Hawthorne’s God

HAWTHORNE HAUNTS ME. HE often comes to mind when I am wandering Boston’s streets. He seems always just around the corner.

Once, Nathaniel Hawthorne was stopped in a Boston street by an old woman inquiring “if he were an angel.” Biographers say the woman was overwhelmed by Hawthorne’s remarkable beauty. But she must have been struck by his otherworldly aspect. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne declared himself a “citizen of somewhere else.” For Hawthorne was a kind of liminal being who, in his fiction, sought a place “somewhere between the real world and fairy land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet.” His sister-in-law, Elizabeth, compared his blue eyes to “mountain lakes seeking to reflect the heavens.”

Hawthorne lived in a secular age in which the old Puritan belief had disappeared while the new faith lay in material progress. He wrote romances, lamenting the difficulty of “writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight.” Rejecting the many reformers of his time, Hawthorne turned for consolation to the past. He preferred “the narrow but earnest cushion thumper of puritanical time to the cold lifeless, vaguely liberal clergyman of our day.”

Hawthorne also rejected the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson that was blustering about him in Concord. In Mosses from an Old Manse, he wrote of Emerson’s flock of followers: “Never was a poor little country village infested with such a variety of queer strangely-dressed, oddly-behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important agents of the world’s destiny, yet were simply bores of very intense water.” As for Emerson, Hawthorne added, “I sought nothing from him as a philosopher.”

Bicentennials for Emerson and Hawthorne were recently celebrated. That Emerson’s received more attention says much about the spiritual decline of America. Since 1832, when the Reverend Emerson refused to celebrate the Unitarian service, his gnostic creed has grown apace and is now America’s reigning dogma. Flannery O’Connor realized this: “[W]hen Emerson said he could no longer celebrate the Lord’s Supper unless the bread and wine were removed, an important step in the vaporization of religion in America had taken place.” Randall Stewart likewise regretted Emerson’s influence on the American spirit, recognizing his doctrine as radically “anti-Christian.” Christians believe that Christ healed the division between the world of spirit and the world of matter and became the bread of life. Emerson’s staged refusal was a rejection of the material world of things as unredeemed.

Both Hawthorne and Herman Melville viewed Transcendentalism as a misnomer and fraudulent spirituality. Emerson never transcends to anything. He makes “self” the judge and sole authority of truth. In his Divinity School Address, given at Harvard in 1838, Emerson called for every man to become his own Jesus and to “go forth anew to take possession of the earth.” Flannery O’Connor said he trapped himself in a region whose borders are the walls of his own skull. And Melville thought Emerson suffered from a defective sensibility: “A self conceit . . . [and a] blindness proceeding from a defect in the region of the heart.”

Emerson, and not Hawthorne, is the father of our introverted modern America, where truth is relative and self-manufactured. This religion of self infects every level of society, ranging from the Self Help sections in bookstores to the slogans of advertisement, from movies to public television, from college curriculums to gum-chewing stars. It penetrates the chambers of the Supreme Court, where Sandra Day O’Connor ruled in Planned Parenthood v. Casey that there is “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe.” All are the offspring of Emerson’s gnostic gospel “that the soul makes its own world” and “nothing is sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” Yale’s Harold Bloom, a professed Gnostic, celebrates this “freedom from nature, time, history, community and other selves” in The American Religion.

In “Experience,” Emerson wrote that “the true romance which the world exists to realize will be the transformation of genius into power.” But Hawthorne, a writer of genius, wrote romances in order to steer the world away from such a destructive course. Many of Hawthorne’s romances dramatize and portray such perverse wills to power and the dementia to dominate and control nature. In “The Birthmark,” Aylmer the scientist destroys his wife Georgiana in an effort to erase her natural birthmark, a crimson hand on her cheek. Like Emerson, Aylmer would erase “the visible mark of earthly imperfection.” Hawthorne thought such a power demonic. The past century offers enough examples of Emerson’s “transformation of genius into power.”

