PART ONE
[I]n these States, for both man and woman, we must entirely recast the types of highest personality from what the oriental, feudal, ecclesiastical worlds bequeath us. … Of course, the old undying elements remain. The task is, to successfully adjust them to new combinations, our own days.
—Whitman
Chapter 1
WALT WHITMAN held that “society, in these States, is canker’d, crude, superstitious, and rotten. Political, or law-made society is, and private, or voluntary society, is also.” And yet he also held that a vigorously democratic ethos is struggling to be born of the people as they are, and wants midwifery from writers who would be pleased to see it explicit and mature. The “important question of character,” as Whitman poses it in Democratic Vistas,1 is what sort of people we can reasonably aspire to be, given the disturbing condition of society as it stands and the influence it has already had on us. It is a question very much with us today, but we have largely forgotten how to pose it in Whitman’s democratic way. Indeed, we have largely lost sight of the tradition of reflection that Democratic Vistas represents. It is part of my purpose in this chapter to remind America that this tradition exists. I shall be painting in very broad strokes on a large canvas, providing just enough detail—in the form of commentary on quotations from Emerson, Whitman, and Dewey—to challenge received opinion on what the moral and religious landscape of the United States has been like. Think of this as a Ben Shahn mural in prose.
These figures represent only one strand of an American debate over religion, ethics, and political community that has been going on since Emerson’s lectures and essays of the late 1830s. Another strand, equally important but much more aware of itself as a tradition, is that of orthodox Christianity from the Puritanism of Plymouth Rock to the denominational soup of our own day. Yet another, to be explored briefly in the next chapter, is a sort of blues spirituality rooted in the practices of African polytheism. In jazz, rock, and film, as well as in novels, essays, and poems, the spirit of the blues and Emersonian striving for perfection have often reinforced one another, creating a combined cultural force that orthodox Christians have found deeply disturbing but have largely misunderstood as an expression of liberal secularism. It is not always easy to distinguish the various strands of American religious thought and practice. Some thinkers, like Cornel West, self-consciously integrate them all. As Harold Bloom has said, many Americans who call themselves Christians are in fact more Emersonian than Augustinian in outlook. Many others care more about the ecstasy of the crossroads than the agony of the cross.
Bloom is being characteristically hyperbolic, however, when he declares Emerson the founding prophet of the American religion.2 The definite article and singular noun reduce something complicated and conflicted to something simple and unitary. American religion is a swirling whirlwind of religious energy and experimentation, accompanied by much open conflict. In this chapter I want to contrast the Emersonian and Augustinian strands of American religiosity without exaggerating their differences. Ever since Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” of 1838, he and his followers have been engaged in a tug of war with orthodox Christians over the future of American piety. Christians, ever mindful of Augustine’s great work, The City of God, have never been reluctant to condemn the Emersonians for underestimating the human spirit’s need for settled institutional and communal forms, including a structure of church authority to reign in spiritual excess. The Emersonians, for their part, would rather quit the church than grant that some holder of church office or even a democratically organized congregation has the authority to administer the distinctions between saved and damned, saint and sinner, true and false prophet, scripture and apocrypha. Above all, they have been persuaded from the beginning that the idea of original sin is blight on the human spirit. Orthodox Christians sense in all this the errors of ancient heresies—Montanist and Pelagian, to be precise—and have never tired of prophesying against them.3
My focal point in this chapter will be what Emersonians have said about the virtues. I will emphasize one virtue in particular, piety, because this has been central to the broader debate over religion, ethics, and political community. Piety, in this context, is not to be understood primarily as a feeling, expressed in acts of devotion, but rather as a virtue, a morally excellent aspect of character. It consists in just or appropriate response to the sources of one’s existence and progress through life. Family, political community, the natural world, and God are all said to be sources on which we depend, sources to be acknowledged appropriately. Emersonians and Augustinians agree that piety, in this sense, is a crucial virtue, and they share an interest in clarifying the proper relationship between civic and religious piety. But they disagree over how the sources should be conceived and what constitutes appropriate acknowledgment of our dependence on them. It is remarkable, all things considered, that they have remained on speaking terms, for they spend a great deal of time squinting at one another suspiciously and uncomprehendingly. But in fact they have largely agreed on the value of religious freedom, the separation of church and state, and the legitimacy of constitutional democracy in our era. And they have learned much and borrowed much from one another along the way.
One of my aims in this book is to describe the political consensus of Emersonian and Augustinian democrats in a fresh way, without underestimating its fragility. Political philosophers have approached the topics of “overlapping consensus” and “public reason” by developing a theory of the social contract, the central ideas of which derive from the Enlightenment liberalism of John Locke and Immanuel Kant. For reasons that I will elaborate in chapter 3, I find the social-contract model of political community—and especially its conception of public reason—insufficiently historical and sociological. As a student of religion, I am inclined to approach these topics more concretely. That means beginning with the religious visions and perfectionist projects that have actually mattered to most Americans, and only then constructing a philosophical account of the promise and dangers implicit in our political culture.
THE QUESTION OF CHARACTER AND THE DEBATE OVER PIETY
The premise of Whitman’s social criticism is that character and society are reciprocally related; each has an effect on the other. We bear responsibility both for society’s current condition, which would have been otherwise if we had had different virtues and vices, and for its future condition, which will depend on what we make of ourselves today and tomorrow. If we find society in poor condition, we have reason to fear the effects of that society on us. We may be weakening—may indeed have already ruined—our own capacity as a people to reform. The worse the social circumstances appear, the deeper the suspicion that we may be characters in a tragedy, awaiting only the final compensation for the flaws in our character. The deeper that suspicion goes, the stronger the temptation will be to place one’s hope in some temporal power other than, better than, higher than, stronger than, the people.
The question of character is important, in Whitman’s view, precisely because we are not self-evidently fit to perform the tasks that our circumstances demand of us if we want to live democratically. “In fact,” Whitman writes, “it is to admit and face these dangers I am writing. To him or her within whose thought rages the battle, advancing, retreating, between democracy’s convictions, aspirations, and the people’s crudeness, vice, caprices, I mainly write this essay” (DV, par. 3). Merely to celebrate our character by joining in chants democratic, instead of looking “our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease” (DV, par. 16), is smugness. It may also involve embracing a form of racial mysticism or chauvinistic idolatry—a despicable piety indeed. That Whitman was himself prone to such crudeness and superstition—for example, in his remarks on the Saxonization of Mexico or on Oregon’s exclusion of blacks—shows that the physician of democracy can suffer from the very ills he proposes, in his better moments, to diagnose in the people. A critic who would identify democratically with the people should, in the act of criticizing their self-worshipping cant as so much “hectic glow” and “melodramatic screamings” (DV, par. 16), be conscious of having himself to heal. I will not be praising Whitman for removing hubris and superstition from his identifications.
