9. harriet beecher stowe and max weber on calvinism and the american character

end p.218

9 Geneva’s Crystalline Clarity: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Max Weber on Calvinism and theAmerican Character

Peter J. Thuesen In June 1853, Harriet Beecher Stowe, exhausted from a triumphant publicity tour in England for her antislavery novel, UncleTom’s Cabin, crossed the English Channel for a few weeks of leisure travel on the Continent. One of her first stops wasGeneva, which afforded her the chance to reflect on John Calvin and his legacy in Western culture. Gazing at the view of MontBlanc from the city, she wrote: “Calvinism, in its essential features, will never cease from the earth, because the great

fundamental facts of nature are Calvinistic, and men with strong minds and wills always discover it.”1 It was a surprisingstatement, given her otherwise tortured relationship to her New England Puritan heritage, yet it signaled a recurring theme ofher writings and anticipated in striking ways the arguments of the sociologist Max Weber a half century later in The ProtestantEthic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905).

Both Stowe and Weber were reared in similarly anti-Catholic cultural contexts and regarded Calvinism as the mostintellectually and morally vigorous form of Protestantism. Though Weber is usually credited with creating the ideal-typeCalvinist—the sober-minded individual who constantly strives to prove her election through diligent labor in her calling—Stoweexpressed the type earlier and in more popular idiom. Repeatedly in her fiction and prose, she lauded the industriousness ofthe New England Puritans

end p.219

and their heirs even while critiquing the harsher aspects of their theology. She also anticipated Weber in annexing the notionof the “Protestant ethic” to nationalism, in her case by identifying Calvinism as the source of the Yankee propensity for hardwork and moral clarity. In idealizing the Calvinist spirit, she stood apart from her nineteenth-century literary peers, who moreoften portrayed Calvinism in purely negative terms as a system that was obscurantist, gloomy, and fatalistic. While Calvinismin popular liberal fiction drove its adherents to ethical paralysis and even insanity, Calvinism in Stowe’s (and Weber’s)imagination offered the best foundation for a virtuous society.

Anti-Calvinism in American Literature

The birth of the American republic brought with it a backlash against Calvinism, whose emphasis on original sin and absolutepredestination seemed to violate the new nation’s spirit of self-determination. America was the land of boundless possibilities,the endless frontier where people could remake themselves by shedding, as historian Bernard Bailyn put it, “the heavy crust

of custom that was weighing down the spirit of man.”2 The quarrel with Calvinism in American literature began with workssuch as Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic novel Wieland (1798), which, though evincing a Calvinist-like appreciation for thedepths of human psychology, indicted what Brown regarded as the illusions perpetuated by religion. A Quaker turnedskeptical deist, Brown spun a tale in which the melancholy male protagonist, Theodore Wieland, believing himself under theirresistible power of God’s will, kills his wife and children, only to learn that, in reality, he was the victim of his own delusionsand the suggestive powers of a traveling ventriloquist, Carwin. In revealing his voice-throwing technique, Carwin declares that

he is imparting “a lesson to mankind on the evils of credulity on the one hand, and of imposture on the other.”3

In the generation after Brown, liberal New Englanders, such as the Unitarian theologian Henry Ware Jr., penned furtherindictments of Calvinism’s alleged morbidity. The protagonist of Ware’s Recollections of Jotham Anderson (1824) is oppressedby the seemingly irreconcilable teachings of humans’ total depravity and of their accountability for sin. The doctrine ofpredestination only adds to the torment: “My blood chilled when I heard the arbitrary decree of election announced, and,connected with it, the joy of the righteous in the sufferings of the wicked.” All of it “was a wilderness to me. I turned on every

side, and could find no relief.”4 Similarly, one of the most popular authors of domestic fiction, Catharine Maria Sedgwick,skewered the Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards and his New Divinity heirs in novels such as A New England Tale (1822).

end p.220

Sedgwick later recalled in her autobiography how her sister and mother-figure, Eliza, suffered from the “horrors of Calvinism”until “her faith softened into a true comprehension of the filial relation to God” and she gained “redemption from the crueldoctrines of Geneva.” Sedgwick joined a chorus of popular fiction writers bent on discrediting the old Calvinist establishment,

including Lydia Maria Child in Hobomok (1824) and Sylvester Judd in Margaret (1845).5

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2003 - 2010. All Rights Reserved.Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for detailssee http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/privacy_policy.html).Subscriber: University College London; date: 15 November 2010

John Calvin's American LegacyDavis, Thomas, Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, Thomas H, Indiana Univers ity-Purdue Univers ityPrint publication date: 2010, Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2010Print ISBN-13: 978-0-19-539097-1, doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390971.001.0001

including Lydia Maria Child in Hobomok (1824) and Sylvester Judd in Margaret (1845).

Other New Englanders preferred the genres of poetic satire and prose criticism for castigating Calvinism, particularly in itsEdwardsean form. In his poem “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” (1858), Oliver Wendell Holmes imagined the logical system ofEdwards’s predestinarian Freedom of the Will (1754) as a “one-hoss shay” that lasted for a century until one day it self-

destructed: “All at once, and nothing first, / Just as bubbles do when they burst.”6 Mark Twain began reading Freedom of theWill in 1902 after a visit with his best friend, the Congregational minister Joseph Hopkins Twichell, who gave the book to him toread on the train back to New York from Hartford. “Continuously until near midnight I wallowed and reeked with Jonathan in hisinsane debauch,” Twain wrote in a letter to Twichell. “All through the book is the glare of a resplendent intellect gone mad—amarvelous spectacle.” Edwards was at his most drunk near the end of the treatise, Twain observed, “where what I take to be

Calvinism and its God” show up and “shine red and hideous in the glow from the fires of hell.”7

