Patrick J. Keane-Emily Dickinson's Approving God - Divine Design and The Problem of Suffering (2008) PDF
Patrick J. Keane-Emily Dickinson's Approving God - Divine Design and The Problem of Suffering (2008) PDF
Patrick J. Keane-Emily Dickinson's Approving God - Divine Design and The Problem of Suffering (2008) PDF
Approving God
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E m i l y D i c k i n s o n ’s
Approving God
Divine Design and the Problem of Suffering
Patrick J. Keane
Keane, Patrick J.
Emily Dickinson's approving God : divine design and the problem of
suffering / Patrick J. Keane.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: “Focusing on Emily Dickinson's poem ‘Apparently with no
surprise,’ Keane explores the poet's embattled relationship with the deity of her
Calvinist tradition, reflecting on literature and religion, faith and skepticism,
theology and science in light of continuing confrontations between Darwinism
and design, science and literal conceptions of a divine Creator”—Provided by
publisher.
ISBN 978-0-8262-1808-7 (alk. paper)
1. Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Dickinson,
Emily, 1830-1886—Religion. 3. Dickinson, Emily, 1830–1886—Knowledge—
Calvinism. 4. Theology in literature. 5. Belief and doubt in literature.
6. Religion and literature—United States—History—19th century. 7. Science
and literature—United States—History—19th century. I. Title.
PS1541.Z5K36 2008
811'.4—dc22
2008020814
Acknowledgments xi
A Note on Dickinson Texts xiii
Introduction:
A Poem and Its Theological, Scientific, and Political Contexts 1
Part I
Part II
v
vi Contents
Appendix:
Derek Mahon’s “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” 215
Bibliography 225
Index of First Lines 237
General Index 241
Dedicated to Michele Christy
and, in particularly loving memory,
to Kay Farquhar
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take
which you please,—you can never have both. Between these, as a
pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose dominates
will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party
he meets,—most likely his father’s. He gets rest, commodity, and rep-
utation; but he shuts the door to truth. He in whom the love of truth
predominates will keep himself aloof from all moorings, and afloat.
He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite
negations, between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits
to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion, but he is a
candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law
of his being.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Intellect”
The question whether the universe and the place human beings have
within it owe their origin to blind chance or to a supremely wise and
good plan arouses us all.
—Christoph Cardinal Schönborn,
“Reasonable Science, Reasonable Faith”
A god who is all-knowing and all-powerful and who does not even
make sure that his creatures understand his intention—could that be a
god of goodness? Who allows countless doubts and dubieties to per-
sist, for thousands of years, as though the salvation of mankind were
unaffected by them, and who on the other hand holds out the prospect
of frightful consequences if any mistake is made as to the nature of the
truth? Would he not be a cruel god if he possessed the truth and could
behold mankind miserably tormenting itself over the truth?
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak
xi
xii Acknowledgments
xiii
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E m i l y D i c k i n s o n ’s
Approving God
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Introduction
A Poem and Its Theological,
Scientific, and Political Contexts
1
2 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
1. Bloom, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, 345; Joanne
Feit Diehl, Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination.
4 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
both retired, and have both had bouts with cancer (his far more seri-
ous than mine), we still discuss the old question.
This time, the discussion included a number of current articles and
a handful of recent much debated books by the so-called neo-atheists:
Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, and Victor J. Stenger
(Christopher Hitchens would weigh in the following month). We also
found ourselves responding to the chapter “Einstein’s God” in Walter
Isaacson’s new biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe. It was in the
course of this conversation that I quoted “Apparently with no sur-
prise,” in which the beheading of a “happy Flower” by an unseason-
able Frost, a “blonde Assassin,” is overseen and sanctioned by “an
Approving God.” My friend’s response reflected his religious posi-
tion, and something of mine. By way of full disclosure, I should say
that we have both “evolved” (if not progressed) from the Catholicism
of our boyhood. I have become an agnostic. Jim, professionally an
engineer, is really a scientist, conversant with the workings of quan-
tum mechanics but also interested in biblical scholarship, The result is
that he is, and has been for some time, an atheist: a conviction unaf-
fected by the fact that he knows, though he is presently doing well,
that he is dying of an incurable form of cancer, multiple myeloma.
