American Romanticism as product of Puritanism and Enlightenment thought

American Romanticism
Introduction
Romanticism was a 19th century phenomenon that focused on the creative aspect of the human experience as opposed to rational and empirical aspects of scientific inquiry. The Enlightenment had been born of the rise of the Scientific Age that coincided with the shattering of Christendom in Europe via the Protestant Reformation. The Age of Science, with extreme emphasis on the collection of empirical data and the arrangement of new proofs to explain alternate models of the universe, reality, the world and humanity itself, gave birth to the Enlightenment Era, in which Reason was finally literally deified and enshrined during the French Revolution. Both the Enlightenment and Romanticism, which followed, had their roots in the writings of Rousseau, who advocated a new social contract based on liberty and the natural rights of man. Thomas Paine combined reason (a staple of the Enlightenment) with passion (a staple of the Romantic Era) in his political writings, which inspired the Declaration of Independence in America. Romanticism in the U.S. in the 19th century was one part reason, two parts getting back to nature, and three parts religion—primarily of the Protestant Puritan sort. It was the latter the influenced the romantic works of Hawthorne and the tragic works of Melville (mainly Moby-Dick but also “Bartleby” and several others). Ralph Waldo Emerson embodied American Romanticism in his letters and philosophy, Paine in his political tracts, and, of course Edward Taylor in his focus on man as in dire need of God’s grace, as now that his “brightest diamond is grown / Darker by far than any coal-pit stone” (Taylor 2.16-17). Romanticism in America was thus a bit different from what it was in Europe, primarily because of the American social, political, and religious influences that shaped it. This paper will show that American Romanticism was the product of Puritanism’s Divine Providence as well as Enlightenment views of reason.
Background
American Romanticism was born of the melding of strict, conservative Puritan ideas of Divine Providence (observing God everywhere and in everything and mankind’s explicit need for God’s grace in order to be saved), science, Logic and reason of Enlightenment thinking. The convergence of Puritanical religious fervor like that of Taylor’s, naturalistic piety and expression of purpose like that of Emerson’s, and an intense focus on the application of logic and reason like that of Paine’s in one’s individual daily life and philosophy resulted in the American Romantic stylings of literary contributors who focused on Individualism, the idea of self-reliance, the concept of being “large” and containing “multitudes”(ala Walt Whitman), and the problem of faith for the children of the Romantic Age—particularly Hawthorne, Melville and Dickenson. 
Thomas Paine’s “Age of Reason” was primarily a treatise against the need for organized religion. In Chapter 6 of that work, entitled “Of the True Theology,” Paine promotes his naturalistic theology—Deism—over the revealed tenets of Christianity. This thus pulled American society in one direction, while Edward Taylor, with his focus on man’s need for Christ in order to be saved from sin, which had made man’s soul black as coal, pulled society in the opposite direction. Paine rejected the idea of the need for the kind of salvation preached by Taylor, viewing revealed religion as antithetical to Reason, which the Enlightenment philosophers had embraced wholeheartedly. Taylor was somewhat more Baroque in his take on the subject, believing wholly in the power of Christ (Aldridge). Emerson was a kind of confluence of the two, preaching Transcendentalism as a the spiritual high of humankind when people embraced the idea of self-reliance.
As Emerson noted, “There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.” This was the essence of his belief in self-reliance: that man is at his best when he is pursuing some goal that he can achieve through the application of his own mind, heart and body. This idea helped to build the concept of American ingenuity—the concept that Americans are uniquely made as a people with a unique culture to embrace adversity and overcome obstacles through innovative solutions that embrace creativity and logic. These two qualities were emblematic of the two eras—the Romantic and its immediate precedent the Enlightenment. American Romanticism combined both Romanticism’s embrace of creative passion and the Enlightenment’s embrace of hard-nosed empiricism and logic. That is one of the reasons the Industrial Age caught on with such fierce imaginative and unbridled spirit in America in the 19th century: it was born of American Romanticism, which actually coupled the rational focus of Enlightenment philosophy with the creative brilliance of the Romantic thinkers and artists.
America had both, after all. Paine was America’s own Enlightenment thinker, who helped inspired the Declaration of Independence in the previous century and who served as the guiding light of Deism, which was the main religious ethos of the Founding Fathers. America as a whole, however, was mainly Puritan—and Taylor embodied this aspect of America in the 19th century. The Puritan spirit flowed out of the religious zeal that dominated Europe and primarily the Anglo-Saxon world during the Protestant Reformation. Puritanism could be as harsh and domineering in its religious outlook as Melville’s Ahab was intent on killing the white whale: unyielding, unswerving, and adamant to the very end that there could be no other way. Others, of course, questioned the intense fervor of the Puritan mindset, starting with Hawthorne, whose Scarlet Letter was one of the great American works of the 19th century to draw focus on the Puritan system of judgment, condemnation and hypocrisy. Hawthorne, however, found reason to hope in at least a few of his Puritan characters—and that hope was found in a deep-down faith that God was, after all, made of heart and would forgive the repentant sinner.
