. Though living for a time in Concord, he more fully imbibed the Calvinist/Puritan ethos. His gravest objection was the transcendentalists’ rejection of original sin. This theme and its devastating concomitant, human guilt, was central to most of Hawthorne’s stories. He further

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deplored the New England elitism that pervaded the transcendentalist mentality. Emerson exerted a literary effort to disabuse young people of the very notion of human evil. On the point of human depravity, therefore, Hawthorne and Emerson could not have been further apart.65 The optimistic harmonization of the scientific and the spiritual realms had enjoyed its unbounded historical moment. Human exceptionalism had been reframed, but could it be sustained in such unorthodox forms? Some elements of a more traditional defense of human exceptionalism may be seen among the transcendentalists. Emerson’s friend, the poet Jones Very (1813–1880), in 1839 published hymnic words on the dignity of the human frame in his poem “The Created.” It was an attempted reclamation of the human exceptionalism implicit in ancient Genesis. The poem concludes, with reference to the image of God in the flourishing of the human person, with the lines: And thou dost wear the robe that first thou wore, When bright with radiance from his forming hand, He saw thee Lord of all his creatures stand.66

CONCLUSION Orthodox theological anthropology had a daunting task. On the one side were the materialists and skeptics, insisting that God was either nonexistent or thoroughly disinterested in humanity. Humanity was increasingly on its own in an uncaring universe. On the other stood the idealist tradition, and its American iteration in transcendental thought. These thinkers had little patience with biblical exegesis or systematic theologizing. They rendered and exalted the human into a virtual godlike status, to the point of embracing pantheism (God is all) or panentheism (God is the soul of the material world). Transcendentalism, applied to humans as well as to God, could easily be seen to threaten the distinction between Creator and the created order, and thus foster undue pride, the chief of the traditional seven deadly sins. Both human dignity and human depravity had to be upheld under the traditions of Western Christianity. Should the accent and emphasis of theological anthropology be upon humanity’s dignity and potential as created in the imago Dei? Or ought most scrutiny be trained upon the ravages of human depravity and sin? Indeed, such became an individualized struggle, as in the case of the poet Jones Very himself, who was dismissed from Harvard Divinity school and spent a brief time in an insane asylum, after which Emerson edited a book of his poems. For a few years Very claimed to be the Holy Ghost, in an echo of Channing’s theology. After 1838 Jones Very took on the pastorate of a few scattered small congregations across New England. Much of his later life he

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spent time wandering the streets of his hometown of Salem, Massachusetts.67 The tensions between the ancient faith and modern ideas, as often noted in the biographical historiography of the Victorian age, could at times prove mentally unbearable. As an essentially anti-creedal movement, such a body of diverse figures would remain resistant to any systematic account. Dissatisfaction with traditional religion, an intoxication with Romantic art and literature, with a newfound conviction of the innate goodness and boundless potential of humanity, found a voice and a place among the transcendentalists. This flexibility, which was doubtless perceived as a virtue in its first generation, by the next generation had rendered it nearly sterile and unlikely to grow beyond the confines of its most fervent adherents. Many transcendentalists were absorbed into a broader network of passionate social reform, most notably the abolitionist cause. The conceptual divinization of the natural world also aligned with the outrage occasioned by reports of human ravaging of nature. Much has been written in recent years about creation care, and this represents a Christianity striving to come to terms with human responsibility for stewardship, grounded in the resources of the faith and tradition, amidst an era of unfettered economic exploitation of the world’s resources and impotent human governments. Stewardship and conservation are terms that have theological depth, even if they see ebbs and flows in popularity. The Christian response, like the response of society, has been fragmented. Human exceptionalism involves crafting a balance between individual rights and social responsibilities. Emphasis on one or the other led to the above-noted split in the ranks of the transcendentalists. When no synthetic account emerged or succeeded in harmonizing both these vitally human impulses, human exceptionalism became destabilized and imperiled. Emerson’s oversoul did not dislodge the human fascination with the individual soul. In both psychology and in social reform, the rhetoric of the human soul was deployed in several ways, even as the soul was often redefined. The next chapter considers the metaphysical status of the soul itself. It also explores the soul in its moral dimension, treating notions of the dignity of the souls of the disenfranchised. Even if the soul came in for substantive critique as a metaphysical category, its moral importance was given voice by a variety of persons who only in recent years have been accorded their due attention in scholarship.

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NOTES 1. Evan Berry, Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 5. 2. Ibid., 53–54. 3. See Mark R. Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 10–28. 4. Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003), 143. 5. For an excellent and succinct overview of Transcendentalism, see Russell Goodman, “Transcendentalism” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed December 17, 2019. https:​//​plato​.stanford​.edu​ /archives​/win2019​/entries​/transcendentalism​/. 6. E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 198. 7. Ibid., 200. 8. Ibid., 204. 9. William Ellery Channing, The Works of William E. Channing, D. D. (Boston, MA: American Unitarian Association, 1899), 291. 10. Ibid., 292. 11. Ibid., 292–93. 12. Ibid., 293. 13. Ibid., 294–95. 14. Ibid., 297–98. For further details on Channing’s rejection of the trinity as “irrational,” see Holifield, 205–207. 15. Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 8. 16. Ibid., 9. 17. Ibid., 12–13. Grodzins explains Unitarianism thus: “Unitarians rejected the Puritan, Calvinistic view of the human will as hopelessly corrupted by original sin. They denied that people were born sinful, celebrated the potential greatness of human reason and conscience, and developed a spirituality of self-culture.” Dean Grodzins, “Unitarianism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, ed. Joel Myerson et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 52; cf. 50–69. 18. Gary J. Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion: 1805–1900 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 6–8, 46–58. 19. Theodore Parker, Theodore Parker: An Anthology, ed. Henry Steele Commager (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1960), 89–90. 20. Ibid., 93–94. 21. Summary distilled from Michael Moran, “New England Transcendentalism,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: MacMillan, 1967), 5: 479–80. 22. Parker, 95. 23. Ibid., 96–97.

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24. On the disputes between New England Calvinists and Unitarians in this period, see Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 284–87. 25. Kathleen Coburn, ed., Inquiring Spirit: A New Presentation of Coleridge from his Published and Unpublished Prose Writings (New York: Pantheon, 1951), 397. 26. Dorrien, 59–63. 27. Ibid., 72–77. 28. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Essays and Lectures (New York: Modern Library, 1983), 8. Emphases in the original. 29. Ibid., 10. 30. Ibid., 18. 31. Berry, 138. 32. Merchant, Reinventing Eden, 105. 33. Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 14–15. Richardson mentions Emerson’s affinities with Schleiermacher at 69, 111, 197, and 290, and the theologian’s influence on the transcendentalists at 249 and 325. 34. Ibid., 233–34. 35. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman (New York: Signet Classics, 2003), 299–300. 36. Noll, 184. 37. Emerson, Selected Writings, 278–79. 38. Ibid., 286–87. 39. Richardson, Emerson, 414. 40. Ibid., 379. 41. Emerson, Writings, 524. 42. Ibid., 308. 43. Historian of feminism Nancy Cott has interpreted “women’s sphere” at the middle of the nineteenth century in three modes. Women as victims or prisoners of domesticity; women as forging an ideology of domesticity directed to their own purposes; and women as a distinctive “subculture among women that formed a source of strength and identity and afforded supportive sisterly relations,” anchored in the agency of women, not in the expectations of men. Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 197. Fuller seems nearest to this third meaning, using it as a means of eventually subverting the notion of restrictive spheres. 44. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1845), 26–27. 45. Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes (Boston: Little & Brown, 1844), 65. 46. William W. Stowe, “Conventions and Voices in Margaret Fuller’s Travel Writing,” American Literature 63 (June 1991), 250–51. 47. Stoll, 213. 48. Ibid., 215. On the historical connections between Transcendentalism and Environmentalism, see Lance Newman, “Environmentalist Thought and Action,” in The

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Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, ed. Joel Myerson et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 172–82. 49. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 85. 50. On the thorny issue of how to describe Thoreau’s religion (or lack thereof), see Christopher A. Dustin, “Thoreau’s Religion,” in A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau, ed. Jack Turner (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2009), 256–93. Dustin argues that “As Thoreau sees it, nature points beyond itself, to a transcendent ground that is neither separable from it nor reducible to it” (259). Thoreau hoped that “religion itself can be religiously as well as naturally redeemed” (262). His theology is encapsulated in the concept of “communion with nature,” which can then become in some sense “redemptive” (264–67, 269–71). For a brief survey of emerging studies of Thoreau’s religion, see Alan D. Hodder, “Roundtable on Thoreau and Religion: A Response,” The Thoreau Society Bulletin 283 (Fall 2013), 4–7. 51. Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849; reprint ed. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), 80. 52. Ibid., 98. 53. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Boston, MA: Houghton and Mifflin, 1897), 327. 54. Ibid., 341–42. 55. Ibid., 344. 56. Ibid., 345. 57. Ibid., 415–16. Most of Thoreau’s few religious references were to Hindu texts and traditions. 58. Gura, 6. 59. In Perry Miller, ed. The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 166. 60. Ibid., 176; cf. Plato, Phaedo, 82, in Robert Maynard Hutchins, ed., Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1955), 7: 233–34. 61. See Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, “Antislavery Reform,” in The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, eds. Joel Myerson et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 210–21; and Phyllis Cole, “Woman’s Rights and Feminism,” Op. Cit., 222–40. 62. Richard Kopley, “Naysayers: Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville,” in The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, eds. Joel Myerson et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 597. 63. Ibid., 599. 64. Ibid., 600. 65. Ibid., 604–8. 66. Helen R. Deese, ed., Jones Very: The Complete Poems (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 158. 67. See Richardson, 301–6.

Chapter 9

Perils of the Soul in Nineteenth-Century Thought Metaphysics and Morals

Naturalistic explanations of human nature were beginning to be set forth in print to displace the notion of divine origin and purpose. This would eventually come to include the origin and existence (or nonexistence) of the human soul. One historian of science has noted, “The human soul would become a product of natural evolution, not a divinely implanted spiritual element transcending the material world. All the ingredients of an explosive mixture were present.”1 While this conclusion may read later developments backward to some degree, the human soul stood in a state of peril by the year 1900. In this chapter I highlight the diverse array of approaches to the soul in the nineteenth century literature. The concept of the soul was deployed variously across many disciplines. Such variety mirrored multiple strands of thought, from panpsychism, to associationism, to materialism, to traditional theological accounts, as well as social reform accounts of the soul. The power and reality of the soul, as a topic permeating protests over various indignities visited on human persons, became a matter of deep existential as well as intellectual import. In the literature we see several developmental trends. The first is from panpsychism to Idealism. The second is from empiricism through associationism to experimental psychology. The third is materialism. The fourth is traditional Christian theology. The fifth approach to the soul was that of moral reform, wherein the fully human person was not merely a body to be exploited, but a soul possessing an identity and a dignity to be upheld.

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THE SOUL ANCIENT AND MODERN Accounts of the soul from ancient Greek philosopher Plato prioritized the soul over the body to such an extent that he could present the body as a chain or as a prison. Death was a release from a state of being bound and limited by the body. Jewish and Christian traditions prized the body as created originally good, as capable of being employed in the service of God, and as a location for many discrete acts of worship directed toward the deity. Yet these traditions did not treat the inner life, sometimes labeled “soul,” sometimes “mind,” sometimes “spirit,” sometimes “heart,” or simply “the inner man” in a strictly philosophical or systematic fashion. The capacity to think, reflect, meditate, and direct the will toward the good path was fundamental to a well-ordered inner life. Within the body problematic elements that could hinder the higher or nobler aspirations of the inner person were spoken of as the “flesh” in the Greek New Testament. Whereas the Hebrew scriptures had referred to the flesh in a more neutral fashion, such as “all flesh” to refer to humanity as a whole, the term came in the Christian tradition to be a source of anxiety. The flesh and the spirit were portrayed by the apostle Paul in tension. The term for spirit, pneuma, was used of the created human spirit as well as the divine Holy Spirit. In later philosophical thought, the moral or relational dimension of the soul was often overshadowed by philosophical speculations on its status as an immaterial substance, and how it should be distinguished from the body. With the rise of modern Western medicine, the body came to be regarded with increasing fascination as a repository of scientific insight and as a field of detailed investigation. Cadaveric research as well as comparative zoology allowed refinements of understanding of how the body worked, and how it interacted with its environment.2 The nineteenth century saw several breakthroughs in the study of the physical brain, including some famous cases of persons who survived brain injury in such a manner that appeared to occasion dramatic personality changes.3 New accounts of the human nervous system, as well as reforms in the treatment of those with cognitive impairment, led to changes in perspective on the older discourses, both philosophical and theological, regarding the soul. The fascination with the function of the brain made it seem to be more tractable in terms of explaining human beliefs and behavior than the fragmented debates over the soul. That which can be studied by empirical method drew the attention of investigations using repeatable protocols, as well as novel mechanisms and tests to discern cause and effect, as well as nature and nurture, in the formation of human characteristics. Discussions of the soul in the modern era rarely saw a complete harmonization of theological and philosophical treatments of the topic. Drawing on



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scholastic treatments of the soul influenced by Aristotle, theologians used the language of substance. In this case a substance is not something physical, but rather that set of necessary and sufficient conditions to render a stable ontology. The soul was seen as an immaterial substance, and the body as a material substance. With the rise of modern science and more exacting studies of the nervous system and the brain, interest in how the soul might or might not influence the body rose to the fore in philosophy. Focus shifted to the functions of the soul or the operations of the soul rather than its mere existence. Alongside the rise of a pragmatic approach to science, skepticism toward the soul grew. If the human soul existed it was widely seen as having to “do” something, to have a role in the employment of the body and its capacities. Coming up with a consensus account of how an immaterial soul can influence a material body has proven elusive. In this section I sketch a few of the major theories and thinkers involved in this debate. Only some positions that were staked out retained human exceptionalism, that is, set humans apart as distinct from other creatures or from physico-chemical reality as a difference in kind, not merely a difference in degree. This fragmentation challenged theologians keen on reintegrating the soul and body as differentiated but mutually informing substances. PANPSYCHISM TO IDEALISM Panpsychism held that soul was real, but that it was also pervasive in nature and not unique to humans. Gustav Fechner (1801–1887) founder of the scientific school of psychophysics, believed in a hierarchy of souls. His studies of plants led him to conceive the idea that plants derive pleasure from sunlight, and have plant souls. This view expanded to embrace a superhuman level of awareness or consciousness, in which the earth, societies, and the heavenly bodies all co-participate. Fechner used terms indicating a divine or angelic quality for the earth soul. He redefined standard orthodox theological terminology such as divine attributes of omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence to posit the world’s animation by the divine.4 After an intensive decade studying human vision, he sought to relate the physiology of sight to the soul by measuring the relation between physical stimuli and psychological sensations. He published his views in his 1860 Elements of Psychophysics, thus earning a place in histories of early German Psychology. His musings on the mental nature of matter were thereafter largely ignored by mainstream psychology, but the experimental methods employed by Fechner continued to be utilized and developed by later experimental psychologists.5 R. Hermann Lotze (1817–1881) developed the theory of pervasive mindstuff in his 1856–1864 work Microcosmos. Here, he held that mechanistic

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thinking about reality was inadequate. He touted a dual aspect to matter, the outer and the inner. The outer surface of matter manifested the mechanical features studied by the scientific method. Yet internally, even matter has a mental dimension, and the very atoms have soul or a psychic life. He concluded that “no part of being is any longer devoid of life and animation.” At the risk of mockery, he even said that dust is permeated with animate life.6 Josiah Royce (1855–1916) employed the term conscious life more prominently than soul in his rhetoric. Royce probably granted more prestige to dual aspect thinking in the American context than any other figure of our period. He wrote: All life, everywhere, in so far as it is life, has conscious meaning, and accomplishes a rational end. This is the necessary consequence of our Idealism . . . no empirical warrant can be found for affirming the existence of dead material substance anywhere. . . . And we have no empirical evidence of the existence of any, relatively whole, conscious process, which is less intelligent or less rational than our own human processes are.7

Royce could sound conventionally religious, and, like his colleague William James, thought that scientific accounts of religion need not undermine a modern role for religious thought. “Our idealistic theory teaches that all individual lives and plans and experiences win their unity in God, in such wise that there is, indeed, but one absolutely final and integrated Self, that of the Absolute,” he wrote, echoing earlier intuitionist theologians like Schleiermacher. For Royce, religion declares what exists, then relates that reality to both a moral code and a religious feeling or experience. He stated: “There may be a religion without a supernatural, but there cannot be a religion without a theoretical element, without a statement of some supposed matter of fact, as part of the religious doctrine.”8 A religion is threefold in its purpose: it tells humans how to act (the practical), how to feel (the emotional), and what to believe (the theoretical).9 For Royce the project of reconstructing religion for a modern world meant going through a period of searching and doubt. This occasioned for moderns a state of anxiety. “We are not content with what we learned from our fathers; we want to correct their dogmas, to prove what they held fast without proof, to work out our salvation by our own efforts,” he conceded. “But we know not yet what form our coming faith will take. We are not yet agreed even about the kind of question that we shall put to ourselves when we begin any specific religious inquiry.” Royce exemplified those who cast about to define “what all men everywhere mean by religion.”10 The value of a philosophy of religion for Royce was its willingness to sort mere religious experiences of the individual from “real divine Truth.” Not



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unlike the prophets of old, Royce warned: “Take heed lest your object of worship be only your own little pet infinite, that is sublime to you mainly because it is yours, and that is in truth about as divine and infinite as your hat.” Royce valued the social dimension of religion over the individual as a way of finding genuine truth. “What is only yours and in you, is not divine at all,” he stated. In other words, intensively individualistic religion is inadequate. He pled, “Unless you lift it up into the light of thought and examine it often, how do you know into what your cherished religious ideal may not have rotted in the darkness of your emotions?” Philosophical method applied to religion may engender doubt, but for Royce such doubt will turn out to be both a duty and a privilege. For even a thoroughgoing doubt can contain “in its bosom” the truth that the philosopher has sworn to discover.11 Such an open approach to religious insight was not the only, nor was it the predominant, approach to the study of the human soul in the era. By contrast to Royce, experimental psychology, often grounded in materialist assumptions, was on the rise. ASSOCIATIONISM TO EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY One secular alternative to panpsychism in nineteenth-century re-visioning of the soul was associationism and its gradual transformation into an empirical or experimental psychology. In this theory, mental ideas are formed by the associations of sensations that occur together in a repeated fashion. “Things become associated in our minds by virtue of our experiences in the world; thus, associationism is grounded in empiricism,” according to this reading of history.12 Building on the eighteenth-century work of associationist physician David Hartley (1705–1757), and father and son James Mill (1773–1836) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), associationist thought trended toward materialism. Hartley had sought to uphold the immaterial soul, yet his methodology focused on the nervous system in such a way that the soul’s role was more honorific than functional.13 The Mills had no need to court religious public opinion in their milieu, and their approach was consistently atomistic. They utilized chemistry as the source of building blocks for an empirical theory of knowledge. James Mill’s account of associations was his 1829 Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind. He forged a fundamental distinction between sensations and ideas, an inheritance from Aristotle, now updated for a scientific age. Ideas are tenuous representations of physical sensations. Expanding the standard five senses to eight, James Mill rendered these as central components of consciousness. Upon experiencing a sensation, an idea forms that is then associated with other sensations, which in turn generate new ideas. The mind passively receives sensations and makes such associations, but