The second friend with whom I had conversations in the spring of
2007 has also had a recent encounter with cancer. I met Paul in gradu-
ate school, and we have stayed in touch, exchanging visits over the
past quarter century. While I was visiting him and his wife in March,
he directed my attention to an article in the Catholic theoconservative
publication First Things. It was by Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, gen-
eral editor of the new Catholic Catechism and a prominent Church
spokesman on issues involving creation, evolution, and design. I was
aware of Schönborn as a result of an op-ed he had published in the
New York Times in 2005: a piece that stirred so much controversy that I
had been following some of his subsequent pronouncements, of which
this essay seemed the most important.3 Since I devote parts of two
chapters to the commentaries of Cardinal Schönborn, I should explain
3. The essay is titled “Reasonable Science, Reasonable Faith.” A related and sup-
portive piece, “God and Evolution,” by Avery Cardinal Dulles, appeared in the
October 2007 issue of First Things. Schönborn’s op-ed and subsequent lectures are
incorporated and expanded on in his Chance or Purpose: Creation, Evolution, and a
Rational Faith.
6 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
why, and just what the issues he engages have to do with Emily Dick-
inson’s poem about Nature and God, and with an audience, especially
an American audience, reading such a poem in 2007.
-
The immediate context of the cardinal’s July 7, 2005, op-ed was the
controversy over the teaching of Intelligent Design, with school
boards, notably in Kansas and Pennsylvania, besieged by demands to
present the “controversy,” to “teach the debate.” Under the public-
relations cloak of fair and balanced presentation, this was an attempt
by the Discovery Institute and other Christian fundamentalists to dis-
courage, both in the classroom and in textbooks, the teaching of evo-
lution. Five months after the cardinal’s op-ed, the anti-Darwinian tide
was temporarily but powerfully turned back by the judge’s decision
in a widely reported case involving the Dover, Pennsylvania, school
board. Insisting that instructors read to their classes a statement assert-
ing that Darwinian evolution was an inconclusive “theory, not a fact,”
the Dover school board had tried to mandate the teaching of an “alter-
nate theory,” Intelligent Design, as science. Federal District Court
judge John E. Jones III—though a nonactivist conservative jurist, a
Christian, and a Bush appointee—was scathing, even derisive, in
rejecting what he characterized as a doubly duplicitous attempt: first,
to “misrepresent well-established scientific propositions,” and, sec-
ond, to require the teaching of “an untestable alternative hypothesis
grounded in religion.” In trying to smuggle religious Creationism into
the biology classroom, an “ill-informed faction” led by the board’s
chairman had driven the school board to act with what the judge
called “breathtaking inanity.”4
That decision, and, not least, the unexpectedly caustic language,
was applauded by those residing within a secular, humanist, post-
Enlightenment tradition. But the discontent of those who chose to
make Dover a constitutional test case for Intelligent Design and the
reaction of those disappointed or angered by the judge’s ruling serve
to remind us that for most Americans, and not only fundamentalists,
science alone cannot provide the sense of transcendent meaning they
4. Kitzmuller v. Dover; the full ruling (December 20, 2005) is on the National Cen-
ter for Science Education Web site: http://www.natcenscied.org/. On DVD, see
the 2007/2008 Nova production, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial.
Introduction 7
5. See Alfred I. Tauber, “Science and Reason, Reason and Faith,” in Robert M.
Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum, eds., Intelligent Design: Science or Religion? Criti-
cal Perspectives, 311.
8 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
6. The most recent books of both Gingerich and Haught are briefly characterized
at the end of Chapter 2. The responses to the Templeton Foundation question were
widely published in October 2007. For the twelve essays in their entirety, see
www.templeton.org/purpose.
7. Edward J. Larson and Larry Wilban, “Leading Scientists Still Reject God.”
Introduction 9
8. Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, 307.
10 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
9. Michel Onfray, Atheist Manifesto: The Case against Christianity, Judaism, and
Islam, 5. Onfray calls Kant’s first Critique “a monument of timid audacity.”
Introduction 11
10. Critique of Pure Reason, Bxxx (117); B refers to the second edition, A to the first.
12 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
peacefully coexist? As we have already seen, and will again, for many
they can; indeed, at a certain sophisticated level, the clash may present
neither a real problem nor an adequate explanation for the loss of faith.
The distinguished philosopher Charles Taylor, in a monumental study
published in 2007, expressed dissatisfaction, on two levels, with what
he acknowledged to be the widespread argument that modern West-
ern secularism is to be explained in terms of science having refuted
and crowded out religious belief. After registering two objections, he
ends by making a crucial point about a range of possibilities:
First, I don’t see the cogency of the supposed arguments from, say,
the findings of Darwin to the alleged refutations of religion. And,
secondly, partly for this reason, I don’t see this as an adequate expla-
nation for why in fact people abandoned their faith, even when they
themselves articulate what happened in such terms as “Darwin
refuted the Bible”, as allegedly said by a Harrow schoolboy in the
1890s. Of course bad arguments can figure as crucial in perfectly
good psychological or historical explanations. But bad arguments
like this . . . leave out . . . many viable possibilities between funda-
mentalism and atheism.11
12. Baym, American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences: Styles of
Affiliation, 139, 143, 148–49.