The question of character gets short shrift, not only from those who worship the people as a race or a nation, thus placing our character beyond question, but also from those who believe that our political and economic systems are structurally immune from whatever faults the people might have. In Whitman’s eyes, the latter group is as superstitious as the former. They suffer under “the prevailing delusion that the establishment of free political institutions, and plentiful intellectual smartness, with general good order, physical plenty, industry, &c … do, of themselves, determine and yield to our experiment of democracy the fruitage of success” (DV, par. 15). It is simply not the case that our political system can dispense entirely with civic virtue and still survive as a democracy. Our constitutional checks and balances can, to some extent, neutralize the evil effects of self-interest among the people. Our economy does sometimes punish sloth and stupidity with its unseen hand while “uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and in a certain highly-deceptive superficial popular intellectuality” (DV, par. 16). But there is nothing in either system to guarantee that we will, over time, possess all of the virtues required to sustain the nondeferential conversability of a genuinely democratic politics.
Without help from the people, no constitution can prevent a wealthy and powerful class from rigging the electoral system to favor the wealthy and powerful. If such a class were to gain control of government, it would then be able to use all available constitutional means, including taxation, expenditure, and regulation, to rule plutocratically. It might then succeed in fostering conditions in which gaps between social classes would widen and democratic participation would atrophy. These conditions, in turn, could strengthen a potential oligarchy’s hold on power while weakening the people’s ability to resist. The result could hardly be termed democratic. It would be more accurately described as a caste system in modern dress—a feudal regime without the grace of chivalry.
Something much like this nightmare of oligarchy was haunting Whitman when he published Democratic Vistas in 1871, as the new industrialists and professional elites began to establish themselves in the aftermath of the Civil War. As a Jacksonian democrat, Whitman could not help viewing this development with suspicion:
The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. (DV, par. 16)
In retrospect, Whitman’s judgment seems prescient, for this was the era in which Wall Street lawyers, northeastern bankers, arms manufacturers, and railroad builders initiated the careers that allowed them to dominate political economy in the Gilded Age.
Another potential oligarchy appears to have arisen today, as a new class of managers and professionals consolidates both political and economic power in the aftermath of the New Deal. The emergent American institutional elite—the upper echelon of officials in government, major corporations, accounting firms, prestigious universities, and foundations throughout the nation—has recently become the object of heated controversy from all sides. Each ideological faction has its own self-serving definition and social analysis of the elite. No one denies, however, that members of the new elite have benefited greatly from the influence they exert on the electoral system, the system of higher education, the professional licensing system, and the economic system. From a democratic point of view, of course, the emergence of any such elite must be viewed with suspicion, as a potential threat to democracy. So much the worse if the elite is dominated by members of the same social class, has already secured its grip on the crucial levers of power, and has significantly widened the gap between itself and everyone else in America.4 The people retain the right to vote, of course, as well as certain constitutional protections, but their effective political voice appears to be dwindling as rapidly as the average wage earner’s share in the common wealth.
Under circumstances like Whitman’s and ours, with potentially antidemocratic forces assembling allies and attempting to divide or coopt their foes, the question of character attains utmost importance for friends of democracy. It becomes the question of whether the people can summon the spiritual wherewithal, the moral fiber, to act on behalf of democracy before democracy itself gives way. As stewards of our society, we bear the responsibility for its survival and betterment. As products of our society, however, democratic reformers and critics are themselves bound to be weakened or corrupted by practices and institutions that appear “canker’d, crude, superstitious, and rotten,” when surveyed from a democratic point of view. It is hard to see how we, the people, under such circumstances, could possess the virtues required for democratic amelioration of the social conditions that so desperately need our attention. The greater the need for democratically initiated reform, it seems, the smaller the likelihood that the people will be ethically and politically competent to supply it. The question of character acquires highest importance in a democracy at those recurring moments when the viability of democratic reform is itself in question for just this reason. Ours appears to be such a moment.
As I survey the day-to-day lives of my fellow citizens, it seems reasonable to fear that we have largely:
• ignored the plight of the poor everywhere;
• permitted the American state to prop up countless tyrants abroad;
• neither adequately prevented nor mourned the civilian casualties of our militarism;
• failed to hold professional elites responsible to the people;
• acquired a habit of deferring to bosses;
• preferred pecuniary gain and prestige to justice;
• ceased to trust ourselves as competent initiators of action;
• retreated into enclaves defined by ethnicity, race, and lifestyle;
• and otherwise withdrawn from politics into docility, apathy, or despair.
If some or all of these fears are indeed justified, is not our political economy in immediate danger of ceasing in practice to be a democracy in any but a purely formal sense? Would our constitutionally mandated electoral apparatus, checks, balances, and formally recognized rights be enough, by themselves, to give us a government that is of, by, and for the people?
So far, I have simply posed the question of character in something like Whitman’s terms—the rhetoric of a committed democrat. I now want to consider antidemocratic versions of the same question, highlighting as I do so the roles that the concept of piety tends to play in them. Whitman was self-consciously rescuing the question from his opponents, showing that it could be made into a question democracy poses to itself. In Whitman’s day as in ours, however, the question has most often been posed to America by authors unfriendly to democracy. Whitman refers specifically to Thomas Carlyle’s Shooting Niagara, confessing that he “was at first roused to much anger and abuse by this essay from Mr. Carlyle, so insulting to the theory of America … expressing as it does certain judgments from the highest feudal point of view” (DV, par. 25n). But he was also deeply familiar, as any Romantic poet would be, with Wordsworth’s version, which in turn owed much to Edmund Burke. And he was equally familiar with a theological version of the question circulating in American Protestantism.
