EDIS Conference Workshop F

"Zero at the Bone" "Dickinson and Calvin’s God"

Trondheim, Norway 5 August 2001

Emily Seelbinder

Queens College, Charlotte, NC

If you teach a survey of American literature, as I do regularly, you may know the challenge of standing before a classroom full of restive undergraduates the morning after they have wrestled far into the night with "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." It is a sermon that rarely leads my students to a great awakening, but it does lead them to prayer—that their teacher will not have prepared pop quiz and will move quickly on to the next assignment. They come to class that morning armed and dangerous, some because they have found the reading too difficult or "boring," most because they feel that Edwards has misrepresented God.

A lively discussion generally leads to the following distillation of Calvinist doctrine: We are born innately and irrevocably depraved—there is nothing we can do to make ourselves worthy of redemption—yet we have been endowed by our Creator with free will, which implies self-determination, except that the Creator who gave it to us, being omniscient, already knows what we will do and, being omnipotent, has already determined—before we are born—whether we will be numbered among the saints on the Day of Judgment. It is a logic that induces despair, glassy-eyed confusion, and outrage among my students; few—if any—are willing to accept it, much less allow that anyone in his or her right mind could have believed such rubbish.

Having read a number of scholarly discussions of Dickinson’s experience of religion and grappling myself with her reading of Scripture, I would say that such responses are not unique to naïve, inexperienced readers of the Puritans and their descendants. Let’s face it, Calvinism is devilishly difficult to, uh, justify.

Now, I am not a Presbyterian, but I do occasionally play one in church, and my little liberal arts college proudly claims its affiliation with that denomination, which also claims a majority of the churches in our fair city. In effect, I am surrounded by Calvinists, and for all I know, I am a Calvinist, but I have never really felt I could explain Calvinism very well. I suppose I could have put some questions to our chaplain, but when I started thinking seriously about this workshop’s topic, she was in Guatemala with several of our students and another member of the faculty on a mission trip. So I turned instead to the source of all Dickinson knowledge and the one who had invited the Rev. Mr. Calvin into our discussion in the first place: I emailed Jane to ask, "How are we defining or describing ‘Calvin’s God’?"

Her coy reply: "I’ll leave that definition to you. One of the charms of that phrase is that it’s so ambiguous." So much for that option.

I went to my college’s library, where, as luck would have it, the member of our staff who holds a Master’s of Divinity was on duty. "You’re just the person I need," I said. "I need a brief explanation of the Westminster Confession and the principles of Calvinism."

"How do you expect me to know that?" she replied. "I’m a Methodist." She did, however, wander over to our reference shelves and return with The Westminster Dictionary of Church History, which, thanks to one of the few faculty perks we have, I was allowed to take home to my study.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a certain friend, who had witnessed more than enough of my floundering and who happened to be proofreading a Catholic Encyclopedic Dictionary, brought home for my amusement a pre-Vatican II definition of Calvinism: "The heretical system of John Calvin . . . ." (Not an auspicious beginning.) The definition went on to demonstrate that Calvin’s system was contradictory and downright dangerous. (Nothing new there.) "Calvinism" it concluded, "has exerted a very strong influence on Protestantism, an influence that by its insistence on liberty of thought and its rejection of a hierarchical priesthood has led to the complete isolation of the individual soul . . . ."

Ah-HA! I thought, a lifeline: How many of Dickinson’s poems and letters reflect an acute sense of alienation—from God, from organized religion, from the Puritan tradition—in short, from Calvinism! Yet I could not agree that the cause of that alienation was the lack of a hierarchical priesthood and liberty of thought. Dickinson’s liberty of thought is, after all, one of the many qualities that make her work so appealing. Besides, John Calvin had descended on my home like Edward Gorey’s Doubtful Guest, and good breeding alone required that I treat him with civility.

I turned instead to "Calvin, John" in The Westminster Dictionary of Church History (the polar opposite of the pre-Vatican II source mentioned above). Soon we were playing a modified version of a game Karl Keller had taught us and comparing my guest’s work to that of Emily Dickinson. The results were really quite extraordinary.

Did you know that Calvin trained not only for the priesthood, but for the practice of law? When he came to examine Scripture in the development of his "heretical system," he did so in a careful, even lawyerly manner. The Westminster Dictionary describes the result:

If Calvin’s theology contradicts itself, very well then, it contradicts itself: it is large—it contains multitudes.

Emily Dickinson, the daughter and sister of lawyers and herself no slouch at dissecting language, developed a body of work that is equally large, ranging in its exploration of numerous subjects over many, sometimes contradictory possibilities while it resists being reduced to central principles. In her treatment of matters religious, Dickinson’s work, like Calvin’s, may be described as "uniquely saturated in biblical thought . . . ranging over the Old and New Testaments and affirming all their theological complexity." Perhaps it was this "dwell[ing] in Possibility" that allowed her the "Occupation" of "spreading wide [her] narrow Hands / To gather Paradise – " (Fr 466A).

