American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson

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СКАЧАТЬ married when you were in college nor even while you were in theological seminary. In fact, it was regarded as positively an immoral thing to do.’’ For one, it indicated that ‘‘you couldn’t control yourself,’’ and, second, it was considered irresponsible to marry a woman before attaining the means to support her.⁵

      Anne was quite a catch for the working-class Muste. Her family was comfortably middle class; her father was a Dutch Reformed minister and two of her older brothers were physicians. In contrast to Muste’s home, where his parents could barely read and write, Anne’s had an ‘‘intellectual atmosphere’’ that he eagerly absorbed. Together, he and Anne’s family read and discussed Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, and other texts. It was, he recalled, a year of being ‘‘intoxicated’’ by ‘‘intellectual life and experiences.’’⁶

      Ironically, when Muste moved to the New York metropolitan area to attend New Brunswick Theological Seminary, he entered an intellectual community that was less stimulating than his fiancée’s home in rural Iowa. It was, he recalled, ‘‘a devastating experience’’ to go there; he would not ‘‘have survived it without New York,’’ where he was able to take classes at New York University and Columbia University.⁷ One of the oldest seminaries in the United States, New Brunswick had long faced declining enrollment and student complaints about the quality of its education, so much so, in fact, that Reformed congregations in the metropolitan area rarely hired its graduates. New Brunswick’s official historian has suggested that one reason for its poor reputation was its conservatism. Yet this explanation overlooks the fact that nearby Princeton Theological Seminary, which was even more orthodox, had a better reputation. One gets the sense that it was the seminary’s insipidness, rather than its conservatism, that was the problem; certainly that was what rankled Muste.⁸ While other American seminaries were becoming more scholarly, New Brunswick persisted in viewing itself as a school for training ministers and was reluctant to adopt contemporary academic standards. Until 1907, faculty members were hired by the Reformed Church’s General Synod, which believed that the best qualification for teaching was holding a successful pastorate.⁹

      As much as Muste disdained New Brunswick, it provided him with a supportive environment for mediating between Calvinism and liberalism, and between his ethnic ties and national loyalties. In the first place, despite Muste’s low opinion of the faculty, they considered him ‘‘the most brilliant student our seminary has had for twenty years,’’ endowed with unique ‘‘spiritual power,’’ and awarded him a fellowship that gave him an annual income of $3,500.¹⁰ Second, his classmates, most of whom were Dutch Americans like himself, formed a tight-knit group that provided him with friendship and community. Third, he gained valuable ministerial experience. As the only student who was fluent in spoken and written Dutch, during his first year, the seminary dispatched him for the summer and every other weekend to a Dutch-speaking church in Albany, New York, where he was responsible for preaching a morning service in Dutch and an evening service in English.¹¹

      This experience made Muste aware of the differences between a Dutch and an American pulpit. In Dutch, he was expected to ‘‘expound some passages of scripture rather than preach topical sermons,’’ while in English, the ‘‘personal and spiritual needs of people’’ were paramount, and he found himself moving away from ‘‘the typical Calvinist and Reform Church position’’ in order to appeal to his American parishioners. Through this process he discovered that he preferred the latter; he was ‘‘interested in the personal problems of people’’ and liked relating to them in more intimate terms.¹² In embracing a distinctly American and liberal Protestant homiletics, Muste departed from the tradition in which he had been raised and from what he was learning at New Brunswick.

      Muste’s evolving views on homiletics relates to the most important advantage of attending New Brunswick Theological Seminary: its location in the New York metropolitan area, which gave him access to the theological and philosophical currents and controversies of the early twentieth century. In fact, it was exposure to American ministers in Manhattan that provided him with a model for the personal style of preaching he practiced in Albany.¹³ Most crucially, he was able to take advantage of an agreement between the seminary and New York University and Columbia University that allowed students in high standing to pursue postgraduate degrees for free. Interested in philosophy, Muste traveled two hours by train once or twice weekly to take graduate courses at New York University and, later, Columbia in an effort to fill his ‘‘hunger’’ for knowledge.¹⁴

      Muste began taking classes in the philosophy department at Columbia University at an exciting time. Since being hired in 1902, Nicholas Murray Butler, the ambitious president of the university, focused on shifting its curriculum away from undergraduate education and the classics to graduate and professional education. As part of this modernizing effort, Butler had recently hired John Dewey.¹⁵ The pragmatist joined a faculty of ‘‘friendly critics,’’ philosophers of diverse schools who together offered a well-rounded curriculum. The head of the department was F. J. E. Woodbridge; the other members of the faculty were Felix Adler, William P. Montague, and Wendell T. Bush. In later years, Dewey’s pragmatism would exercise a tremendous influence on Muste’s thought and politics. At this point, however, it was Woodbridge who made ‘‘the deepest impression.’’ Like Dewey, Woodbridge espoused naturalism, a distinctly modern approach to philosophical problems that draws upon the methods of the empirical sciences. However, rather than embrace the democratic creed of pragmatism in which he saw traces of idealism, Woodbridge turned back to Aristotle and classical philosophy. Woodbridge thus provided the young Calvinist Muste an entrée into modern thought without completely challenging his worldview. As Muste commented of Woodbridge’s appeal, ‘‘I was definitely a Platonist. This tied in with my Calvinism.’’¹⁶

      Even so, Muste’s exposure to naturalism and pragmatism subtly shifted his Calvinist worldview. William James’s ideas about religion particularly affected him.¹⁷ In Varieties of Religious Experience and his other writings, as well as at several public lectures Muste attended, James defended religious belief against the ‘‘intimidation’’ of positivistic science and, indeed, suggested that religion and science could be reconciled.¹⁸ He pointed out that science, like religion, was a human creation; personal inclination and social context shaped scientific knowledge, making it no more ‘‘true’’ than other truth claims. And he called upon science to evaluate religious belief using the scientific method of inquiry in which experience and results determine the truth of a hypothesis. Based on this criteria, James insisted, religious belief was as real as empirical science because it could ‘‘make a genuine difference in our moral life.’’ He made the same demand upon religion, dismissing tradition and doctrine as paths to truth, and emphasizing the ‘‘fruits’’ and consequences of beliefs. James was uninterested in ‘‘secondhand religious life’’ because it was based on tradition, not experience, and he drew his readers’ attention to the mystical tradition of spiritual inwardness and direct experience with the divine.¹⁹

      James pointed Muste toward a more modern religiosity and sensibility. Unlike his contemporaries, and certainly unlike his professors and peers at New Brunswick Theological Seminary, James defined religion broadly and inclusively. Religion was ‘‘the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.’’²⁰ Indeed, James must be identified ‘‘with the Christian ‘modernism’ of his milieu, according to which religion was a fine thing but specific theological doctrines were felt to be something of a distraction.’’²¹ The impact on Muste was subtle yet dramatic. As he recalled, Varieties of Religious Experience ‘‘opened up to me a great variety of approaches to life and in that way . . . laid the groundwork for wrestling with . . . the theology [with which] I was brought up.’’²² In particular, James’s stress on experience over form, and his celebration of spiritual inwardness and mysticism, suggested the possibilities of a religious life stripped of theology and the church.

      James СКАЧАТЬ