In part 2, we will see that the question has recently become a pressing concern for major Christian thinkers in America. Hauerwas, MacIntyre, and Milbank pose it in terms borrowed from Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas.5 There are important differences among these traditionalists, but they all tend toward the same negative conclusion with respect to democracy. Democratic individualism, they say, undercuts the structures of tradition and community within which alone it is possible to nurture the virtues that sustain moral education and political life. Democracy is one of the modern forces that level excellence and virtue along with hierarchy, unwittingly clearing ground for a tyranny of the majority to occupy. By eroding premodern social distinctions, it creates a society that is atomistically fragmented yet, paradoxically, also highly prone to conformity. Many similar challenges have been addressed to democracy in recent years, with Leo Strauss and Friedrich Nietzsche perhaps qualifying as the sources most often studied in the universities. But throughout this book, I will have a handful of contemporary Christian writers in mind as representative critics of democracy. Their versions of the question of character deserve a response, and this book is my attempt to supply it. I begin with Whitman largely because he and a host of others inspired by him are so hard to absorb into the story these authors tell about America.
Whitman was severely suspicious of the question-begging terms in which previous generations of traditionalists had cast the question. Why should anyone be surprised, or troubled, if a thinker working with concepts from “feudalism” (DV, par. 4), or from other premodern and Old World sources, were to find the character of the American people wanting? “The purpose of democracy” is that of “supplanting old belief in the necessary absoluteness of establish’d dynastic rulership … as furnishing the only security against chaos, crime, and ignorance” (DV, par. 24). It therefore goes without saying that democratic character will, from an antidemocratic point of view, appear to tend toward chaos, crime, and ignorance.
The issue of piety is central to the dispute. Democracy will appear intrinsically impious, and thus vicious, to its foes in part because they see it as an all-out attack on the social structures that have long been taken to be among the sources of our existence and progress through life. Piety, if understood as deference to a hierarchy of powers on which social life depends, seems simply to be washed away in a tidal wave of democratic self-assertion. In deferential respect, common people once bowed down in gratitude and humility to everything higher than themselves in the chain of being. The value of such piety consisted partly in the contribution it made to education in the virtues. The reverence for authority implicit in it fostered docility, which in turn permitted an individual’s character to be shaped by tradition and community toward virtue. Democracy, in contrast, trumpets self-reliance and holds docility in contempt. It encourages individuals to stand up, think for themselves, and demand recognition of their rights. Whitman says, “Long enough have the People been listening to poems in which common humanity, deferential, bends low, humiliated, acknowledging superiors. But America listens to no such poems. Erect, inflated, and fully self-esteeming be the chant; and then America will listen with pleased ears” (DV, par. 106).
Lamentation over the fate of piety in the democratic age can be voiced in either a secular or a theological spirit. From Cicero to Machiavelli and down to the present, philosophers and political theorists have often construed religious piety instrumentally. This meant promoting religion not for its own sake, but rather as a convenient means of support for this-worldly virtue. Their real interest was civic piety—piety toward the structures of civil society and the political order itself. If religious piety could be manipulated with an eye toward the well-being of the republic, then, from a Machiavellian perspective, so much the better. Any religious tradition’s forms of piety will do as far as the prudent prince is concerned, provided only that its widespread acceptance contributes stability and strength to public order and virtue. In this one respect, Edmund Burke resembled Machiavelli. He displayed little or no interest in the theological question of how God ought to be conceived as the supreme object of our piety. What mattered to him was that the English constitution, by which he meant the entire web of inherited prejudices and practices of English life, in fact included an established religious tradition whose characteristic forms of worship and deference conferred stability and strength upon the whole social fabric. “We know, and, what is better, we feel inwardly,” Burke wrote, “that religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good, and of all comfort.”6 He refers here to religion, not to God, and his point is quite different from the one that some followers of Augustine would want to make.
All Augustinians hold that the true God should be recognized for what he is and worshipped in the manner that he requires of us, which is the only manner truly appropriate to his nature and fitting as an acknowledgment of our actual dependence upon him. Theological truth is therefore of paramount importance. Not just any form of religious piety will do. To the contrary, only one form could be deemed correct, because only one qualifies as a just response to the ultimate source of our existence and progress through life. Anything less than this, anything other than this, will be vice, not virtue. A way of life that does not have piety toward the true God at its center will be vitiated in some measure, because the most important part of justice will be missing from it. As Augustine put it, “true virtues cannot exist except in those who possess true piety.”7
There are Augustinians and Augustinians. They all agree that modern democracy is vitiated to some significant degree by its lack of true piety. But some embrace modern democracy, somewhat ambivalently, as a way station in a long journey toward the end of human history. Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey defended this position in the twentieth century; Jean Bethke Elshtain defends it today. Niebuhr was fond of quoting Churchill’s famous remark that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all of the others; it perfectly expresses his ambivalence. Augustinian traditionalists, however, take modern democracy to be vitiated through and through by its prideful and disastrous secularization of the political sphere. As a result, the Augustinian’s characteristic ambivalence toward the political order hardens into a traditionalist rejection of secular society.
It should be clear, then, that those who appeal to traditional piety as part of the fabric of virtue that sustains our society and who vilify democratic individualism as an acid eating away at that fabric do not all have the same vision of piety and virtue in mind. They do tend, however, to employ many of the same rhetorical devices when they describe and denounce democracy. Perhaps the most important of these is a contrast between democracy, understood as a leveling force, and something else—called tradition, culture, civilization, or community—on which the possibility of a virtuous common life is held to depend. Modern democracy is a force that results in fragmentation, not a culture hospitable to its own distinctive virtues and praiseworthy character types. Its characteristic form of moral discourse consists in the assertion and counterassertion of individual rights, not in reflection on and cultivation of the virtues. It is all about self-reliance and self-assertion, not piety. It destroys the character of the citizens who participate in it. So goes the standard traditionalist story.
It was high time, Whitman thought, to recast the question of character in democratic terms. In some passages, he seems to discard ancient and medieval traditions of the virtues altogether, as when he says that “the models of persons, books, manners, &c., appropriate for former conditions and for European lands, are but exiles and exotics here” (DV, par. 66). This move might seem merely to invert the practice of Whitman’s opponents, and thus to beg the question from the democratic side. He might well be accused of arbitrarily rejecting all standards that might have any chance of entailing a critical judgment on democratic character, simply on the grounds that they are old or foreign. His celebration of a uniquely American youth and newness is often arbitrary and excessive; it grows from the same root as his mystic euphoria over Anglo-Saxon stock. Yet Whitman was capable of a subtler formulation, which better approximates the pragmatic conceptual strategy I propose to follow when modifying virtue democratically.
