[Edited Message Follows] On Thu, Dec 17, 2020 at 09:39 AM, Mark Lause wrote:
> > John Brown was a Puritan only in the sense of its distillation through the > Great Awakening of the early eighteenth century and, more importantly, the > "Second Great Awakening" of the early nineteenth. Perry Miller focused > heavily on the former, but the second really kicked open the possibilities > . . . . We could say that the two provided the vital complex of ideas > that led to the American Revolution and the Second American Revolution. > As someone half baked in the crucible of the Presbyterian Church during a time when they tried to teach the TULIP doctrine with Snoopy cartoons, I can testify to the humanistic tradition that was so strangely interwoven with the witch-hunting cruelty of reformed Protestantism. This mostly means Calvinism. By no means all, as it were, militant Protestants were or are Calvinists or Puritans, though the American Great Awakenings AFAIK bridged gaps within the broader English-speaking Protestant movement and prepared the way for Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, the subhuman Falwells, and the bestial syncretist so-called "Christianity" of the Trump period, which doesn't have the brains to be actually Puritanical. Without Milton's Satan and Bunyan's Mr. Christian there would have been no romantic individualism in England, where capitalism first emerged fully formed. When Sandeman subjected his followers to a particularly crazy version of Calvinism, the intolerable pressure caused William Godwin to pop out, opening the door for the English Romantics--especially Shelley, who--unlike "Bob Dylan"--was a no-fooling great poet and also a vehement radical in the context of his times. Without the Calvinism of Geneva there would have been no Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What for example H.L. Mencken denounced as Puritanism was really the decorum of Main Street America, which he contrasted to the sublime intellectual aristocracy of antebellum Virginia, per Mencken "the arbiter elegantiarum of the Western World": [O]bserve Virginia today. It is years since a first-rate man, save only Cabell, has come out of it; it is years since an idea has come out of it. The old aristocracy went down the red gullet of war; the poor white trash are now in the saddle. [" Sahara of the Bozart ( http://writing2.richmond.edu/jessid/eng423/restricted/mencken.pdf ) "] Mencken liked to oppose himself to Puritanism while claiming liberal indulgence for his own ambiguous racism, antisemitism, and--eventually--pro-Nazi elitism. Like Thomas Beer (now disgraced and forgotten, but in many ways a far better writer) and even the Lost Generation after the "Great War," Mencken is fixated on what white Americans used to call the Victorian period of the American nineteenth century--something that kept reaching its bony hand up out of the grave at least throughout the nineteen-fifties. Mencken passed on an antipuritanism partly rooted in antebellum proslavery propaganda to generations of "liberal" moral rebels themselves rooted in a romantic tradition that could never have existed without Puritanism. The term "Puritan" has so to speak been through the wars in the English-speaking world alone--two big civil wars and innumerable cultural revolutions of one kind or another--and abundantly illustrates the meaning of the word "contradiction." As to the Continent, that is yet another story. Rossini wrote an opera romanticizing the English Puritans, and Meyerbeer wrote another on the Huguenots, who were themselves also Calvinists. It seems to me that anybody who with belief actually read Jonathan Edwards in first half of the nineteenth century qualifies as a "Puritan" in more than one sense. American post-Puritan contemporaries of Brown, like Emerson, had obviously leapt forward from Calvinism, like Rousseau, Godwin, and Shelley. Brown--a practicing believer in predestination and all the rest of the TULIP nonsense--was still seriously reading Edwards: he can't have been unaware of aligning with Puritanism in the strictest sense. Nevertheless, the broad scope of the term "Puritan" as it has slithered hissing through the past three centuries requires a stipulative definition, as there can't be an absolute one. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#4548): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/4548 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79036678/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