Even as late as the mid-twentieth century, the New England preoccupation with Edwardseanism was evident in the career ofthe poet Robert Lowell, who had planned to write a biography of Edwards but abandoned the plan after growing “more and

more numb” from perusing Freedom of the Will .8 Instead, Lowell wrote four poems on Edwards, including “Mr. Edwards andthe Spider” (1946), which begins by paraphrasing the young Edwards’s “spider letter” in which he commented on the beautyand intricacy of spider webs. The poem’s tone quickly turns ominous as Lowell borrows the lurid imagery of Edwards’s“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in portraying the dreadful omnipotence of the Calvinist sovereign: “What are we inthe hands of the great God? / It was in vain you set up thorn and briar / In battle array against the fire.” Edwards’s spiderbecomes an “hourglass-blazoned” black widow, which, though venomous enough to kill a tiger, is powerless before the greatGod who dangles it by a thread over the pit of hell. Fiery annihilation is the “sinner’s last retreat”—an inferno in which no

human strength is sufficient to uphold the “abolished will.”9 In another poem, “After the Surprising Conversions” (1946),Lowell recreated the suicide of Edwards’s uncle Joseph Hawley, who fatally slit his own throat, casting a pall over the revivalsignited by Edwards’s preaching. The poem paraphrases Edwards’s own words from his revival account, A Faithful Narrative(1737), describing Hawley as one who “durst not entertain much hope

end p.221

of his estate in heaven” and comparing the devil to a peddler who urges, “My friend, Cut your own throat. Cut your own

throat. Now! Now!”10

Lowell’s chilling poems bespeak the widespread assumption, by then firmly entrenched, that Calvinism was America’s(particularly New England’s) endemic religious pathology, a hairsplitting system that drove people to melancholic insanity. Tobe sure, two important writers in the American literary canon—Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville—found inCalvinism’s dark side precisely its compelling power. Hawthorne, in The Scarlet Letter (1850), revealed himself to be what onecritic has called an “unchurched Calvinist.” Chillingworth, one of the novel’s main characters, pronounces that his “old faith”(Calvinism) “explains all that we do, and all that we suffer.” Similarly, Melville, in narrating Pierre (1852), comments that all“mature men” eventually know that we are not ultimately “our own factors.” Nobody better illustrates this than Captain Ahab

from Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), who represents a will inexorably bent on its own destruction.11 Subtle as Hawthorne’s orMelville’s appreciation of Calvinistic determinism was, however, their novels inadvertently contributed to the popular use ofCalvinism as an ideogram for doom and gloom.

Stowe’s Complicated Affair with Calvinism

To Hawthorne and Melville, Calvinism’s unflinching gaze at the depravity and determinism of human existence was anecessary corrective to the sentimentality purveyed by what Hawthorne famously derided as the “scribbling women” of his

era.12 One of these women was Stowe, whose own relationship to Calvinism was far from simple and who, ironically, sharedsome of Hawthorne’s views about the inescapability of Calvinist conclusions. That her religious novels bear a strong Calvinistinfluence is no surprise: her father, the Congregational minister Lyman Beecher, traced his ancestry to the original Puritansettlement of the New Haven Colony. Harriet and her ten siblings grew up in Litchfield, Connecticut, in a deeply evangelicalhousehold where intense doctrinal discussions were everyday fare. All seven sons went on to become clergymen, but it was

two of the daughters, Harriet and Catharine, who would produce the most intriguing religious reflections.13

After Lyman’s first wife, Roxana Foote, died when Harriet was five, the sixteen-year-old Catharine became her surrogatemother and remained so even after Lyman remarried. Catharine, like all of Lyman’s children, had felt heavy pressure from herfather to yield to the Holy Spirit’s workings and to give a public profession of conversion, which New England Calvinists hadlong required for full church participation. Yet, she was thrown into a spiritual



end p.222

crisis when her fiancé, Alexander Metcalf Fisher, a young Yale professor who had not experienced conversion himself, died in ashipwreck. According to the inherited New England theology, Fisher was in serious danger of spending eternity in hell, andCatharine tortured herself over this possibility while also entertaining increasing doubts about the logic of Calvinism. Later inlife, she would reject Calvinism altogether and embrace a version of Common Sense philosophy that posited the intuitive

nature of basic religious truths.14 In the meantime, the young Harriet was absorbing Catharine’s growing interest inmetaphysics and was developing a precocious ability to engage in theological disputation. In what Lyman called the proudestmoment of his life, Harriet was chosen at age twelve to read at a school assembly her composition “Can the Immortality of

the Soul Be Proved by the Light of Nature?”15 Soon thereafter, she experienced conversion, and, in 1824, she entered theHartford Female Seminary, recently founded by Catharine, where she continued to hone her skills as a writer and, eventually,served for several years as a teacher.

In 1834, after Lyman became president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Harriet married his junior colleague CalvinEllis Stowe, a Congregational minister and biblical studies professor. Though later in their marriage she would referaffectionately to her white-bearded husband as “my old rabbi,” the couple’s temperamental differences often straineddomestic life. A number of family losses, including the suicide of Harriet’s brother George and the death of the couple’seighteen-month-old son in a cholera epidemic, compounded their hardship even as Harriet was gaining fame as a writer forpopular periodicals. Her big break finally came in 1852 with the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which brought herinternational fame and the opportunity to tour Europe as the honored guest of antislavery societies.