He claims in one passage that “the types of highest personality” bequeathed to us by “the oriental, feudal, ecclesiastical worlds” form “a strange anachronism upon the scenes and exigencies around us”—and then adds, crucially: “Of course, the old undying elements remain. The task is, to successfully adjust them to new combinations, our own days” (DV, par. 84). This task is a critical one, and it involves coming to terms with traditional conceptions of the virtues as well as modern, democratic circumstances and persons. To those who would think this task incredible, he offers assurance that it is not. A paragraph later, he speaks of America’s need to “cease to recognize a theory of character grown of feudal aristocracies,” and to “sternly promulgate her own new standard” (DV, par. 85). He also speaks, charitably and pragmatically, however, of “accepting the old, perennial elements, and combining them into groups, unities, appropriate to the modern, the democratic, and to the practical occasions and needs of our own cities, and of the agricultural regions.” He is saying that a critical language will have to be hammered out in which the question of character can be posed fairly and usefully to a democratic society: fairly, so as not to beg the question against democracy; and usefully, so as to make wise critical judgments possible.
When Whitman decides to appropriate the term “culture” for his own democratic project, thus turning the tables rhetorically on those who imagine democracy as the opposite of a culture, he says, remarkably, “We find ourselves abruptly in close quarters with the enemy” (DV, par. 67). He is conscious of the need for “a radical change of category, in the distribution of precedence” (DV, par. 68). His rhetorical challenge will be to say what a democratic culture could be, with both terms receiving due emphasis. A culture is an enduring collection of social practices, embedded in institutions of a characteristic kind, reflected in specific habits and intuitions, and capable of giving rise to recognizable forms of human character. He calls for “a programme of culture, drawn out, not for a single class alone, or for the parlors or lecture-rooms, but with an eye to practical life,” and he emphasizes the need to take into account both “working-men” and “the perfect equality of women.” He then generalizes the point: “I should demand of this programme or theory a scope generous enough to include the widest human area. It must have for its spinal meaning the formation of a typical personality of character … not restricted by conditions ineligible to the masses” (italics in original).
Whitman is not backing off from his democratic commitment to the language of rights when he embarks on this program of culture and speculates on what the virtues of truly democratic individuals might be. As far as he is concerned, these two strands of democratic discourse are compatible with one another. The existence of Democratic Vistas is enough to raise doubts about the kind of story MacIntyre has told, according to which proper thinking and writing about the virtues went into eclipse at about the time Enlightenment philosophers started theorizing about rights (see chapter 5, below). The truth of the matter is that Democratic Vistas belongs to a lively modern discourse about the virtues that includes other great champions of democratic tendencies, like Wollstonecraft, Hazlitt, Emerson, Thoreau, and Dewey, as well as representatives of competing traditions. It is true, of course, that academic philosophers paid much less attention to the virtues in the era during which Kant and Mill became canonical figures in the university curriculum, but academic philosophy is only one locus of ethical discourse. In the broader tradition of public discussion, Whitman was hardly unique in seeing rights and virtues as complementary components of democratic culture.
Emerson, of course, is Whitman’s immediate precursor within the tradition of democratic virtue theory, just as Dewey is his immediate heir. Whitman’s task in Democratic Vistas is to extend what Stanley Cavell calls Emersonian perfectionism into the realm of political reflection at a moment of national crisis.8 “Perfectionism” is a somewhat misleading term in this context, because it appears to imply commitment to “a state, the same for all, at which the self is to arrive, a fixed place at which it is destined to come home to itself” (Conditions, 13).9 No Emersonian posits such a state. Emerson and Whitman are committed to an ethics of virtue or self-cultivation that is always in the process of projecting a higher conception of self to be achieved and leaving one’s achieved self (but not its accumulated responsibilities) behind. The force of “always” here is to cancel the fixed telos of perfection toward which earlier perfectionisms directed their ethical striving. The Emersonian self is continuously being reshaped by its own aspiration to achieve a higher form of goodness or excellence. Emerson calls this process “ascension, or the passage of the soul into higher forms.”10 This is no doctrine of leveling, as far as virtue is concerned. It is democratic in its conviction that each soul has a vocation to ascend, and realistic in its recognition that most persons—perhaps moderns most of all—are content to remain mired in the conformity of the masses. Emersonian perfectionism involves no hesitation to call excellence, mediocrity, and vice by their correct names. Cavell comes closest to expressing the ambition of Democratic Vistas when he writes:
If there is a perfectionism not only compatible with democracy but necessary to it, it lies not in excusing democracy for its inevitable failures, or looking to rise above them, but in teaching how to respond to those failures, and to one’s compromise by them, otherwise than by excuse or withdrawal. (Conditions, 18)
PIETY RECONCEIVED
We have seen that Whitman happily mixed concepts drawn from Old World theories of the virtues with local conceptual artifacts fashioned by lovers of democracy. He would not have had much left to work with if he had jettisoned all old words with a troubling history. The term “virtue” itself would be problematical to a democratic purist, given its gendered etymology, but Whitman is not deterred. Does his democratic program of culture leave any room for a virtue worth calling “piety”? Is this a word to which the “fossil and unhealthy air” of feudalism clings (DV, par. 53)? Or can we succeed in giving it a fresh, democratic air? It does not matter much whether we retrieve the word or not. His fellow democrats, Emerson, Thoreau, and Dewey, were all more attracted to it than was Whitman. It was one of Emerson’s favorite words, and he placed it prominently in his table of democratic virtues: “Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can teach; and every man can open his door to these angels, and they shall bring him the gift of tongues.”11 But it was demonstrably part of Whitman’s project to ask how the poets of democracy ought to conceive, and respond to, the sources of our existence and progress through life. This constituted much of his literary business. Hence, he had much to say about piety. For piety, in the sense at issue here, is virtuous acknowledgment of dependence on the sources of one’s existence and progress through life.