One of Dickinson’s primary concerns in her reading of Scripture was to discover the nature of God, who is portrayed in many poems and letters as remote, unmoving, unfair, cruel, or unresponsive. "God is a distant – stately Lover – ," one poems declares, "Woos, as He states us – by His Son – / Verily, a Vicarious Courtship – " (Fr 615A). Calvin’s reading of Scripture also produced a distant God who communicates vicariously [what a delicious pun that word suggests, but I digress . . .]:

Dickinson echoes Calvin’s understanding of the condescension of Word and sacraments in this famous poem available to us only in a transcription by Sue:

This poem alludes not only to the opening chapter of the gospel of John, in which "the Word [that] was with God, . . . and was God" is said to have been "made flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1.1-14), but also the first letter to the Corinthians, in which Paul shows the "mystery" of the Resurrection by which "we shall all be changed" and "Death is swallowed up in victory" (1 Cor. 15.51, 54). Cynthia Griffin Wolff has suggested that "perhaps no single passage had such currency in mid-nineteenth-century Amherst as I Corinthians 15. . . . Every Amherst Congregationalist would have recognized an allusion, however subtle, to any portion of it" (72). Dickinson herself alluded directly to this passage at least a dozen times (Capps 162-163). Unlike her neighbors, for whom the Word was common currency, Dickinson’s speaker experiences it as a private communication, calibrated to her "specific strength" and "tasted / With ecstasies of stealth."

According to the Westminster Dictionary, Calvin’s "doctrine of predestination was an attempt to account, in light of certain Pauline statements, for the diversity of human response to the gospel" ("Calvin, John"). For Dickinson, as it was for Calvin, interpretation of Scripture was a deeply personal experience, fraught with risk and uncertainty, and yet absolutely necessary. Standing on this side of the "Pierless Bridge / Supporting what We see / Unto the Scene that We do not – " (Fr 978), "Faith bleats to understand – " (Fr 283C), the only certainty being that "A Species stands beyond – / Invisible, as Music – / But positive, as Sound," and though "Narcotics cannot still the Tooth / That nibbles at the soul – " (Fr 373), the seeker stumbles forward, hoping, perhaps knowing that "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (1 Cor. 13.12).

Dickinson, however, was clearly more unwilling than Calvin to set aside doubts and uncertainties. Repeatedly, her speakers suggest that God’s "fond Ambush – / Just to make Bliss / Earn her own surprise" (Fr 365A) is unfair and unjust. What is the point, her speakers ask, of making us wait to know "why"? There is little comfort now:

At other times, her speakers cling to and even take comfort in the hope that their faith, however faltering, will be revealed as true. The potential for joy can sometimes be found in a transcendent liminal moment, described exquisitely here:

The reasoning of the soon-to-be butterfly in this poem could be said to describe Dickinson’s approach to Scripture. Alicia Ostriker has identified in Dickinson’s manipulation of biblical material not only "a hermeneutics of suspicion" and "the hermeneutics of desire," but also "a hermeneutics of indeterminacy" (all evident in many poems discussed above and below). "What I mean," Ostriker explains,

Ostriker reads these strategies as feminist revision, rebellion against the faith of her fathers. I would like to suggest that Dickinson’s hermeneutics of indeterminacy may also be derived from her religious training.

It is well established that nineteenth-century New Englanders were expected to know their Bibles thoroughly and that Emily Dickinson’s education included direct and indirect instruction in reading and interpreting Scripture. One source often overlooked in discussions of Dickinson’s religious training, however, is a biblical reference text owned by the Dickinson family and perhaps consulted by the poet in the careful study of Scripture that is revealed in her letters and poems. Placing Dickinson’s work side-by-side with this text reveals some provocative comparisons.

A Companion to the Bible, edited by William Jenks and published in 1838, is a massive volume containing all the tools deemed necessary for lay readers of Scripture: a concordance, a study guide, biographies of biblical commentators, a Bible index, a symbol dictionary, a geographical dictionary, maps, portraits, engravings and other illustrations. Of particular interest is the study guide, described on its separate title page as

Following this announcement are nearly 200 pages of densely packed text: three nine-inch columns per page, each line measuring just under one-sixteenth of an inch. The guide is divided almost evenly into four parts: Part I discusses the history of biblical literature and criticism and offers a guide to biblical interpretation; Part II provides background on the biblical books; Part III explains biblical theology; and Part IV covers biblical history, geography, science, arts, and domestic usages. Wood engravings are interspersed throughout to relieve the eye and illustrate the discussion.

From this description of the guide’s contents, we might expect a rigid, dogmatic text, full of fundamentalist interpretive absolutes. Yet, almost in the center of the guide’s title page (just before the word abridged above) we find this quotation from a "Professor Planck" (a scholar quoted at some length in the guide):

When we peruse the pages that follow, we find that this study guide’s purpose is not to mandate, but truly to assist, to provide the reader with tools for reading intelligently.