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only reflection and repetition can strengthen such associations into modes of permanency, then certainty, and then finally facility.14 In John Stuart Mill the concept of mental associations morphed from a mechanistic to a chemical model. One account summarizes John Stuart Mill’s approach as the mind actively synthesizing sense impressions by analogy to the way chemicals form bonds in combinations. In this bottom-up manner, several ideas at a lower scale may coalesce into larger ideas that are complex. J. S. Mill’s analysis of logic would become fundamental to those who would later promote psychology as a science of the mind rather than a philosophy of the mind.15 Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain (1818–1903) added a greater sense of historical development of the mind-body problem as the culmination of associationism in the British milieu. His two volumes, The Sense and the Intellect of 1855, and The Emotions and the Will of 1859 became, through many revisions, “the standard British psychological texts.”16 His greatest achievement was the founding in 1876 of the influential journal Mind. As a repository of British thought in the arena of psychology, as well as a rival to German developments in the field, this organ “was a considerable contribution to the development of psychology as a discipline independent of both philosophy and physiology.” Avoiding the temptation to sheer reductionism, Bain theorized on inner drives and habits, as well as trial and error as a central component to learning theory. Use of case histories and of aptitude testing in the field may also be traced back to Bain’s influence.17 In Mind and Body of 1873, Bain set forth a sweeping overview of one of the more vexing problems in the history of philosophy. He surveyed discussions of the soul from the ancient Greek philosophers, up through the church fathers, then medievals and moderns. At the end of his historical account of debates between empiricist and rationalist approaches to the human mind, Bain described the turn toward materialism. The soul was under considerable reassessment in German psychology, even as Bain was establishing his own experimental method in Britain. He was yet unwilling to identify materialism as the dominant psychological philosophy in Germany, but noted “a movement toward Materialism has arisen in Germany within the last twenty years.” As such it constituted, at least in part, a reaction against the Idealism of the previous decades. German Materialism was an attempt to apply scientific naturalism to the human condition, including mind. Such writers built their rejection of a distinct substance of the soul upon “the accumulated proofs, physiological and other, of the dependence of mind on body.” They employed theoretical features of physics, including the correlation, conservation, and persistence of force, into an account of mental phenomena. Force on this view was fully accountable in terms of its embodiment in matter.18



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European researchers were taking insights from physics and applying them to the human mind. Scientists such as Joseph Priestly and David Ferrier (1843–1928) had queried whether any nonmaterial entity should be invoked in an explanatory manner “until we see what these multifarious activities of matter are able to accomplish.” Bain concluded, however, that such positions were not yet dominant in German psychology. He even insisted that “their language is always metaphysically guarded.” He perceived their insights to be modifying “even the highest transcendentalism of that remarkable country.”19 Such restraint, if true, was short-lived. Metaphysical accounts would soon recede from focus before the advances of the empirical experimental methods of German and British psychology. These developments contributed to the decentering of the human soul from Western theories of the mind. The tensions between panpsychism and experimental psychology also contributed to the separation of psychology from philosophy as increasingly discrete disciplines. One historian narrates this process as “the story of how psychology became a science, divorced itself from literature, and invented that most modern of concepts, the mind.”20 Bain’s own empiricist viewpoint emerged in the closing pages of the treatise, which throughout had offered a survey of past thinkers. He noted that: “The arguments for the two substances have,” with reference to body and soul, “now entirely lost their validity.” Bain saw the two-substance view as incompatible with science. In place of the traditional duality of the Western tradition, he offered instead “one substance, with two sets of properties, two sides, the physical and the mental.” He even invoked as a metaphor the fourth century Athanasian Creed: “not confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.”21 For a treatise aimed at removing orthodox considerations from view in the mind-body problem, this invocation may be seen as an intended moment of irony. We have considered panpsychism and associationism as developed in the nineteenth century, sometimes overlapping but increasingly rival approaches to human experience. We now turn, albeit quite briefly, to consider materialism, the philosophy most likely to provoke the wrath of theologians in the period. Public intellectuals who openly embraced materialism as a worldview or philosophy were relatively few, at least until the last quarter of the century. Not many would have repeated so bluntly, as did Enlightenment skeptic Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757–1808) in 1802: “The brain secretes thought like the liver secretes bile.”22 Various arguments for materialism were set forth after the mid-century by German scientists Carl Vogt (1817–1895) and Ludwig Büchner (1824–1899) and Dutch physiologist Jacob Moleschott (1822–1893). American lawyer and popular orator Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) widely promoted agnostic freethought and found the notion that the soul survives the death of the body an absurdity.

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Yet even an antagonist toward theology like agnostic Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) sensed a duty to uphold some form of dignity for the human in his 1863 tome Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature. Having argued that the human body stood in an unbroken continuum with the bodily structures of the apes, Huxley noted that the capacities to bring civilization set humans apart from other species. He anticipated what would later develop as the concept of cultural evolution to supplement natural selection as an account of human history. “Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge, that Man is, in substance and in structure, one with the brutes”; he assured his readers. Huxley appeared at pains to undergird human uniqueness. Regarding the distinct capacities of the human, he wrote: “for, he alone possesses the marvelous endowment of intelligible and rational speech, whereby, in the secular period of his existence, he has slowly accumulated and organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of every individual life in other animals.”23 The focus of Huxley’s opposition was not religion itself but theology. At an Anglican gathering in 1864, evangelical scientists had declared that harmony between the natural order and scripture should be accorded the status of a fortieth article added to the Thirty-Nine Articles, the doctrinal touchstone document of Anglicanism. In response, Huxley and others formed the X Club, dedicated to the proposition that science must be “‘untrammeled’ by any theology.” Several of the X Club members thereafter formed a weekly review entitled the Reader. According to a prominent Darwin biography, “the Reader was probably the last attempt in Victorian England to keep together liberal scientists, theologians, and men of letters.” This would prove difficult with the presence of Huxley, however. In an editorial, Huxley avowed that science could not be satisfied “‘with anything short of absolute victory and uncontrolled domination over theology.’”24 For all this, Huxley held back from an outright denial of the existence of an immaterial soul. While his position in private letters was more materialistic, he chose instead publically to remain agnostic on either the materiality or immateriality of the soul, leaving it an open question. For Huxley the most objectionable element of belief in the soul was the notion of its survival of the death of the body. In his November 17, 1870, speech to the Metaphysical Society, he surveyed various arguments for the immortality of the soul, and found them wanting. His conclusion was: “The Immortality of the Soul cannot be deduced by scientific methods of reasoning from the facts of physical or psychical nature.” Also left open was the possibility that the soul could be simply be reduced to matter.25 In 1893, sociologist Lester Frank Ward (1841–1913) averred that no strictly critical study of the soul had yet been produced. At most, analysis had been applied to “the thinking and knowing faculty” but in so doing philosophers



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had attended to the mind rather than the soul. Ward perceived as the reason for this avoidance a fear that “its ontological oneness would be destroyed and the supposed foundations of religion and hopes for the future would be put in jeopardy.” He accused theologians of lacking the power of analysis, as they derived their view of soul from sacred writ, and emphasized its moral rather than its sensual qualities. For Ward, however, soul was to be defined as “the collective feelings of organic beings and their resultant efforts.” By this definition the soul had been subtly relegated to “art, literature, religion, and government,” all of which “added nothing to its extent or fruitfulness.”26 Philosophy was then free to treat “mind” as distinct from “soul.” Ward sought to rehabilitate the soul, however, by examining its role in social life. “In human society, as I shall presently endeavor to show, the soul is the great transforming agent which has worked its way up through the stages of savagery and barbarism to civilization and enlightenment, the power behind the throne of reason in the evolution of man.”27 Historian Jon H. Roberts has described the balancing act achieved by leading figures in the orbit of the New Psychology, emerging in the last four decades of the nineteenth century. While a few figures, such as Thomas Huxley of Great Britain and the American Lester Frank Ward, promoted strongly reductionistic interpretations of the studies of the brain, many figures resisted the move toward materialism. Roberts cites major thinkers who eschewed the notion that mental activity could be accounted for in purely physiological terms. Transatlantic academia also held the line for a time. Both Cambridge University and Harvard University leaders sought to insulate the fledgling field of psychology from the charge of conflicting with religion. Still, accounts of mental life were carefully protected, on the other flank, from any efforts to hinder research based on objections from orthodox theology. This included a warning from psychologist G. Stanley Hall (1846–1924) that use of “peculiarly theological concepts such as the soul” was impermissible.28 Even among those who took an overall materialist philosophy as their default worldview the soul was not so much rejected as redefined to fit their unique rhetorical and professional purposes. One recent account of the intersection of early psychology and religion strikes an optimistic note. Psychological traditions “were used to reform and revive religion—to purify it of nonessentials, to make its spiritual objectives comprehensible and plain.” On this reading, some American psychologists used “psychological strategies” for a positive purpose, namely, “to reconstruct older forms of faith or develop new ones.” Such an interpretation reflects once again the complexity thesis over the thesis of conflict in the science-theology relationship.29

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THEOLOGIANS ON THE SOUL In this section we shall focus on theologians Charles Hodge, William Shedd, and John Miley as examples of debates over the soul internal to late nineteenth-century American Protestant thought. Human nature, including the soul, will be the centerpiece of this analysis, with some elements of the original sin debate included. Such systematic theological discussions of the soul interacted only minimally with the debates noted above, in part because the origin more than the function of the soul was of central import to theological debates then current. Princeton theologian Charles Hodge (1797–1898) valued both reason and science, and desired a partnership between them, but held deep concerns about “scientific overreaching.”30 As seen in chapter 4, a reading of Hodge’s works in the 1870s indicates he was aware of thinkers both in Europe and America involved in exploring Darwin’s views. At times Hodge was dismissive, but for the most part he expended effort to lay out the various historical and contemporary positions on the biological, philosophical, and theological debates over heredity, and the heritability of the human soul. Old disputes among theologians over the origin of the soul were given fresh impetus by Darwin’s natural selection doctrines. The status of the human soul evinced multiple layers in the history of theological reflection, many of which were renewed in debates over an animal origin for humanity. Traducianists held that there is really only one human soul, a singular human essence, first found in Adam, but extended to humanity through procreation. Traducianism therefore held some affinity for panpsychism, at least in terms of problematizing the value of the individualized human soul. Whereas the passing on of physiological hereditary traits of the human body through procreation occasioned little difficulty theologically, the passing on of a spiritual substance or soul via procreation had long been a minority and contested position among theologians. Traducianism, from the Latin tradux or “stem” had found adherents in the Christian tradition since the early church. St. Augustine flirted with the idea, but never embraced it.31 In Protestantism, Martin Luther and many Lutheran theologians embraced traducianism, as did John Milton. The Reformed tradition of John Calvin for the most part opposed traducianism. Traducianism was held to be a threat to genuine individuality, moral responsibility, and individual salvation. Hodge surveyed and then disputed analogies such as the notion that there is only one oak essence, while individual acorns and trees are insignificant. He ridiculed the idea that a thousand candles lit from one candle were really only one candle in the aggregate.



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Hodge outlined three standard views within Christian theology upon the origin of the soul: preexistence of the soul, traducianism, and immediate creation of each individual soul.32 Preexistence was held by second century theologian Origen, but this view fell out of favor by the time of scholastic theology. The majority position in Christianity, and dominant in the Reformed tradition of Hodge, was the creationist position, with a few opting for traducianism. Hodge held that Adam was the federal head of the human race, representing his progeny for a testing time of probation. Adam’s sin was the failure of the test, and dire consequences fell upon the whole represented race. Proponents of traducianism had reasoned that it was the easiest way to account for the transmission of sin from Adam through multiple generations of posterity. For Hodge this was an overreaching and unbiblical strategy. Reformed theologian William Shedd (1820–1894), writing only a few years after Charles Hodge’s death, offered a vigorous defense of the hereditary nature of the human soul, traducianism, and inherited sin, in his 1888 Dogmatic Theology. After several years as a Congregationalist pastor and seminary professor, Shedd accepted a position teaching systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York. This lasted from 1863 to 1893. He was known as an arch defender of old-school Calvinism and the seventeenth-century Westminster Confession.33 In his Dogmatic Theology, upon surveying other possible positions on the origins of the soul, Shedd adduced three areas of argumentation for traducianism: scripture, systematic theology, and physiology. Chief among Shedd’s theological arguments was the favorability of traducianism for removing “the great difficulties connected with the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity,” namely “the injustice of punishing a person for a sin in which he had no kind of participation.”34 How was God justified in condemning the entire human race for the sin of the individual Adam? Various theories were available in Christian theology to deal with the problem. The traducianist solution was rather simple: We are all Adam and Adam is us; there is only ultimately one individual human substance. Shedd briefly discussed what he dubbed the physiological argument on behalf of traducianism. He stressed the singularity of the nature that humans share as a species. He mentioned naturalists and philosophers such as De Candolle, Quatrefages, Agassiz, Dana, Stahl, Hunter, Coleridge, and Heinroth on behalf of a unified, living, and invisible principle (albeit under a variety of labels) that brings coherence to a species in the natural world, whether of plants, animals, or humans.35 Here Shedd’s affinity with panpsychism appeared, but the differences between panpsychism and theological traducianism were fairly significant, given the former’s extension of soul

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into the nonhuman and even the inorganic world. Shedd insisted that human nature is real and distinct.36 John Miley (1813–1895) was a Methodist minister in Ohio and New York City up to 1873, when he became the Chairman of the Department of Systematic Theology at Drew University in New Jersey. His two-volume Systematic Theology was published toward the end of his life in 1892 and 1894. It became a standard text for Methodist seminarians and theologians.37 Miley warned about sheer materialistic or atheistic interpretations of evolution. He regarded the theory as an unprovable hypothesis, full of assumptions and dogmatism. While Miley questioned the scientific merit of evolution, he also seemed little threatened by it. “Whether God formed the body of primitive man immediately from the ground or mediately through a long process of genetic derivation,” Miley calmly observed, “does not in itself affect either his complete constitution as man or his place in Scripture, as related to theological anthropology.”38 As historians of science have noted, this period held many efforts at conciliation between scientific and religious accounts of the origins of human life. Central to his theological anthropology was Miley’s exposition of the cardinal doctrine that humanity was created “in the image of God.”39 Miley articulated those attributes of God he believed to be implanted in humanity. Humanity’s spiritual nature, intellect, morality, emotion, personality, and holiness were implicit in the doctrine, though these attributes were reflections, not full replications, of the divine attributes.40 The theological concept of communicable attributes thus enhanced the exceptional ways in which humans reflected God’s nature and attributes when this was, in principle, possible. Miley rejected the preexistence of souls, which could have made all humans really present and participatory or complicit with Adam’s disobedience.41 Miley also rejected “generic oneness of the race,” including traducianism.42 One key objection to a singular generic human being encompassing all was encapsulated in Miley’s query: “How can the essence be divided without dividing or destroying the personality?”43 Miley held that such a theory meant not merely Adam’s sin, but all subsequent sinning in human history would also necessarily be included in the guilt of current humanity, a position he found untenable.44 The systematic theologies of Hodge, Shedd, and Miley focused on issues such as the origin, transmissibility, and moral character of the soul. The terms of such an internal debate in theology could at times be recondite, and somewhat aloof from pressing social problems. In a time of social reform, the moral implications of the soul’s existence made impact on attitudes toward humans previously marginalized. Social reformers spoke about the soul in urgent life situations. Enslaved persons and women insisted that they were



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not merely bodies to be used and exploited, but souls with rational capacities to cultivate and an inherent dignity to be upheld. A society that could regard slaves and women as important merely because of their bodies served to imperil human exceptionalism. THE DIGNITY OF THE SOUL DESPITE SLAVERY Whereas Darwin’s theory was dethroning the human person and relegating such to the status of a mere animal, social reformers were insisting that women and slaves were fully human, and emphatically not mere animals. Such social meanings must be juxtaposed to the metaphysical, intellectual, philosophical, and theological debates in which discourse on the soul had been traditionally held. The rhetoric of the soul thus proved to be multivalent and at times dissonant in this era. The slave narrative is now seen as an essential genre for investigating the overall history of the transatlantic slave trade and abolitionism in the nineteenth century. The spiritual and political impulses of slave and former-slave autobiographies intertwined. “The ability of black autobiographers to signify on religious and political registers simultaneously lay largely in the elasticity of the language they used,” one historian notes. “The Bible itself provided a crucial source of the language of liberation—of salvation—that could be construed by black writers in highly creative ways.”45 Here the use of the soul as part of the overall rhetorical strategy in the defense of the dignity of the enslaved is my primary focus. One of the most feared documents among slaveholders was the searing indictment of slavery known as Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, by David Walker (1785–1830) of North Carolina, and later Boston, Massachusetts. His address was given in 1828 before the General Colored Association in Boston.46 This was published as an 1829 tract openly calling for slave insurrection. The vividness of Walker’s rhetoric can hardly be overstated. In his accounting, whites had murdered millions of slaves, stolen wives, mothers, fathers, and children out of “devilishness.” They were continuing to “chain, hand-cuff, and drag us about like rattle-snakes—shoot us down like wild bears,” and subjugate slaves in support of their own families, Walker proclaimed. Condemnation of the treatment of humans as if they were animals became a repeated trope in later slave narratives. “They know well, if we are men—and there is a secret monitor in their hearts which tells them we are—they know, I say, if we are men, and see them treating us in the manner they do, that there can be nothing in our hearts but death alone, for them.” The theological foundation of Walker’s rage was the imago Dei: “Man is a peculiar creature—he is the image of his God, though he may be subjected

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to the most wretched condition upon earth.” Such conditions however are incapable of erasing from the human breast “the spirit and feeling which constitute the creature man.” This inner awareness expressed a fundamental human nature: “because the God who made him after his own image planted it in his heart; he cannot get rid of it.”47 Thus, the treatment of black slaves as beasts was a fundamental violation of their inherent dignity as beings created in the very image of God. Their natural response was to rise up to throw off the chains of slavery, on Walker’s view, by violence if necessary. In his harrowing tale of slavery and escape, finally, to freedom in England, American Moses Roper (1815–1891) sought divine help in earning enough to purchase the freedom of his enslaved family members. In his prayerful petition for the help of Providence, in 1837 he wrote: “Should that Divine Being who made of one flesh all the kindreds of the earth, see fit that I should again clasp them to my breast, and see them in the reality of free men and free women, how shall I, a poor mortal, be enabled to sing a strain of praise sufficiently appropriate to such a boon from heaven.”48 The unity of all humankind in a created status, one humanity originating from one God, became a standard refrain in the genre. James Williams (b. 1805) described the life of the slave in stark terms. He spoke of being coerced to “to whip unsparingly” each man or woman, “who faltered in the task, or was careless in the execution of it, myself.” Such demeaning treatment flowed from the threat that he would become “subject at any moment to feel the accursed lash upon my own back, if feelings of humanity should perchance overcome the selfishness of misery, and induce me to spare and pity.”49 The use of slaves to abuse other slaves is a recurrent and tragic theme in the narrative literature. At times the abuse was more direct. Williams described in stark terms the cruel whipping of a pregnant woman by an inebriated overseer. In his drunken state this individual “made no distinction between the stout man and the feeble and delicate woman—the sick and the well.” In fact, this was not an isolated case, as “women in a far advanced state of pregnancy were driven out to the cotton field.” Yet Williams reported this master had a reputation as being better than some other masters. “At other times he seemed to have some consideration, and to manifest something like humanity,” Williams stated. He at least provided “a good supply of ham and cornmeal.”50 The phrase “something like humanity” served as itself a subtle but effective critique, however, as even this master’s character fell well short of the full humanity it had an obligation to manifest. The full humanity of slaves, in juxtaposition with the inhumanity of their masters, is a repeated theme in the slave narrative genre. Williams admired one slave, who went by the name of “Big Harry,” because “the weary and crushing weight of a life of slavery had not been able to subdue” him. On