When traditionalists conclude that democracy is antithetical to piety itself, they must be assuming that piety consists essentially in deference toward the hierarchical powers that be. But from a democratic point of view, the only piety worth praising as a virtue is that which concerns itself with just or fitting acknowledgment of the sources of our existence and progress through life. The philosophical expression of such concern begins in Plato’s dialogue, the Euthyphro, and extends through such thinkers as Cicero and Aquinas, before reaching the modern period. The Emersonians agree with Plato’s Socrates that justice is always at issue in the practices of piety. They hold that justice requires suspicion of power worship in all of its forms. When they denounce piety as a vice, they mean piety as defined in the traditionalist way. When they praise it as a virtue, they are imagining the sources of our existence and progress through life in some other way, while devising their own democratic means of acknowledgment. Imagining or conceiving of those sources and choosing ethically and aesthetically apt expressive means of acknowledging dependence on them are both things for which an Emersonian poet or essayist expects to be held responsible discursively. Whitman can be expected to have his own interpretations of the sources, as well as his own injunctions about how the friends of democracy ought to respond to them.12 He hardly expects what he says to go without opposition, but he does hope that his readers can, in his words, recognize thoughts they themselves have had but perhaps let slip from their consciousness.
When Whitman says, hyperbolically and prophetically, “There will soon be no more priests,” I take him to mean people to whom we should feel bound to defer as custodians of this imaginative work.13 “Priest” is his poetic name for someone thought to have the authority to proclaim such work already complete. The reason there will soon be no more priests is that self-reliant democratic individuals are in the process of taking the responsibility for such work into their own hands, taking “the rough deific sketches” from the past “for what they are worth and not a cent more.”14 He does not mean that there will soon be no more celebrators of Holy Communion, preachers of divinely inspired words, or spiritual advisors. The remarkable thing is that in America, Whitman’s prophecy has largely, astonishingly, come true. There are, for example, men called “priests” in contemporary American Catholicism, and they play important roles in the lives of their communities. But, for the most part, their parishioners no longer defer the imaginative work of piety to them. The “priests” themselves know this; their congregations know it; the Vatican is busily scrambling to find remedies for it. But the proposed remedies will fail. The feudal patterns of deference to ecclesial authority will not soon return. It is a pity that traditionalists are inclined to disparage this achievement as a sin against piety rather than welcoming it as a way of taking responsibility for piety.
Some traditionalists worry that the sort of religious questioning that goes on in many American congregations is tantamount to standing in judgment of the divine source of our being. In Leaves of Grass, Whitman taunts them with the intentionally ambiguous phrase, “Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah.”15 Is that not impious? Who are we to decide whether God is worthy of worship? On this point, Socrates, Aquinas, and Whitman are agreed. Any divine being who expects acts of piety, while prohibiting acts of idolatry, had better be prepared to tolerate the thinking—the employment of concepts, the making of judgments, the use of imagination—that is involved on our part in deciding which beings, if any, are worthy of worship. This means that one is, at least implicitly, employing one’s own standards of worth. Self-reliant piety seeks to take responsibility for this commitment by making it explicit, poetically or philosophically, in the form of a claim—as something for which reasons can be requested.
Human pride being what it is, it will not be easy to think for oneself, in the pursuit of self-critical but genuine piety, without succumbing to the temptation of denying the very conditions of one’s own existence or otherwise masking from oneself the sources on which critical thinking depends. This, I believe, was the vice Dewey had in mind when he condemned “militant atheism” every bit as forcefully as he condemned the equally suspect stance of traditionalist supernaturalism.16 By militant atheism, I take him to have meant an attitude of arrogant disregard for the sources of one’s existence and progress through life. Dewey objected to militant atheism, not to atheism as such. He held that it was possible for an atheist to possess “natural piety,” that is, “a just sense of nature as the whole of which we are parts.” “The essentially unreligious attitude is that which attributes human achievement and purpose to man in isolation from the world of physical nature and his fellows” (CF, 25).
Dewey took traditionalists to be right in maintaining that we ought in some appropriate way to acknowledge the ultimate sources of our existence. But, from his point of view, the traditionalists go wrong in demanding that we must all do so in one, essentially fixed way. He worried that specific religious traditions “now prevent, because of the weight of historic encumbrances, the religious quality of experience from coming to consciousness and finding the expression that is appropriate to present conditions, intellectual and moral” (CF, 9). Behind this worry lay the Emersonian question: “Why should it be assumed that change in conception and action has now come to an end?” (CF, 6). Emerson had complained of the “stationariness of religion” and of our tendency in religious matters to be “idolaters of the old.” Referring to ancient founders and kings, Emerson wrote: “Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue?”17 Against Emersonian anticlericalism, some Augustinians argue that there can be neither any semblance of virtue, nor any means to participate in a sacramental life of communion with God, outside of a community that recognizes some structure of authority and practice as ordained by God. The choice, as they see it, is not between freedom and arrogance but between anarchy and order.
Dewey sought a spiritual path between the extremes of militant atheism and arrogant traditionalism. Whether he found it is, of course, another question. It seems to me that the version of religious naturalism asserted in A Common Faith is itself too militant, too sure of its ability to debunk traditional forms of faith as irrational, to play the role Dewey wanted it to play in his public philosophy. Dewey was right to say that piety owes much to acts of imagination. This is no less true when we defer to the spiritual authority of others than when we work out a self-consciously poetic religious vision. If we are honest, we will admit that the margin of error in religious matters encompasses very nearly the entire subject. In religious pursuits, we all seem to be groping in the dark. Otherwise, how are we to explain the history of religious discord? Hubris, wishful thinking, sadism, and masochism have every opportunity to distort our religious thinking. No doubt, these dark forces help explain why we disagree on religious topics to the extent we do. But if being justified in believing something depends on contextual factors that vary from one person to another, and if the relevant standards of justification are as permissive as pragmatism makes them out to be, then Dewey is not in a position to declare supernaturalism beyond the pale of justified belief. According to pragmatic scruples, this is not something that can be determined in abstraction from the lives of particular human beings. It is therefore unwise to decide the issue between supernaturalism and naturalism on an official basis. Dewey might well be justified in accepting naturalism as his own view. The question is whether his denial of supernaturalism can be an essential component of the common faith he proposes for democratic citizens. Why suppose that naturalism can play the role he envisions for it in public culture when most citizens reject it?