Yet, in 1857, she suffered another wrenching loss that soon emerged as a turning point in her own religious quest. In anuncanny parallel to Alexander Fisher’s death, her son Henry, a freshman at Dartmouth College, accidentally drowned whileswimming in the Connecticut River. Like Fisher, Henry had not experienced the requisite conversion, and his mother’s anguishover the state of his soul led her to a profound grappling with her Calvinist heritage. Stowe’s religious reflections would appearmost vividly in two novels, The Minister’s Wooing (1859), first serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, and Oldtown Folks (1869). Herquarrel with the strict standard of conversion in the New England churches also led her to abandon Congregationalism forAnglicanism. Though she remained an Episcopalian until her death in 1896, her innermost theological views always defiedeasy denominational classification. Indeed, as Charles H. Foster has astutely argued, Stowe “said both yes and no to

Calvinism.”16

end p.223

Stowe’s no to Calvinism is obvious enough. Like other New England thinkers, she was haunted as much by Edwards as byCalvin. The male protagonist in The Minister’s Wooing is based on Edwards’s disciple Samuel Hopkins. The novel recreatesthe loss of Catharine Beecher’s fiancé in the tale of a pious young woman, Mary Scudder, whose fiancé, James Marvyn, ispresumed lost at sea while still in an unconverted state. Prodded by her mother, Mary accepts a marriage proposal from Dr.Hopkins, whom Stowe at once satirizes for his rigid Edwardseanism and lauds for his antislavery activism. At the end of thestory, however, in an unlikely plot twist derided by some critics, James Marvyn miraculously returns. He promptly experiences

conversion and is wed to Mary by the self-denying Hopkins, who weeps tears of joy over James’s saved soul.17

The novel’s plot line, however, often becomes mere scaffolding for long theological excurses in which Stowe sharply criticizesthe New England Calvinist obsession with the “evidences” of conversion. The root of this pathology, as she saw it, wasEdwards, whose revival sermons were “so terrific in their refined poetry of torture, that very few persons of quick sensibilitycould read them through without agony.” Not only did Edwards and his disciples oppress the New England psyche with thenotion that only an “infinitesimal” portion of humanity constituted the elect, but they also set an unrealistically high standardof regeneration, which Stowe likened to trying to reach heaven by a rungless ladder. To make matters worse, anxiety-wrackedparishioners received scant comfort from religious services, which were devoid of the “softening poetries and tenderdraperies” of pre-Reformation ritual. Religion in New England was reduced to the logic of a system, and Stowe felt the “verychill of death in the analysis.” When James Marvyn is presumed lost at sea, his grieving mother denounces the Calvinist Godwho would create humans as vessels of wrath fitted for destruction: “I can never love God! I can never praise Him! I am lost!lost! lost!” Significantly, the only character who is able to rescue Mrs. Marvyn from this abyss is the black servant Candace,who implores her to take her sorrows to Jesus. As Joan Hedrick has argued, women and African Americans become, for Stowe,instruments of salvation. Stowe also employs the image of women as weavers who build webs of relations between humans,unlike the male systematicians who construct theological systems separating elect from damned. The motif of the feminine

weaver radically recasts the image of a spider dangling over the pit of hell in Edwards’s infamous sermon.18



Stowe continued her polemic against Edwards in Oldtown Folks, a lengthy local-color novel. In diagnosing the religiouscondition of New England families, she singled out their “constitutional melancholy,” which Edwards exacerbated by departingfrom the “tender and paternal” confessionalism of some of his Puritan forebears. Edwards subjected the process ofconversion to unremitting

end p.224

rational analysis, which many later New Englanders ironically carried to its logical conclusion by abandoning orthodox religionaltogether. Edwards further hastened this rebellion by imposing strict expectations of conversion before parents could bringtheir children for baptism. Stowe’s own solution, hinted at in Oldtown Folks, was to take refuge in the sacraments, particularlybaptism, as sufficient for salvation. This led her to embrace that “nice old motherly” institution, the Episcopal Church, which,

in its high church wing, at least, retained a greater emphasis on sacramental efficacy.19

Yet, for all of the echoes of liberal anti-Calvinism in Stowe’s work, her novels are more intriguing for their simultaneousaffirmation of Calvinism as the refining fire that purified and strengthened the Yankee soul. Repeatedly in her writings, shecommends the intellectual acuity of New England, where farmers debated theology “in intervals of plough and hoe” andwhere the “great unanswerable questions which must perplex every thinking soul” were “posed with the severest and mostappalling distinctness.” This “intense clearness” was both the weakness and the strength of the New England mind:weakness, because it often had the effect of “lacerating the nerves of the soul”; strength, because it fostered a mental

prowess that set New Englanders apart from most other peoples of the world.20 In Oldtown Folks, Stowe lapsed into anti-Catholicism by comparing the intellectually agile yeomen of New England to the Spanish peasantry. The former were drivenby “active-minded Calvinism,” while the latter were awash in “pictures, statues, incense, architecture, and all the sentimental

paraphernalia of ritualism.”21 Elsewhere, she even praised the predestinarian angst that had afflicted many a New Englander,including herself: “It is a mark of a shallow mind to scorn these theological wrestlings and surgings; they have in them

something even sublime.”22 Indeed, though Stowe rejected Calvinism’s negative psychological consequences, she embracedits unshrinking engagement with the fundamental problems of the human condition to the end of her career.

Even Hopkins’s notion of disinterested benevolence, with his controversial suggestion that regenerate persons ought to bewilling to be damned for the glory of God, was, for Stowe, “both noble and appalling,” according to Lawrence Buell: appalling,because of its seemingly impossible demands on human nature; noble, because it encouraged self-sacrifice for the common

good.23 The antislavery preaching of Hopkins and his followers drew heavily on Edwardsean concepts of benevolence, a factnot lost on Stowe in her own crusade against human bondage. She regarded New England’s indigenous Calvinism as the bestresource for combating not only slavery but also the many lesser evils that slaveholding had overshadowed. In contrast tomany of her literary and intellectual contemporaries, she saw Calvinism as essentially

end p.225

humanitarian in character—a system of thought that fueled the forces of social reform.24