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every plantation, Williams averred, there were “individuals whose look and air show that they have preserved their self-respect as men,—that with them the power of the tyrant ends with the coercion of the body—that the soul is free, and the inner man retaining the original uprightness of the image of God.”51 Here the human exceptionalism of the soul, as distinct from the body, remained intact, fulfilling a vital role in social reform rhetoric. It was an essential component of the argument against slavery, in that the enslaved are more than mere bodies to be manipulated at the will of another. Their dignity inhered in a vibrant intelligence, an active and inner life, and an enduring will, yearning for freedom. Frederick Douglass (c. 1817–1895) achieved high rank among abolitionists, and this was enhanced by his publicized conversations with President Lincoln over the issue. But much of that fame flowed from the eloquence of the pen of Douglass. He gave clear expression to the experience of slavery not merely as an adult but turned his attention to the effects upon him during his own tender years as a child. The expression of anguish in the songs of slaves made a deep impression on Douglass at an early age. He did not fully comprehend as a child slave “the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs.” Such songs bespoke “a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish.” Such songs have had enduring appeal and depth due to the seriousness of the injustice they have decried. “Every tone was a testimony against slavery,” recalled Douglass, “and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.” Douglass urged his readers to visit a plantation and listen to such songs “if any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery,” For Douglass, such songs were seldom an expression of happiness, and “the songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart.”52 The hardest period of slavery for Douglass was under the master known as Mr. Covey. “Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me,” he confided to his readers. “I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed . . . the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!”53 Even as a child, upon reading a book denouncing slavery and espousing human rights, thoughts of his own condition brought great pain. “The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers,” Douglass exclaimed. Contemplation of his condition through reading began to “torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish.” In his youth he even questioned the value of reading. “I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own.”54

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This unjustified reduction of slaves to the status of an animal, and even to make the state of animal existence momentarily preferable to the lot of the slave, recurred frequently across the pages of the slave narrative genre. Yet the theme could be deftly turned against slaveholders, indicating that they had unwittingly reduced themselves to the status of beasts by their own treatment of slaves. Their humanity, not that of their slaves, was the one in grave peril. James W. C. Pennington (1807–1870), a minister in the Presbyterian tradition, wrote about his period of enslavement in the state of Maryland many years after his freedom. When asked why he undertook this task after this lapse of time, he wrote, in 1850, to undermine terms common among Christian promoters of slavery terms such as: “kind masters” or “Christian masters,” or “the mildest form of slavery.” To such melioristic language he retorted, “The being of slavery, its soul and body, lives and moves in the chattel principle, the property principle, the bill of sale principle; the cart-whip, starvation, and nakedness, are its inevitable consequences . . . warring with the dispositions of men.”55 For Pennington the core injustice of slavery was its effect on the mind of the slave, especially in the denial of education. “There is one sin that slavery committed against me, which I can never forgive. It robbed me of my education; the injury is irreparable,” he lamented. In this context he discovered his own purpose. “If I know my own heart, I have no ambition but to serve the cause of humanity; all that I have desired or sought, has been to make me more efficient for good.” By contrast, the inhibition of slave education made of slavery a “vile monster” in the estimate of Reverend Pennington.56 Most poignant of all in Pennington’s account was a letter addressed to his former master, in the year 1844. Doubtless it was a cathartic experience to make this letter public, as a means of expressing in a more direct manner, an accountability upon slaveholders regarding their treatment of slaves. In this letter, Pennington stated that even in childhood, the injustice of slavery was apparent to him. “The nature which God gave me did not allow me to believe that you had any more right to me than I had to you, and that was just none at all.”57 Despite the fundamental wrong of the system, Pennington took pride in his work as a blacksmith, as well as his fundamental honesty and hard work on behalf of his master. He took umbrage at the master’s treatment of his father, mother, brothers, and sisters, by the repeated use of brutal insults. Pennington held him to account in the following terms: “You struck me with your walking-stick, called me insulting names, threatened me, swore at me, and became more and more wrathy in your conduct,” indeed, “I had good reason to believe that you were meditating serious evil against me.”58 Then in a standard refrain for evangelical preachers, Pennington remarkably pledged that he was now “taking the blood of my soul peaceably off your soul,” in a gesture of forgiveness. Lingering concern for his former master’s



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soul welled up in the following words: “You are now over seventy years of age, pressing on to eternity with the weight of these seventy years upon you. Is not this enough without the blood of some half-score of souls?” Even further, Pennington pled with him to “remember that you are soon to meet those whom you have held, and do hold in slavery, at the awful bar of the impartial Judge of all who doeth right.” The plea to his former master was therefore not merely a political one. It was certainly a personal appeal, but one deeply and pervasively theological, and rooted in the terms of Christianity and sacred text equally available to both men. In Solomon Northup’s (c. 1807–c. 1875) popular narrative Twelve Years a Slave, he described the attitude of “Young Master Epps.” Despite the fact that this figure “possessed some noble qualities,” he appeared incapable of using his powers of reason “to comprehend, that in the eye of the Almighty there is no distinction of color.” The problem was one of classification, often seen and reflected in scientific ethnographical texts of the era. “He looked upon the black man simply as an animal,” wrote Northup, “save in the gift of speech and the possession of somewhat higher instincts, and, therefore the more valuable.” Thus, even the slave’s communication abilities became commodified in the slaver’s reductionistic economic view of the enslaved. “To work like his father’s mules” including treating them to whipping, kicking, and scourging, “to address the white man with hat in hand, and eyes bent servilely on the earth, in his mind, was the natural and proper destiny of the slave.” Such attitudes were inculcated intergenerationally, as Northup expressed it: “Brought up with such ideas—in the notion that we stand without the pale of humanity—no wonder the oppressors of my people are a pitiless and unrelenting race.”59 Slave narratives and narratives of former slaves authored by women were also an essential component of the African-American insistence on human dignity. Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883) described the system of slavery as “soul-killing.” She wrote, “If there can be any thing more diametrically opposed to the religion of Jesus, than the working of this soul-killing system—which is as truly sanctioned by the religion of America as are her ministers and churches—we wish to be shown where it can be found.”60 Black exceptionalism, female exceptionalism, and human exceptionalism intertwined in her language of protest. In an incident in Georgetown in which a streetcar conductor sought to eject Sojourner Truth due to her race, the issue of her full humanity emerged in bold relief. While accompanying a white philanthropist doing benevolence work, Sojourner was pushed back by this conductor when she tried to board. “Get out of the way and let this lady come in,” he gruffly insisted. Sojourner replied, “Whoop! I am a lady too!” On another streetcar, the conductor took her by the shoulder and ordered her out. At this point the white philanthropist

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intervened. The conductor asked if Sojourner “belonged to her.” “‘No,’ replied Mrs. Haviland, ‘She belongs to humanity.’” The conductor then slammed Sojourner Truth against the door. “I told him I would let him know whether he could shove me about like a dog,” she recalled, “and said to Mrs. Haviland, Take the number of this car,” upon which he became more contrite. This action had dislocated her shoulder, requiring a hospital visit. After complaining to the streetcar company, and with the aid of a lawyer, “the fellow lost his situation.” Sojourner noted with satisfaction that the case “created a great sensation,” in the local press, and “before the trial was ended, the inside of the cars looked like pepper and salt.”61 Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) was the pen name of Linda Brent, whose Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was long contested in scholarship on the question of authenticity.62 The uniqueness of her story included its willingness to expose the sexual exploitation of female slaves by prominent white masters. Her master, Dr. Flint, began to try to fill fifteen-year-old Harriet’s “young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of.” Here was “a man forty years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of nature,” she objected. Yet the fundamental injustice of the relationship emerged with clarity. “He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things. My soul revolted against the mean tyranny.”63 The narrative of Harriet Jacobs turned the animal trope on its head. She wrote of victims who “make their escape from this wild beast of Slavery.” She decried the consent of northerners “to act the part of bloodhounds, and hunt the poor fugitive back into his den,” in a criticism of the Fugitive Slave Act, part of the Compromise of 1850.64 The defense of human rights could only rationally proceed on the foundation of the conviction that humans, including the enslaved, are exceptional, and comprised of both body and soul, and bear that status across racial differences. Treatment of humans as mere animals is a violation of their fundamental and inherent dignity, and debases both parties in the transaction. CONCLUSION We have seen both academic and social reform approaches to the topic of the soul. Philosophers, psychologists, social reformers, former slaves, and theologians all treated the soul in their varied contexts and according to their training and experiences. The soul’s origin and corruptibility, as well as its essential nature, were lasting themes in philosophical and theological discussions. Human souls as distinct from mere animal bodies led to criticisms of social practices that contradicted the dignity of the soul such as slavery. A



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divine origin for the soul should have undergirded notions of equal dignity for all who possessed a soul. Yet such was not yet the lived reality for many women and enslaved persons. The social reform ethos of the era, and the availability of cheap print, allowed their voices to be heard in new and more urgent ways. With the lack of a consensus view of the soul in the transatlantic world, the possibility of a cohesive understanding of humans as exceptional was imperiled in several ways. Whether it was panpsychism or traducianism which made the individual soul no longer unique, or materialism that made the soul nonexistent, or experimental psychology that reduced soul to mind and finally to brain chemistry, or chattel slavery that denied the full dignity of the soul while merely valuing the body regarding African Americans, or chauvinism that restrained the souls of women, all contributed to a fragmented view of the soul that resulted in its marginalization. If indeed the balanced and harmonious union of substantively distinct features of the human, body and soul, is essential to the upholding of human exceptionalism, exceptionalism was imperiled. One dimension of human dignity is the recognition that the human predicament involves the pervasive presence of human sin, or the moral dimension. Sin was of significant fascination in the transatlantic world, even as it was subject to several qualifications and redefinitions. The received theological tradition included revived discussions on the relative weights of original and actual sin in human experience. In the next chapter a few nineteenth-century assessments of human corruption, including modern interpretations of degeneration, are explored. NOTES 1. Peter J. Bowler, Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity from Darwin to Intelligent Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 78. 2. See Sanjib Kumar Ghosh, “Human Cadaveric Dissection: A Historical account from Ancient Greece to the Modern Era,” Anatomy & Cell Biology 48 (2015), 153–69, and Nuno Henrique Franco, “Animal Experiments in Biomedical Research: A Historical Perspective,” Animals 3 (2013), 238–73. 3. See C. James Goodwin, A History of Modern Psychology, 3rd ed. (Danvers, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 82–87. 4. David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 122–6. 5. Goodwin, 103, 104–7. 6. Ibid., 126–28.

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7. Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual (New York: Macmillan, 1901), 240–41. 8. Josiah Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy: A Critique of the Bases of Conduct and of Faith (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1885), 3. 9. Ibid., 4. 10. Ibid., 6. 11. Ibid., 13–14. 12. Goodwin, 46. 13. See David Hartley, Observations on Man: His Frame, His Duty and His Expectations (London: Leake and Frederick, 1749), 535–36. 14. David Hothersall, History of Psychology, 4th ed. (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University, 2004), 72–73. 15. Goodwin, 53–55. 16. Ibid., 75. 17. Ibid., 76. 18. Alexander Bain, Mind and Body: The Theories of their Relation (New York: Appleton, 1889), 193–94. For a succinct overview of developments of experimental psychology in Germany from Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) to Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), see Goodwin, 69–75; 107–120. 19. Bain, 195. 20. Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), xv. 21. Bain, 196. 22. Brad Pasenak, “The Mind is a Metaphor,” accessed December 8, 2021, http:​//​ metaphors​.iath​.virginia​.edu​/metaphors​/17922. 23. Thomas Henry Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (New York: D. Appleton, 1863), 132. For an outright denial of immortality, see John Stuart Mill, “Utility of Religion,” in Essential Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. Max Lerner (New York: Bantam, 1961), 402–32. 24. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 526–27. 25. T. H. Huxley, “The Views of Hume, Kant, and Whately upon the Logical Basis of the Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul,” The Metaphysical Society, November 17, 1870, accessed December 6, 2021, https:​//​mathcs​.clarku​.edu​/huxley​/Mss​/VIDIS​ .html. 26. Lester F. Ward, The Psychic Factors of Civilization (Boston, MA: Ginn & Company, 1893), 46–47. 27. Ibid., 49. 28. Jon H. Roberts, “The Science of the Soul: Naturalizing the Mind in Great Britain and North America,” in Science without God: Rethinking the History of Scientific Naturalism, ed. Peter Harrison and Jon H. Roberts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 176–78. 29. Christopher G. White, Unsettled Minds: Psychology and the American Search for Spiritual Assurance, 1830–1940 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 196. See extended discussion of several figures who wrestled to harmonize



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Darwinism and orthodox theology in James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to come to terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 245–345. 30. E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 380. 31. Augustine appears to have left the question open through much of his career. He held that there were four viable options, according to Augustine scholar Roland Teske’s analysis, summarized briefly: 1) traducianism; 2) creationism; 3) preexistence and divine animation; and 4) preexistence and auto-animation. Augustine leaned toward a preexistence for the soul but remained unsure of the definitive answer. See Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, s.v. “Soul.” 32. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. II (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Co., 1874), 65–71. 33. Dictionary of Christianity in America, s.v. “Shedd, William Greenough Thayer (1820–1894).” 34. William Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, vol. II (1888. Reprint Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1971), 19, 30. 35. Ibid., 67. 36. Ibid., 68–69. 37. Dictionary of Christianity in America, s.v. “Miley, John.” 38. John Miley, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Eaton & Mains, 1892), 358. 39. Genesis 1:26–28. 40. Miley, 407–8. 41. Ibid., 472–73. 42. Ibid., 475–81. 43. Ibid., 480. 44. Ibid., 484. 45. Philip Gould, “The Rise, Development, and Circulation of the Slave Narrative,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey A. Fisch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 14. 46. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 27. 47. David Walker, Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles: Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America (Boston, MA: D. Walker, 1830), 69. 48. Moses Roper, Narrative of My Escape from Slavery (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003), 42–43. 49. James Williams, Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave (New York: Anti-slavery Society, 1838), 43. 50. Ibid., 64–65. 51. Ibid., 53–54.

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52. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself, ed. W. Phillips and W. Lloyd Garrison (Boston, MA: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), 37–8. 53. Ibid., 94–95. 54. Ibid., 67. 55. James W. C. Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith; or, Events in the History of James Pennington, 3rd ed. (London: C. Gilpin, 1850), iv–v. 56. Ibid., 56–57. 57. Ibid., 79. 58. Ibid., 80. 59. Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (Philadelphia, PA: John E. Potter, 1853), 261–62. 60. Olive Gilbert, Narrative of Sojourner Truth (Battle Creek, MI: Olive Gilbert, 1878), 36. 61. Ibid., 186–87. 62. The authenticity of the work is defended by Stephanie A. Smith, “Harriet Jacobs: A Case History of Authentication,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey A. Fisch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 189–200. 63. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Lydia Maria Child (Boston, MA: Author, 1861), 44–45. 64. Ibid., 56.

Chapter 10

Original Sin, Degeneration, Theology, and Science

During the nineteenth century debates raged over the origin, scope, and impact of original sin upon humanity. Were humans flawed by nature in fundamental ways? Did God create humans already destined to moral failure? Could guilt be transmitted from a guilty ancestor such as Adam to his descendants? Was the body or flesh evil in and of itself, or was it merely a locus for environmental factors and interpersonal relations leading to evil? Was conscious awareness of their moral condition and responsibilities central to assessments of human culpability? Social implications of notions of hereditary depravity began to arise in new, scientifically oriented guises. Were humans to be seen as equally “sinners,” or was there a reason to separate persons, and even races and classes, by degrees of depravity or degeneration? Could degeneration be understood not merely in the old terms of sin, but in terms of the newer theories of physiological defect? These and other questions permeated Protestant discourse. When the older categories of sin were displaced by accounts of hereditary or environmental degeneration, elites could place other humans into socially and morally “fit” and “unfit” categories. Degeneration theory set the stage for the eugenics movement early in the next century. In this chapter numerous nineteenth-century accounts of the origin and transmission of human sin are discussed. The tragedy of the fallen human condition and the anxieties occasioned by moral failure constitute a unique hindrance to the flourishing and manifestation of the divine likeness in the human life and experience. Theological voices debated the meaning and scope of sin, and forged theories of how it may be overcome. Here I sketch a portrait of fragmentation of theological accounts of human sin during the era in question, while suggesting some of the ramifications of this portrait for subsequent developments in the social arena. 187

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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE ON ORIGINAL SIN Consideration of the changing ideas about sin in the nineteenth century could start at various points. Due to his prominence, and frequent mentions as a major influence upon other figures in disparate disciplines, literary giant Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) stands at the front of this discussion. Scholars have long noted his profound influence upon ordinary religious folk as well as theologians in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Most notably, his 1825 work Aids to Reflection represented a rethinking of ancient categories of religious thought. For our purposes the focus shall be on his chapter in this work entitled “On Original Sin.” At the outset, Coleridge bypassed the question of the bare existence of original sin, taking this for granted.1 The existential weight of the doctrine on Coleridge, a genius who struggled as an opium addict, may be discerned in the poignancy of his cry, regarding sin, “For my part I cannot but confess that to be, which I feel and groan under, and by which all the world is miserable.”2 Unlike many scholars who followed him, Coleridge was less interested in the metaphysical dimensions of the fall of Adam and Eve, and more fascinated by its psychological impact. He started with Adam, who “fell under the evils of a sickly body, and a passionate and ignorant soul.” Regarding the human progenitor, “His sin left him ignorant, his ignorance made him foolish and unreasonable,” Coleridge insisted. Adam was “to choose when he could not reason,” and, to complicate his situation even further, “had passions most strong when he had his understanding most weak.”3 Coleridge emphasized the simplicity of Adam, echoing second-century church father Irenaeus. This approach stood in stark contrast to the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century stress upon the genius of Adam, and its compromise by a catastrophic fall, in Protestant thought.4 When it came to describing the social damage of sin, the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner turned to a nautical metaphor: the shipwreck of the soul. “Like ships in a storm, every one alone hath enough to do to outride it,” Coleridge mourned. But the human condition led soon to “the intolerable calamity of their mutual concussion.” The damage is rendered worse when the ship is not only tossed by the storm, but is “violently dashed” against other vessels. “So it is in mankind,” lamented the epic poet.5 The second metaphor to capture Coleridge’s attention was that of a chain. Here the links in the chain of cause and effect connecting us to Adam must be properly understood. In the case of the transmission of original sin, “a cause amounts to little more than an antecedent. At the utmost it means only a conductor of the causative influence.”6 In lengthy footnotes, which make up nearly half the chapter, Coleridge delved more deeply into the meaning