Hawthorne opened his heart and mind to the sufferings of the world, and did not hermetically seal himself from the disagreeable aspects of existence, as Emerson urged. His daughter Rose wrote of him: “He was as earnest as a priest for he cared that the world was full of sin and sorrow.” He was concerned about the breakup of community and knew Emerson’s radical egotism to be antithetical to civilization.

Hawthorne longed for a belief that would unite people in a community of love that connected the living and the dead. He moved toward a sacramental vision. But he never arrived at the point T.S. Eliot (another descendant of Massachusetts Puritans) did in Four Quartets, “that flesh our only hope / that blood our only drink.” This accounts for the elusive and compelling quality in Hawthorne’s writing, and the sadness that falls over it like a veil.

It has been said that the opposite of love is not hate, but power. Hawthorne understood this. The genuine artist is well grounded and knows that men and women are limited and dependent creatures. We cannot “empower” ourselves or “take charge,” as the current followers of Emerson pretend. We are all subject to sorrow and decay. We are not in charge of even the most basic things. We did not set our own hearts to beat and cannot prevent the day they will stop. Being limited and dependent is what we call life. It keeps us human and makes love, tenderness, and sympathy possible.

Hawthorne’s writing springs from this reality. His work would have us recognize our limitation as creatures and the need to give ourselves in love. Hawthorne’s wife Sophia sided with her husband: “Waldo Emerson knows not much of love, he has never yet said anything to show he does. . . . He has never yet known what union meant with any soul. He is an isolation.”

From Witchery to Sanctity examines the religious vicissitudes of the Hawthorne family, from when William Hawthorne arrived in Massachusetts in 1630 to the death of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter Rose in 1926. William Hawthorne’s son John was a judge during the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692, and condemned people to death. In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel wondered whether “those ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, when Puritanism was relapsing to Unitarianism. Though not a churchgoer, Hawthorne had a strong religious disposition. Flannery O’Connor thought him “Christ haunted.” He satirized his age in “The Celestial Railroad” as concerned with the latest “news, topics of business, and politics, or lighter matters of amusement; while religion, though indubitably the main thing at heart, was thrown tastefully into the background.” It is a parody of The Pilgrim’s Progress, where modern Christians take a comfortable railway journey to the Celestial City. Abaddon, the fallen angel in Bunyan’s classic, now functions as chief engineer of the train, which “shows the liberality of the age” and proves “all musty prejudices are in fair way to be obliterated.”

With the exception of his wife Sophia, a talented artist, Hawthorne’s in-laws were among the elite reformers of the day. His wife’s sisters, Elizabeth and Mary Peabody, were close friends of Emerson, supporters of Transcendentalism and of the Rev. William Channing’s Unitarianism. All were abolitionists. Mary became Mrs. Horace Mann, the champion of public education. Hawthorne ridiculed these types in his stories. He was not an abolitionist. Of John Brown, he wrote that “nobody was ever more justly hanged.” He thought Emerson “imbued with false originality,” Channing a “Rev. Mr. Flimsy Faith,” and wisely decided to educate his children at home. Christmas season at the Hawthorne household must have been interesting!

Hawthorne belonged to the Democratic party, which advocated conservative, small government. Politics helped him support his family; then as now, writing alone could not do the trick. Hawthorne held various public patronage positions, like coal and salt measures at the Boston Custom House, surveyor at the Salem Custom House, and his biggest plum, American consul in Liverpool during 1853-57. He also wrote for Democratic newspapers and penned a presidential campaign biography for his friend and Bowdoin classmate, Franklin Pierce.

Hawthorne believed in a different kind of reform and progress than his New England brethren. He would have delighted in the quip of the French Catholic Charles Baudelaire, who held that “the only progress is the progression toward the realization of original sin.” And that the only reform possible must take place within the human heart. Hawthorne held the same beliefs.