In response to this question, Dewey asserts a dubious evolutionary master-narrative that is reminiscent of Auguste Comte:
History seems to exhibit three stages of growth. In the first stage, human relationships were thought to be so infected with the evils of corrupt human nature as to require redemption from external and supernatural sources. In the next stage, what is significant in these relations is found to be akin to values esteemed distinctively religious. This is the point now reached by liberal theologians. The third stage would realize that in fact the values prized in those religions that have ideal elements are idealizations of things characteristic of natural association, which have been projected into a supernatural realm for safe-keeping and sanction. (CF, 77–78)
Dewey is not the only pragmatist to deploy such a story. (Richard Rorty is another.) But in the absence of a supporting argument, the story seems to be an instance of the same sort of wishful thinking it claims to find at work in supernaturalism. By using the word “would” in the last sentence, Dewey implicitly admits that the final stage of this evolutionary scheme is not working out as a naturalist might wish.18
Naturalistic piety presupposes naturalism. It construes the sources of our existence and progress through life in naturalistic terms, and endeavors to acknowledge dependence on those sources in appropriate ways. Naturalists who are not militant atheists will want to express piety toward what Dewey calls the “matrix of human relations” on which we all depend (CF, 70) and toward “the enveloping world that the imagination feels is a universe” (CF, 53). But they will stop short of positing, as an additional object of piety, a supernatural source of that enveloping (natural) world. They might also be inclined to claim that “reference to a supernatural and other-worldly locus has obscured” the “real nature” of the “human abode” and weakened the force of “goods actually experienced in the concrete relations of family, neighborhood, citizenship, [and the] pursuit of art and science” (CF, 71). Supernaturalists, for their part, will see this stopping short as a failure to respond appropriately to the ultimate source of our existence and progress through life. They might also be inclined to explain this failure as an effect of prideful self-assertion, a willful rejection of a human being’s actual status as the fallen creature of a perfect Creator.
It would be presumptuous to think that the debate between naturalistic and supernaturalistic piety can be resolved in the foreseeable future. There is no reason to declare either of these types of piety the religious basis of social order. But perhaps it is possible to discern a bit more common ground here than the proponents of naturalism and supernaturalism tend to notice when they get caught up in diagnosing the illusions and sins they impute to one another. If being justified in believing something is a contextual affair, and if differences in upbringing and life experience are relevant contextual factors, then perhaps our religious opponents are justified in believing what they believe. This recognition ought at least to give us pause before we propose an uncharitable diagnosis of our religious differences. The default position will be that our neighbors are justified in believing what they believe. If we are charitable interpreters, we will view those who differ from us religiously, in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary, as people doing their best to offer appropriate acknowledgment of their dependence. Insofar as they do acknowledge that dependence appropriately, given their own conceptions of the sources of our existence and progress through life, they may be said to exhibit an attitude that is worthy of our respect, if not our full endorsement. We can praise this aspect of character as a virtue for the same reason that we can praise the courage, temperance, or wisdom of someone we oppose in battle or debate. We can then leave open whether it satisfies the highest standard of excellence one might want to apply in this area, whether it is a virtue in the strongest sense.
Naturalists and supernaturalists describe the ultimate source of existence differently; accordingly, they acknowledge their dependence on it in different ways. No one knows how to resolve such differences of doctrine and religious practice once and for all by rational means. Of course, on all sides there are people who describe those following a path unlike their own simply as vicious. But this habit displays a lack of generosity that is hard to square with the social virtues in general. In any event, it is not good for democracy.
Once we distinguish Dewey’s concept of natural piety from his commitment to naturalist metaphysics, we can see that it belongs to a tradition that goes back to Edmund Burke. This might seem odd, given that Burke was also a source of modern traditionalism. How did it come to pass, then, that followers of Emerson and Whitman like Dewey began thinking of natural piety as a virtue that matters to democracy? The best shortcut I can take through this complicated thicket of intellectual history is to say that Emersonian theorists of virtue sought to democratize a Burkean conception of piety that came to them by way of Wordsworth. Burke, you will recall, was one of those to declare that democracy, in eroding the moral foundations of the received social structure, carries away with it reverence, gratitude, obedience, and loving care for every object of piety on which the common life and virtuousness of the citizenry depend. The objects of piety, for Burke, include God, family, country, place, state, and tradition. Traditional practices of piety constituted for him part of the “moral wardrobe” of the imagination with which society drapes naked human nature and without which we all sink into unmitigated vice. Genuine piety, for Burke, is our natural disposition to acquiesce gratefully in the historically contingent, imaginative constructions that clothe our nakedness in virtuous habits and sentiments. These virtuous habits and sentiments he takes to be our second nature, the cultural covering that distinguishes us from the brutes. It is this acquiescence in our own second nature that democracy threatens to undermine.
In doing so, democracy unintentionally gives rise to an unnatural form of piety that Burke calls “sinister.” Here is the passage in which he coins the phrase:
A species of men to whom a state of order would become a sentence of obscurity, are nourished into a dangerous magnitude by the heat of intestine disturbances; and it is no wonder that, by a sort of sinister piety, they cherish, in their turn, the disorders which are the parents of all their consequence. Superficial observers consider such persons as the cause of the publick [sic] uneasiness, when, in truth, they are nothing more than the effect of it. Good men look upon this distracted scene with sorrow and indignation. Their hands are tied behind them.19
This is relatively early Burke, so he is not yet talking about the democratic theorists of rights at the time of the French Revolution, but he has already begun to formulate the contrasting types of piety, genuine and sinister, that he will eventually have in mind when criticizing the Revolution. His later writings describe democracy as a disordering of culture that gives rise to a class of disordered men. Those men do possess a kind of piety, a vicious kind, which expresses itself in gratitude for the disturbances that make their own rise to power and influence possible. They, too, Burke believes, are bound to worship the sources of their progress through life, but we are foolish to praise them for it, because their progress through life comes at the expense of our second nature. Sinister piety is a standing temptation for those “men of talent” who stand to profit personally from democratic disturbance of the received ethical order.
Wordsworth’s poetry swerved toward Burkean piety when he abandoned his youthful enthusiasm for the French Revolution. At that turning point in his life, he saw in his own radicalism the sinister piety of a young man of talent. Henceforth he called upon the powers of his Romantic imagination to celebrate poetically what he called, in The Prelude, “the discipline of virtue” implicit in the natural lore and folkways of the British countryside. As the Wanderer says:
Thus, duties rising out of good possessed,
And prudent caution needful to avert
Impending evil, equally require
That whole people should be taught and trained.