The chapter on biblical interpretation opens with a frank acknowledgement of the difficulties of reading Scripture, then promises that such difficulties are not insurmountable:

Significantly, the authors go on to caution the reader against the uncritical use of commentaries, including their own guide, for doing so "is displacing the word of God, by the substitution of human compositions; good in themselves, perhaps, but still human, and therefore unauthoritative compositions." The student must always go first to Scripture, the "actual communications of GOD himself! [sic]. . ." (23).

How like Emerson’s advice to the American Scholar this is: "Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated," Emerson insisted. "Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings . . ." (57; emphasis added). The authors of the guide conclude their introduction with some very Emersonian advice: "The theologian, then, ought to commence his studies with the principles of interpretation, so that he might apply them for himself, that the decisions of inspiration alone may control his judgment" (23; emphasis added).

Section III of the chapter outlines the "Moral Qualities Requisite in an Interpreter of Scripture": "Gratitude for the Fact and Character of Divine Revelation – Humility – Devout Prayer – Ingenuousness and Decision of Purpose" (25; the dashes are part of the heading, not Dickinsonesque flourishes). The authors avow they "are prepared for the sneer and the laugh of the witling, when we say, that the most illiterate man who can read his Bible, and avail himself of the information it contains, knows infinitely more about a future state of existence, than either Socrates or Plato; and, what is of far more value, his knowledge is more influential" (26). The great thinkers of any era, they imply, lack the wherewithal to interpret Scripture to their advantage. No reading of Scripture is complete without the presence of the Holy Spirit, " the peculiar office" of which is "to ‘lead men into all truth’" (27). The authors go on to cite Jesus’ advice that we "become as little children" in order to be brought closer to God and conclude, "We must bring a free and unoccupied mind to the exercise [of interpreting Scripture] . . . . We must bring with us the docility of a child, if we want to gain the kingdom of heaven . . ." (28).

Do the childlike poses Dickinson adopted in many of her poems—especially those concerning a relationship with God and Heaven—come immediately to mind? In that famous declaration of independence from conventional celebrations of the Sabbath, the childlike speaker, experiencing the Word of God directly, apparently gains easy entry into the kingdom:

Dickinson’s childlike speakers are seldom so docile, however, and for most of them, the childlike approach to Scripture fails to suffice. The result is not a stronger, more mature faith, but a deep sense betrayal and doubt.

When the speaker of "I meant to have but modest needs" (Fr 711A) finds her childish prayer mocked by all of Heaven, she stalks away in childlike fury:

Matthew 7.7-8, to which the poet alludes here, turns up several times in her poems and letters, most often with reference to disappointment. Writing to the Hollands in 1853, Dickinson declared, "If prayers had any answers to them, you were all here to-night, but I seek and I don’t find, and knock and it is not opened. Wonder if God is just – presume he is, however, and t’was only a blunder of Matthew’s" (L 133). Thirty years later Maria Whitney received a similar complaint: "You are like God. We pray to Him, and He answers ‘No.’ Then we pray to Him to rescind the ‘no,’ and he don’t answer at all, yet ‘Seek and ye shall find’ is the boon of faith" (L 860). The speaker of another poem merges Matthew’s "blunder" with Revelations 3.20 and asks, "Why – do they shut me out of Heaven?" She suggests that if their situations were reversed, she would not be so cruel as God:

The authors of the study guide on the Dickinson family shelves would not have been surprised by the failure of these attempts to apply human logic to Scripture: "Every attempt to fathom, by our limited reason, the deep things of the Most High, or to reconcile, with systematic nicety, particular points, which, though clearly revealed, may not appear to our contracted view perfectly accordant with each other, or with our idea of what is right and befitting the Almighty, must be utterly vain and futile" (27). Still, in the sections that follow, they place before the student interpreter a dizzying array of tools out of which to fashion their readings. A quick perusal of section titles will show that most of these tools require vigorous exercise of the intellect: "Literary Qualifications of an Interpreter," " General Rules of Biblical Interpretation," "Of the Signification of Words," "Scripture Parallelisms," "Subsidiary Means of discovering the Signification of Words," "Interpretation of Tropical Language," "Poetry of Sacred Writings," "Interpretation of Symbolical Language," "Types and Secondary Senses."

What becomes clear as one works to acquire each of these tools is that the individual believer’s interpretations of Scripture must be the result of a seemingly contradictory and often frustrating process of rigorous hermeneutical scholarship and childlike simplicity. At both the center and the circumference of this process is Scripture, simultaneously transparent and opaque. Carpenter’s Guide to the Reading and Study of the Bible, contained in the Jenks Companion, articulates standard interpretative principles for believers in the Calvinist tradition. One of the hallmarks of the Protestant Reformation was its insistence that the Word of God (Scripture) could not and should not be experienced through human intermediaries. Both Luther and Calvin arrived at their then-radical theologies by careful, close readings of Scripture; they expected others to do the same. It would appear Emily Dickinson took them at their word.

Works Cited