Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 59

THE BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC AND AMERICAN CIVIL RELIGION

hood is now, but onlookers are too stupid to
realize it.
"For the brave world is given to us
For all the brave in heart to keep,
Lest wicked hands should sow the thorns
That bleeding generations reap.
"Oh world! oh time! oh heart of Christ!
Oh heart, betrayed and sold anew!
Dance on, ye slaves! ay, take your sport,
All times are one to such as you."

Howe's preoccupation with events in
Europe runs through these two poems and
others in the collection. The nationalist
movements of the 1840s, despite suppression
at the hands of France, Austria, and Russia,
seemed to her certain to triumph in history's
inexorable march toward freedom. Europe's
struggle between revolution and counter-
revolution gave Howe a template with which
to trace the meaning of events at home and
abroad. Indeed, the fight over American slav-
ery in the 1850s was but one episode in the
epochal struggle between Slavery and Free-
dom worldwide. Likewise, wars for liberation
and unification abroad were matched soon by
a war for liberation and unification at home.11

A

s potent as Howe's romantic national-
ism and historicism were on their own,
combined with liberal Unitarianism and
transcendentalism they become revolution-
ary. Unitarianism and transcendentalism
blended into a single intellectual reform
movement for Howe, much as they did for
Emerson, Ripley, Hedge, John S. Dwight,
and others. Like them, she rejected the
"sensational" epistemology of John Locke
in favor of Kantian intuition and made a
close study of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. She also read Hegel, Goethe, Herder,
Spinoza, Comte, and, like Emerson, a good

deal of Swedenborg. She first encountered
Unitarianism in a sermon by William Ellery
Channing, but later in Boston she and her
husband attended Theodore Parker's church
from 1846 to 1854 and then moved to James
Freeman Clarke's Church of the Disciples.
Parker had established himself as one
of the most important and controversial
importers of German higher criticism and
philosophical idealism, while Clarke was
one of the few Unitarian ministers radical
enough to exchange pulpits with him. Howe
left behind the evangelical Episcopalianism
of her father and her childhood to identify
with the most progressive wing of reforming
Unitarianism. Her handling of the Bible and
her depictions of Christ, miracles, dogma,
ritual, and the moral apathy of the modern
church reflect her liberal Unitarianism and
her debt to German idealism and Sweden-
borg's mysticism.
In the 1950s, historian Edward Snyder
published a short but thorough analysis
of Howe's blending of biblical motifs and
language in the Battle Hymn, especially
the poet's fascination with the apocalyptic
"Day of the Lord."12 Even with the help of
this careful scholarship, however, it is easy to
come away from reading or singing the Battle
Hymn with the impression that the poem is
little more than a patchwork of violent images
snipped from Scripture. But it is much more
than that. No matter how many Old and
New Testament verses appear in the poem, it
doesn't "work" theologically without Howe's
Unitarian doctrines of Christ and salvation.
Literary scholar Gary Williams, in
his illuminating study of Howe's poetic
imagination, points to scholars' conflicting
interpretations of Howe's "Christ" in the last
stanza of the Battle Hymn ("In the beauty
of the lilies, Christ was born across the
seas").13 Edmund Wilson, in Patriotic Gore,
identified Howe's "treatment of Jesus" as one
59
Modern Age - Fall 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Fall 2014