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of terms such as “nature.” Nature is “a power subject to the law of continuity,” discerned by human understanding “only under the form of cause and effect.” Yet for Coleridge, there was a simultaneity or reciprocity to cause and effect, such that the effect can easily be perceived as the cause, and vice versa. A desire to free the will led him to conceive of the will in its opposition to nature. Coleridge introduced the term “spirit,” or that which is “opposed to nature,” and “raised above nature, as self-determining spirit—this namely, that is a power of originating an act or state.”7 In this Coleridge seemed to be articulating agent causation, or what would later be called the libertarian position in free will debates. For our purposes, we can discern human exceptionalism as upheld in the idea of the human spirit transcending or even overruling mere nature. For something to qualify as sin, “it must be original,” but if it “has not its origin in the will,” but only known by various terms such as: “calamity, deformity, disease, or mischief,” then for Coleridge “sin it cannot be.”8 As an illustration he turned to the “mad-house,” wherein passions and appetites may cause all sorts of actions, but “neither law nor humanity permit us to condemn the actor of sin.” In a court of law, the “maniac” is no longer a free agent, and thus must be absolved from guilt for the act. Reason is therefore the condition of free will.9 Later, Coleridge connected the will with the spiritual dimension of the human person: “Sin therefore is spiritual evil: but the spiritual in man is the will.” Sin must have an origin in spirit, and since God as Spirit is not its origin, sin must originate in the human spirit.10 At the end of the day, for Coleridge, human sinfulness stood as “a mystery, that is, a fact, which we can see, but cannot explain.” He turned to the disease metaphor. If a doctor is called in and prescribes a medicine, the patient may not understand either the disease or how its cure works, but can nonetheless experience a restoration to health again. For her part, the patient must take the medicine as prescribed. In the moral arena the medicine is the spiritual disciplines prescribed by the church. The doctor says, “Ask me not how such a disease can be conceived possible. Enough for the present that you know it to be real: and I come to cure the disease, not to explain it.”11 Both explanation and cure were of great transatlantic concern when it came to the doctrine of sin. In the American context, Nathaniel William Taylor was wrestling anew with this troubling arena of human failure. NATHANIEL WILLIAM TAYLOR CHALLENGES NATIVE DEPRAVITY Nathaniel William Taylor (1786–1858) was a Congregationalist minister, professor of theology, and close confidant and protégé of Yale’s Timothy

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Dwight (1752–1817). Taylor is often credited with the rise of the New Haven Theology which deeply modified the Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards, whose Congregationalist tradition Taylor sought both to continue and to reform. Taylor was recruited by Dwight, and in 1822 began to serve as the Dwight Professor of Didactic Theology at Yale, where he served until his death. His views were set forth in the Quarterly Christian Spectator in the 1820s and 1830s. A sermon entitled Concio ad Clerum before a gathering of Congregational ministers in 1828 served as one historic inception point for his role as a theological controversialist. Our focus is Taylor’s modification of the doctrine of original sin. He labored to excise from its Augustinian roots the notion of original guilt. In elevating the role of free will, redefining the divine moral government, denying that sin plays a part in God’s plan to save, and allowing that the unregenerate can do good, Taylor’s theology sparked internecine debate among Calvinists, but also betook to itself a broader cultural shift toward Scottish Common-Sense Realism.12 Posthumously published in 1859, Taylor’s Essays, Lectures, Etc. upon Select Topics in Revealed Theology marked his mature thought on sin and human nature. At the outset he offered this definition of human depravity: “All mankind (without the interposition of divine grace) are, in respect to their first moral character, wholly and positively sinful.” Taylor qualified this teaching in the following ways. First, not all human mental phenomena are sinful. Secondly, not all humans are as bad as they could be. Thirdly, comparatively, not all are equally wicked; fourthly, he denied that “they are simply destitute of holiness in distinction from any thing positively sinful”; and fifthly, we cannot deny there are humans in the world who by grace are good.13 Taylor was at pains to overturn a commonplace assertion among theologians, that “to say that man is depraved without the interposition of grace, is the same thing as to say he is depraved by nature.” He found this routine move illegitimate and “obviously incorrect.” Admission must be made of “the circumstances of men” as well as nature as the source for depravity, per Taylor.14 He sought to foreclose any loss of individual responsibility, and to insist on the obligation of human repentance. Taylor defended the universality of sin with both Old Testament and New Testament texts that would be familiar to his readership. He also cited the “universal call to repent” as evidence of universal sin. The contrast between the new person and the old person, the new creature replacing the old creature, gave Taylor further evidence of the corruption of the old.15 Taylor warned preachers not to accuse their auditors of an overt hatred for God. They would lose credibility among those who “have never had such distinct views of God” especially when “you cannot convince them of the contrary.”16



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Taylor sought to tease apart the sources of human impulses. Two categories predominated his discussion: “involuntary states of constitutional propensities” as distinguished from “specific volitions—acts of the will—choices in which the mind chooses the gratification of some of its constitutional propensities.” For Taylor, in neither case could such acts be construed as morally good, because they do not derive their motivation from the supreme love of God.17 Terms such as “lovely” and “good” when applied to human virtuous action were not, in his estimate, moral terms. Such terms bespoke fitness, beauty, or utility. But none of them rose to the level of morality.18 Here he contrasted David Hume’s notion of moral excellence with the standard upheld by the Christian, namely, the supreme love of God. Hume’s standard reduced morality to mere utility. Taylor colorfully named Hume “this Prince of Infidels,” who would substitute moral sensations for the divine love in the human heart.19 When Taylor arrived at his analysis of the contested doctrine of original sin, he restated the doctrine: “that as a consequence of the sin of Adam, a corrupt or depraved nature is propagated to all his posterity.” Taylor took special pains to refute one approach to this propagation: Imputation.20 He denied the common claim that the Jews held to the doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s sin to his progeny. He averred that “in the ancient Greek Church the doctrine of Imputation cannot be found. Figures such as Origen, Chrysostom, and Cyril of Alexandria held death not to be a punishment, but merely a consequence of Adamic sin.” The Latin church, however, had errantly served as the source of the doctrine of imputation. This for Taylor and other critics stemmed from “the false mode of interpreting the words of Paul in Romans 5:12–13” in the Latin Vulgate translation from the Greek. It turns out several interpretations of Imputation had developed over the centuries. Taylor delineated them as 1) The Augustinian; 2) Representation or Federal Headship; 3) The Middle Knowledge or God’s “foresight of the consent of posterity in Adam’s sin”; 4) Sovereign transfer of Adam’s sin to his posterity; and 5) “Putation” or the view that “God considers and treats the posterity of Adam as if they were guilty, or had committed his sin,” and are liable to the punishment thereof.21 For Taylor imputation is unnecessary because posterity “are born with a nature which is sinful and corrupt, and which has become so, exactly in that manner in which Adam’s nature became corrupt.”22 Here is where his controversial theological conclusions emerged, especially in the eyes of Taylor’s traditional Calvinist detractors. Taylor announced a shift in theology. He asked: “Is the doctrine of our oneness in Adam and sinning in him essential to Orthodoxy?” He answered that “this doctrine has not only been denied for a long time by the Orthodox of New England, but is also denied extensively, probably by a majority of the Orthodox clergy of the United States.”23 Absent

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modern methods of surveying the opinions of clergy on this matter, such was a somewhat impressionistic conclusion. For example, most of those trained at Princeton rather than at Yale would have objected to this construal of the beliefs of clergy.24 Taylor’s own position on original sin rendered each person like Adam in several ways. Each person has been created morally upright. Both Adam and his posterity sinned as a voluntary act. Guilt was imputed to Adam and to posterity in the same way, as the due consequence of having sinned. “Thus the only original sin of Adam’s posterity is the sin which each of them, as one moral person with Adam, being like him created upright.” In consequence, “it is this sin, with all its corruption and guilt, and with this only, that each of the posterity is born, not created.” Taylor concluded that “each individual of the race, not God, is the author of his own sin.”25 By asserting that God created the species upright, Taylor thought that this “‌‌‌‌should clear God from the charge of creating the descendants of the first pair sinners, and so being the author of sin; a fact which would bear them out in saying that ‘God formed us in his own image.’” The corruption that occurred, therefore, “is not the work of God, but the consequence of OUR degenerating from OUR primitive condition; that man was favored with rectitude by the divine goodness.” Taylor added “that it is a depravity which did not originate from nature, but an adventitious quality or accident, and not a substantial property originally innate; that it was the same sin in number and in kind as committed by Adam and his posterity.” On the key issue of original and transmissible guilt, he further noted: “it is not a guilt additional to that of the first apostasy, but identical with it—the sin by which the species rebelled; that moral dispositions must be concreated with human nature, though God did not create a sinful disposition.”26 This raised an oft-noted paradox. God created humans, yet humans were sinners. In what ways, then, could God be exonerated from making sinners? Taylor saved his strongest objections for the theory of physical depravity. Under this view, “God creates man with a physical or constitutional property or attribute of the soul, which consists in a propensity, taste, relish, or disposition to sin, and, which is in itself sinful, and the cause of all sin.”27 Taylor enumerated his objections to such a view of physical depravity as follows. The propensity toward sin is not identical with sin. If it is, then a vicious circle is created in which sin is the cause of sin, when it is the very factor in need of explanation. The origin of the sinful disposition is not answered by this equation between propensity and sin per se. Taylor saw terms like “disposition, temper, affection of mind,” widely believed to be antecedent to actions, to be mental preferences, or a set of mental acts of an agent. As such, none of these can be described as “a constitutional property of the soul.”28



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In the fifty-first psalm, ancient King David had lamented: “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5 KJV). This statement had long served the cause of those who promoted natural depravity from birth. Taylor held that “David here uses figurative phraseology.” Taken literally he would be indicting his own mother, not himself, and the tenor of the psalm is David’s own personal guilt, including his sin with Bathsheba and conspiracy to have her husband killed. “‌‌‌‌We are then obliged to consider the language of the Psalmist as figurative, and either to exclude wholly the notion of sin prior to birth, or else deny the principle laid down by the apostle that children do no good or evil prior to birth (Romans 9:11).” The emphasis of David is not physical depravity, but voluntary action.29 What then does the phrase “Mankind are depraved by nature” mean? Here Taylor sought to clear the ground of flawed interpretations. Depravity cannot mean that anything “created or propagated” as a property of the human mind may be construed as sinful. To assert that God would create a sinful nature in humans is, according to Taylor, “monstrous and revolting” and fails to acknowledge all are now created in God’s image (James 3:9). Depravity cannot mean that Adam and his descendants “are one moral person, or one moral being, and therefore his posterity “acted in his act or sinned in his sin.” For Taylor such would be a violation of “the reason my Maker has given me,” as well as of the prophetic text from the eighteenth chapter of the prophet Ezekiel, that “the soul that sinneth shall die.” Depravity cannot mean or imply “that any of the constitutional propensities of the mind are sinful.” Adam before the fall had these propensities, and Jesus Christ was tempted in all ways yet was without sin. Depravity cannot be in the mere excitement of these propensities, so long as a person “duly subordinates all his desires of inferior good to the will of God.” In fact, this is the positive good of self–discipline and of testing. Depravity does not teach that there is any disposition which is the cause of all sin. Sin must have a cause that is not itself sin, to assert otherwise is for Taylor “self-evident absurdity, even the most palpable nonsense!”30 What did Taylor mean, then, by “depravity by nature”? Here he argued: “I mean simply that nature is the occasional moral cause of the universal sinfulness of mankind. I mean that nature is a cause therefore, which, though certainly followed with depravity, is yet as truly subject to man’s powers of moral agency, as it would be were all his acts perfectly holy.”31 Taylor offered commentary on the fifth chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the classic New Testament text on the relation of Adamic sin to human sin generally. Here he emphasized that even in the fallen state of humanity, God’s grace and mercy can be seen. Taylor construed the “mode of connection” tying Adam’s first sin and its results to his progeny under the heading “God’s Sovereign Constitution.” This he set in contrast with “the mode of a strict legal procedure.” God sovereignly ordained “an economy of

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grace immediately after the sin of Adam.” Why would God do this? “So that his posterity commence their moral probation under a system of both law and grace.”32 In essence, the sentence of death in its fullest sense, eternal separation from God, was mercifully suspended, and the human race was placed in a probationary condition. “The sentence to temporal death under this economy, respected not Adam only but his whole posterity.” Human mortality was “on account of sin, indirectly” as a result of Adam’s sin, but “directly because of their own sin.”33 Taylor sought to avoid the other popular view of original sin that held it as an imputed sin, or a legal penalty. He asserted the indirect quality of the relation between Adamic sin and death, to prove that “both Jews and Gentiles— all the descendants of Adam, in consequence of his sin, are sinners, and justly exposed to the final condemnation.”34 How exactly indirect culpability truly differs from direct culpability in Taylor’s approach remains murky. Was it a distinction without a true difference? According to Gary Dorrien, Taylor’s views must be seen as a middling position between the extremes of Unitarianism and the older Calvinism, amongst whom debates raged in the middle of the nineteenth century. “To Taylor,” writes Dorrien, “this was the appropriate orthodox response to the Unitarian charge that the Calvinist doctrine of imputed Adamic evil made God the author of sin.” This was in effect also philosophically grounded in Scottish Common Sense Realism.35 Mark Noll describes the theological shift, which was already made public by Taylor in a famous 1829 sermon, in individualistic terms: “Taylor thus transferred the onus of sinfulness from character to actions—people were alienated from God because of their own choices and not because of the sinful nature they shared with all other humans.”36 E. Brooks Holifield has noted the lines of criticism leveled at Taylor by his detractors in the mid-nineteenth century, many of whom suspected his views of promoting Pelagianism, a heresy resisted by St. Augustine in the fifth century.37 Human nature was not by itself the problem for humans in the experience of sin, but the misuse of a unique conscious moral awareness and the exercise of a human will embedded within that human nature led to moral failure. ALBRECHT RITSCHL ON ORIGINAL SIN Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889) was professor of theology at Bonn (1851– 1864) and then Göttingen (1864–1889). His writings were wide-ranging, surveying Christian notions of perfection, human conscience, the school of Pietism, and the relationship between theology and metaphysics. He revisioned dogmatic theology to raise it above the partisan fray of denominational



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disputations. His most famous work however was his The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation. By the third edition of 1888 Ritschl boasted “from the growing sale of my writing” that many were no longer “to be intimidated from learning from me directly” rather than relying upon strategies such opponents had used “to falsify and cast suspicion upon my theological views.”38 Ritschl defined justification and reconciliation in terms of divine attributes that apply and extend to people, who receive it subjectively. Certain presuppositions grounded justification as a religious truth, including the idea of God, the role and extent of human sin, and the role of the person and work of Christ. Ritschl defended the necessity of justification and explored the relation between justification and religious functions and human moral activity.39 At the outset of his chapter “The Doctrine of Sin” Ritschl acknowledged that if there is to be reconciliation, “it must be presupposed that all men are sinners.” He perceived sin as most recognizable from within the horizon of the reconciled community, the church. The focus here is the keen self-awareness of actual sin that believers must face if they are to grasp their reconciliation. Ritschl took issue with reformer Martin Luther, who placed belief in the dogma of original sin on the same level as belief in God. Here Ritschl contrasted Luther with Augustine. According to Ritschl, Augustine had merely adopted his doctrine of original sin “as an inference from his estimate of the worth of the Christian salvation.”40 For Ritschl any doctrine of sin is incomprehensible apart from a prior consideration of the good, and of Jesus Christ as the exemplar of goodness. This made deeply problematic the doctrine of original sin as something natural to humanity because it would render the person of the sinless Christ as “an anomalous phenomenon in human history,” and would “make the historical appearance of Christ unintelligible.” If by contrast Jesus Christ became the primary standard of measurement not just of the believer’s view of the world, but of the human self, the person of Christ would become the ground of every doctrine, including the doctrine of sin.41 The emphasis on Jesus as a moral exemplar for humanity was part of a prominent trend in the theological anthropology of the era, though Ritschl also maintained a place for a doctrine of justification in the work of Christ. Ritschl held the distinction between sin and crime as important, even when involving the same action. “A given action, in the light of a human society and the law of the State, is a wrong and a crime,” he observed. “But the same action is sin,” he added, “when it springs from indifference towards God, as the Benefactor and Governor of human life.” Thus, sin is a religious idea, whereas crime, per se, is not.42 This distinction would be blurred many times

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in the ensuing decades as social reformers obfuscated the line between crime and sin, both in rhetoric and in social control through social policy.43 Ritschl believed he had located a weakness in the doctrine of original sin as articulated by both Augustine and Luther. These theologians had emphasized Adam’s sin as the natural inheritance of all his descendants, and as a maximal form of sin. Because it was the abuse of free will in Adam, who held free will in its purist form, they portrayed original sin as a catastrophic failure that affected not merely Adam but all his progeny. Ritschl interpreted the church father thus: “Augustine’s doctrine of original sin has for its outcome the thought that each individual descendant of our first parents is of necessity burdened with the highest degree of sin, and that in this respect all men are alike.”44 Ritschl held that individual responsibility for evil, whether habit or tendency, cannot be squared with the belief that “the individual action is the involuntary accident of a determining force of inborn inclination.” Education presupposes that the child has some “impulse to the good.” Education would be rendered untenable if opposed by “the tendency of the child’s will to evil and of the determining power of evil, as asserted in the doctrine of original sin.”45 For Ritschl, the degrees of sin we observe as varying from individual to individual in society is incompatible with a dogma of original sin “which asserts of all the descendants of Adam an equally high degree of sinful inclination.”46 Augustine developed the deduction of “inherited sin from the natural relation between children and their sinful parents,” all the way back to Adam, through misreading Paul’s letter to the Romans.47 To combine the notion of inherited sin with the notion of personal guilt was to lapse into irrationality, in Ritschl’s estimation.48 By contrast, he held that “since Paul neither asserts nor suggests the transmission of sin by generation, he offers no other reason for the universality of sin . . . than the sinning of all individual men.”49 Ritschl sought to expose the dichotomy between two standard notions in the Christian doctrine of sin. First, human concupiscence in the form of immoral or inordinate desire stands opposed to the divine law. Concupiscence “constitutes, in the form of original sin, the basal form of the conception of sin.” Second, a religious standard marks as sin “indifference and mistrust towards God which are involved in unlawful and criminal conduct.” For Ritschl, these two ideas “occupy different planes.” He believed the reformers had so emphasized concupiscence that they had lost sight of the deeper problem of sin as mistrust toward God when the latter was more foundational to the biblical doctrines of sin and redemption. Indifference and mistrust toward God were the underlying causes of concupiscence. Indifference and mistrust toward God are themselves acts of the will, and not natural responses to God.