Emerson in “Self Reliance” turned the focus of American Romanticism away both from politics and reason (ala Paine) and from religion and God’s grace (ala Taylor) be reimagining the world through the lens of the Transcendent Ideal, which he identified as self-reliance. Through self-reliance one could climb up to the highest heights of pleasure and accomplishment. Emerson did not dismiss the presence of the divine in nature and within man’s soul, nor did he dismiss reason: he married the two in a new kind of American train of thought. This faith in the transcendent was what allowed Emerson to write: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.” This acceptance of divine providence was important in the American concept of Romanticism. It helped the American Romantics to embrace nature and marry the religious impulse with the impulse for individual accomplishment—the impulse to strike out on one’s own, similar to what Huck Finn does in Twain’s novel on the boy.
The Divine Providence
Fiero notes that in Europe the Romantic Movement was a reaction “against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the depersonalizing effects of Western industrialization” (Fiero 210). In America, the Romantic Movement was not so much a reaction against Industrialization as a way for Americans to embrace the spirit of ingenuity that made Industrialization possible. And rather than reject the reason and logic of the Enlightenment era, American Romanticism rather took it. Emerson did this the most by bringing the areas of reason into the areas of divinity studies and creating a new way of life—Transcendentalism.
Transcendentalism taught that divinity ran its fingers through all things in creation—that it imbued life with its spirit and that by being in communion with nature, one could be in communion with the divine. There was no need for the type of organized religion that had come in the past—the Old World religion which had held Christendom together prior to the Protestant Reformation. American Transcendentalism embraced the ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers—liberty and equality were staples of the Transcendentalist movement (Versluis).
For the Transcendentalists there was no need for revelation or dogmas: individual reason was fully capable of spelling out the secrets and mysteries of God, of nature, of life, and of the universe. As Emerson stated, “the relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole.” In other words, the American Romantics saw the divine as something that was not confined to a church building. They saw God as a spirit who communicated to people at all times in all ways. It was a joyful expression that differed from the dark and haunted vision put forward by the Puritans, who emphasized with an explicit focus on the sinfulness of humankind, as Taylor does in his “Preface.”
Taylor welcomed the divine presence but he did so in Christian terms. Emerson was one remove from that and instead preferred to espouse a divine providence in generic terms; a set of terms that were not bound by the laws of the Old or New Testament (which Paine himself rejected in Age of Reason). So there was in American Romanticism a kind of competition between disparate views when it came to God, and the synthesis of these disparate views was a compromise: the Romanticist in America could believe in a Deity, but that would be about as far as it would go. The Deity could be felt, lived and experienced by communing with nature and approaching life in a pick-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps sort of way, which also had a definite Protestant/Puritan ring to it.
Taylor described the Divine Providence as a being “Who spake all things from Nothing; and with ease / Can speak all things to Nothing, if He please”—as a being “Whose Little finger at His pleasure Can / Out mete ten thousand worlds with half a Span” (1.23-36). This could be compared to Emerson who described the Divine Providence as a Deity who was reflected in every person. Emerson rejected the idea that God could be defined by Old World values, codes, dogmas or doctrines. The Puritans only half rejected such a notion, for though they rejected the creeds of the Church in some form, they did not reject the faith—they simply altered the doctrines of the faith and created something new for themselves in the act. Emerson took their revolt one step further and in the direction of the Deists and the rationalism of Paine. Emerson stated, looking back over his shoulder at the Puritans, who were one step too close to the Old World religion: “If, therefore, a man claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not.” In doing so, Emerson made it clear that he was not interested in speaking on God in any sense that one might feel obliged to become, for example, a Roman Catholic. That would be to believe in doctrines opposed to the modern conception of liberty and equality. That would be to believe in a creed once professed by monarchs and monarchies. That would be un-American for these new American Romantics.
The Enlightenment Views
But of course these American Romantics would be nowhere without their Enlightenment forbearers, and Paine was among the top of the list. His Age of Reason was an excoriation of organized religion and everything the Old World represented. In setting up America, Paine was helping to set up a new world and a new order, one which would be founded on pure reason—pure philosophy—not the dogmas associated with revelation. Rousseau would be Paine’s patron saint—not St. Peter or his scholastic namesake Aquinas. Paine wanted nothing to do with the Old World and that was why he penned a treatise on the new one—the Age of Reason.
Paine boasted that the Old World faith was dying: “The suspicion that the theory of what is called the Christian church is fabulous, is becoming very extensive in all countries; and it will be a consolation to men staggering under that suspicion, and doubting what to believe and what to disbelieve, to see the subject freely investigated” (15). Paine meant that the Christian church was “fabulous” not in the modern sense of the word meant today—i.e., great and wonder—but rather that it was full of fantastical and outlandish ideas that had no basis in reality—though for a millennium and a half the ideas had been accepted and embraced by generation after generation of men of all ranks and classes in life. Paine, a child of the Reformation and a father of the Enlightenment (and of the Revolution in France that would inevitably lead to the Reign of Terror), saw history differently: he had none of the faith of the Old World and wanted none of it.