The Language of Protestant Memory

But something else—a different sort of intellectual need, a different sort of emotional compulsion—also seemed to be fueling Luther's renewed emphasis on predestination. "I am saying this," he said, "in order to refute the dangerous doctrine of the sophists and the monks, who taught and believed that no one can know for a certainty whether he is in a state of grace."^[76] The key word for Luther was "certainty," and it was this word that he would repeat over twenty times in his commentary on a single verse of Galatians (one that, moreover, does not itself make certainty an issue).^[77] "The enemies of Christ," Luther insisted, "teach what is uncertain, because they command their consciences to be in doubt." Good Christians, therefore, must do the opposite, namely, "strive daily to move more and more from uncertainty to certainty." Noting that the "monster of uncertainty is worse than all the other monsters," Luther "thank[ed] God, therefore, that we have been delivered from this monster."^[78] That deliverance separated right-thinking Christians once and for all from those doubting papists: "We, by the grace of God, are able to declare and judge with certainty, on the basis of the Word, about the will of God towards us, about all laws and doctrines, about our own lives and

those of others. On the other hand, the papists and the fanatical spirits are unable to judge with certainty about anything."^[79]

The great boon of predestination was just that: it granted certainty. And for Luther, certainty could come only from what he called the "necessary foreknowledge of God," which, especially in The Bondage of the Will (1525),^[80] he elevated into the central divine attribute. It is "fundamentally necessary and salutary," Luther said, "for a Christian to know that God foreknows nothing contingently, but that he foresees and purposes and does all things by his immutable, eternal, and infallible will." Luther's God was sometimes wrathful, sometimes merciful, but he was always knowing, or rather, fore knowing, his infinite prescience making up for our infinite ignorance. Against Erasmus, then, who argued that it was "irreverent, inquisitive, and vain to say that God foreknows necessarily," Luther countered with due incredulity: "Do you, then, believe that he foreknows without willing or wills without knowing?" Since that was absurd, Luther concluded that it was impossible that anything "should exist or persist contingently," if by "contingent" one means "by chance and without our expecting it." In the end, then, divine foreknowledge turned out to be a transitive foreknowledge: human beings could not aspire to partake of its contents, but they could at least partake of its certitude. It was for that reason, indeed, that Luther was able to point to the "necessary foreknowledge of God" as "the one supreme consolation of Christians," one that set them apart from "the greatest minds [who] have stumbled and fallen, denying the existence of God and imagining that all things are moved at random by blind Chance or Fortune."^[81]

Luther did not seem particularly concerned with the conceptual relays between divine foreknowledge and human certitude (the latter is not, after all, logically or experientially consequential upon the former, as the American Puritans could easily have told him). Like Calvin, who, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), also spent several pages arguing that there was no such thing as chance,^[82] he seemed to have believed that the elimination of the contingent would itself be sufficient ground for human certitudes.^[83] But what is important here is perhaps not so much the rigor of Luther's reasoning as the way he reanimated a cluster of concepts, deriving from their apparently syllogistic connection a newly authorized mode of being in the world. And so it was that faith (or, more precisely, "justification by faith") would emerge as the central tenet of the Reformation, both as

an attitude toward God and as equipment for living. "Faith in God," Luther said, was "the supreme worship, the supreme allegiance, the supreme obedience, and the supreme sacrifice."^[84] More than that, it was also the "principal weapon" for Christians, an indispensable weapon, for

We are engaged in a battle, not with one prince or emperor but with the whole world. Everywhere the devil has spiritual weapons with which he attacks the ministers of the Word on the right and on the left. For this reason we now have so many adversaries—not only the fanatics but the princes, the popes, and the kings of the whole world with all their adherents. Who will overcome all these adversaries? He, says John, who is born of God. This must happen through faith in Christ, which is the victory.^[85]

The images of universal belligerency (and, of course, the image of ultimate victory) were hardly incidental here; they made up the very language of faith for Luther: a language that construed the world as "the kingdom of the devil" and construed the Christian as, first and foremost, "a warrior."^[86] Over and over again, then, Luther rejoiced that "through faith we kill unbelief, contempt and hatred of God," that "faith slaughters . . . and kills the beast that the whole world and all the creatures cannot kill," that "it killed and sacrificed God's bitterest and most harmful enemy."^[87]