So shall licentiousness and black resolve
Be rooted out, and virtuous habits take
Their place; and genuine piety descend,
Like an inheritance, from age to age.
This is hardly the occasion to undertake an inquiry into everything that Wordsworth meant by “genuine” or “natural” piety. He was clearly using such terms to recommend some form of acquiescence in an essentially traditional way of life attached to a particular place. Yet his poetic practice consisted largely in imaginative redescription of ordinary objects and individuals within the setting of a beautiful and sublime natural world.
This practice made available to Romantic poets who happened to be attached to another particular place, called America, a vocation of imaginative redescription that could be turned to purposes more democratic than Burkean. America, no less than the Lake District of England, puts the beauty and sublimity of the natural world on display. The American poet is no less concerned than his English counterpart with imagining that world well, thereby doing justice to it poetically and acknowledging his dependence on it expressively. His poetry, too, articulates a kind of natural piety. It also, like Wordsworth’s, endeavors to describe the moral wardrobe of a people’s imagination. But it directs its descriptive powers at the ordinary individuals it finds in its own particular place. In them it sees neither the plush velvet of Burke’s imperial monarchy, nor the “glorious habit” of a rural Wanderer, but the loose-fitting clothing of a democratic individuality:
in youth fresh, ardent, emotional, aspiring, full of adventure; at maturity, brave, perceptive, under control, neither too talkative nor too reticent, neither flippant nor sombre; of the bodily figure, the movements easy, the complexion showing the best blood, somewhat flush’d, breast expanded, an erect attitude, a voice whose sound outvies music, eyes of calm and steady gaze, yet capable also of flashing—and a general presence that holds its own in the company of the highest. (DV, par. 71)
American democracy possesses its own civilizing practices in which “whole people should be taught and trained” and toward which one might reasonably come to feel gratitude, even reverence. “But,” as Sabina Lovibond has put it in another context, “natural piety must be distinguished from the kind of ‘piety’ which consists in being ‘content to accept’ the dominant language-game, regardless of its merits or defects from a critical standpoint, simply because it is there.”20 The language-games involved in the civilizing practices that Emersonians like Whitman and Dewey have in mind are democratic. They are discursive practices designed to permit and encourage reflection on their own merits and defects from a critical standpoint. “Thus,” writes Emerson, “are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom.”21
It is also the case, however, that we would not be the kind of people we are, in our better moments, unless we had been shaped by participating in such practices and unless countless individuals had suffered to create, defend, and perfect them. This is the note struck by Meridel Le Sueur, a twentieth-century heir of Whitman’s democratic vocation, in the epigraph from North Star Country that I have placed at the beginning of this book.22 It is significant that Whitman wrote Democratic Vistas after visiting and working in the Civil War hospitals, an experience absolutely central to his democratic piety. He deeply admired the ordinary people he witnessed in those hospitals, and he learned much from them and from his own responses to them. “The most moving thing about Whitman after all,” writes David Bromwich, “is that he teaches, instead of an absolution of sins, a sort of patience with deformities from which human charity might begin.”23 This patience, when extended by experience and a poet’s discipline of observation, itself gives rise to a kind of piety. It is a kind of piety entirely distinct from acquiescence in the dominant practices and institutions or their natural setting simply because they are there. It is a self-conscious identification, undertaken on the part of an individual who, thinking for him– or herself, acknowledges that on which his or her self-reliant judgment depends.24
This much is clear for Whitman. Neither working men, nor women, nor the masses of common people are to be deemed virtuous for knowing their place in a hierarchy, or for being disposed to defer to those above them in the chain of being. They will all be encouraged to assume the posture of self-respect. Does it follow from this that democracy is antithetical to piety itself? If piety consists essentially in deference toward the hierarchical powers that be, then democracy and piety are incompatible. Yet it need not be that. If piety is the virtue of fitting or just response to the sources of our existence and progress through life, then nothing in Whitman is opposed to it. The important issues, for him, will then be how the sources of our existence and progress through life should be imagined and how one ought to respond to those sources in attitude and action. Much of Whitman’s poetry is devoted to precisely these two questions. It is the bane of doctrinaire religion, from Whitman’s Emersonian point of view, to declare the work of religious imagination complete, thereby assuming an essentially deferential posture toward the past in spiritual affairs. Self-reliant piety holds, in contrast, that it is our own responsibility to imagine the sources on which we depend and to fashion lives worthy of our best imaginings. That is why he says, “The priest departs, the divine literatus comes” (DV, par. 6).
Is there room, in the heart of someone assuming this self-reliant posture, for religious gratitude? In the Thanksgiving edition of the Philadelphia Press in 1884, Whitman had this to say about one component of democratic piety:
Gratitude, anyhow, has never been made half enough of by the moralists; it is indispensable to a complete character, man’s or woman’s—the disposition to be appreciative, thankful. That is the main matter, the element, inclination—what geologists call the trend. Of my own life and writings I estimate the giving thanks part, with what it infers, as essentially the best item. I should say the quality of gratitude rounds the whole emotional nature; I should say love and faith would quite lack vitality without it. There are people—shall I call them even religious people, as things go?—who have no such trend to their disposition.25
Gratitude, not loyalty or deference, is, for the tradition of Emersonian perfectionism, the better part of piety.
Dewey is simply carrying this tradition forward when he charges “militant atheism” with a “lack of natural piety.”
The ties binding man to nature that poets have always celebrated are passed over lightly. The attitude taken is often that of man living in an indifferent and hostile world and issuing blasts of defiance. A religious attitude, however, needs the sense of a connection of man, in the way of both dependence and support, with the enveloping world that the imagination feels is a universe. (CF, 53)
He concludes, “A humanistic religion, if it excludes our relation to nature, is pale and thin, as it is presumptuous, when it takes humanity as an object of worship” (CF, 54).