This emphasis on the progressive aspect of Calvinism was especially apparent in her recollections of her 1853 visit to Geneva.One evening, she stopped at the spot just outside the city where the Spanish physician Michael Servetus was burned at thestake for denying the Trinity (a capital offense under civil law in Geneva’s holy commonwealth). Calvin’s complicity in theexecution was a stock feature of textbook portrayals of the reformer, in which Calvinism emerged as the foil of intellectual

freedom and human rights.25 But Stowe took a different tack as she meditated at the site of the burning. “The world is alwaysunjust to its progressive men,” she wrote, referring not to Servetus but to Calvin. Inevitably, “one fragment of past absurditycleaves to them,” tarnishing their reputations. “Hence we hear so much of Luther’s controversial harshness, of Calvin’sburning Servetus, and of the witch persecutions of New England.” Yet, the contributions of Luther and Calvin to civilizationwere profound, Stowe suggested, and she left little doubt about her greater admiration for the Geneva reformer: “Luther wasthe poet of the reformation, and Calvin its philosopher. Luther fused the mass, Calvin crystallized. He who fuses makes the

most sensation in his day; he who crystallizes has a longer and wider power.”26

Experience, she added, proves that the facts of nature are Calvinistic: “The predestination of a sovereign will is written over allthings. The old Greek tragedians read it, and expressed it. So did Mahomet, Napoleon, Cromwell.” They tried the forces ofnature and discovered the limits of their own strength. Indeed, to all people who strive “in vain with the giant forces of evil,”there is great serenity to be gained from the thought of an overpowering, yet ultimately benevolent, divine will. “Howevergrim, to the distrusting, looks this fortress of sovereignty in times of flowery ease,” in times of trouble it has always been the



refuge of God’s people. “All this I say,” Stowe added, “while I fully sympathize with the causes which incline many fine and

beautiful minds against the system.”27

What emerges in Stowe’s travelogue and in her novels is an alternative to the negative ideogram of Calvinism that so oftenprevailed in American culture and even, at times, in her own writings. On Stowe’s reading, the term Calvinist was synonymouswith the sober, virtuous Yankee yeoman—the sort of citizen whose industry built the American republic and whose clear moralthinking, Stowe assumed, would ultimately (with God’s providential assistance) eradicate the evil of slavery. Thus, the UnitedStates would live out its destiny as a beacon of hope and freedom for the world. Calvin’s native France might have gone in thesame direction had Louis XIV—the “Jezebel de Medici”—not driven out the Protestants by revoking the Edict of Nantes. ButFrance’s loss was America’s gain. “Some of the best blood in America,” Stowe remarked, “is of

end p.226

the old Huguenot stock.” The Huguenots, along with the Puritans, bequeathed to the United States the treasure of Calvinism,with its dual emphasis on divine sovereignty and human freedom and accountability. “Wherever John Calvin’s system of

theology has gone,” she added, “civil liberty has gone with it.”28

The Weber Thesis—and Parallels to Stowe

Though it is unclear that Max Weber ever read anything by Stowe, his remarkably similar view of Calvinism’s moral superiority

was shaped, as in her case, by biography and even by travel.29 Weber (1864–1920) was born in Prussian Saxony in the townof Erfurt, where Luther had attended university. Precociously interested in history and ideas, the thirteen-year-old Weber, in anincident reminiscent of Stowe’s essay-contest triumph at age twelve, presented two papers to his parents as a belatedChristmas present: “About the Course of German History, with Special Regard to the Positions of the Emperor and the Pope”

and “About the Roman Imperial Period from Constantine to the Migration of Nations.”30 Weber’s father, Max Sr., was a culturalLutheran who accepted religion’s utility but was not personally pious. His mother, Helene Fallenstein, was descended fromHuguenot immigrants and was far more introspective and driven by a strong social conscience. When the young Weber,having imitated his father’s pleasure seeking, came home from university with a beer belly and a facial scar from a bar fight,his mother was horrified and reflexively slapped him across the face. Yet, Weber grew fonder of his mother over time andcame to admire her ethical seriousness. Her ancestral Calvinism, secularized and liberalized in her own piety, seemed, to

Weber, to offer a moral paradigm for the Germany of his day.31

Indeed, like Stowe, who believed that the United States had become ethically lax, Weber sensed a creeping quietism amongthe German bourgeoisie and feared it had become morally and politically complacent under the strong rule of Bismarck.Despite his own German nationalism, Weber was something of an Anglophile who resembled British Whig historians in

regarding Puritanism as a major source of England’s achievements.32 In his inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg inMay 1895, Weber seemed to have in mind this imagined ideal of Puritan rectitude when he declared that Germany’s futuregreatness depended on whether its “leading strata are able to raise themselves into the hard and clear atmosphere in which

the sober activity of German politics flourishes.”33

Weber also found examples of sober activity in the United States, to which he and his wife, Marianne, traveled in August 1904to attend a scholarly

end p.227

congress in St. Louis. After the meeting, he toured other regions of the country, including rural locales in Oklahoma and NorthCarolina, where he witnessed the “inner-worldly asceticism” later made famous by his Protestant Ethic, which he was thenwriting. In contrast to medieval mystics who engaged in a contemplative flight from the world, inner-worldly ascetic

Protestants sought to master the world and themselves through self-scrutiny and productive activity.34 Weber regarded thisinner-worldly asceticism as most characteristic of what he called the “sect” type of religious association rooted in theCalvinist-Puritan tradition. Its exemplars included Baptists, Quakers, Pietists, and Methodists, among others—all groups thatthrived in rural and small-town America. A common denominator among these groups was their sectarian worldview: theirself-selecting membership and enforced moralism, which contrasted with the all-inclusive, saints-and-sinners character ofEurope’s state churches. Like the Puritans of old, latter-day American Puritans organized societies of the godly, where

acceptance by one’s peers carried greater value than any sacramental rite administered by an umbrella-like state church.35