A language such as this inevitably suggested political usages. Michael Walzer, in his influential study of the political legacy of Protestantism, has argued for a direct link between the Reformation and the political discipline of the state, although he is also careful to distinguish between Luther's mystical inwardness and Calvin's institutional fanaticism, tracing the "programmatic and organizational" character of the Puritan state primarily to the latter.^[88] But there is another sense in which Luther himself, mystical and inward as he so often was,^[89] might nonetheless be said to be a willing party (and indeed a major contributor) to a newly emerging language of faith, faith not only spiritual but also temporal, dictating not only political discipline (Walzer's emphasis) but also political belligerency. Here, Walzer's insight should perhaps be supplemented by that of Sacvan Bercovitch, who has emphasized the intimate connection between Puritan religiosity and the geopolitical ambition of the state. It was the continuing vitality of the Puritan rhetoric, its periodic profes-

sions of doom, Bercovitch argues, that would sustain a dream of national expansion, a dream of Manifest Destiny, for over two hundred years.^[90]

Especially in light of that legacy, it is worth noting that faith was singled out by Luther not only as a much-needed weapon against a world teeming with enemies but also as a much-needed corrective to a Catholic theology wallowing in love. The "dangerous and wicked opinion of the papists" was that good work must be "performed in the grace that makes a man pleasing before God, that is, in love"; they had even "attributed formal righteousness to an attitude and form inherent in the soul, namely, to love." Duns Scotus had written (and Luther quoted him with disgust) that "if a man can love a creature, a young man love a girl, or a covetous man love money—all of which are a lesser good—he can also love God, who is a greater good."^[91] For Scotus, love of God was not categorically different from love of the world: the two shaded into each other, one drawing sustenance from the other. For Luther, this confusion of the divine and the naturalistic could not be more wrong. But here he seemed to have found an enemy in none other than Augustine himself, who, in his Confessions , had celebrated just such a confused love of God and of the world:

But what is it that I love in loving thee? Not physical beauty, nor the splendor of time, nor the radiance of the light—so pleasant to our eyes—nor the sweet melodies of the various kind of songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers and ointments and spices; not manna and honey, not the limbs embraced in physical love—it is not these I love when I love my God. Yet it is true that I love a certain kind of light and sound and fragrance and food and embrace in loving my God, who is the light and sound and fragrance and food and embracement of my inner man—where that light shines into my soul which no place can contain, where time does not snatch away the lovely sound, where no breeze disperses the sweet fragrance, where no eating diminishes the food there provided, and where there is an embrace that no satiety comes to sunder. This is what I love when I love my God.^[92]

For Augustine, love of God was indeed not the same as love of the world, but it was also not intelligible apart from the latter, because it was our love of the world, our capacity to enjoy it, that enabled us to love God and enjoy him . In On Christian Doctrine , Augustine wrote,

"To enjoy something is to cling to it with love for its own sake. . . . Those things which are to be enjoyed make us blessed." And though he cautioned against loving the world too much, enjoying it too much, lest we lose sight of "Him who is to be enjoyed," in the long run it was nonetheless "by means of corporal and temporal things [that] we may comprehend the eternal and spiritual."^[93]

Luther did not include Augustine in the company of the dangerous and wicked papists,^[94] but he might well have, when he accused those papists of believing that "faith is the body, the shell, or the color; but love is the life, the kernel, or the form."^[95] Luther did not mince words here:

Such are the dreams of the scholastics. But where they speak of love, we speak of faith. And while they say that faith is the mere outline but love is its living color and completion, we say in opposition that faith takes hold of Christ and that He is the form that adorns and informs faith as color does the wall. Therefore Christian faith is not an idle quality or an empty husk in the heart, which may exist in a state of mortal sin until love comes along to make it alive.^[96]

For Luther, faith was all in all unto itself; it had no need for love and indeed no room for it. "Where they speak of love, we speak of faith": that injunction mapped out a new path for Protestant theology, a new language it would henceforth speak to worship God and to dwell among men.

Still, if the discourse of love was to be officially outlawed in Reformation theology, the language of Christianity itself, with its ancient habit of piety and ecstasy, its inherited capacity for earthly and heavenly delight, might turn out to be less reformable, less observant of the narrow discipline Luther would impose upon it. He could not, in fact, completely reform even his own language, and even his belligerency was not as straightforward as one might have expected: "our hearts will be filled by the Holy Spirit with the love which makes us free, joyful, almighty workers and conquerors over all tribulations, servants of our neighbors, and yet lords of all."^[97] And so, in spite of his injunction, in spite of his attempt to turn Christian theology into some austere edifice—some windowless structure, illuminated only by faith—the language of Christianity (and indeed the language of Protestantism itself) would ultimately survive in a manner different from what he would like. It would not (and could not) submit to his

reformation, because, historical language that it was, its semantic field would always be a field of accumulated usage, saturated with inherited emotions, inherited meanings, a language not reducible to any theological accent momentarily put upon it, nor exhausted by any political program momentarily sanctified in its name.

