I recently posted about using poetry as a source for studying American history, and religious history – or rather, why you are making a mistake if you don’t include certain really significant landmark works. Here is a prime example.
In 1915, Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) published Sunday Morning, one of the greatest of Modernist writings in English, and among the most important American poems of the century. (It appeared in part in 1915, but not in full until 1923). It is centrally concerned with religion, with Christianity, and with the religious options available to educated people in the early twentieth century. It belongs front and center in any history of American religious thought at that time.
When the Gods Left
Stevens himself was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and came from a conservative and even puritanical religious background – Pennsylvania German Lutheran and Reformed. In his last months, he turned to Catholicism. But he came of age in the very questioning atmosphere of Harvard at the turn of the century. In 1951, he wrote a brilliant and very quotable account of the world’s loss of faith in his lecture “Two or Three Ideas,” delivered at Mount Holyoke College:
To see the gods dispelled in mid‐air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing. Since we have always shared all things with them and have always had a part of their strength and, certainly, all of their knowledge, we shared likewise this experience of annihilation. It was their annihilation, not ours, and yet it left us feeling that in a measure we, too, had been annihilated. It left us feeling dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents, in a home that seemed deserted, in which the amical rooms and halls had taken on a look of hardness and emptiness. What was most extraordinary is that they left no mementoes behind, no thrones, no mystic rings, no texts either of the soil or of the soul. It was as if they had never inhabited the earth. … At the same time, no man ever muttered a petition in his heart for the restoration of those unreal shapes.
In the 1910s, like so many others, Stevens was exploring the intellectual demands of Christianity, seeking to understand whether it remained a credible system in light of so many intellectual challenges. What, if anything, could be salvaged? And if not Christianity, what other alternatives were available?
1915: Crisis, Experiment, Reaction
The years around 1915 were an effervescent era in American history, which in so many ways parallels the late 1960s. The mid-1910s too was a time of mass radicalism and labor unrest, feminist agitation, free speech fights, and bold experiments in art and literature. It was a time of furious anti-war campaigning, in this case not about a war in progress, but rather a potential conflict: liberals and radicals desperately wanted to keep the US out of Europe’s Great War. It sounds a lot like 1968, doesn’t it? In the spiritual realm, Christian orthodoxy faced many challenges from what we today would call New Age movements, including Asian-themed sects, Theosophy and New Thought, as well as esoteric and occult groups – not to mention straightforward atheism. The fact that the world’s great Christian empires were massacring each other so enthusiastically, and constantly citing God as their justification, raised grave questions about any boasts of “Christian civilization.”
As in 1968, Christians agonized over how far their old certainties remained credible. Some had no doubts. The Fundamentals – which gave their name to fundamentalism – appeared between 1910 and 1915, and in 1915 conservative Presbyterians issued a declaration of war within the denomination under the title “Back to Fundamentals.” A potent evangelical revival found its anthems in such legendary hymns as “The Old Rugged Cross,” which was written in 1912 and first published in 1915; and “In the Garden” also dates from 1912. That is all over and above the still burning Pentecostal revival that had begun in 1906.
But other believers were far from convinced. The Fundamentals would not have bothered to assert the points they did – about the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, Christ’s divinity, miracles, or scriptural literalism – if those specific beliefs had not been under such determined and wide-ranging attack over the previous decades. The Fundamentals responded by doubling down. The Higher Criticism was making a deep impact, and reaching a mass audience. Since the 1890s, daily newspapers and popular magazines had regularly announced the discovery of alternative and lost gospels, including chunks of the Gospel of Thomas. You could read about newly found Old Testament pseudepigrapha, including early discoveries related to Qumran and the later Dead Sea Scrolls. By 1915, all these potentially explosive texts were available in cheap mass market books. Truly mad theories about Christian origins proliferated.