14 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
14. James R. Guthrie, “Darwinian Dickinson: The Scandalous Rise and Noble
Fall of the Common Clover,” 73.
16 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
15. Ann Coulter, Fox News, “The Big Story” (November 18, 2007). Brownback,
New York Times, May 31, 2007; for responses, see letters to the editor, June 1, 2007.
May 2007 also saw the opening, in Petersburg, Kentucky, of a “Creation Museum,”
intended to “counter evolutionary natural history museums that turn countless
minds against Christ and Scripture” and featuring a display of Noah’s ark and the
spectacle—sancta simplicitas!—of dinosaurs and humans presented as coexisting
neighbors. In its first two months (the director of the museum reported in July),
there were more than a hundred thousand visitors.
16. Though acknowledging that there are valid challenges to the religious per-
spective, Haught criticizes the “new atheists” for theological shallowness, for a
failure to engage religion much beyond fundamentalist varieties easy to carica-
ture, and (in terms of my central theme) for their evasion of the problem of suf-
fering by attributing the cause of suffering to faith. The two other books mentioned
Introduction 17
17. Writing in the first year of the Iraq war, psychologist Robert Jay Lifton
argued, “We are experiencing what could be called an apocalyptic face-off
between Islamist forces, overtly visionary in their willingness to kill and die for
religion, and American forces claiming to be restrained and reasonable but no less
visionary in their projection of a cleansing war-making and military power. Both
Introduction 19
degree. Were Islamic jihadists (their spread helped rather than hin-
dered by the war in Iraq) to get their hands on a nuclear weapon, the
targeting of infidels might well be carried out in God’s name by zealots
willing to engage even in mass murder in the name of religion. Theo-
cratic Iran, the chief beneficiary of the Iraq fiasco, might develop a
nuclear capability, triggering a U.S. or Israeli preemptive strike. And
there is a more immediate nightmare scenario. The nuclear arsenal of
Pakistan, a state on the verge of chaos and with its northwestern
mountain enclaves providing safe haven for Osama bin Laden, may
fall into the hands of Islamic extremists sympathetic to Al-Qaeda and
willing to use such weapons in God’s name.18
These will seem improbable scenarios only if those of us who think
of ourselves as rational actors in a reasonable world try to explain
away or simply deny a very long history demonstrating a willingness
on the part of fanatics, convinced that God is on their side, to kill their
fellow creatures because of absolutist religion. There is an under-
standable but dangerous tendency on the part of liberal Christians and
progressive, secular optimists committed to peaceful international
cooperation to repress evidence of man’s primordial proclivity to vio-
lence. That is the theme of two of the most powerful poems of the
ing the huge issues opened by Emily Dickinson’s “little” poem. These
include the challenges presented to theodicy by evolution and, implic-
itly, by the Problem of Suffering. If God exists, and he is all-knowing,
all powerful, and all-loving, how can the natural and human world he
created, and of which he “approves,” be the site of so many violent
forces—at once random, recurrent, and indifferent to all that is happy,
beautiful, and innocent?19
19. Appearing too late to figure in the present text, but decidedly worth men-
tioning, is George Steiner’s recent rumination, at once wide sweeping and mov-
ingly personal, on “theology and its bodyguard, theodicy.” He insists on the
futility of “words, words, words”—however acrobatic, eloquent, or repellent the
arguments—to “render acceptable the bestialities and injustice of reality,” to make
“understandable” unmerited “suffering under God.” The essay, “Begging the
Question,” appears as the coda to Steiner’s My Unwritten Books (New York: New
Directions, 2008). He does not mention the great German, but in his insistence on
the futility of theodicy, skeptical Steiner is allied, philosophically though not of
course religiously, with Kant. A believer and early defender of philosophic opti-
mism and providential reasoning, Kant concluded in his late postcritical work
Failure of All Philosophic Attempts at Theodicy (1791) that our limited reason is utterly
incapable of gaining insight into the highest Wisdom, the mysterious ways of God.