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“But if these anti-religious functions can be proved to be merely habitual, not hereditary defects, then by laying the emphasis upon them we wreck the notion of original sin.”50 Ritschl exemplified a shift in Protestant thinking away from prioritizing hereditary guilt because of original sin, and toward individual guilt in an emphasis on actual sin. Yet many Protestant social reformers, having left behind universal hereditary guilt in Adam, would still maintain belief in hereditary sin through degeneration theory and, eventually, a social reform movement known as eugenics. Their focus, however, would no longer be upon acknowledging their own solidarity with the rest of fallen humanity, but a selective identification of vice-ridden groups within the body politic as objects of castigation, restriction, and punishment. The point of connection between older theological accounts of intergenerational human failure and the new science of heredity was the concept of degeneration. THE RISE OF DEGENERATION THEORY Outside the discourse of theology social reform texts show a growing belief in the power of degeneration, starting with individuals, but spilling over into families, communities, nations, and finally civilization itself. The rather inchoate fears of the late nineteenth century found a center in degeneration theory. In a sense, degeneration theory became something of a secular doctrine of original sin. However, the term “degeneration” became like a wax nose, with near infinite pliability in its rhetorical usefulness for a variety of historical figures. Here I shall only briefly survey a few major tomes treating degeneration as another form of the erosion of human dignity as the century moved toward its sunset. Sir Edwin Ray Lankester (1847–1929) served as professor of zoology at the universities of London and Oxford. He was director of the British Museum from 1898 to 1907. His lasting contribution to science was in discovering a parasite key to understanding malaria. He served as the President of the Marine Biological Association in 1892. He was knighted in 1907. Though many promoters of degeneration theory became ardent eugenicists by the early twentieth century, Lankester opposed eugenics and promoted educational reform as the preferred solution to societal decay.51 Lankester sought to ally degeneration theory with Darwinism, and thus confer upon it the imprimatur of science. For alongside upward moves in complexity in natural history there were also abundant examples of degeneration. This resulted from an organism no longer utilizing features that had been putatively acquired during evolutionary progress in its ancestral history.

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Lankester applied this insight from lower life forms to humanity. He wrote: “Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained, seem to lead as a rule to Degeneration; just as an active healthy man sometimes degenerates when he becomes suddenly possessed of a fortune.”52 The ensuing decades saw major advances in the science of heredity, and Lankester’s nurture-based educational emphasis would be overshadowed by a hereditarian interpretation of human degeneration. Lankester applied degeneration theory widely as the monograph progressed. Higher states of civilization over time “have decayed and given place to low and degenerate states.” Lankester regarded as an error any sweeping or universal application of this phenomenon as an explanation for all “the savage races of mankind.” Still, “there is no doubt that many savage races as we at present see them are actually degenerate and are descended from ancestors possessed of a relative elaborate civilization.” As specific instances, Lankester cited Central America, Egypt, the Fuegians, and Australia, as exemplars of the degeneration thesis.53 Such prejudicial language, jarring as it is today, was commonplace in the ethnographic literature of the era. Here we see the shift from the universal focus of the theological tradition of original sin to the divisive hierarchical focus of degeneration theory. Lankester next turned to the real concern of his essay. “With regard to ourselves, the white races of Europe, the possibility of degeneration seems to be worth some consideration,” he lamented. He saw the notion of inevitable progress that many of his countrymen imbibed as an instance of “unreasoning optimism.” He warned that “it is well to remember that we are as subject to the general laws of evolution, and are as likely to degenerate as to progress.” Compared with the achievements of the ancient Greeks, modern Europeans possess a disfigured modern civilization still rife with falsehoods, superstitions, “self-inflicted torturing of mind,” and “reiterated substitution of wrong for right.” Using the analogy of humans to mollusks, Lankester offered a sobering zoological claim: “Possibly we are drifting, tending to the condition of intellectual Barnacles or Ascidians.”54 Stepping back from this note of pessimism, Lankester then offered some hope to avert disaster. “We are as a race more fortunate than our ruined cousins—the degenerate Ascidians.” Humans control their destinies by hopeful labor, and by “a knowledge of man’s place in the order of nature.” This hinted again at human exceptionalism, at least in the cultural component. Civilized humanity “may be able duly to estimate that which makes for, and that which makes against, the progress of the race.” Great Britain served, in his mind, as the vanguard of this hope. “The full and earnest cultivation of Science—the Knowledge of Causes—is that to which we have to look for the protection of our race—even of this English branch of it—from relapse and



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degeneration.”55 Some cultures, therefore, were apparently more exceptional than others. Whereas Lankester’s solution, education, was widely touted as the anodyne to many of the world’s problems at the waning of the century, it was not enough for other promoters of degeneration theory. One such figure was American physician Eugene S. Talbot. His Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs, and Results represented many who were deeply disturbed about trends seen as harmful to society, lumped conveniently under the term degeneration. Physicians were playing a major role in warning the public of degenerate stock, mostly the urban underclass, that simmered threateningly in the growing cities of the transatlantic world. The language and rhetoric of disease and contagion was routinely applied to persons seen as both unhygienic and fecund.56 For Talbot, the goal was to protect the family. His solution for protecting the family was “to stop the production of degenerates.” He noted two major measures in social policy that, by 1898, were being tried in civilized nations. The first approach was to regulate marriage. To Talbot this was an ineffective strategy. First, this could only prevent the most egregious forms of degeneration. Secondly, this did nothing to constrain human passions, and to keep degenerates from finding and mating with one another. He was for liberalization of marriage laws to reduce the occurrence of “illicit relationships of permanent character” which only, in his view, produce more degenerates. The second approach was “castration,” and by extension other forms of sterilization then beginning to be employed in asylums of Europe and America. This course was objectionable to Talbot, because it “ignores completely the rights of individuals under the English common law” and the U.S. Constitution. Talbot favored a Lamarckian “inheritance of acquired characteristics” idea of heredity. He saw little difference between the criminals who were being targeted for castration and the “hysteric offspring of good family.” One offspring was as likely to be degenerate as the other due to environmental factors abetting degeneration.57 Talbot proposed multiple approaches to combating degeneration other than marriage regulation and castration. He called for more attention to educating females to guard them from “the factors of degeneracy during puberty and during matronhood.” Then, as soon as children are born, they should be trained “during the first months of life.” The aim was to teach the infant self-control. This included training the infant not to “expect attention at every moment it cries,” and by carefully attending to real wants, while ignoring “caprice.” Anticipating twentieth-century behaviorism, Talbot pronounced, “With this regularity many of the factors underlying caprice, peevishness, and anger can be prevented in the earliest months of life.” The child should be watched carefully for signs of degeneration, including convulsions, screaming fits, night

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terrors, and abnormal bodily functions. If the child is identified as having mental degeneration, then Talbot recommended from early on “physical and mental training in the special asylums for imbeciles and idiots.” He asserted that such facilities offer “such splendid results that it is surprising that parents, and especially those charged with bad heredity, are not encouraged and advised by their physicians and friends” to place their children in asylums in their first year. As the children mature, they should be trained in such a way as to avoid “mental and physical overwork” and that “young brains must not be over-excited with worry or emotionalism.” Further, “the will of children ought to be cultivated and strengthened.” Finally, “their minds should be methodically educated.”58 If Talbot’s solutions seem vague, disturbing, and antiseptic, a strong contrast in rhetorical style is evoked upon reading the writings of Max Nordau (1849–1923). Co-founder of the Zionist movement, and popular social critic, Nordau would eventually break with radical Zionism by 1911. A Hungarian-French physician by training, Nordau seemed keenly attuned to what he saw as societal degeneration across Europe. His focus was not family dynamics, but cultural formation and cultural degeneration. His rhetoric was strongly, even stridently, moralistic in tone, and the racialized component is disturbing to the twenty-first century reader. Nordau promoted the idea that mental degeneration may be read from the external features of the human body, particularly the “asymmetry of face and cranium,” blending phrenology with the criminological theories of Italian Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909). The physical markers of underlying degeneration became known in the later eugenics literature as the “stigmata of degeneration.”59 More disturbing for Nordau were the underlying character qualities of alleged degenerates. “That which nearly all degenerates lack,” he declaimed, “is the sense of morality and of right and wrong. For them there exists no law, no decency, no modesty.” In their criminal activity such individuals “commit crimes and trespasses with the greatest calmness and self-complacency.” The term of art for this, growing in popularity in European criminology, was “moral insanity.” Even when not engaged in outright crime, such a person “goes into raptures over evildoers and their deeds; professes to discover beauties in the lowest and most repulsive things; and tries to awaken interest in, and so-called ‘comprehension’ of, every bestiality.” Egoism and impulsiveness “constitute the chief intellectual stigmata of degenerates.”60 What made degenerates even more sinister to Nordau, as well as to many social reformers of the era, was the possible combination of degeneration and genius. He cited various authors “who have contributed to the natural history of the degenerate” to this effect. Traits of “meanness and pettiness” may “co-exist with the most brilliant qualities.” Or a degenerate may “employ



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his brilliant faculties quite as well in the service of some grand object as in the satisfaction of the basest propensities.”61 Blending of genius and mental defectiveness was a commonplace inconsistency in the emerging eugenics literature of the transatlantic world. American Brooks Adams (1848–1927) applied the theme of degeneration to a study of Western history and culture. Like Talbot and some other degenerationists surveyed here, he was focused on the state of social decay that began with the family. For Brooks Adams, the family as the agent of societal advance or decline was central. “Nothing is commoner,” he lamented, “than to find families who have been famous in one century sinking into obscurity in the next, not because the children have degenerated, but because a certain field of activity which afforded the ancestor full scope, has been closed against his offspring.”62 It is difficult not to read this somewhat autobiographically. Two presidents of the United States stood within Brooks’s family lineage. He was a lawyer and essayist in Massachusetts, and the son of a diplomat. As a totalizing discursive trope, degeneration was serviceable to many social critics and reformers. The proliferation of books and articles decrying degeneration, and proposing social policies to curb this shadowy enemy of the public good, bears testimony to its historic moment of utility. Yet the project of only seeing degeneracy in the “other,” and not in the self or in all humanity, led to profound abuses of human rights by the powerful. The full toll of these developments is only now beginning to be unmasked in the growing research into the eugenics movement. If degeneration was a deeply flawed and ostensibly “scientific” substitute for the older theological doctrine of universal sin, one substantive way to correct its abuses would be a return to the ancient sources of wisdom about the human condition. Among those promoting theological assessments of sin no unifying and influential voice was to be found. Protestants were divided from Catholics, and divided from one another on a whole host of issues. This inhibited any unified defense of human dignity of sufficient strength to stem trends toward dehumanization. CONCLUSION Human exceptionalism was traditionally upheld by an affirmation of human creation in the image of God, and usually in terms of the central presence of a human soul. Yet biblical texts presented the moral dimension of the human as compromised from early on by the presence of failure and sin. The case could be made that the awareness of sin, including the violation of both written and unwritten codes of conduct, marked humans as exceptional. Other animals do not have a conscience in the human sense, and do not possess written codes of conduct by which to assess individual or group behavior. Animal

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rights ideals, for instance, often place a responsibility on humans to care for other animals in ways that are nonreciprocal in character. This at least tacitly acknowledges an exceptional moral dimension for human action. Some evidence of social behavior and cooperation among other primates, with notions of reciprocity and fair play may be adduced. The question of how different species mentally and morally process social interaction remains even today open-ended.63 Yet in the end, abstract reflections upon morality and complex systems and theories for adjudicating moral failure are uniquely human processes, and contribute to the exceptional character of the human. In the science and theology dialogue there are now many scholars taking up an interdisciplinary conversation about how best to account for human moral failure.64 Even in the nineteenth century the beginnings of efforts to bridge the gap could be adduced. If science and theology could find a rapprochement perhaps the erroneously alleged eternal warfare between these two approaches to reality might be overcome. The haunting question at the dawn of the new century remained: Was it a bridge too far? One figure who sought to rehabilitate religion, and to do so from a scientific point of view, was the famous Harvard psychologist, William James. His lectures on the varieties of religious experience shook the worlds of both theology and science. Theology had diminished in importance among many of the elite shapers of public opinion of the day, but religion as experience now took center stage. It remained to be seen if such an approach to religion could protect or maintain human exceptionalism. NOTES 1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (London: W. Pickering, 1839), 196. 2. Ibid., 197. 3. Ibid., 199. 4. See Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Modern Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 17–51; 139–85. Recent reassessments of the doctrine of the fall are available in William T. Cavanagh and James K. A. Smith, eds., Evolution and the Fall (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017), passim. 5. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, 199. 6. Ibid., 200. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 203–4. 9. Ibid., 204. 10. Ibid., 206 11. Ibid., 221. 12. D. A. Sweeney, “Taylor, William Nathaniel,” Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals, ed. Timothy Larson et al. (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 2003), 661–62.



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13. Nathaniel W. Taylor, Essays, Lectures, Etc. upon Select Topics in Revealed Theology (New York: Clark, Austin & Smith, 1859), 134. 14. Ibid., 135. 15. Ibid., 137–38. 16. Ibid., 139. 17. Ibid., 144. 18. Ibid., 145. 19. Ibid., 147. 20. Ibid., 163. 21. Ibid., 164. 22. Ibid., 165. 23. Ibid., 167. 24. E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 374. 25. Taylor, Essays, 169. 26. Ibid., 178. 27. Ibid., 183. 28. Ibid., 186–87. 29. Ibid., 189–90. 30. Ibid., 193–94. Emphasis in the original. 31. Ibid., 197. 32. Ibid., 294. 33. Ibid., 296. 34. Ibid., 299. 35. Dorrien, 115. 36. Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 298. 37. Holifield, Theology in America, 354–61. 38. Albrecht Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, ed. and trans. H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay (Clifton, NJ: Reference Book Publishers, 1966), vii–viii. 39. Ibid., 25–26. 40. Ibid., 328–29. 41. Ibid., 330–31. In 1854 the Roman Catholic Church addressed this through the Papal Declaration by Piux IX of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. See Richard McBrien, Catholicism, new ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 1091–94. 42. Ritschl, 334. 43. Dennis L. Durst, Eugenics and Protestant Social Reform: Hereditary Science and Religion in America, 1860–1940 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017), 87–112. 44. Ritschl, 336. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Cf. Ibid., 344–45. Ritschl underscored this point, stating: “Finally, Augustine’s exegesis of Romans v.12 is admittedly false. Paul does not say that all have sinned

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in the person of Adam.” Due to uncertainty in the text, Ritschl held that no doctrine could be built upon it, insisting Paul “says not a word about the transmission of sin and the inheritance of bias by natural generation.” Adam’s death produced mortality, not guilt, for all. 48. Ibid., 340. 49. Ibid., 348. 50. Ibid., 342–43. 51. Richard Barnett, “Education or Degeneration: E. Ray Lankester, H. G. Wells and The Outline of History,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (2006), 203–29. 52. Ray E. Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (London: Macmillan, 1880), 32–33. Capitalization in the original. 53. Ibid., 58–59. 54. Ibid., 59–60. 55. Ibid., 61–62. 56. See Kelly Hurley, “Hereditary Taint and Cultural Contagion: The Social Etiology of fin-de-siècle Degeneration Theory,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 14 (1990), 193–214. 57. Eugene S. Talbot, Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs and Results (London: Walter Scott, 1898), 347–50. 58. Ibid., 352–58. 59. See Durst, 35–42. 60. Max Nordau, Degeneration, translated from the 2nd German ed. (London: William Heinemann, 1898), 18–19. 61. Ibid., 22–23. 62. Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History (New York: Macmillan, 1897), vii. 63. S. F. Brosnan, “Precursors of Morality: Evidence for Moral Behaviors in Non-Human Primates,” in Empirically Informed Ethics: Morality between Facts and Norms, Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy 32, eds. Markus Christen et al. (New York: Springer, 2014), 85–98. 64. See Stanley P. Rosenberg and Michael Burdett et al., eds., Finding Ourselves after Darwin: Conversations on the Image of God, Original Sin, and the Problem of Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 111–305.