Suppose we grant, then, that there is room for gratitude in the self-reliant heart, at the point where self-reliance recognizes its dependence on the natural and social circumstances without which it would be for nothing. Is there a place in such gratitude for recognition of an indebtedness that can never wholly be discharged? The Augustinians suspect that the answer is no. Nietzsche is probably the leading modern critic of piety to press this question in a skeptical direction. What worries him about piety is precisely the implication that we owe more to the sources of our existence and progress through life than we could ever repay. This is, he thinks, a debilitating thought, a seed of resentment that cannot be part of a life that affirms life. But Nietzsche and Whitman both had Emerson as their mentor. And I take it that Whitman, in embracing a kind of pious gratitude that Nietzsche did not, had an Emersonian thought in mind that Nietzsche, who turned against democracy, neglected. This thought is best expressed in the following passage from Emerson’s essay “Experience”:
When I receive a new gift, I do not macerate my body to make the account square, for, if I should die, I could not make the account square. The benefit overran the merit the first day, and has overran the merit ever since. The merit itself, so-called, I reckon part of the receiving.26
Masochistic self-abasement is not a virtue at all by Emersonian lights, even when it goes misleadingly by the name of piety. A host of modern writers since Hume join in its denunciation—Nietzsche among them. But Emerson, the greatest champion of democratic self-reliance, is working hard in this passage to leave room for a spiritually healthy recognition of dependence. I would put the point by saying that it does not belong to the virtue of justice for me to do more than I could possibly do to make the account square. No genuine virtue requires more of a human being than a human being could conceivably do. It is not an expression of justice but a mark of sadomasochistic pathology to demand perfect reciprocation where only imperfect reciprocation is possible.
The genius of the passage from Emerson lies in the grateful but life-affirming spirit in which he was able to receive—and acknowledge dependence on—gifts that could not be fully reciprocated. He knows full well that he is indebted, beyond all capacity to repay, to the sources of his existence and progress through life, but his is a piety cleansed of sadomasochist tendencies by democratic self-respect. He is ready to receive gifts joyously, to acknowledge them justly, without maceration of body or soul. When he says that “the benefit overran the merit the first day, and has overran the merit ever since,” he is unafraid to mean his merit. He does not take the possibility of merit to be cancelled out by the fact it would not have arisen entirely of its own accord. He is saying that what he really does deserve to be praised for, whether it be his genius or his character, is itself conditioned. His merit does not go all the way down. It is rather part of the receiving, part of the gift. Even so, it is not unmixed with his efforts. Emerson’s moral psychology is one in which taking due pride in one’s accomplishments, praising others for theirs, and relations of asymmetrical obligation can be recognized under justice—and distinguished from mere hubris.
This does not mean, of course, that hubris represents no danger in a democratic context. It is a standing danger in every person who acquires power, prestige, or wealth. But an Emersonian like Whitman or Dewey will want to balance recognition of the danger it poses with a rhetoric of encouragement and generosity directed especially toward the common people, toward women, toward slaves, and the descendants of slaves. We had better bring all of these people into the scope of democratic individuality before we worry too much about the hubris that might someday arise in their hearts. The relative autonomy of healthy self-reliance is the basis for genuine piety. Dewey was standing within a tradition of self-critical piety indebted to both Emerson and Whitman when he declared that “the reverence shown by a free and self-respecting human being is better than servile obedience rendered to an arbitrary power” (CF, 7).
Now, it would be foolish to expect Augustinians to read such a remark in context and not detect in it a trace of pride, which in their diction names the sin that alienates human beings from their true home in God. What Dewey calls “self-respect” and Emerson calls “self-reliance” is the fruit of a perfectionist spiritual practice that self-consciously refuses to be disciplined by Augustinian warnings or restrained by structures of ecclesial authority. There are profound religious differences here, and they are not to be papered over or taken lightly. But once we bring these differences into focus, we can see why they have not prevented members of either group from identifying with a constitutional order in which church and state are separated.
Augustinian democrats see pride at work in every human heart, including the heart of every Augustinian. So this, by itself, cannot serve for them as a criterion of exclusion from the political community. A political community consisting entirely of prideful sinners still has important business to attend to, things it can do more or less well, more or less justly. Emersonian democrats are more apt to describe the citizenry as asleep or as corrupted than as sinful, but they care as deeply as anyone does about achieving a more perfect union. They count themselves among those with a responsibility to improve on our institutional arrangements, especially by making them properly responsive to the needs and voices of the least well-off. In short, they count themselves as citizens.
Both groups have long been impressed by the limitations of politics. They recognize its historically demonstrated shortcomings, and do not expect it to save anyone’s soul. They care too much about piety, as they understand it, to entrust a modern nation-state to define its ultimate object or to mandate practices for expressing and cultivating it.27 States just aren’t good at such things, and have caused a lot of harm when they have overstepped their bounds. Monarchs made a mockery of piety by presuming to have the authority to oversee it. They made war in the name of Christ, coerced their subjects to conform, and caused many to flee their homelands in search of freedom and security. There is no reason to expect democratically elected presidents and legislators to be better vicars of true piety than the kings and queens of centuries past. We are not inclined to put the nature and existence of God to a vote.
A state that imposes religious (or irreligious) conformity on a people prevents dissenters from leading lives that fully reflect their own commitments on matters of great importance. Or worse, it aims to make up their minds for them, thereby robbing selves of the capacity to think their own thoughts. It will come as no surprise that the champions of self-reliance see such bullying as a grave assault on the human spirit. Many Christian communities have learned from their own experience of persecution to call it a violation of conscience. No one supposes that we would be better off if we made our commitments in a vacuum, independently of familial and cultural influence. No freedom that absolute is at issue. In cultivating their own piety, citizens will take sustenance from whatever traditional stories, exemplary lives, communal structures, poetic images, and critical arguments prove valuable. It is up to them to make something of their inheritance and to discard those of its parts that insult the soul. The freedom they exercise is situated in a network of evolving normative constraints. But the state has no business interfering in such matters. Its proper work lies elsewhere.
What is it about a human being that freedom of conscience honors? For that matter, what is it about a human being that the prohibition of murder honors, or the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment? Christians answer these questions by telling a story about souls created in the image of God. Emerson and Whitman also often talk about souls and about something divine or wondrous that can be discerned in a human being. They are self-consciously waxing poetic at those moments. They think of the Christian story as ossified poetry, and are striving for fresh images of their own. Their intent is not to take dogma and argue with it on its own terms. Their intent is simply to express faithfully something they have experienced and to enliven a similar capacity for awe and love in their readers. Speaking of the poet of democracy in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” Whitman writes:
He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round a helpless thing,
As he sees the farthest he has the most faith,
His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things,
In the dispute on God and eternity he is silent,
He sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement,
He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and women as dreams or dots.28