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Part I
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Chapter 1
25
26 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
Who the devil, one wonders, is the adversary the speaker chooses to
send up against Jove himself? As Morse reports, no help is to be found
in the annotations of either Johnson or Franklin, both of whom append
a note by Mabel Loomis Todd identifying “Shaw” as a day laborer who
“used to dig” for the poet. This hardly seems a qualification for taking
on God in a court of law on a charge of having destroyed her carefully
sown garden by sending his own court official in the form of a prema-
ture frost. Scholars have resolved the mystery of biographical refer-
ence, and so explained the joke.1 I will be making few such ventures;
what interests me is this early (1859) challenging of God and the
adumbration of theological issues addressed rather more seriously in
the frost-and-flower drama of “Apparently with no surprise.”
In the case of the latter, all depends on the presentation of that
moment when the silent but deadly frost, the “blonde Assassin,”
assaults the “happy” flower and “beheads it at its play,” all under the
auspices and with the explicit approval of an inscrutable God. Obvi-
ously, more is going on here than the registration of a passing incident
in a garden. In microcosm, “Apparently with no surprise” engages the
relationship between God and Nature; the pathos of mutability; and,
1. The reference is to the distinguished jurist Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of the
Massachusetts Supreme Court from 1830 to 1860. (He was also the father-in-law of
Melville, who dedicated his first novel, Typee, to him.) Summarizing work by pre-
vious scholars, Morse explains, “In the home of Edward Dickinson, the word ‘Shaw’
commanded reverence. Now that we know this, we can get the joke. Father’s law
office is upheld from season to season by Father’s Shaw, says this poem, but in my
garden I have a Shaw of my own—and my Shaw can plead before a court ultimately
Supreme” (Jonathan Morse, “Bibliographical Essay,” 266–67). Later, Emily Dickin-
son would mount her own defenses, and charges, in that Supreme Court.
28 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
But when God, interrupting one of these dialogues, in fact makes his
dramatic appearance, it is not to answer his defiant victim but to impe-
riously reprimand him as a mere mortal who has no business con-
fronting divinity. The magnificent Lord God who addresses the
unjustly afflicted Job “out of the whirlwind” remains as enigmatic as
the suffering he permits (even initiates) and unapologetically refuses
to explain. Instead, he confronts Job with his own litany of unanswer-
able questions: “where were you when I laid the foundations of the
earth” or when “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of
God shouted with joy?” Has Job “walked in the recesses of the deep?
. . . Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of
Orion?” If not, “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He
who argues with God, let him answer it” (Job 38–40).
The chapter that follows, 41, is devoted to the majestic and terrifying
creature—the Hebrew original of Blake’s Tyger and Melville’s Whale—
in whom this God takes particular pride and with whose fearful power
he associates his own. Can Job “draw out Leviathan with a hook? . . . will
he speak soft words unto thee? Will he make a covenant with thee?”
Overwhelmed by the exuberant delight this sardonic, taunting God
takes in his own creative power, a repentant Job, earlier and under-
standably absorbed by his own personal agony and horrific losses,
responds with necessarily partial but now direct recognition of the awe-
some divinity who made and governs the universe. “I had heard of thee
by the hearing of my ear, but now my eye sees thee” (Job 42:4).
The pious epilogue, a painful falling-off from the preceding sub-
limity, presents us with a cowed Job and an even more morally dubi-
ous divinity: a double-entry bookkeeper who compensates the
guiltless penitent for all his losses, including, most disturbingly, “sub-
stitute” children replacing the ten God himself permitted to be sense-
lessly destroyed by a storm. This vulgarization of the greater-good
answer to suffering seems grotesque if not obscene. But what matters
in terms of any theodicy worthy of the name is that Job does not
endorse the “justice” of a God who seems no more interested than
Leviathan in “covenants.” Job submits instead to the irresistible evi-
dence of the Almighty’s power: sovereign and, finally, unchallengeable.
In its evocation of an omnipotent but ambivalent divinity and
unfathomable mysteries, in its implication that suffering is not per-
sonal but universal, and in its varying perspectives, the Book of Job
30 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
2. Though often associated with the Book of Job, King Lear may have even
deeper affiliations with Ecclesiastes. That connection, advanced by Shakespeare
critic Arthur Hirsch in terms of the play’s “over-all conception,” has been
endorsed by Harold Bloom: “The enormous emptiness of Koheleth reverberates
all through Shakespeare’s darkest drama, which is also his wisest” (Where Shall
Wisdom Be Found? 103).