His “Earth’s Holocaust” tells the tale of a group of ardent reformers who commit most everything to flames in their desire to build a better world. At the end, only three are gathered at the great fire–“the hangman, the last thief and the last murderer.” They decide to hang themselves as there is “no world left for us any longer.” But a “dark-complexioned personage,” whose “eyes glowed with a redder light than that of the bonfire,” joins them and says no. “The wiseacres” have forgotten to throw the most crucial things into the flames. The last murderer inquires what that might be. “What but the human heart itself? . . . I have stood by this livelong night and sneered at the whole business. O take my word for it, it will be the old world yet.”

Though Hawthorne dealt with dark subject matter, he was not himself morbid. He enjoyed drinking and smoking cigars with political friends and associates, like Melville and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Emerson, ever the puritan, disapproved of Longfellow’s “bottles of different colored wine and wine glasses and fine coats.” Hawthorne’s reforming brother-in-law Horace Mann was equally prudish, and, “on one occasion finding Hawthorne smoking a cigar, declared he could no longer hold the man in high regard.”

As a young man Hawthorne had been a recluse. His gift of vision made him different, as he walked an isthmus between time and eternity in an age that Henry David Thoreau said had “camped down on earth and forgotten heaven.” Hawthorne feared his gift would isolate him as a cold observer of life. The ability of seeing into the heart of things separated him from others, and he longed to open communication with the world. How fortunate he was to meet and marry the painter Sophia Peabody.

It would be difficult to find a more fulfilling marriage of two giving hearts. “We are but shadows,” he wrote Sophia. “We are not endowed with real life, and all that seems real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream–till the heart be touched. That touch creates us, then we begin to be beings of reality and inheritors of eternity.” And Sophia wrote: “Before our marriage I knew nothing of its capacities and the truly married alone can know what a wondrous instrument it is for purposes of the heart.” Their marriage was fruitful, bringing three children into the world.

The authors provide an excellent outline of the original beliefs of the Massachusetts Bay Puritans. This book also has a good sketch (which every student should read) toward understanding Hawthorne’s work. But it suffers from being unacquainted with Flannery O’Connor’s insights into both Nathaniel and Rose Hawthorne. In addition, the authors seem unaware of the classic work on Hawthorne by Marion Montgomery, Why Hawthorne Was Melancholy: The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit of the Age, which thoroughly examines the vicissitudes of Hawthorne’s heart.

O’Connor treasured Hawthorne as a writer because he struggled against the same destructive forces of nihilism and gnosticism that she saw raging around her. O’Connor’s characters are violently shocked out of their closed gnostic world. She saw Hawthorne addressing the same problem. Though she detected a restlessness and melancholy in him, “Hawthorne interests me considerably,” she wrote. “I feel more of a kinship with him than any other American.”

As Marion Montgomery said, “Hawthorne, though dissatisfied with Emerson’s thought, is nevertheless restless. He is always homesick for a country. His restlessness and our own excursions into history and art do not so much take us into the past as they lead us again and again out of time to ask the timeless questions always besieged by the present moment of our particular being. His restlessness very nearly brings him back to Rome.”

After his Liverpool consulship, Hawthorne actually lived in Rome. Curiously, his journal tells of repeated trips to St. Peter’s to watch people going to the confessionals. One entry reads, “The more I see of the Catholic Church, the more I wonder at the exuberance with which it responds to the demands of human infirmity.” Rose Hawthorne would complete the journey to Rome. She came to accept an absolute authority beyond self and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1891. In 1898 she founded an order of nuns, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, who still care for cancer victims in New York. Flannery O’Connor said that “she discovered much of what her father sought and fulfilled in a practical way the hidden desires of his life.”

And the Hawthorne family’s journey toward sanctity continues. In 2003 Cardinal Egan of New York began canonization proceedings for Rose Hawthorne. In order to become a saint, Rose must be declared “venerable,” a proven Catholic role model, and two miracles must be attributed to her. Hawthorne’s venerable ancestors would have been appalled at the thought of one of their own becoming a papist saint. Perhaps Emerson would have even burnt her for a witch.

Patrick J. Walsh is a writer in Massachusetts.