Sunday Morning
Sunday Morning portrays a woman taking a leisurely breakfast in a sunny room, and conspicuously not preparing for church. It is not entirely clear how much of the poem is a dialogue with the poet, and how much is the woman’s internal musing in a stream of consciousness form, but the central theme is clear. The woman is trying to decide what she believes, or what anyone can legitimately believe, about Christ, Christianity, and faith. I won’t summarize the poem in any detail, as you can easily read it for yourself at multiple sites, and it repays frequent re-reading. Let me single out a couple of major themes, specifically as they apply to the religious debates of the time. (Yes, I am omitting other key themes, images, and ideas).
Whatever the other issues of the time – Creation, miracles, the Virgin Birth – she is above all concerned with the idea of the reality of the Resurrection, the central claim of faith, and in that, she is accurately reflecting so much of the thought of the time. As she muses, “her dreaming feet” pass
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.
The problem with those religious claims is that they are simply irrelevant to her, when she lives so enjoyably in the senses, the pleasures of a sunlit world with all its splendid tastes and smells. She loves beauty, and above all the beauty of the natural world. Why should she waste time on these ghostly concepts, to a religion of shadows and the grave, to an empty fantasy of Paradise?
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
From the sun warming the room in which she sits, she moves to thinking of how the sun has been central to worship. Should not Sunday be a day to worship the sun?
But should she feel guilty for her hedonistic and present-centered attitude? She can’t just reject the spiritual dimension.
She says, “But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.”
Through the poem, she wrestles with the idea of death and transience. Initially, she feels that death is something to be feared and rejected as the end of beauty, but then accepts it as an inevitable part of the natural cycle. “Death is the mother of beauty.”
Pagan Solutions?
So if not the Christian world view, what? In an important passage, she imagines the authentic religion of paganism, not seen as an ancient relic doomed to destruction by monotheism, but as a logical and free-standing system of worship and reverence, a future more than a past:
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.
They live in the present, they worship the present. They are part of Nature. That is all the paradise they need, all the Heaven.
Here more than in other places, the question arises whether we are meant to read this as her continuing reverie, or as the vision of the poet interlocutor: it is very masculine!
Read from the point of view of 1915, the passage is both prophetic and alarming. This was a very good year indeed for the rhetoric of blood and martyrdom, of redemptive sacrifice, of “blood returning to the sky.” Look at the war propaganda of all the combatant nations in the Great War. Also look at the rhetoric of nationalist and revolutionary movements, most obviously Pádraig Pearse in the Irish nationalist cause. The passage portends the movement to exalting the “primitive” that in the American context would soon take the form of a fascinated rediscovery of Native American religion and culture, the glorification of “Red Atlantis” in New Mexico and elsewhere. (I wrote about this at length in my 2004 book Dream Catchers). It also foreshadows modern-day neo-pagan movements.
But we also think of the neo-pagan revivals that would take political form, which would exalt race, blood, and virility. Notoriously, such movements were central to the history of Europe over the next two decades, and some deployed solar symbols. Nor was the US immune from such temptations. Coincidentally or not, it was in 1915 that the Ku Klux Klan re-established itself, with all its rhetoric of blood, racial authenticity, true manliness, and radical anti-modernity. It was directly inspired by that year’s blockbuster movie hit, Birth of a Nation. To return to an earlier point, the Klan’s unofficial anthem was “The Old Rugged Cross” – a rugged hymn for rugged men?
Need I add that Stevens himself was not for a second venturing into any of those unsavory proto-fascist realms? But Sunday Morning does help us understand many of the spiritual currents that would become so strong in the 1920s and beyond, including much of that earlier New Age.
Spiritual But Not Religious
As the poem ends – as the woman’s daydream ends – she says farewell to orthodox Christian faith, and to any idea of Resurrection:
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
She is still open to a spiritual reverence for Nature and its cycles, but it is a spirituality without Christ and, more important, without God. Without trivializing a great poem, dare I suggest that it is the charter text for the idea of being “spiritual, but not religious”, SBNR?
Historians of American religion can get a lot out of Sunday Morning as a source. But at the same time, anyone reading Stevens from a literary angle is making a mistake if they fail to contextualize it in the passionate religious struggles of the time.
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