Chapter 11

William James Seeks to Save Religious Experience

A noiseless patient spider, I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres To connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul. —Walt Whitman

When considering the life and thought of William James (1842–1910) and his possible role in the perils of human exceptionalism, one is faced with a panoply of issues to disentangle. James was a student of Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), who taught him exacting empirical methods when studying fish species in the Amazon basin.1 Agassiz also influenced James negatively in that James eventually rejected the strong idealist philosophy embraced by Agassiz. When James turned his attention to religious experiences, he framed them in terms of varieties, attempting to apply the skill of the zoologist to psychological phenomena. Because religious praxis offered behaviors and texts amenable to empirical study, and due to his fascination with the psychological dimension of religious belief in a modern age, James sought to give a deeper account of it. At the same time, James believed that theology served little purpose in furthering understanding of religious experience, and whatever its influence was, James saw theology as a negative dimension of religion. 205

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The focus of this chapter will be the late-nineteenth-century views of philosophy, science, and religion in James’s Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experiences. This book comprised his most sustained discussion of religion. In James the prospect of scientific study of human nature found its focus in religious experience, not in theological speculation. Religious experience could still serve as a mark of human exceptionalism, but not primarily a set of propositions to be believed. RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES AND HUMAN NATURE The relevance of Varieties to this book’s overall thesis would be weaker had James not appended a subtitle to his lectures, namely: A Study in Human Nature. Thus, the ultimate focus of his meditations on religious experiences was not the mere experiences themselves, but something more fundamental, and approaching the metaphysical: what it means to be human. Here we immediately face a conundrum. James seemed not to put much stock into metaphysics. He looked down upon philosophical theology and dogmatic creeds of various forms, seeing them as counterproductive and secondary. He was chary of trying to nail down experience in any final or definitive way. His concerns were practical, serving as a co-founder of the American school of Pragmatism. Yet in reading and meditating on James’s investigations into religion we find an attempt to see how religion in all its pluralistic variegation could prove purposeful. James could explore, in turn, religion and neurology, the reality of the unseen, healthy versus sick-minded religiosity, the divided and united self, conversion, saintliness, mysticism, philosophy, and other characteristics of religious life. Scientific methods could be applied to religion, and not merely in a strictly dismissive or skeptical way. James made clear his disdain for “monism” or the reduction of all reality to a single proposition or explanation. In part this was a reaction to the extreme monism of his father, Swedenborgian Henry James, Sr. (1811–1882). “William hated the idea of undifferentiated oneness,” one literary scholar notes. “He thought the universe should be renamed the ‘pluriverse.’”2 His reveling in pluralism, the “varieties” of religious experiences in some ways mirrored, even if only metaphorically, the varieties of species of fish he helped discover and catalog in Brazil with Agassiz. James prized the empirical over the conceptual, the particular over the general, unveiling before his eyes a fascinating and bewildering heterogeneity. Despite his embrace of variety, his search for an overarching purpose was never completely absent from the mind of William James. His scientific mentor Agassiz was a polygenist, holding that species, even the races of humanity, were separately created. Yet he studied the varieties of fish species of the

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Amazon with exhaustive exactitude. James inherited an empiricism that was still haunted by Idealist schemes such as that which framed the paradoxical approach of Louis Agassiz. Could there exist species of religious experience that could be taxonomically arranged into categories of greater generality? One historian of Pragmatism observes: “James’s pluralistic radical empiricism was developed in contrast to, and as a reaction against, the varieties of absolutism and monism that he battled with all his life.” He urged his auditors toward a greater sensitivity to empirically derived accounts of religious experience. He contended against idealists whose “conception of God was only a threadbare philosophical abstraction.”3 Yet whenever one engages in sustained debate with an ideology, one’s own articulation still partakes of some elements of the discourse of that ideology. While James favored a strong empiricism, his analysis of religious varieties sought to sort, categorize, and assess relations between them. The sick-minded soul and the healthy-minded soul bifurcation in Varieties, for example, does not remain strictly empirical, and can strike the reader as rather procrustean and selective at times. James did not go down the same anti-religious path as figures noted in chapter 5 above, like Feuerbach, Comte, Tylor, Maudsley, and Nietzsche. He was not convinced that science could explain everything, and was often a staunch anti-reductionist. At the same time, he did not return to theological categories that Schleiermacher, Kingsley, and Ritschl had attempted to retain, reform, and modernize. The possibility of seeing some harmonization of science and a de-theologized religion remained a live option, if ultimately an unfinished project, for William James. “James had a genius for isolating himself in a middle position,” one James biographer notes. “He could explain the appeal of religion to people who thought of themselves as unbelievers, and he could explain to the religious how the entire subject could be grasped and accepted as processes that took place in the human mind, broadly conceived.” The net result of this mediating role was inevitably isolating, both objectively within scholarship, and in James’s own experiences, for “he is too religious for the unbelievers and not religious enough for the believers.”4 One account of the approach William James took to religion indicates further his ambivalent posture. “James oscillated between thinking that a ‘study in human nature’ such as Varieties could contribute to a ‘Science of Religion’ and the belief that religious experience involves an altogether supernatural domain, somehow inaccessible to science but accessible to the individual human subject.”5 On the topic of beliefs, his 1897 “The Will to Believe” set forth the right of humans to make momentous decisions to believe when compelled by the circumstances, even in the absence of evidence. Further, he defended the occasional invoking of theism analogously to the scientific principle of theorizing prior to access to evidence. To James, belief in God

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was a reflexive or natural response to the riddle of life functioning in human thought even apart from proof of the divine existence.6 VALUING VARIATION In The Varieties, James found that while there is a utility and even a biological aspect to the experience of religion, these do not establish its grounding in truth. One of his beliefs that nonetheless transcended proof was that “religious experiences connect us with a greater, or further, reality not accessible in our normal cognitive relations to the world.”7 Religion received at the hands of James a more sympathetic treatment than it was accorded by many in the academic world, including in the field in which he excelled, namely, experimental psychology. I would argue that such an epistemological complexity is part of why James is still read with fascination by persons both religious and secular to this day. He defies simplistic categorization, and takes an eclectic approach that both scientists and students of religion can recognize. The reader may observe, for instance, the conclusions reached at the end of the Varieties. The religious life includes certain beliefs that seem to remain largely intact even in the modern milieu. First, the material world is part of a spiritual universe that is larger than the material. Next, the human still seeks “union or harmonious relation” with what may be called a higher universe. Furthermore, prayer or “inner communion with the spirit thereof” has some impact in bringing real energy to bear on psychological or material phenomena. Additionally, religion adds “a new zest” to “the gift of life” and can manifest itself as either “lyrical enchantment” or “appeal to earnestness and heroism.” And finally, religion can offer “an assurance of safety and a temper of peace,” as well as fostering within relationships “a preponderance of loving affections.”8 This was more than the rehabilitation of a generalized religiosity. One account argues that James engaged in a “career-long defense of certain aspects of the culture of liberal Protestantism as understood and cherished by many educated Americans of his generation.” He eventually did so through a strategy of embracing “the epistemic unity of all experience and belief, and to vindicate the generic human ideals for which Protestantism was a historical vehicle within rather than outside the discursive constraints of modern science.”9 Later pragmatists, such as John Dewey and Richard Rorty, did not find that same vehicle to be useful. In acknowledging positive contributions of religion to modern life, James was swimming against academic currents at the turn of the twentieth century. One growing specialization was the “science of religions,” or an attempt to

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take a scientific approach to the study of the place of religion in a wide range of human cultures. This was, in effect, the early infancy of the discipline of comparative religions nested within the broader field of cultural anthropology. Yet according to James, such an enterprise would immerse the investigator into an arena characterized by “groveling and horrible superstitions,” that could lead to a rejection of religion generally by the sophisticated modern student. James warned that “the consequence is that the conclusions of the science of religions are as likely to be adverse as they are to be favorable to the claim that the essence of religion is true.”10 His mind was more open to the potential benefits of religious faith and practice than many in his academic circle. This concern led James into an excursus on the private nature of religious experience versus the public nature of the scientific method. Religion revolves around the believer’s “private personal destiny.” But “science,” he wrote, “has ended by utterly repudiating the personal point of view.” This tension between the disciplines brought James to repudiate natural theology as a public theology ostensibly grounded in science. For James, natural theology took something precious and exposed it too easily to public scorn. “The books of natural theology which satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers,” he stated, “seem to us quite grotesque, representing, as they did, a God who conformed the largest things of nature to the paltriest of our private wants.”11 Still, James had little patience with the complete severing of public science from private religious experience. A modern science that simply looks down upon religion as an unfortunate primitive holdover from less enlightened times was, for James, a shallow outlook. The reason he held this position was a part of his general unease with abstraction and conceptualization. His objection held that “so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term.”12 The practical stood in a tension, perhaps a necessary one, with the theoretical. Jeremy Carrette has analyzed the distinction between percepts and concepts in James, validating the claim that concepts took a secondary position in James’s epistemology: “In this process, James, well ahead of late twentieth-century and early twentieth-first-century debates, recognized the relativity and contextual nature of religion. He understood its classificatory order and its strategic deployment and rejected the essentialism of the term because he understood the vital distinction between sensory-perception and conceptual thinking.”13 James encapsulated the tension between Idealism and empiricism that had simmered throughout the nineteenth century, and indeed, Western thought and tradition.

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James insisted that “cosmic objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess,” whereas, by contrast, “the inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our experience are one.” To those who sneer at private experience as unscientific, James pushed back, arguing: “it is the one thing that fills up the measure of our concrete actuality.” Any account lacking this component would remain “a piece of reality only half made up.”14 He proceeded to repudiate the “survival theory of religion” urging that it is grounded upon “an egregious mistake.” Just because our ancient ancestors mixed errors of fact and religion does not mean that “we should therefore leave off being religious at all.” The retention of a vital role for religion was to be grounded in a “responsible concern with our private destiny.”15 Yet the public dimension of religion shaped by dogmatic formulations and creeds did not hold the same valuable place for William James. RELIGION WITHOUT CREEDS The problem of the private-public tension within the science-religion nexus would not simply disappear. James wanted to “rehabilitate the element of feeling in religion and subordinate its intellectual part.”16 The element of feeling could be communal as well as individual, but the communal aspect of religion to be studied was not recitations of creeds but shared experiences. James qualified this tension between the cognitive and the affective elements somewhat when he admitted: “Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feelings or by thought.”17 When James compared Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist religious practitioners he found that the realm of feelings is responsible for the “constant elements,” not the varied “theories which Religion generates.” It is difficult not to hear at this point a faint echo of Schleiermacher’s intuitive, nondogmatic approach to religion. For James, if religion has an essence, it will be found in the “feelings and the conduct.”18 Creeds and the faith-state in which they are developed can be treated “as purely subjective phenomena, without regard to the question of their ‘truth.’” James cited psychologist James Henry Leuba (1868–1946) to the effect that God is neither known nor understood, but merely used. Religion is thus preserved, but more for its utility than its truthfulness.19 What of the creeds then? Is there anything useful in them, that can serve as a common ground amongst the varieties of existing religions? For James, the creeds canceled one another out. But he saw interreligious common ground in two more general and universal impulses, namely, “an uneasiness,” and “its

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solution.” All religions seem to hold that there is something wrong with us in our natural state. All religions offer a solution in the form of saving us from our “wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.” James exuded confidence that all the religious experiences he described within his Gifford lectures, complete with lengthy autobiographical sections from various religious figures who had described their inner struggles, could be summarized in this way. These terms were able to cover “the divided self and the struggle,” along with “the appearance of exteriority of the helping power,” in conjunction with “our sense of union with it,” and therefore “fully justify our feelings of security and joy.”20 James was quite aware of a range of questions that would be spawned out of this simplified account, admitting that “it is in answering these questions that the various theologies perform their theoretic work, and that their divergencies most come to light.” The disagreements that already have existed for centuries, including “pantheism and theism,” “works and grace and karma,” and “rationalism and mysticism,” can continue to “carry on inveterate disputes.”21 The religious reader may get the sense, even today, that if James’s turn toward the subjective, experiential, and pragmatic should carry the day, theological discussions must seem increasingly like fruitless rear-guard actions. Specifically Christian answers would seem “unfair to other religions,” and be a kind of “over-belief,” as James himself noted.22 James was candid and acknowledged when he was invoking over-belief. Indeed, this is how much of the twentieth century and beyond academic world has thus regarded theology itself. This kind of sensitivity was not new, though for others over-belief was to be abandoned rather than accepted. In 1855, author Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880), in a tome on comparative religions, had described theology in the following unflattering terms: “I was obliged to trample under my feet the theological underbrush, which always tangles and obstructs the path, when the soul strives to be guided only by the mild bright star of religious sentiment.”23 Did William James preserve human exceptionalism by locating human nature primarily within private experiences that serve some practical ends from the subject’s point of view? What would be the relationship between such experiences and the doctrines or even dogmas in which they found occasional expression? To be sure, James offered an alternative to materialism. “The world interpreted religiously is not the materialistic world over again, with an altered expression; it must have, over and above the altered expression, a natural constitution different at some point from that which a materialistic world would have.” He at times put himself into “the sectarian scientist’s attitude,” but after a while he could not regard such a mindset as less than mere humbug. “Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the

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scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow ‘scientific’ bounds,” he admitted.24 At the same time, his overarching hostility to creeds foreclosed the possibility that even exacting doctrinal statements could prove formative to meaningful religious experiences, and not merely alien to them. CRITIQUES OF JAMES Richard Rorty has ostensibly identified fundamental inconsistencies in James. Was James arguing “that supernaturalism might be true because it might be good for you?” Or was James going further and arguing “that it is in fact true because there is ample experiential evidence for it”?25 In his conclusion, James seemed to accept the legitimacy of the latter, under his coined term “over-beliefs,” some of which James freely admitted himself to holding.26 The open-mindedness of James has not always been shared by those who study him. Rorty insisted that it is not clear whether James was defending the older standard definition of religion, with its restrictiveness intact, or whether he was upholding something merely “vitally important to a person’s self-image.”27 The latter definition would make many persons conventionally unreligious suddenly religious indeed. As Carrette has observed, “James’s modernist understanding offers a fundamental rethinking of ‘religion’ as context dependent, interdisciplinary and fluid in shape.”28 Ultimately, Rorty concluded that James became “more than just a pragmatist” by the end of The Varieties. Rorty nonetheless still upheld the value in reading that work just so the reader may encounter the magnanimity of James himself, and not for the value of the intellectual conclusions James drew.29 The slipperiness of the term “religion” was outdone only by the vagueness of the term “experiences” as employed by James, as with many others in the psychology of religion. Making our experiences a point in favor of human exceptionalism has itself received challenges in recent years. Even animals have experiences. Some researchers have even suggested that the rudiments of religion can be detected in nonhuman animals.30 So perhaps religious experiences cannot of themselves preserve human exceptionalism, or grant access to a unique “human nature.” Such a blurring of the lines marking off human exceptionalism cannot so easily be dispatched. In another famous work by William James, a consideration of the power of reasoning led him to consider the differences between a dog and a human being. James acknowledged that some form of associationism can account for our ability to train dogs to perform desired actions, even extraordinary and surprising ones. Yet the differences between dog and

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human associations inclined James to preserve human exceptionalism. Of the human’s best friends, James averred that “they are enslaved to routine, to cut-and-dried thinking; and if the most prosaic of human beings could be transported into his dog’s mind, he would be appalled at the utter absence of fancy which reigns there.” The rudiments of association, largely in terms of one object associated with another, may be seen in dogs but mainly as reinforced by habit. Still, in canine contemplation, “sunsets will not suggest heroes’ deaths, but supper-time.” While Darwin had insisted on the similarities of the dog and the human mind, James accentuated distinctions. “This is why man is the only metaphysical animal,” he wrote. As a mere brute, the dog is incapable of conceiving the world other than as it is, that is, “takes the world simply for granted, and never wonders at it at all.”31 Even more deeply still, religion, and by extension, theology, requires the capacity to wonder at it all. CONCLUSION Higher-order rational thinking, abstraction, thinking about the fact that I am thinking, these all enter into the preservation of human exceptionalism, even if they do not give us the full picture. Articulated beliefs such as “Human beings are created in the image of God, and are therefore exceptional” might be necessary to ground religious flourishing. Such beliefs have the capacity to occasion emotional experiences, but it is unclear what sort of an advancement it is to sever the experiential from the intellectual, or even the creedal. So long as religion is kept in a private sphere, whether that sphere be evangelical or progressivist or hierarchical in character, its harms are restricted mostly to individuals and their immediate interpersonal relations. Indeed, in a post-9/11 world, much of the impetus for keeping religion in the private sphere has been a profound and often openly stated fear of what religion can do in the public sphere when set loose. But religion does not, as a matter of historical record, remain in the private sphere, as Peter Berger and other sociologists of secularism have come to admit.32 Perhaps James could be seen as an effort to bring aspects of the natural theological use of science and the intuitionist emphasis on experiences together, in a new pragmatic synthesis. It seems his impressive genius could not, in the end, mend the rift, at least beyond the bounds of a select cultural elite. Assessments of pragmatic agendas and utility must also always include the question: “useful for whom?” Without a transcendent, divine, and just referent, the poor and marginal, for example, may lack the power to adjudicate their own pragmatic claims. Transcultural and universal human rights, even abstracted as they are from isolated human experiences, remain an important

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hedge against the trampling upon the weak by the strong. Rights grounded in the status of a doctrine, the doctrine of human persons made in the image of God, at least in theory, lay a durable and universal foundation upon which the varieties of religious experience can continue to be fostered, nurtured, and protected.33 NOTES 1. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 128–45. 2. Ibid., 88. 3. Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010), 58. 4. Robert D. Richardson, William James in the Maelstrom of American Modernism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 406. 5. Russell Goodman, “William James,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2021 edition), accessed December 16, 2021, https:​ //​plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/win2021​/entries​/james​/. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Viking Penguin, 1982), 485–86. 9. David A. Hollinger, “‘Damned for God’s Glory’: William James and the Scientific Vindication of Protestant Culture,” in William James and a Science of Religions: Re-experiencing the Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Wayne Proudfoot (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 10. 10. James, Varieties, 490. 11. Ibid., 492–3. This had become a growing critique of natural theology at the time; cf. James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 259. 12. Ibid., 498. Emphasis in the original. 13. Jeremy Carrette, William James’s Hidden Religious Imagination: A Universe of Relations, Routledge Studies in Religion 28 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 54. 14. James, Varieties, 499. 15. Ibid., 500–501. 16. Ibid., 502. 17. Ibid., 504. Yet in many traditions, the recitation of creeds is a communal exercise as part of the liturgy. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 506–7. For an even less conciliatory approach to this question earlier in the nineteenth century, see John Stuart Mill, “The Utility of Religion” in John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Religion, Great Books in Philosophy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1998), 69–124.

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20. Ibid., 509. One century later, comparative theologies entered once more into interreligious dialogue, see Paul F. Knitter, Introducing Theologies of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2003), 203–15; 235–37. 21. James, Varieties, 510. 22. Ibid., 511. 23. Lydia Maria Child, The Progress of Religious Ideas Through Successive Ages (New York: C. S. Francis, 1855), viii. 24. James, Varieties, 519. 25. Richard Rorty, “Some Inconsistencies in James’s Varieties,” in William James and a Science of Religions: Re-experiencing the Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Wayne Proudfoot (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 86. 26. Ibid., 88. 27. Ibid., 89. 28. Carrette, 50, emphasis in the original. 29. Rorty, 96–97. 30. See James B. Harrod, “The Case for Chimpanzee Religion,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture 8 (March 1, 2014), 8–45. I am not convinced by this argument, but it illustrates how scientists might dismiss James and his use of religious experiences as a unique marker of human nature. 31. William James, The Principles of Psychology, in The Great Books of the Western World 53 (Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 682. 32. Peter L. Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, ed. Peter L. Berger (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 1–18. 33. See David G. Thompson, “The High Price of Unity: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” in Everyday Theology: How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, C. A. Anderson, and M. J. Sleasman (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 99–113.