Everywhere he visited in the United States, Weber marveled at the level of religious participation. “This in a country,” he



wrote, “where there is a constitutional ban on official recognition of any church.” He admitted that, from the standpoint ofsecularized Europeans such as himself, the ubiquity of churches and their centrality in Americans’ lives seemed, at first,“grotesque and frequently repellent.” Yet, he argued that the “exclusiveness of these circles”—their sectarian, faithful-remnant mentality—accounted for their “superiority in the struggle for existence.” Membership in a church community “ofgood repute” was, for Americans, a sign of an individual’s trustworthiness. In Oklahoma, Weber met a traveling salesman ofiron tombstone lettering, who commented: “As far as I am concerned, everyone can believe what he likes, but if I discoverthat a client doesn’t go to church, then I wouldn’t trust him to pay me fifty cents: Why pay me, if he doesn’t believe in

anything?”36

Weber observed the Calvinist, sect-type church most vividly in Mount Airy, North Carolina (later the inspiration for AndyGriffith’s Mayberry), where he and his wife visited several cousins on his mother’s side. (Part of the family had changed itsname from Fallenstein to Miller when the father immigrated to the United States.) With Frank Fallenstein, a more recentimmigrant, serving as translator, the Webers attended what Marianne called a “Baptist christening”—a service of believers’

baptism in which a number of people were baptized by immersion in an ice-cold mountain stream.37 One of the personsbeing baptized was a businessman who was planning to open a bank in Mount Airy. Recounting the incident in a later essay,Weber cited the man’s baptism as evidence of ascetic Protestantism’s legitimating function in the community. The

end p.228

thorough scrutiny required for admission to the Baptist sect certified the businessman’s probity in the eyes of prospectiveclients. This “ruthlessly rigorous control over the conduct of their members,” in Weber’s view, was the hallmark of the inner-worldly asceticism practiced by Protestants in the Calvinist-Puritan lineage. He conceded that the sects were starting to losesome of their hold over society as secular service clubs grew in popularity. “There is hardly a small businessman withambitions who does not wear some badge in his buttonhole,” he observed. Yet, the original model of such civic organizations,he added, was the church, particularly the gathered communities of the faithful in the ascetic Protestant sects. In suchaustere conventicles, in which members maintain “a check on each other through mutual confession,” the real strength ofProtestantism was apparent, in contrast to the decadence of Europe’s established churches. “One only has to look at theBerlin Cathedral to know that it is certainly not in this grandiose Caesaro-Papist showpiece but rather in the small meetinghalls of the Quakers and Baptists, where there is no such mystical adornment, that the ‘spirit’ of Protestantism is most truly

manifested.”38

Weber’s romanticized ascetic Protestantism found its most enduring expression in his Protestant Ethic, in which he famouslydescribed anxiety-ridden Puritans determined to prove their elect status through hard work. Predestinarian uncertainty—thehaunting question of elect or reprobate—was the wellspring of Puritan productivity even as it was redolent of tragedy. Thedoctrine of predestination, “with all the pathos of its inhumanity, had one principal consequence for the mood of a generationwhich yielded to its magnificent logic: it engendered, for each individual, a feeling of tremendous inner loneliness.” A man,Weber explained, “was obliged to tread his path alone, toward a destiny which had been decreed from all eternity.” None ofthe traditional persons, mechanisms, or institutions could help the individual facing this stark uncertainty: not the preacher(for Puritans ultimately afforded him little actual priestly status over an elect layperson), not the sacraments (becausePuritans rejected the view that these conveyed grace in any substantial or automatic way), not the church (since, despite theself-policing of the community, nobody could be absolutely sure which visible saints corresponded to the invisible saints in theLamb’s Book of Life), and not even, in a sense, God (because Christ died for the elect alone, as the doctrine of limitedatonement taught). Puritanism, like Protestantism generally, deprived the individual of the traditional way of relievingpredestinarian anxiety: a “gradual storing up of meritorious achievements” through hearing masses, undertaking

pilgrimages, and performing other works of satisfaction.39

Stowe had described the Puritan’s inner isolation in strikingly similar terms in The Minister’s Wooing: “No rite, no form, nopaternal relation, no

end p.229

faith or prayer of church, earthly or heavenly, interposed the slightest shield between the trembling spirit and Eternal Justice.The individual entered eternity alone, as if he had no interceding relation in the universe.” Likewise, in Oldtown Folks, shenoted that, in New England society, “all the draperies and accessories of religious ritual” were “rigidly and unsparinglyretrenched.” There was “nothing between the soul and these austere and terrible problems; it was constantly and severelybrought face to face with their infinite mystery.” The idea that New Englanders had somehow gotten to the heart of thematter was still being echoed a century later by Robert Lowell, who once commented that the Calvinism of his Massachusetts



Bay forebears focused on religion’s “attenuated ideal.”40

Both Weber and Stowe compared the Calvinist-Puritan lineage with traditions they regarded as less intellectually refined. ForWeber, the “hand to mouth” existence perpetuated by Catholicism’s sacramental system provided the most obviouscontrast, though he detected significant holdovers from a Catholic subsistence economy in Lutheranism. Lutherans were“passive in character,” unlike Calvinists, and were more interested in obtaining forgiveness of sins through repeatedpenitence than in doing the hard work of sanctification demanded by ascetic Protestants. Calvinism—not Lutheranism, withits relative “moral feebleness”—was the source of the “tough, upstanding, and active mind of the middle-class capitalistentrepreneur.” Stowe lacked Weber’s familial preoccupation with the comparative merits of Calvinism and Lutheranism, but,as her observation about the Spanish peasantry (quoted earlier) reveals, she shared Weber’s view that a merely sacramentalreligion would never produce adherents of superior mental agility. However comforting Stowe may have found churchly ritualafter her Anglican conversion, only the New England Calvinism of her ancestors had the “sharp-cut crystalline edges and

needles of thought” necessary to yield a supremely active and virtuous citizenry.41

