19th century spirit

It’s exam day in A&S and this chapter is not on it, so I’ll be brief.

I’m not quite ready for the 19th century anyway, I want first to pause and savor the Treaty of Tripoli signed into law by John Adams in 1797 that declared: the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion… any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation. John Adams!

Women, drawn by the new century’s burgeoning reform movements, are about to start showing up at doubt’s party in greater numbers. (One of our adult learners Tuesday night was concerned, on his granddaughters’ behalf, about the  disproportionate representation of males in this story. Me too.) Anne Newport Royall, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ernestine Rose, Fanny Wright, Harriet Martineau…

Equally significant: this will be the century when doubters really begin to understand themselves as affirmers, championing a conception of the godless universe as liberating, not defining themselves strictly in opposition to orthodoxy. Martineau declares God “so irrelevant as to make me blush.” When she finally lets go not only of God but also of residual fantasies of an afterlife, she delights to find herself “a free rover on the broad, bright breezy common of the universe, the happiest woman in England.”

Darwin’s naturalistic evolutionary account of the human epic gives non-theists new legs. And there are the romantic poets (and Emily Dickinson), and Kierkegaard and Marx and Schopenhauer– his line about immortalists “hot for atheism” is funny– and Nietzsche trumpeting his Ubermenschen of the future and denigrating the nihilism of old-time religion (and philosophy).

And J.S. Mill (of his own free will), proclaiming liberty and utility.  And countless others.

And Thomas Hardy, officiating at God’s funeral.

…I could not prop their faith: and yet
Many I had known: with all I sympathized;
And though struck speechless, I did not forget
That what was mourned for, I, too, once had prized.

Still, how to bear such loss I deemed
The insistent question for each animate mind,
And gazing, to my growing sight there seemed
A pale yet positive gleam low down behind…

Tags: Friedrich Nietzsche, Harriet Martineau, Jennifer Michael Hecht, John Adams, Thomas Hardy