Indeed, even in the American colonies, the most obviously Protestant, and most obviously Puritan, commonwealths in the world, the language of Protestantism was sometimes such as would have made Luther turn in his grave. Edward Taylor (1642–1729), minister for fifty-eight years in the frontier town of Westfield, Massachusetts, nonetheless found the occasion, in that "howling wilderness," to write the following lines in his Preparatory Meditations :

My lovely one, I fain would love thee much
  But all my Love is none at all I see,
Oh! Let thy Beauty give a glorious tuch
  Upon my Heart, and melt to Love all mee.
  Lord melt me all up into Love for thee
  Whose Loveliness excells what love can bee.^[98]

Between the love of the adoring subject and the loveliness of the adored object—the boundaries between the two theologically maintained but rhetorically melting, rhetorically melted into each other—Protestantism is not exactly what it should be, or not exactly what Luther said it should be. The animating sentiment here is not Lutheran certainty but Augustinian delight, an emotion at once older but also more fragile, less useful for military purposes. This poem (and scores of others like it)^[99] forcefully reminds us that "faith" is only one possible relation between the finite and the infinite, and that other relations would not cease simply because of the Reformation. It reminds us as well that within the domain of language, Protestantism was not so much a new departure as a variation on an ancient theme. Looming behind Taylor were his beloved Metaphysical poets (especially George Herbert) and, behind them, the shadow of Augustine, with his complex and self-conscious relation to rhetoric, his theology of enjoyment, as well as the entire tradition of biblical tropes and diction, the intellectual and affective styles of Christian worship, in existence for over fifteen hundred years.^[100] Not the least interesting feature of Protestantism is thus its historical memory, habits of speech and habits of emotion sedimented over time, sedimented, as David

Hall has suggested, in a "muddied, multilayered process," as "a river full of debris."^[101] And, once in a while, it is overcome by that sedimentation—as Taylor is in this poem—so that the Protestant voice would sometimes come across much like a transported voice, redolent of a different place and time. "The United States itself has no medieval period," Sydney Ahlstrom has written, "but in Puritanism we confront more than faint vestiges of that era."^[102]

Those vestiges are discernible, not least of all, in the enduring presence of Augustine: not necessarily Luther's Augustine, but a figure that both predated him and survived him, an Augustine less austere, less fiercely channeled, richer with liberalities and delights, an Augustine read and elaborated upon over the centuries, passed down from generation to generation. Perry Miller has written about an "Augustinian strain of piety" in American Puritanism.^[103] That Augustinian strain, I want to emphasize, came not only from the Reformation but also from an older Christian tradition. Seen in that light, American Protestantism too would seem to be a more heterogenous, more "multivocal" field than it might sometimes appear.^[104] Indeed, alongside what was perhaps its dominant trajectory—one that led to the belligerent nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a secular religion of faith without love—we might want to speculate about a host of incipient alternatives, some more tangential than others, some more clearly articulated than others, but all attesting in any case to the semantic richness of the Protestant rhetoric, to the complexity of its historical memory, and to its ability always to exceed, always to overflow, any of its momentary expressions, whether theological, literary, or political. The language of love, in particular, while not directly opposed to the language of nationalism, was nonetheless not encompassed by it and, in its capacity as residue , would not only look forward to a series of residual developments in American theology and American literature but would look backward as well to an affective tradition inherited from a Christianity older than Puritanism itself. In this instance, at least, American Protestantism "does not have its own beginning," as Sydney Ahlstrom has observed. "It is like a conversation being continued by people as they walk into another room."^[105]

The Wide, Wide World is one such conversation. Even as it entertains a newfangled language of modern consumerism, as analyzed by Ann Douglas,^[106] it also draws its sustenance from a time-honored Chris-

tian tradition, alive not only as institutional fact but above all as historical memory, as the intellectual and affective habits which lingered in time. Broadened by that memory but also chastened by it, Warner's novel reminds us, as the church had always done, that "merit" and "desert" are not necessarily self-evident concepts and that throughout much of history, human beings had been inspired and admonished in quite other terms. It reminds us as well that the phenomenon of preference, whether human or divine, is perhaps more deeply arbitrary and more darkly inscrutable than we would like, and so gives us a world tougher and harsher than Whitman's—but one that, in its very toughness and harshness, might also seem more satisfying, or at least more emotionally persuasive. If only implicitly, then, it gestures toward a world more enigmatic than the concept of justice can make of it, a world in which justice appears not only as a more tenuous virtue but also as a smaller one.