The razor-like quality of the Calvinist mind, according to Weber and Stowe, was honed especially on the Sabbath, whichPuritan commonwealths on both sides of the Atlantic treated with special seriousness. Weber pointed to the controversy inearly seventeenth-century England over the “Book of Sports” (issued by James I in 1618 and reissued by Charles I in 1633),which riled Puritans by allowing a number of recreations on Sundays. (Cromwell’s protectorate subsequently enforced a strictsabbatarianism.) Puritans, Weber noted, were not opposed to sports in principle but were hostile toward any amusementsthat devolved into the “purely uninhibited expression of uncontrolled instincts” or encouraged pleasure for its own sake.Wasting time was the Puritans’ cardinal sin. Time “is infinitely valuable, because every lost hour means one less hour

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devoted to labor in the service of God’s glory.” This did not mean, Weber hastened to add, that Puritanism “embodied agloomy philistinism that despised culture.” The Sabbath was meant, instead, as a day to cultivate learning for divine ends.Puritan laypeople in England and even more in New England heard sermons that were “deeply imbued with Renaissancelearning” and that brimmed with “erudition in theological controversy.” The Sunday sermon became, in effect, the equivalentof university training for the laity. “Probably no country has been so rich in ‘graduates,’” Weber opined, “as New England in

the first generation of its existence.”42

Similarly, in her memoir of her European tour, Stowe praised the Puritan model of the Sabbath and its influence onProtestants in Switzerland, England, Scotland, and the United States. Significantly, she posited a direct link between theliberty in these societies and the self-discipline required for Sabbath keeping. “There must be enough intensity of individualself-control to make up for the lack of an extraneous pressure from the government.” The Lutheran branch of theReformation lacked Calvinism’s tendency toward sabbatarian rigor, and, consequently, Lutheran principalities had been lesssuccessful in “sustaining popular rights.” Stowe also anticipated Weber’s argument about the intellectualizing function ofPuritan Sunday sermons. “Ride through France, you see the laborer in his wooden shoes, with scarce a thought beyond hisdaily toil. His Sunday is a fête for dancing and recreation,” she wrote. “Go through New England, and you will find the laborer,as he lays his stone fence, discussing the consistency of foreordination with free will.” The average layperson in New England

gains “more elements of mental discipline” in a single Sunday sermon than “a French peasant gets in a whole lifetime.”43

This vigorous life of the mind, regulated by the rhythm of Sabbath discipline, translated into such productivity in the economicsphere that persons content to live merely hand-to-mouth existences stood out from the crowd. Every New England village,Stowe wrote in Oldtown Folks, had a “do-nothing” whose sloth made everybody else’s diligence all the clearer: “Work, thrift,and industry are such an incessant steampower in Yankee life, that society would burn itself out with intense friction werethere not interposed here and there the lubricating power of a decided do-nothing.” Even so, the virtuous majority needed tobe on guard constantly lest the temptation to laziness spread to other citizens. One of the characters in Oldtown remarksthat the village do-nothing, Sam Lawson, “is enough to make the saints in Heaven fall from grace.” Stowe’s words anticipatedthe logic of Weber’s Protestant Ethic: diligent labor is the best evidence of divine election since a lazy person cannot get into

heaven. “Unwillingness to work,” as Weber put it, “is a symptom of the absence of the state of grace.”44

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Conclusion: The Stowe-Weber Thesis

The Weber thesis, which deserves as much to be called the Stowe thesis, has never ceased to provoke debate among



scholars, for, as historian Alastair Hamilton has observed, the theory is just as difficult to demolish as it is to substantiate.45

Clearly, both Stowe and Weber were affected by their inbred anti-Catholicism, which partly blinded them to the disciplinaryrigor and moral striving that are present in certain strains of Catholic devotionalism. The self-scrutiny so typical of Puritans

was equally characteristic of Catholic rigorists in both the medieval and Counter-Reformation periods.46 To his credit, Weberhad some inkling of this. In The Protestant Ethic, he cited the parallel tendency in Reformed and Jesuit pieties to monitorone’s state of grace. He also spoke of Calvinism’s “affinity (as well as its specific antithesis) to Catholicism.” Similarly, Stowewas not as hostile to all things Catholic as might first appear. In The Minister’s Wooing, she hinted that the Catholic practice ofprayers for the dead—rejected along with purgatory by the Protestant reformers—might have some redeeming value. Shepointed to Augustine, who, in offering up fervent petitions for his departed mother, Monica, “solaced the dread anxieties oftrembling love by prayers offered for the dead.” In such practices, “the Church above and on earth presented itself to the eyeof the mourner as a great assembly with one accord lifting interceding hands for the parted soul.” Both Stowe and Weberwere complex thinkers whose deepest religious sympathies were clearly mixed. They also appreciated the ambiguity ofhistorical explanation, or what Weber called “the inexhaustible complexity of all historical phenomena.” Indeed, Weberanticipated the scholarly firestorm that his Protestant Ethic would ignite. It was not his intention, he bristled, to defend “anyfoolishly doctrinaire thesis as that the ‘capitalist spirit’ ... could only arise as a result of certain influences of the Reformation.

