The "African enslavement of Anglo-Saxon minds": the Beechers as critics of Augustine

Church History, Sept, 2003 by Peter J. Thuesen

Harriet Beecher Stowe, who achieved international fame for her 1852 antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, is best known to historians of American religious thought as a critic of New England Calvinism and its leading light, Jonathan Edwards. But in airing her frustrations with the Puritan tradition, Stowe also singled out a much earlier source of the problem: Augustine, the fifth-century bishop of Hippo. At his worst, Augustine typified for Stowe not only theological rigidity but also the obdurate refusal of the male system-builders to take women's perspectives seriously. Consequently, in the New England of the early republic, when "the theology of Augustine began to be freely discussed by every individual in society, it was the women who found it hardest to tolerate or assimilate it." (1) In leveling such criticism, Stowe echoed her elder sister Catharine Beecher, a prominent educator and social reformer, whose well-known writings on the role of women in the home have often overshadowed her two companion volumes of theology, in which she devotes more attention to Augustine than to any other figure. (2) Yet for all her extended critiques of Augustinian themes, Beecher buried her most provocative rhetorical flourish, as one might conceal a dagger, in the last endnote on the last page of the second volume. Seizing upon the African context of Augustine's career as a metaphor for his deleterious influence on Christian theology, she concluded that reasonable people have a duty to resist the "African enslavement of Anglo-Saxon minds" no less than to combat the "Anglo-Saxon enslavement of African bodies." (3)

Stowe and Beecher's striking indictments of Augustine, when considered alongside criticisms of the church father by other members of the Beecher clan, have curiously escaped analysis by historians, who have focused on the Beechers' strenuous wrestling with the ghost of Edwards. Yet Augustine's prominence in the Beechers' writings as a symbol, if not as a directly quoted source, begs the question of why the bishop of Hippo reemerges at all, especially considering the relatively infrequent mention of his name by Edwards himself. As I shall argue, the bishop of Hippo looms large for the Beechers because of their position at a peculiarly Augustinian moment in New England history--a time when perennial themes from the Pelagian and other controversies of late antiquity resurfaced as elite Protestants struggled to define and maintain republican virtue in the face of perceived societal decay. Like the decline of the Roman Empire that drove Pelagius and his followers to perfectionism, the weakening of orthodox Congregationalism in New England amid a rising tide of Unitarianism, Catholicism, and other alleged threats to Christian civilization prompted several Beecher siblings to reconsider the benefits of old heresies. What was usually lost in the process was the force of Augustine's own Catholic logic, though at least one Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, ultimately found in his high view of the sacraments a balm for wounds inflicted by her ancestral Calvinism. The story of Augustine in the hands of the Beechers is therefore a window into the evolution of a family tradition, as well as a mirror of important changes in the wider society.

I. BEFORE THE REPUBLIC: AUGUSTINE AS RESPECTED FATHER

Ever since the late Harvard historian Perry Miller located the essence of American Puritanism in the "Augustinian strain of piety," scholars have tended to take for granted that Augustine, as much as Calvin, provided the theological substructure of the New England mind. Miller conceded that the Augustinian influence was not always direct, and that the Puritans did not agree with Augustine on every particular, such as the authority of the church or the efficacy of the sacraments. But in surveying Puritan sermons and diaries, Miller insisted that one could "read the inward meaning of all of them" in Augustine's Confessions. The hallmark of this Augustinian piety was its intense introspection--a sense of the heart's natural emptiness, and an all-consuming desire for the fullness that only God could provide. The Puritans' deep resonance with Augustine, according to Miller, was evident in the frequency of quotations of him in their writings, and even in their occasional references to him using the title "Saint," which they normally shunned as too "popish." (4)

Among the numerous scholars who have questioned Miller on various counts, Janice Knight has argued that a strongly Augustinian strain of piety was not universal among Puritans but characterized one faction, which she terms the "Spiritual (or Cambridge) Brethren." Centered in England at the Cambridge colleges, this more mystical wing of the Puritan movement emphasized God's freely infused grace and its passive reception by the elect. The group's leading figure among first-generation Puritans in America was John Cotton, who, though a formidable presence in ecclesiastical politics, suffered a diminished reputation for his association with Anne Hutchinson in the Antinomian controversy. Cotton and the Spiritual Brethren ultimately lost to the majority faction, Knight's "Intellectual Fathers," represented by Thomas Shepard, Thomas Hooker, and John Winthrop, who tended toward a less Augustinian, "preparationist" view of conversion emphasizing the elect's cooperation with God in the process of salvation. (5)