32 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
The tension between private and public takes many forms in the
poetry of Emily Dickinson. The passage just quoted occurs in an essay
discussing that tension in Dickinson’s wartime poetry. But, as “Appar-
ently with no surprise” makes clear, Civil War battlefields are hardly
the only site of struggle, the only “model of earthly events” thought to
be “eternally present to divine vision.” For Dickinson, a lifelong,
expert gardener as well as a poet, the central issue of theodicy—what
to make of suffering and death and possible rebirth in an ordered
world presided over by a supposedly providential and loving God—
was seasonally enacted year after year in her own beloved garden,
over whose plants and flowers she doted as if she were the world’s
first gardener, Milton’s “Eve, alias Mrs. Adam” (L 24). It was a garden
as sequestered as the poet herself. But however retired and retiring
Emily Dickinson may have been, especially after 1860, she epitomized
in private what Emerson had publicly advocated: a self-reliant indi-
vidual averse to conformity and, above all, willing to challenge God as
traditionally conceived. Indeed, though she thought and wrote within
an essentially Christian paradigm, Dickinson, like Melville, out-
Emersons Emerson in the rebellious, sometimes blasphemous audac-
ity of her critique. Whether or not that Dickinson is present in
“Apparently with no surprise” depends not only on what is intrinsi-
cally present in the poem but also, in part at least, on the responses of
readers and the various images of God they bring to the table.
-
Brief and “apparently” uncomplicated, the poem raises momentous
issues, both textual and contextual. The contextual or extrinsic con-
siderations are essentially “religious.” As just suggested, there is the
matter of reader response. Reactions to this particular poem are, as we
might imagine and as I’ve recently confirmed by requesting brief
responses from friends, influenced, at times determined, by a reader’s
religious beliefs or lack thereof. It matters, to begin with, whether one
believes that the kind of “God” depicted in the poem does or does not
exist. Beyond that, there are other questions: whether one conceives
the universe to be with or without purpose or “Design,” and what con-
nection if any there is between a violent, evolving Nature and an
omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving Creator God, presuming that
such a Being exists.
When, as mentioned in my Introduction, I solicited the responses of
friends to this poem, they turned out to be of three sorts. The responses
were brief (a sentence or two) and impressionistic. Unfolding (and
expanding upon) their latent implications, I am taking considerable
liberty in characterizing them as follows.
For some, the poem seemed an objective, “Darwinian” tracing of the
automatic operations of an indifferent, ever-changing nature: an
evolving process of destruction and creation, with the sun going
through its accustomed round, measuring off another day for a Force
(a supposed “God”) presiding over a perishable world. These “objec-
tivist” readers themselves fell into two camps: those whose response
was as unsentimentally “neutral” as the process itself seemed to be,
and those who responded to it with a more modest version of the
quasi-religious awe expressed by Albert Einstein in contemplating the
inexorable laws of the universe.
For others, lifting that “naturalistic” description to the level of
theodicy and personalizing the process, the poem seemed a mini-
Miltonic vindication of God’s ways to man. The destruction of the
flower by the frost was only “apparently” cruel—for some, in fact, it
seemed more likely to be a damaging rather than a killing frost. As
such, it promotes new growth in the spring, and so “plays” its part in
a grand plan devised and approved by a guiding Intelligence who is
also a loving God: a providential Creator who (in accordance with the
redemptive or philosophically optimistic answer to suffering) brings
good out of “apparent” evil, life out of “apparent” death.
Finally, there were those who stressed the random cruelty of the
“beheading,” the leisurely departure of the “Assassin,” and the
movement overhead of the “unmoved” (unfeeling) sun. In their esti-
mation, Dickinson had presented a bleak indictment rather than a
vindication of God: an “Approving God” coldly indifferent to “suf-
fering” in the natural—and, by unavoidable implication, the
human—world, perhaps even taking sadistic pleasure in it. To gener-
alize: my friends’ interpretations were based in part on close attention
to the text, but even more (and here they mirrored the responses I had
The Poem and Images of God 35
5. Assassin is the European name for a member of a secret order founded in the
late eleventh century by Hasan Sabbah, a leader of the Ismaili sect of Islam. Assas-
sins, often fueled by hashish, were distinguished by blind obedience to their spir-
itual leader and the use of murder as a sacred duty to eliminate their foes. The
highest rank, the actual instruments of assassination, sought martyrdom.
36 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
6. For current information on religious sects in the United States, see John C.
Green’s The Faith Factor: How Religion Influences American Elections.
The Poem and Images of God 37
42
Religion and Science: Einstein’s Spinozistic God 43
10. Letter to Phyllis Wright, January 24, 1936; cited in Isaacson, Einstein, 388.
11. The lines of Einstein’s poem may be translated as “How I love this noble
man, / More than I can say in words” (see http://www.AlbertEinstein.info/db/
ViewImage.do?DocumentID+17814&Page=1). See also Einstein to M. Schayer,
August 5, 1927, in Isaacson, Einstein, 388. For the Berlin dinner party, see Charles
Kessler, ed., The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 322. For details in the following
paragraph, see Isaacson, Einstein, 388–89.