”47

Yet, in coining the concept of the Protestant ethic, Stowe and Weber reified an old confessional stereotype that equatedProtestantism with dynamism and progress and Catholicism with passivity and retrogression. Historian Paul Münch has shownthat such stereotypes first proliferated in the eighteenth century as Europeans, coming head-to-head with foreigners in thecolonial arena, became more interested in cultural differences among peoples. The rise of pseudoscientific theories of race in

the nineteenth century only reinforced the old confessional tendency to generalize about the “nature” of certain cultures.48

Both Stowe and Weber were steeped in a Protestant triumphalism that equated popery with intellectual and political slavery.For New Englanders such as Stowe, this rhetoric had been perfected in the Glorious Revolution of 1688,

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when English Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic, in a burst of nationalistic propaganda, hailed the overthrow ofEngland’s last Catholic king. For German Protestants such as Weber, the Kulturkampf under Bismarck and Emperor Wilhelm Ipopularized notions of Catholicism’s cultural inferiority. Stowe and Weber internalized this generalized Protestant chauvinismbut also modified it in claiming the superiority of Calvinism as a basis for social progress. In so doing, they partly rehabilitatedthe image of Calvinism from the disfavor it had incurred among liberal critics.

Stowe’s memoir of Geneva provides an apt concluding illustration of Calvinism’s special place in the Stowe-Weber thesis.Switzerland’s Protestant and Catholic cantons, she observed, “are as different as our slave and free states, and in the same

ways.” Geneva, in particular, “seems like New England—the country around is well cultivated, and speaks of thrift.”49 Suchfertility and economy were the inevitable result, she believed, wherever Calvinism had taken root.

Notes

1. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands , 2 vols. (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1854), 2:277 . On Stowe’strip to the Continent, see Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 250 .2. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard UniversityPress, 1967), 34 . On the anti-Calvinist backlash in the new republic, see Peter J. Thuesen, Predestination: The AmericanCareer of a Contentious Doctrine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 100–135 . On republican ideology as an acidcorrosive of Calvinist and other forms of traditional confessionalism, see Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwardsto Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. 53–92 .3. Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or, The Transformation and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist , ed. Emory Elliott (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1998), 194 . See also Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the AmericanEnlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 149–50 ; and Perry D. Westbrook, Free Will andDeterminism in American Literature (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1979), 62–64 .4. Henry Ware Jr., The Recollections of Jotham Anderson (1824; repr., Liverpool, England: Wright, 1830), 26 . See also David S.Reynolds, Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1981), 115–16 .5. Mary Kelley, ed., The Power of Her Sympathy: The Autobiography and Journal of Catharine Maria Sedgwick (Boston:Massachusetts Historical Society, Northeastern University Press, 1993), 86 . On anti-Calvinism in Sedgwick, Child, and Judd,see Thomas J. Davis, “Rhetorical War and Reflex: Calvinism in Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction and Twentieth-Century



Criticism,” Calvin Theological Journal 33 (1998): 443–56 .

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6. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Deacon’s Masterpiece; or, The Wonderful ‘One-Hoss Shay’: A Logical Story,” in The PoeticalWorks of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1892), 1:421 . See also the comments in Allen C. Guelzo,Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 2 ;and in M. X. Lesser, “Edwards in ‘American Culture,’” in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards, ed. Stephen J.Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 280 .7. Mark Twain to Joseph Hopkins Twichell, February 1902, in Mark Twain’s Letters , 2 vols., ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (New York:Harper, 1917), 2:719 . On Twain’s friendship with Twichell, see Steve Courtney, Joseph Hopkins Twichell: The Life and Times ofMark Twain’s Closest Friend (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 254 and passim .8. Robert Lowell, Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 240.9. Robert Lowell, “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” (1946), in Lowell, Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (NewYork: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 59–60 . Edwards, in his sermon, quoted Isaiah 33:12–14: “as thorns cut up shall theybe burnt in the fire.” Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards , vol. 22,Sermons and Discourses, 1739–1742, ed. Harry S. Stout and Nathan O. Hatch, with Kyle P. Farley (New Haven, Conn.: YaleUniversity Press, 2003), 415 .10. Lowell, “After the Surprising Conversions” (1946), in Lowell, Collected Poems, 61–62 ; Jonathan Edwards, A FaithfulNarrative of the Surprising Work of God, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards , vol. 4, The Great Awakening, ed. C. C. Goen(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), 206–7 .11. “Unchurched Calvinist” and quotations from Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter in Westbrook, Free Will and Determinism , 29.Agnes McNeill Donohue, Hawthorne: Calvin’s Ironic Stepchild (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985), 62 , makes asimilar observation about Chillingworth’s Calvinism. Quotations from Pierre and observations on Moby-Dick from Westbrook,Free Will and Determinism , 38–39.12. Much has been written on the “scribbling women,” including John T. Frederick, “Hawthorne’s ‘Scribbling Women,’” NewEngland Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1975): 231–40 ; James D. Wallace, “Hawthorne and the Scribbling Women Reconsidered,”

American Literature 62, no. 2 (1990): 201–22 ; and Michael Winship, “Hawthorne and the ‘Scribbling Women’:Publishing The Scarlet Letter in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Studies in American Fiction 29, no. 1 (2001): 3–11 .On the struggle against sentimentality, especially by Melville, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (NewYork: Anchor, 1977), esp. 294–96 .13. The best modern biography of Harriet is Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe. On her upbringing, see also Marie Caskey,Chariot of Fire: Religion and the Beecher Family (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), 3–33, 169–207 . OnCatharine, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: Norton, 1973) .14. On the influence of Common Sense philosophy in Catharine’s work, see Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 80–84 .