Conclusion

Since the nineteenth century, theologians as well as some scientists and philosophers have made contributions to an unfolding discourse on what it means to be human. A starting point for many stakeholders in theology is the concept of humanity as created in the image of God, and as a union of body and soul. The field has developed to the point that taxonomies have been proposed. Some of these echo themes already present in the nineteenth century, while others are relatively new, grounded in research into the ancient world and its cosmologies. The oldest taxonomic category for the image of God is known as the substantive approach. Here the terminology stemmed in part from a cross-pollination of theological and philosophical reflection. When contemplating the human, the question arose whether the human was merely a physical body, or a physical body and something more.1 Plato was the most famous dualist, holding the soul to be a unique substance that existed for discrete periods or lifetimes in various bodies. He touted the preexistence and the transmigration of souls. For Plato the body was problematic as a locus for the soul, in that the soul sought to break free from the body. He employed word pictures such as a chain or a prison for the body. Hebrew scriptures, apart from the Greek and Platonic influence, held to a more integrated depiction of the human. The terminology was far more functional than philosophical, and broad in application. The breath of life, ruach, sometimes rendered as “spirit” came from God and rendered the bodily existence of the human animated, or “a living soul.” The term for soul, nefesh, could refer to a range of inner states of awareness in the human. It is occasionally used for animals, indicating that the life principle or animation may connect humans with nonhuman creatures. The term stood in parallel with mind or heart, and could include thoughts, feelings, passions, longings, and affections. The notion of a thinking and feeling soul is more often associated with the Hebrew term leb, or “heart.”2 There are scattered references to the 217

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afterlife in the Hebrew scriptures, indicating hope of a continued conscious, if shadowy, existence beyond the death and dissolution of the body.3 The influence of Greek philosophy on the use of terms such as psyche (soul) in the New Testament has often been noted. One must exercise caution, however, in noting that while New Testament authors may have used the same terms as the Greek philosophers, their interpretations were not simply identical to those thinkers. The tradition of Hebrew valuing of the human body endured in Christian thought. This is evident in early Christian insistence upon a postmortem resurrection body evincing continuities with the earthly body, rather than a mere disembodied or free-floating soul after death. The NT witness to an intermediate state with a conscious postmortem existence prior to the resurrection of the body long stood as an argument in favor of duality of body and soul.4 With Thomas Aquinas in the medieval era the analysis reached a new level of sophistication. He acknowledged in more detail affinities between humans and other animals. Beasts have nutritive and sensitive capacities, as do humans. Humans are unique in having the added capacity of the rational or intellective soul. Thomas replaced the stringent dualism of Plato with an Aristotelian account in which the soul is the form of the body, granting organization to it. This version of the substantive account of the soul makes of the soul-body relation a composite existence, a unity with distinction. The soul is of its essence incorporeal, and not reducible to the physical body. The soul is not subject to division as the body is. The soul’s powers of will and intellect enable it to interact with the body and its environment. How this can be is one of the enduring problems of Western theological anthropology. This has brought in the ensuing centuries much debate over his views, and has left some important questions for both philosophy and theology.5 THE IMAGE OF GOD IN RECENT SCHOLARSHIP Later scholarship with its specializations in ancient languages produced comparative work on extrabiblical traditions and cosmologies. This led to further refinements of understandings of the human as the image of God. By the nineteenth century, the trend in interpretation was toward what is now called a functional approach to the image of God. The functional approach built upon the dominion mandate of Genesis 1:28. Humans were told to “have dominion” over the other creatures. Twentieth-century scholars would begin to balk at interpretations of dominion that were exploitative in character. Was dominion of males over females permitted or encouraged by the text or the tradition? Was the abuse of animals, or the degradation of the environment

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allowable under such a reading? Egalitarian concerns influenced refinements of the interpretations of the functional approach. The Latinate English term “dominion” is cognate with “domination,” yet sustained lexical investigation shows this need not be the connotation of the original terminology. More recent scholarship has sought to bring nuance to the functional interpretation. Both males and females were created in the divine image, as noted in Genesis 1:26–27. The acknowledgment of the shared equality between males and females may be seen in a close reading of the prelapsarian couple in Genesis two. The metaphor of the garden in early Genesis indicated an original harmony wherein humans were distinct from other creatures while present among them. Adam, utilizing his unique rational and verbal powers, is presented as naming the animals.6 Deeper studies into the linguistic context of the idea of dominion indicated its royal resonances, coupled with a democratizing tendency. Whereas other cultures of the time reserved such exalted language only for those at the pinnacle of social power, the biblical authors applied such language to the totality of humanity. The rest of the story of humanity became characterized by intergenerational failure to live up to its lofty beginnings due to human sin.7 Karl Barth (1886–1868) gave the functional approach systematic development. Feminist scholarship criticized Barth’s understanding of the image of God in terms of dominion as androcentric. This is not however a necessary correlate of the functional interpretation so long as insistence is maintained that both male and female share the image of God and thus together in partnership exercise their responsibility over the creation. The ideal of tending the garden, in fact, often accentuates human collaboration and harmony with that created order. Recent interpretations of this motif have emphasized creation care and responsible stewardship as elements that the sole term “dominion” had failed to highlight.8 The third and most recent approach to the image of God is the relational approach. This builds on the lexical detail that the biblical account portrays God as declaring: “Let us make man in our image,” with the puzzling use of the plural form of the personal pronoun. Christian trinitarian understanding has at times seen here at least a faint foreshadowing of the triune godhead. The majestic plural, the addressing of the divine “court of heaven,” and ancient Middle Eastern conventions in the use of the plural, are alternative ways to account for this. Minimally, the use of such pronouns, and a depiction of male and female together forging the first human society, grants plausibility to a creation of humans as inherently social creatures. Each of these approaches taken by itself is subject to critique. The substantive has been historically favored by dogmatic theologians, while the functional has attracted many biblical exegetes, and came to predominate interpretation of the image of God in the nineteenth century. The former view

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“has fallen out of favor with contemporary theologians,” while the latter has been interpreted as susceptible to misogynistic or ecologically imperialistic interpretations.9 Critique has also been leveled at the relational focus on trinitarian relatedness, in which humanity reflects God when God is construed as distinct persons who share a harmonious social relation. Van Huyssteen has urged that such a view is too abstract to be fruitful in interdisciplinary discussions between theologians and scientists.10 In response I would only offer that science itself has many areas of abstraction, including theoretical physics, but that does not render it unhelpful in advancing our understanding. I do not see a strong reason to jettison any of these approaches. So long as we do not insist on privileging one to the detriment of another, a way could be envisioned in which they are harmonized. As noted in the introduction, the notion of human exceptionalism is grounded in balancing the various elements of what human life and experience entails, and this is an ongoing project. The substantive view is meant to insist that self-reflective mental activity is something unique to humans. In looking at studies of animal behavior that suggest otherwise, caution against projecting human assumptions into the mental and physical behaviors of animals is needed. Humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize other creatures. Training of creatures to do human-like things is part of why we are drawn to them with profound affection. Human exceptionalism is not vitiated by animal mimicry of human action or sound, rudimentary use of tools, or a significant repository of shared genetic traits. Whenever the traditional substantive view leads to an uncritical distancing of the human from the rest of creation, the functional and relational approaches may be brought in to serve as a corrective. With the functional view comes a unique responsibility to show kindness toward other creatures. The functional view of the image of God rightly elevates the concept of human dignity. This too should not be abused. Dignity means caring for and stewarding the created order, showing kindness rather than cruelty to animals, and finding the least damaging way to promote our use of the resources around us. It also involves valuing human life, including caring for the most vulnerable among us, and striving to make peace with our fellow humans. It includes accountability structures where we pursue liberty ordered by law, and a sense of our ultimate accountability to our Creator for how we exercise dominion without resort to mere domination. A functional exceptionalism should grapple with how to balance human initiative, with its elements of competitiveness, with the needs of human society, and the pursuit of justice for those on the margins. Capitalism tends to accentuate competition, while socialism attends to social duty. Thus far, neither of the secular versions of these systems has struck a sustainable balance between competition and cooperation. The polarized politics of this century appears to make the calibration of both such human impulses deeply challenging.

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The relational approach to the image of God need not be simply an abstraction. Relating to our fellow humans always has a mediated quality, namely, our embodied condition. Notions of equality stem from our shared status as one humanity. Notions of uniqueness stem from our individual personalities and gifts and their use in building a sense of community, locally and beyond. Relating requires the use of reflection (the substantive image) as well as the acceptance of responsibility (the functional image), whereby individual dignity and social concern converge (the relational image). So, to summarize, these various approaches to the image of God in humanity, developed and debated in a painstaking historical fashion, all contribute to a holistic, exceptional humanity. The perils encountered in the nineteenth century, as well as some new perils, may still manifest themselves in the twenty-first, amplified through the web of connectivity our technology has enabled. A truly theological anthropology requires an understanding of the divine attributes from which this account of the human flows. The discipline of theology has traditionally perceived many of the features of human life as reflections of truths, often couched as revealed truths, concerning God. To be sure, there are many attributes of God in Christian theology that set God apart from human beings. Divine perfections stand in tension with human imperfections, but not in an absolute contrast. Theological anthropology that anchors the human person in the divine image and likeness reflects God in some respects. This set of shared attributes between the human and divine are known as communicable attributes. Both humans and God are personal beings. Humans and God have faithfulness, lived out in covenant relations, though in the case of humans this is an imperfect attribute, whereas in God faithfulness is perfect. This perfection/ imperfection matrix may be applied to other communicable attributes of God such as love, holiness, and even gloriousness. In Christian theology, humans who are in faithful fellowship with God under the influence of divine grace look forward to an eventual glorification by the power and agency of Christ as mediator of salvation.11 One account offers this assessment of communicable attributes: “If we think of God as a being with qualities, we will have no problem accepting the fact that humans have such qualities as well.” Such a list of qualities would include intelligence, will, and emotions that enable humans to participate in relationship with God and each other, exercising responsible dominion within a created order.12 The ultimate beckoning of human exceptionalism is to reflect God more clearly through human pursuits in this life, that is, in theological terms, to be sanctified.

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DIGNITY IN VICTORIAN PERSPECTIVE As an example of the durability of such integrative thinking even in the nineteenth century, I highlight a sermon delivered in Victorian England. On a visit to St. Thomas Church of Winchester England, Episcopalian Bishop Samuel Smith Harris (1841–1888) of Michigan would offer his last sermon on July 15, 1888. He took as his theme, “The Dignity of Man,” and revisited themes he had presented in an Advent sermon some four years earlier. According to his daughter and editor, Sallie P. Harris, he experienced in the middle of the sermon “a momentary unconsciousness which was the beginning of his last illness.” Still, she recalled, he finished the message “in a manner that touched and helped us all.” His biblical text was Genesis 1:26–27. Not unlike many clergy of the era, Harris had sought to come to terms with current scientific accounts of the forming of the human body. “As Christians we need not be disturbed if in the course of scientific investigation it should be established that man as a physical being is the result of a long process of evolution,” he said. He added, “the theory of evolution is not yet proved,” citing Louis Agassiz of Harvard University as a long-term critic of Darwinism. The origin of the body mattered little to Harris, “For man is more than a physical being.” From this point on in the sermon, his prose often waxed poetic, as an encomium upon the spiritual nature of humanity. Harris accentuated “an epoch-marking moment when a new factor appeared; when a new and supernal entity made its august appearance as a visitant from another world; when a power from on high for the first time touched the organic and material, and took up its abode in this lower world.” When was this moment? “When God breathed the breath of life into man’s nostrils and he became a living soul.”13 Harris maintained that the human soul was “fashioned in the image of God.” He perceived within that soul the “mental, moral, and spiritual nature” of humanity. At this point in the narrative Harris offered a gloss on human nature that did not strictly square with Darwin’s own account, namely, a providential and progressive interpretation of natural history. The bishop cited “the latest and most authoritative announcements of the evolutionary school of scientific thinkers,” that humanity is the culmination of the law of natural selection. This key component of Darwin’s thought had “given place to another law which has forever closed the ascending series of species, and there can be, therefore, no nobler creation on this earth of ours than man.”14 From skills in the arts, to the use of the sword in battle, to the power of speech and the use of language, all such “powers belong to the physical man only because he has a soul within him.” The physical body thus provides the apparatus “by means of which the soul expresses itself and holds communion

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with the outer world.” Further, each human soul is unique. Rejecting traducianism, Harris averred that: “The law of generation, transmission, inheritance, largely shapes and determines man’s physical nature; but the soul’s individuality is original and underived.”15 The oratory accompanying the theme of human dignity in the sermon was itself telling. “In the solitude of its individuality each soul is a crowned and sceptered king,” Harris offered. This accorded with the then standard functional interpretation of the image of God. Echoing the themes of the conquest of nature commonplace in the Victorian era, Harris stated of the human being that: “He makes the rivers and the seas his highways, the lightnings his messengers, the winds and currents and all Nature’s forces his servants, because he alone has the power to understand and therefore to use them.” For Harris, humanity’s “quest for knowledge is a divine quest,” and the exercise of “one of the royal prerogatives of its nature.” What separates the human from “the brute” is the power of free will, whereas “the brute is under the absolute control of instinct.”16 For Harris the human soul also possessed an exalted nature. The highest operation of the human spiritual faculty is “Christian worship,” he noted, and “its loftiest fruition will be the beatific vision when man shall see the King in his beauty, and behold the land that is very far off.”17 In this sermon, Harris candidly acknowledged themes of sin and human struggle. Still, such elements were not his central point on this occasion. He concluded with an optimistic tone, often noted in an era when much postmillennial optimism prevailed. He ended his message with the assurance that “even misfortune and disaster and failure are transformed into blessing and success, if through them the soul is humbled and strengthened and more conformed to the likeness of God.”18 Such words brought together elements of hope and tragedy that befit the very condition we all wrestle to understand. In my own era I would express some of these ideas in alternate ways. The rhetoric of Bishop Harris fit the homiletical context and genre in which they were expressed. The exceptionalism of the human inhered for this pastoral figure in the concept of dignity. Given the various assaults upon human dignity and uniqueness I have garnered in this book from various sources across the nineteenth century, the theological flourish offered by Harris stands forth in rather bold relief. Homiletical expostulations of this character were still commonplace in churchly settings. The use of scientific terms, wrested from their sources and enlisted for theological ends, would have appeared to scientific specialists as a transgression of the hardening boundaries between dissimilar discourses. Uplifting language of this variety was by this time quite alien to academic treatises specializing in this or that narrow field of investigation into human physiology or psychology. A chasm was opening between theology and those sciences concerned with humanity. Over time the harmonious collaboration

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between them as envisioned by natural theologians such as William Paley and the Bridgewater divines became precarious and untenable. By the century’s end a state of fragmentation was the norm. Fragmentation over the ensuing century and beyond intensified perils to human dignity, and to human life itself in many episodes of fratricidal conflict between people groups and nations. EFFORTS AT REINTEGRATION SINCE THE NINETEENTH CENTURY With these elements of human exceptionalism imperiled in the nineteenth century, some efforts to mend the fragmentation occurred in the twentieth century and beyond. Where an element of human essence or experience had become imbalanced, efforts to redress the deficits of older views were undertaken by thinkers of a wide range of ideologies. Some reintegration strategies stemmed from religious or theological sensitivity, while other approaches attempted to unify knowledge of the human in a secular mode. Within Protestantism, several church leaders undertook efforts to heal or mitigate divisions among the various denominations. In Edinburgh Scotland, a variety of Protestant fellowships sent representatives to the World Missionary Conference June 14–23, 1910. Many Protestant ecumenists thought that ongoing divisions between denominations were hindering the fulfillment of Christ’s commission to take the good news to all nations. The competitive dimension of human life was tempered by cooperation. The gathering provided seeds of the modern ecumenical movement, that eventually saw institutional form in the World Council of Churches.19 Later international evangelical gatherings and resultant documents promoted global missions as well as social justice concerns. Included among these were the Lausanne Covenant of 1974, the Manila Manifesto of 1989, and the Amsterdam Declaration of 2000. Human exceptionalism, grounded in the doctrine of the image of God, was advanced by declarations embedded in such documents.20 In Catholicism, the gathering of the Second Vatican Council from October 8, 1962, to December 8, 1965, represented the most visible movement of modern Catholicism into ecumenical activity. The gathering invited observers from a wide range of denominations and world religions. Out of this were spawned several regular consultations thereafter, with Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, Lutheranism, Methodism, as well as other traditions. Most significant for the broader theme of human exceptionalism was the document Gaudium et Spes, or the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World. Promulgated December 7, 1965, the document undertook the preservation of the human person and the renewal of human society. The document

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faced outwardly toward the modern world to promote a more active engagement of Catholicism with various human cultures and societal trends. Vatican II participants explored the dignity of the human person, accentuating traditions such as the image of God as the source of this dignity, and defending the union of body with an immortal soul. Gaudium et Spes called for social reforms that would enhance human dignity and address many modern challenges to it. Improvement of mutual and reciprocal human social duties was explicitly set forth as part of the mission of the church in the modern world.21 Whereas the nineteenth century represented a period of considerable tension between Protestants and Catholics, the late twentieth century saw some rapprochement between these traditions. Evangelicals and Catholics Together was published in 1995. Aimed at presenting a united front against secularism and skepticism, it sought common cause in shared values held by traditionalists from both groups.22 Late in the twentieth century, representatives from the Catholic church and the World Lutheran Federation cooperated in forging a joint declaration on the theological doctrine of justification. Issued in 1999, the document sought to heal wounds that could be traced back to the time of Martin Luther.23 Efforts to bridge the divides between theology and the sciences have also produced a large and growing literature by the early twenty-first century.24 Three major organizations sponsor the publication of Zygon: A Journal of Science and Religion. Founded in 1966, editors of this journal seek input from the various disciplines of the sciences, as well as the major world religions, as well as voices representing secularism. Essays also cover ethical topics at the intersection of religion and science. Major sponsoring organizations include Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (founded 1954); Center for Advanced Study in Religion and Science (founded 1972), and the International Society for Science and Religion (founded 2002).25 The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, founded in 1981 at the University of California at Berkeley, seeks to foster engagement between the disciplines of theology and the natural sciences. Its conferences and publications explore Christian theology as well as world religions in conversation with such diverse disciplines as mathematics, neuroscience, studies of the environment, and modern technology. Its primary periodical is the journal Theology and Science.26 An approach more explicitly connecting Christian theology and biblical exegesis to topics in the sciences is taken by Biologos. Founded in 2009, Biologos sponsors podcasts, social media events, and a national conference. Its aim is to foster engagement between scientists of faith and actively involves dialogue with Christian theologians and pastors.27 Exploring the theme of intelligent design in science and religion, with efforts to uphold human uniqueness and dignity in the Western tradition is the mission of the Discovery Institute.28

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One area of considerable debate at the nexus of science and theology remains the status of the human soul. The tradition of dualism has recent defenders, and has experienced something of a scholarly renewal. Some see body and soul as distinct substances in a clear-cut dualism, where others take a dual-aspect approach monistic or holistic in character. The possibility of the soul emerging from underlying physical processes has been suggested. Resistance to scientific reductionism, coupled with a commitment to methodological naturalism has yielded non-reductive physicalism. The complexities of these debates as well as the stakeholder positions involved ensure that such discussions will continue. Defenders of the afterlife in the Christian tradition, including the belief in a postmortem conscious existence apart from a physical body, have also sought to engage in critical conversations with philosophy and neuroscience.29 THE PERSISTENCE OF PERILS Twentieth-century perils to humanity included many episodes of genocide, most notably in Armenia in 1918, in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, in Cambodia in the 1970s, and in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s. Responses to such perils have at times partaken of reactive retributive violence and breakdowns of reasoned discourse and sustained peacemaking efforts. The arms race during the Cold War, and the current fight against global pandemic illnesses are other instances of the observation that human life and its survival is a frightening and fragile affair. Bioethical discussion often intersects with the wrangling discourses of politics in the twenty-first century. Debates over the full inclusion within the human family of unborn children, the disabled, and the elderly represent an ethical peril that continues to center on the question of who counts as fully human. Transhumanism takes artificial intelligence as a positive development that allows humans to merge with machines in order to transcend human limitations. Traditionalists remain wary of such optimism. The question of whether this growing philosophy also imperils human dignity, and how it may do so, will continue to play out in our ever-expanding information age. TOWARD HOPE FOR HUMANITY The temptation of any individual crossing disciplinary lines is to paper over substantive differences for the sake of unity, or to foster the appearance thereof. A plurality of viewpoints, however, is often seen as a strength of the open society, where, at least ideally, the free flow of ideas moves

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humanity closer to a true account of reality. One person’s fragmentation is another person’s pluralism. This book has lamented the fragmentation, with the recognition that developments by the early twenty-first century fostering cross-disciplinary communication have made some positive strides. As seen in the nineteenth century as well as in our own, hubris rather than humility has led humanity into the error of creating the divine in its own image, and this has ironically harmed rather than advanced the actual and existential dignity of daily human life and experience for many of the residents of planet Earth. It is customary in such treatises to quote the noble Bard and his ageless portrayal of Hamlet. “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” Often the quotation will end here. Most of the time we understandably yearn to see this dignity in an idealized way, and we end Hamlet’s statement with that haunting and beautiful rhetorical question. Yet the next phrase of the Bard tells us his story is a moral tragedy, not a comedy: “Man delights not me.” For the tragic character of the human condition to be felt in all its anguished and sorrowing pathos, the possibility and the glory of the human, the status from which we see ourselves fallen, must also be upheld. In the Bible, the Book of Genesis depicts humans having to leave the garden, whereas The Book of Revelation shows the opportunity of renewed access to the Tree of Life. The image of God endures, the soul has both metaphysical and moral resonances that resist annihilation. To be sure, dignity may even partake of a taste of bitterness, so much so that in our moments of cynicism and despair, humans may pronounce the word with derision. Yet this is not as it should be, or it will be, if human hope can stay grounded in an ennobling and transcendent reality. As exceptional people stewarding this earth, we bear exceptional burdens. Our perils must be faced in one way or another. Let us face them well. NOTES 1. A helpful summary is Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, A Brief History of the Soul (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 6–29. 2. Hans Schwarz, The Human Being: A Theological Anthropology (Grand Rapids, MI: 2013), 6; cf. John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 38–43. 3. See Cooper, 52–62.