Religion and Science: Einstein’s Spinozistic God 49
This proposal for separate magisteria has come under attack from
both sides, religious and secular. Among the so-called neo-atheists, it
is rejected most strenuously by Oxford scientist and prominent non-
believer Richard Dawkins, who wonders, in The God Delusion, why
scientists are “so cravenly respectful toward the ambitions of theolo-
gians, over questions that theologians are certainly no more qualified
to answer than scientists themselves.” Instead, he insists, “the pres-
ence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a sci-
entific question.”18 Physicist and astronomer Victor J. Stenger, in God:
The Failed Hypothesis, also takes Gould to task for exempting super-
natural religion from legitimate scientific scrutiny. Even philosopher
Daniel C. Dennett, who finds Gould’s peacemaking intention laud-
able, rejects his proposal, while making it clear that he “is not sug-
gesting that science should try to do what religion does, but that it
should study, scientifically, what religion does.”19
This debate would not be alien to Emily Dickinson. In the 1870s in
New England, no conflict was more heated than that between science
and religion, and the compatibility or incompatibility of evolution
with Design and religious faith. In the second series of his “Lectures
on the Scientific Evidences of Evolution,” given at Amherst College
and published in 1872 as Pater Mundi, or the Doctrine of Evolution, the
Rev. E. F. Burr argued that, while it was not absolutely inconsistent
with theology (the human interpretation of religious beliefs) or with
belief in a Supreme Being, the doctrine of Evolution was, “both in its
practical influence and its logical sequences, . . . quite inconsistent with
a reasonable faith in the Bible and in God,” and so had to be combated
by advocates of a Christian philosophy. Emily Dickinson would not
have attended the lectures, but she may well have read the review of
Burr’s book in Scribner’s.
-
18. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 56. Dawkins’s militancy recalls the 1993 contro-
versy over the attempt to establish a lectureship in theology and the natural sci-
ences, a lectureship handsomely endowed by the English author Susan Howatch.
The plan was ferociously attacked as nonacademic in a lead article by the editor
of the widely read scientific weekly Nature (April 1, 1993). His round dismissal of
the suggestion that scientists had anything to learn from theology provoked many
responses from scientists and theologians.
19. Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis, 10; Dennett, Breaking the Spell, 30.
Religion and Science: Einstein’s Spinozistic God 53
20. Isaacson, Einstein, 390. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, “Transcendental Logic”
section, B75/A51, 193–94. Einstein was reading, and understanding(!), Kant as
early as age thirteen, when he was introduced to the Critique of Pure Reason by a
university student who dined weekly with the Einstein family.
54 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
calmly responded with his most memorable axiom: “The Lord God is
subtle, but malicious he is not” (Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft
ist er nicht). Mathematics professor Oscar Veblen, who overheard the
remark, remembered it and, when the new Princeton math building
was built a decade later, requested permission to carve the words on
the stone mantel of the fireplace in the common room. In cordially
granting his approval, Einstein further explained to Veblen what he
had meant: “Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness,
but not by means of ruse.”21
There is something of this in Emily Dickinson, whose God, though
always a Person, was usually, in keeping with Puritan tradition, hid-
den and elusive. “The Puritan God,” argues Perry Miller, “is entirely
incomprehensible to man,” a “realm of mystery.” Fundamental to
Puritanism is the idea that “God, the force, the power, the life of the
universe, must remain to men hidden and unknowable,” not “fully
revealed even in His own [Biblical] revelation,” behind which “always
lies His secret will.”22 “Divinity dwells under seal,” Dickinson ends
one austere poem (662), an appropriate divinity for a poet who was not
only an heir to the Calvinist tradition but also a recluse. Another, to
which we will return, begins:
have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.”23 “The main
source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and
science,” he insisted in concluding his Union Theological Seminary
speech, “was this concept of a personal God.”
-
As we have seen, and will again, there are those who would deny
this “conflict.” Though often resisted from both sides, the attempt to
make science and religion compatible takes place in both the biologi-
cal and the cosmological realms. There are many physicists who hap-
pen also to be believers, some of whom—Paul Davies, for example, in
The Mind of God (1992) and later works—try to reconcile their religious
faith with their scientific work. Theists often remind us that it was a
Catholic priest, Georges-Henri Lemaître, who was the first (in 1927) to
propose what would become known as the Big Bang theory. But it was
not as a priest, who presumably accepted the idea of a divine creation,
but as an eminent astronomer doing science based on Einstein’s gen-
eral theory of relativity that Lemaître advanced his proposal that the
universe had a beginning. The idea that God caused the Big Bang,
while it might be true, is not a scientific theory since it is not vulnera-
ble to verification or falsification (there are no observations we can
make to prove or disprove it). Lemaître himself insisted on keeping his
theory separate from his religion, even going so far as to ask Pope Pius
XII, who in 1951 interpreted the Big Bang as scientific proof of Gene-
sis, to refrain from making that claim.