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15. Her essay (which argued that the soul’s immortality is revealed not by the light of nature but by scripture) is printed inCharles Edward Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Compiled from Her Letters and Journals (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin,1889), 15–21 .16. Charles H. Foster, The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism (Durham, N.C.: DukeUniversity Press, 1954), 111 . Similarly, Lawrence Buell notes, “Her New England Arcadia is finally a world of Romantictragicomedy, in which, after a suitable amount of tribulation, even the apparent incompatibilities of Calvinism andsentimentalism can be reconciled.” See Lawrence Buell, “Calvinism Romanticized: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Samuel Hopkins,and The Minister’s Wooing,” in Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe , ed. Elizabeth Ammons (Boston: Hall, 1980), 270 .17. Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister’s Wooing, ed. Susan K. Harris (New York: Penguin, 1999) , esp. 325 on JamesMarvyn’s conversion. For an extended analysis of religious themes in The Minister’s Wooing, see Foster, Rungless Ladder, 86–128 .18. Stowe, Minister’s Wooing, 194, 195, 197, 200 ; Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 279–80 . On Harriet Beecher Stowe andCatharine Beecher in the larger American theological context, see Noll, America’s God, 293–329 .19. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks, ed. Dorothy Berkson (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 194–95, 385, 265 . As one of the novel’s characters, Deborah Kittery, tells her cousin: “If you’d try to come into the Church andbelieve, grace would be given to you. You’ve been baptized, and the Church admits your baptism. Now just assume yourposition” (265).20. Stowe, Minister’s Wooing, 50, 193–94 ; Stowe, Oldtown Folks, 29 .



21. Stowe, Oldtown Folks, 373.22. Stowe quoted in Foster, Rungless Ladder, 102 . Ann Douglas has argued that, for Stowe, “sin itself is the sublime, andthat only its enormity puts men on speaking terms with God.” Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 244–45 .23. Buell, “Calvinism Romanticized,” 265 . Hopkins’s idea about being damned for the glory of God is mentioned in Joseph A.Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995),126 .24. On disinterested benevolence as a basis for antislavery thought, see Kenneth P. Minkema and Harry S. Stout, “TheEdwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate, 1740–1865,” Journal of American History 92, no. 1 (2005): 47–74 . OnStowe and the essential humanitarianism of the Edwardsean tradition, see Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture:From Revolution through Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 267 .25. Thomas J. Davis, “Images of Intolerance: John Calvin in Nineteenth-Century History Textbooks,” Church History 65, no. 2

(1996): 234–48 , esp. 237–38 on the Servetus affair.26. Stowe, Sunny Memories, 2:276–77 .27. Ibid.28. Ibid., 2:408–9 .29. The similarity between Stowe’s and Weber’s views has been noticed by at least one other observer. In a brief thoughtpiece, the sociologist Werner Stark

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(1909–1985) noted that Stowe’s Oldtown Folks contained “Max Weber’s argument in a nutshell,” though Stark did not explorethe biographical or other factors behind the affinity. See Stark, “Harriet Beecher Stowe versus Max Weber,” Sociological

Analysis 42, no. 2 (1981): 173–75 .30. Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography , trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Wiley, 1975), 46 .31. Martin Riesebrodt, “Dimensions of the Protestant Ethic,” in The Protestant Ethic Turns 100: Essays on the Centenary ofthe Weber Thesis, ed. William H. Swatos Jr. and Lutz Kaelber (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2005), 23–51 ; on Weber’s parents, 42–48. The slapping incident is told by Weber’s wife in Weber, Max Weber, 69 .32. Guenther Roth, “Weber the Would-Be Englishman: Anglophilia and Family History,” in Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins,Evidence, Contexts, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 83–84 . Seealso the discussion of Roth’s thesis in Lutz Kaelber, “How Well Do We Know Max Weber after All? A New Look at Max Weber andHis Anglo-German Family Connections,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 17, no. 2 (2003): 307–27

.33. Max Weber, “The National State and Economic Policy,” trans. Ben Fowkes, in Reading Weber, ed. Keith Tribe (London:Routledge, 1989), 208 . On the ways in which this lecture anticipated the argument of Weber’s Protestant Ethic, see J. M.Barbalet, “Weber’s Inaugural Lecture and Its Place in His Sociology,” Journal of Classical Sociology 1, no. 2 (2001): 147–70

.34. Fritz Ringer, Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 152–53 .35. On ascetic Protestantism, see ibid., 117–18 . See also the editor’s introduction to Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic andthe “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York: Penguin, 2002), xx–xxi ; and Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology , 2 vols., ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich,trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al. (New York: Bedminster, 1968), 2:479 .36. Weber, “‘Churches’ and ‘Sects’ in North America: An Ecclesiastical and Sociopolitical Sketch,” in Weber, Protestant Ethic,204–5 .37. Details of the Mount Airy visit are reconstructed in Larry G. Keeter, “Max Weber’s Visit to North Carolina,” Journal of theHistory of Sociology 3, no. 2 (1981): 108–14 . On the “Baptist christening,” see Weber, Max Weber, 298 .38. Weber, “‘Churches’ and ‘Sects,’” 207, 208, 209 .39. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 73–74, 79 .40. Stowe, Minister’s Wooing, 198 ; Stowe, Oldtown Folks, 29 ; Lowell, Collected Prose, 287 .41. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 78, 80, 86, 94, 95 ; Stowe, Oldtown Folks, 29 .42. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 107, 113, 114 .43. Stowe, Sunny Memories, 2:411–13 .44. Stowe, Oldtown Folks, 31, 33 ; Weber, Protestant Ethic, 107 .45. Alastair Hamilton, “Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ,” in The Cambridge Companion to Weber,ed. Stephen Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 169 .



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46. See, for example, Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash inPuritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 74–83 ; and Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, ThePractice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1982), 25–39 .47. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 81, 84 ; Stowe, Minister’s Wooing, 197 (see Augustine’s prayer for his mother at the conclusionof book IX of his Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin [London: Penguin, 1961], 203–5) ; Weber, Protestant Ethic, 8, 36(emphasis in original).48. Paul Münch, “The Thesis before Weber: An Archaeology,” in Lehmann and Roth, ed., Weber’s Protestant Ethic, 66–71.49. Stowe, Sunny Memories, 2:281 .

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9. harriet beecher stowe and max weber on calvinism and the american character

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