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4. On this debate see Cooper, 96–109; Schwarz, 13–20. See also Matthew 10:28; Acts 7:55–56; 2 Corinthians 5:1–10; Philippians 1:22–24; Revelation 6:9–10. 5. Goetz and Taliaferro, 48–64. 6. Helpful insights may be gleaned from J. Richard Middleton, “Reading Genesis 3 Attentive to Human Evolution: Beyond Concordism and Non-Overlapping Magisteria,” in Evolution and the Fall, eds. William T. Cavanaugh and James K. A. Smith (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017), 67–97. 7. J. Wentzel Van Huyssteen, Alone in the World? Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology, The Gifford Lectures 2004 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 120–23. 8. Many books treat this theme. See for example Steven Bouma-Prediger, For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian Vision for Creation Care, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010), 81–154. 9. Van Huyssteen., 133; cf. 135, 150. 10. Ibid., 144. 11. Michael F. Bird, Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2020), 192–95. 12. Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 471. 13. Samuel Smith Harris, The Dignity of Man: Select Sermons (Chicago, IL: A. C. Mcclurg, 1889), 95–96. 14. Ibid., 97–98. 15. Ibid., 98–99. 16. Ibid., 102. 17. Ibid., 104. 18. Ibid., 107. 19. Mark A. Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 261–86. 20. J. I. Packer and Thomas Oden, eds. One Faith: The Evangelical Consensus (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2004), 62–70. 21. Jeffrey A. Mirus, The Documents of Vatican II: A Summary and Guide (Manassas, VA: Trinity Communications, 2010), 93–98. For a helpful overview of the social and trinitarian view of the image of God in Catholic tradition, see F. Russell Hittinger, “Toward an Adequate Anthropology: Social Aspects of Imago Dei in Catholic Theology,” in Imago Dei: Human Dignity in Ecumenical Perspective, ed. Thomas Albert Howard (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 39–78. 22. Thomas Nelson, Charles W. Colson, and Richard Neuhaus, eds. Evangelicals and Catholics Together: Toward a Common Mission (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1995), passim. 23. The Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church, Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), passim. 24. John Polkinghorne, “Science and Theology in the Twenty-First Century,” Zygon 35 (2000), 941–53. 25. See Zygon: A Journal of Science and Religion, http:​//​www​.zygonjournal​.org​/, 2021, accessed January 8, 2022.

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Index

the Absolute, 9, 45, 50, 54–56, 61, 155, 168 Adam, 12n1, 18, 58, 119, 127, 137, 146, 174–76, 187–97, 219 Adams, Brooks, 201 Agassiz, Louis, 119–20, 175, 205–7, 222 agnostics, agnosticism, 4, 68, 77, 79, 119, 126, 172 Anthony, Susan B., 134–36 anthropocentrism, 18, 21, 88, 90, 99, 132, 148 anthropomorphism, 59, 62, 68–69, 148, 220 anti-theology, 9, 83, 87–105 apologetics, 21–29, 51, 74 Aristotle, 17, 38, 167, 169, 218 asylum, asylums, 94, 161, 199–200 atheism, 4, 20, 25, 38, 72, 74, 79–80, 95, 104, 113, 119, 131, 141, 176 Augustine, Saint, 24n15, 77, 80–81, 85n48, 135, 174, 185n31, 190–91, 194–96 Bain, Alexander, 170–71 Barth, Karl, 53, 219 biology, 2–3, 78, 82, 92–93, 112–14, 119, 174, 197, 208 Bowen, Francis, 159

Boyle, Robert, 25, 35, 39 Bridgewater Treatises, 8, 34–35, 41, 157, 224 brotherhood, 130, 138–40 brutes (nonhuman animals), 29, 172, 179, 213, 223 Büchner, Ludwig, 171 Buddhism, 210 Butler, Joseph, 22, 25 Cabanis, Pierre Jean George, 171 Calvin, John, 18–19, 174 Calvinism, 71, 73, 117, 146, 149–50, 159, 175, 190–91, 194 Catholic Church, 75–82, 96, 135, 203n41, 225 Chalmers, Robert, 71 Chalmers, Thomas, 8, 31–34 Channing, Edward, 153 Channing, William Ellery, 10, 146–48, 153 chartism, 127–30, 140 Child, Lydia Maria, 211 civilization, 92–93, 105, 139, 141, 157, 172–73, 197–99 Clarke, Samuel, 39 Colby, Clara Bewick, 134–35 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 35, 145, 149, 152, 175, 188–89 247

248

Inde

Combe, George, 10, 109, 112– 17, 119, 121 complexity thesis, 4, 7–9, 173 Comte, Auguste, 9, 89–91, 93, 95, 105, 207 confessions, Protestant, 56, 60, 62, 65n40, 89 175 conflict thesis, 3–8, 61, 80, 120, 174 conscience, 32–34, 103, 127, 132, 151, 162n17, 194, 201 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 32 Crane, Stephen, 145, 152 crania, 115, 117, 120 See also skull, human creation, 2, 10–11, 15–21, 26, 28, 31, 36, 38, 57, 68–82, 87–88, 117, 134– 38, 147, 175, 201, 219–220, 222 Creator, 20–21, 36, 71, 7, 101, 113–16, 136, 147–48, 160, 220 creed, 6, 56, 114, 118, 134–35, 151, 154–55, 171, 206, 210, 212–13, 214n17 cultured despisers, 9, 47–52, 54, 61 Cumberland, Richard, 32 Darwin, Charles, 9, 30, 67–83, 85n48, 92, 104, 118, 172, 177, 197, 213, 222 De Condorcet, Marquis, 90 degeneration theory, 3, 11, 187, 197–201 Deism, 22, 25, 28, 31, 74, 114 De La Mettrie, Julian Offray, 23 Democritus, 98 depravity, human, 18, 60, 102, 160, 187, 190–93 determinism, 101, 104, 112–13, 119, 151, 210 Dewey, John, 208 Dickens, Charles, 30, 129–30, Diderot, Denis, 22 Dionysian worldview, 99–103 Disraeli, Benjamin, 30, 129 dog, 63n11, 118, 182, 212–13 Douglass, Frederick, 179

education, 20, 30, 35, 69, 90, 97, 101, 112–13, 117, 121, 127–28, 130–31, 149, 180, 196–98, 199 emotion, 1, 4, 26, 33, 45–48, 50, 54, 63, 68–69, 91, 93, 99, 105, 116, 120, 151, 159, 168–70, 176, 213, 221 empiricism, 62, 150, 165–66, 168– 71, 205–209 Enlightenment, 5, 9, 14, 27–31, 34, 41, 45–48, 51–52, 56, 61–62, 114, 125, 171, 173 enslaved persons, 3, 11, 176–83 See also slavery Essays and Reviews, 26 ethics, 5, 9, 27, 31, 47–49, 65n40, 70, 97, 151 evil, 29–30, 34, 39, 97, 99, 116, 129, 137, 160, 180, 187–89, 193–96 evolutionism, 9, 76, 81–82, 85n48 faculties, 19, 32, 34, 36, 38, 68, 110–11, 113–16, 119, 121n2, 148, 150– 51, 201, 227 faculty psychology, 100, 110, 113, 150– 51, 173, 223 Fechner, Gustav, 167 feelings, 41, 45, 48, 50, 63n11, 88, 100, 102, 116, 173, 178, 210–11, 217 feminism, 136, 141, 156, 163n43, 219 Ferrier, David, 171 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 9, 87–89, 91, 105, 147, 157, 207 Finney, Charles Grandison, 154 Fowler, Orson Squire, 10, 109, 117–21 fragmentation, 2, 11, 47, 63, 167, 187, 224, 227 free agency, human, 15–16, 30, 52, 90, 101, 104, 120, 135, 137, 148, 151, 156, 158, 179, 178–80 free will, 12n1, 18, 60, 99, 189– 90, 196, 223 Fuller, Margaret, 10, 155–56, 163n43 Galen, 16 Gall, Franz Josef, 10, 91, 109–13, 119

Inde

Garbett, Edward, 5 Gay, John, 32 Gladden, Washington, 10, 125, 138–41 Gliddon, George R., 115 Gray, Asa, 9, 70–73 Gregory of Nyssa, 16 guilt, hereditary, 75, 176, 187, 190, 192, 197, 204n47 Hall, G. Stanley, 173 Harris, Samuel Smith, 222–23 Hartley, David, 20–22, 169 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 159–60 Hedge, Frederic Henry, 150 Hegel, G. F. W., 63n11, 87, 89, 104 Herschel, John, 39 Hinduism, 155, 158, 164n57 Hodge, Charles, 9, 11, 73–74, 174–76 Holy Ghost. See Holy Spirit Holy Spirit, 14–15, 147–48, 161, 166 Hughes, Thomas, 127 human exceptionalism, definition of, 1–4, 201–2, 213, 220–21 human rights, 125, 130, 135, 139, 156, 159, 161, 179, 182, 199, 201, 213–14 Hume, David, 21, 34, 38, 89, 191 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 68, 73, 76, 80, 84n19, 85n48, 172–73 Idealism, 66n64, 88, 111, 149, 154, 165, 167–70, 209 image of God, approaches to, 217–21 immortality, 47, 119, 172, 184n23 incarnation, doctrine of, 14–15, 127, 133, 139 Industrial Revolution, industrialization, 10, 30, 41, 125–28, 132, 140, 144n58, 153 Ingersoll, Robert G., 172 intellect, 17, 33, 36–37, 41, 45, 57, 93, 101, 103, 111, 116, 150, 154, 156, 170, 176, 179, 218 intelligent designer, 27–29, 33, 38, 41, 61, 72–73

249

intuitionism, intuitionists, 3, 7, 9, 23, 41, 61–62, 146, 153, 155, 157, 168, 213 Irenaeus, 14–15, 58, 188 Jacobs, Harriet, 182 James, Henry Sr., 206 James, William, 11, 168, 202, 205–14 Kant, Immanuel, 40–41, 46–48, 52, 101, 104, 149 Kingsley, Charles, 74–75, 127–30, 207 Lagrange, Joseph, 89 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, 69, 82, 112, 199 Lankester, Ray E., 197–99 Laplace, Pierre, 38–39, 89 laws of nature, 30, 39, 112 See also natural law Leo XIII, Pope, 79–80 Leuba, James Henry, 210 Locke, John, 150 Lotze, R. Hermann, 168 Ludlow, John Malcolm, 127–29, 131 Marx, Karl, 87, 89, 131 materialism (philosophy), 23, 31, 68, 93, 109, 112–13, 119, 126, 131, 165, 169–73, 183, 211 Maudsley, Henry, 9, 94–97, 105, 207 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 10, 125–33, 140–41 metaphysics, 48–49, 82, 91–95, 100– 102, 110, 115, 150, 165, 194, 206 Miley, John, 11, 174–77 Mill, James, 169–70 Mill, John Stuart, 169–70, 214n19 Mivart, Saint George Jackson, 9, 75–79, 82, 85n48 Moleschott, Jacob, 171 morality, 22, 30–33, 38, 40–41, 47, 83n10, 99–100, 103–4, 116, 118, 127–31, 146, 176, 191, 200, 202 Morton, Samuel George, 115

250

Inde

naturalism, 2, 6, 22–23, 26, 53, 89, 94, 96–97, 105, 110, 121n3, 156, 165, 170, 226 natural law, 28, 74, 78, 114, 116 natural selection, 23, 69–73, 76–78, 82–83, 85n48, 172, 174, 222 natural theology, 3, 7–8, 20–22, 25–42, 45, 47, 61, 69–74, 82–83, 88, 116– 18, 148, 152, 157, 209 nature-nurture debate, 113, 166 Naturphilosophie, 111 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 9, 97–105, 107n36, 107n37, 207 Nordau, Max, 200 Nott, Josiah C., 115, 119 original sin, 11, 59–60, 101, 120, 160, 162n17, 174, 187–98 Osgood, Samuel, 159 Otto, Rudolph, 53 oversoul, 10, 154, 161 Paine, Thomas, 27 Paley, William, 8, 26–41, 51, 67, 69, 72, 82, 224 pantheism, 53, 59, 88, 95, 153, 155, 160, 211 Parker, Theodore, 10, 150–52 Pascal, Blaise, 19–20, 97 Paul, Saint, 14, 140, 166, 191, 196, 204n47 Pelagianism, 194 Pennington, James W. C., 180–81 philosophers, 7, 17, 19, 22–23, 26, 35, 40, 45–46, 68, 89, 111–12, 133, 149, 158, 166, 169–75, 182, 217–18 phrenology, 3, 9–10, 91, 105, 109–121, 200 Pico Della Mirandola, 18–19 Pius IX, Pope, 82 Plato, 16, 18, 35, 98, 100, 159, 166, 217–18 pluralism, 11, 206–7, 227 Poe, Edgar Allen, 159

poetry, 10, 35, 97, 145, 149, 152, 155, 160–61, 205 polygenism, 119, 122n28, 206 Pope, William Burt, 65 positivism, 73, 91, 93, 105, 109 prayer, 95, 154–55, 178–79, 208 Priestly, Joseph, 22, 171 pseudoscience, 110, 122n11 psychology, 2–4, 9, 11, 49, 69, 93, 97, 109, 113, 119, 132, 150–51, 161, 165–73, 183, 208, 212, 223 Puritans, 146, 159, 162n17 races, human, 68, 75, 92, 115, 120, 122n28, 187, 198, 206 rationalism, 9, 45–47, 56, 71, 130, 170, 211 Ray, John, 20–21 reason, 1, 25–41, 45–47, 60, 68, 77, 83, 96, 98, 102, 125, 131–32, 146, 151, 157, 162n17, 173–74, 180–81, 187–89, 193, 227 reductionism, 63, 89, 97, 100, 105, 140, 170, 175, 181, 226 religious experience, 9, 11, 48–50, 61–62, 66n64, 94–97, 202, 205–14 Renaissance, 14, 18–19 Ripley, George, 149 Ritschl, Albrecht, 194–97, 204n47, 207 Robespierre, Maximilien, 90 Roget, Peter Mark, 113 Romanticism, 34, 41, 45–46, 49, 53, 56, 61, 66n64, 69, 111, 149, 153, 156, 161 Roper, Moses, 178 Royce, Josiah, 168–69 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 9, 45–63, 103–4, 153–55, 163n33, 168, 207 secondary causes, 7, 33, 72, 76–77, 79–82 secularization, 6, 31, 67, 69, 90, 109, 118, 120, 125–26, 130–31, 141, 144n58, 150, 169, 197, 208, 220, 224 sensationism, 21–22, 150, 167–70

Inde

Shedd, William, 11, 174–76 sin. See original sin skepticism, 4, 21–22, 25, 27, 29, 31, 36–38, 40, 46, 48, 62, 71–72, 79–82, 89, 94, 102, 113–14, 147, 160, 167, 171, 206, 225 skull, human, 3, 105, 109–21 See also crania slave narratives, 177–82 slavery, 11, 159, 113–16, 177–83 See also enslaved persons social humanity, 10, 119, 121, 125–41, 225 socialism, Christian, 10, 126–27, 130– 31, 133, 140–41 soul, human, 2, 11, 13, 18, 23, 76, 81, 93, 105, 109, 147, 154, 161, 165, 169, 171, 174–75, 201, 222–23, 226 soul, preexistence of, 16, 81, 175–76, 185n31, 217 Spencer, Herbert, 73, 77, 84n19 sphere, domestic, 146, 163n43 See also women’s sphere Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 134–36 Stewart, Dugald, 39 suffrage, 134–41 supernaturalism, the supernatural, 6–9, 19, 22, 71, 77–78, 80, 94–96, 119, 168, 207 Talbot, Eugene S., 199–201 Taylor, Nathaniel W., 189–94 theistic evolution, 9, 68, 70, 76, 79 theological anthropology, 1–22, 26, 45, 54–58, 63, 67, 88, 125, 134, 145, 159–60, 176, 195, 218, 221 Thirty-Nine Articles, 21, 172 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 17, 42n9, 77, 80–81, 218 Thoreau, Henry David, 10, 153–58, 164n50 Tindal, Matthew, 43n29

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Toland, John, 28 traducianism, 11, 81, 174–76, 183, 185n31, 223 Transcendentalism, 62, 141, 145, 147– 51, 159–60, 163n48, 171 Trinity, 10, 15, 52, 125, 147–48, 150, 162n14, 219–20, 228n21 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 9, 91–94, 105, 106n14, 207 uniqueness, human, 1, 8, 10–11, 12n11, 29, 61, 76, 87, 105, 115, 125, 141, 167, 172, 183, 194, 212, 215n30, 217–21, 223, 225 Unitarianism, 22, 71, 120, 126, 146–53, 159, 162n17, 194 urbanization, 10, 125–27, 129, 133, 137, 144n58, 199 utilitarianism, 27, 32, 34–35, 50, 93, 159, 191, 208, 210, 213 Very, Jones, 160–61 Victoria, Queen, 39, 133 Virchow, Rodolph, 81 Vogt, Carl, 23, 171 Voltaire, 22 Walker, David, 177–78 Ward, Lester Frank, 173 watch analogy, watchmaker analogy, 27, 33–34, 72, 77 Whewell, William, 8, 35–40, 67 women, 3, 10, 90, 125, 127, 131, 133– 41, 156, 163n43, 176–78, 181–83 women’s sphere, 134, 136, 146, 163n43 Working Men’s College, 10, 125, 127–33, 140 X Club, 172 Zahm, John Augustine, 9, 79–82

About the Author

Dennis L. Durst, MDiv, PhD, is associate professor of theology at Kentucky Christian University. He is also the author of Eugenics and Protestant Social Reform (2017).

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