Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 60

MODERN AGE

"so characteristic of Calvinism"-that is, as
taking a backseat to the Old Testament war-
rior God of the battlefield.14 Howe's modern
biographer, Deborah Clifford, writes of this
stanza that by emphasizing "God's justice
rather than his mercy," Howe, "like so
many liberal Christians [of the war years],
had reverted to the stern evangelical creed
of her childhood."15 Williams much more
plausibly points to "the militant, conviction-
driven figure so compellingly limned in [the
Passion-Flowers poem] 'Whit-Sunday in the
Church.' " This Christ is not the Jesus of
Calvinist or evangelical orthodoxy but the
thoroughly modernized Jesus-the zealous
reformer-of Boston's liberal Unitarianism.
If this Jesus still owed anything to Calvin-
ism and to evangelicalism, and he did, it was
as those traditions were adapted by New
England liberalism under the influence of
the most innovative of nineteenth-century
German theology. Unitarians like Howe
kept Calvin around on their own terms.
They missed the irony as they forgot their
hostility to John Calvin's doctrines long
enough to praise John Brown as a hero
animated, they said, by the same theology
that had produced the Scottish Covenant-
ers and Cromwell's New Model Army.16
They were happy to feature Calvin in their
story as a cultural force behind Puritanism,
revolution, and social reform and not as the
Reformed theologian of the doctrines they
had jettisoned long ago in their rebellion
against New England orthodoxy.
An odd but significant source for the Christ
who appears as the "Hero" of the Battle
Hymn of the Republic is Emanuel Sweden-
borg (1688-1772). The eighteenth-century
Swedish mystic who founded the Church
of the New Jerusalem influenced a number
of transcendentalists, including Emerson
and George Ripley. Howe singled out Swe-
denborg's "theory of the divine man" for its
60

FALL 2014

influence on her idea of Christ, and pointed
to several of his hefty tomes as the "writings
which interested [her] most." She credited
Swedenborg with the doctrine of Christ she
still adhered to in 1899. Jesus was "the heav-
enly Being whose presence was beneficence,
whose word was judgment, whose brief career
on earth ended in a sacrifice, whose purity
and pathos have had much to do with the
redemption of the human race from barba-
rism and the rule of the animal passions."17
In light of her Christology, there is no rea-
son to read the Battle Hymn of the Republic
as inconsistent with Howe's liberal faith or
as some sort of reversion to the default mode
of childhood Calvinism. Her Christ and the
kind of redemption he provided matched
Parker's and Clarke's and any number of
other liberal Unitarians' theology. Again, a
poem from her 1853 Passion-Flowers makes
her theology of Christ and the Church
obvious. The collection's title itself points to
Christ and his suffering. The passion-flower
vine, first encountered by Spanish explorers
in the Americas in the sixteenth century, was
popular in Victorian Britain and America. An
Italian monk early in the seventeenth century
had published a description of the flower's
complex structure and its supposed symbolic
connections to the wounds of Christ, includ-
ing the crown of thorns. Beginning with the
title of her collection, then, Howe invoked
powerful Christological symbolism.

T

he poem "Whit-Sunday in the Church"
effectively depicts Howe's Christ and
summarizes her indictment of the modern
Church.18 Whitsunday is another name
for Pentecost in the liturgical year. It falls
seven weeks after Easter and marks the gift
of the Holy Spirit and the apostolic miracle
of tongues. Howe celebrated the miracle of
Pentecost in this poem as the binding of
humankind back together with the recovery
Modern Age - Fall 2014

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