Others reject the Kantian truce between knowledge and faith, sci-
ence and religion, an accommodation endorsed by such large-minded
thinkers as the American pragmatists William James and John Dewey
and reaffirmed by Gould. Believers who reject the notion of separate
magisteria include theistic evolutionists (National Human Genome
Resources director Francis Collins, for example, or philosopher Alvin
Plantinga), as well as scientist-theologians such as Ian Barbour, Arthur
Peacocke, and the physicist and Anglican priest J. C. Polkinghorne.
But even Polkinghorne—the author of such books as Science and Prov-
idence (1989), Belief in God in an Age of Science (1998), and, most recently,
Quantum Physics and Theology (2007)—begins the latter, subtitled An
Unexpected Kinship, by acknowledging that, since theology and science
24. Polkinghorne, Quantum Physics and Theology, 1. Peacocke, who died in 2006,
argued (more ingeniously than persuasively) that, by freely choosing to limit his
omnipotence to accommodate random mutations as the raw material of Darwin-
ian evolution, God displayed divine humility.
Religion and Science: Einstein’s Spinozistic God 57
1. And then there is the best seller. That international phenomenon, the seven
Harry Potter novels (over 400 million copies sold thus far, in some sixty lan-
guages), fits into this secular, even neo-atheist pattern. Unlike Middle Earth and
Narnia, the fantasy worlds projected by J. K. Rowling’s precursors (Catholic
J. R. R. Tolkien and Anglican C. S. Lewis), her magical world, both in the novels
58
God and Evolution: The Contemporary Debate 59
The debate over religion in America is hardly new, but, witch trials
aside and with the possible exception of the original Darwin wars in
the 1870s, it has seldom been as fierce or as public. Reflecting the gen-
eral interest in the recent atheist challenge to fundamentalist religion,
Newsweek in April 2007 invited Sam Harris and Rick Warren, Califor-
nia pastor and author of the wildly popular The Purpose-Driven Life, to
discuss what the informed moderator, Jon Meacham, called “the ulti-
mate question: is God real?” The debate was won by Harris, who
argued for Darwinian evolution instead of an intelligent Designer and,
in addressing one of Warren’s “great evidences” for the existence of
God—“answered prayer”—challenged believers to an experiment:
“Get a billion Christians to pray for a single amputee. Get them to pray
that God re-grow that missing limb.” As for the Bible and the Koran:
it was “exquisitely clear” that neither “represents our best under-
standing of the universe.” Subsequent letters to the editor attributed
Warren’s poor showing to the fact that “he had to try to present the
Bible as something other than the very fallible creation of man that it
is”; or regretted that he hadn’t met Harris’s onslaught in subtler
ways—by, for example, conceding that “no all-controlling deity exists,
but that there is a spiritual connection among us”; or by proposing a
simple rather than a literalist spirituality: “a non-denominational
sense of a benevolent higher power that calls us to serve mankind and
the planet through love.”2
These are valid points. But, of course, it is precisely the personal,
highly sectarian, usually literalist interpretations of God as depicted in
the Bible and Koran that Harris and his fellow atheists are most intent
to refute, even when the exercise amounts to shooting fundamentalist
fish in a barrel. Not since the “death of God” controversy in the late
1960s has theology been so publicly discussed. Making his case and
selling his book, Hitchens spent much of 2007 debating, on television
(with Al Sharpton and, more substantively, with Jon Meacham) and at
packed college events. In October alone, the month in which I happen
to be writing, Hitchens debated the role of religious belief in the mod-
ern world with Alister McGrath, Oxford professor of historical theol-
ogy and author of the four-volume A Scientific Theology, then with
right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza, a skilled debater who, taking Kant
for gospel, insisted, as he does in What’s So Great about Christianity, both
that believers have “faith” because they “do not claim to know God”
and that theism “knows that there is a reality greater than, and beyond,
that which our senses and our minds can ever apprehend.”3 Hitchens
took his own book tour into hostile territory, the heart of the American
Bible belt, where he repeatedly identified as the target of his animus
the God of the monotheistic religions, for him a brutal “dictator in the
skies.” I raise the point since, to the extent that the God she addresses
throughout her life is essentially the Calvinist deity of her childhood,
Emily Dickinson is, if not completely, then largely in agreement. The
difference is that, while she fearlessly and ferociously questions her
Calvinist legacy, Dickinson seldom if ever questions God’s existence.
There are focal and tonal distinctions among the neo-atheists, with
Harris and Hitchens the most wide-ranging and polemical, Dawkins
and Stenger the most relentlessly focused on hard science, and Den-
nett—neither biologist nor physicist, but a philosopher—the most
even tempered. He might be appreciated by Einstein, who would find
Harris, and, especially, the angry Dawkins and combative Hitchens
too belligerent for his taste. At the risk of seeming churlish toward
those from whom I have learned much, I cite Einstein. “What sepa-
rates me from most so-called atheists,” he said in 1953, “is a feeling of
utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the
cosmos.” And in a letter a dozen years earlier, he compared “fanatical
atheists” to “slaves . . . still feeling the weight of the chains which they
have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their
grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’—can-
not hear the music of the spheres.”4
5. Lee Smolin, “The Other Einstein,” 83. For some, string theory has already rec-
onciled those two equally valid but mutually incompatible theories: quantum
mechanics, demonstrably true at the micro level, and the general theory of relativ-
ity, demonstrably true at the macro level. If that duality can be breached, who knows
what other mysteries regarding the deepest truths of the universe may yet be
unveiled, including, perhaps, the unifying Holy Grail Einstein was seeking. On one
level, as Freeman Dyson has recently observed, string theory may be considered
“the revenge of the heirs of Einstein against the heirs of Bohr” and his well-
established concept of “complementarity.” See Dyson, “Working for the Revolu-
tion,” 47, and, for an accessible discussion of superstrings and “the quest for the
ultimate theory,” Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimen-
sions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. Einstein’s “final” writing is reported in
Isaacson, Einstein, 543.
62 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
Emily Dickinson’s little poem, are engaging in their own right. They
also provide a context in which to fully explore a miniature yet bio-
logical and cosmic drama in which the featured players are a “happy”
Flower that a lethal Frost “beheads” while an “unmoved” sun meas-
ures off one more day “For an Approving God”: an “apparently” grim,
but perhaps merely realistic, illustration of what Alexander Pope
referred to, in his famous couplet on Isaac Newton, as “Nature and
Nature’s laws,” presided over by the Lawmaker, God.
-
In his Times op-ed, “Finding Design in Nature,” Cardinal Schön-
born, himself a future candidate for the papacy, dismissed “as vague
and unimportant” a 1996 statement in which Pope John Paul II
observed that “evolution,” or, rather, the “several theories of evolu-
tion,” constituted a valid “hypothesis,” indeed “more than a hypoth-
esis.” Rather less casual than Schönborn implies, John Paul’s
statement (its thesis was that “Truth Cannot Contradict Truth”) was
issued to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on October 22, 1996, and
given front-page coverage around the world. The New York Times
headline on October 25 was typical: “Pope Bolsters Church’s Support
for Scientific View of Evolution.”6 There was a more sensationalistic
headline in the conservative Il Giornale: “Pope Says We May Descend
from Monkeys.” (He didn’t, and we don’t; we are related to, not
descended from, monkeys.) The context of John Paul’s statement, as he
makes clear, was Pope Pius XII’s 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, and
what made John Paul’s statement newsworthy was his revision of
Pius’s insistence that evolution had to be treated with caution, that,
while having strong claims to legitimacy, and not necessarily “in
opposition” to faith, it might still be untrue.
As Schonbörn notes, though John Paul was superseding Humani
Generis by asserting that “new knowledge” has demonstrated beyond
a reasonable doubt the origin of the “human body” from “pre-existing
living matter,” the pope did not define the “several theories of evolu-
tion” in 1996. Even so, his endorsement was troubling to others beside
Cardinal Schönborn. John Paul’s statement was accepted, but with
pain, by a theist who, in a letter to the New York Times written shortly
after the publication of John Paul’s statement, confessed that the
pope’s “acceptance of evolution”
Emily Dickinson, who saw death and dissolution all around her and
harbored few illusions about a gentle creation (frost “beheads” flowers
with divine approval; nature “sears” saplings, “scalps” trees [314]),
knew that when it came to religious faith, “the shore is safer . . . but I
love to buffet the sea” (L 104). One nevertheless sympathizes with the
believer for whom the pope’s remarks left a faith with “tougher seas to
sail.” And his awareness of pain and suffering, as well as his sense of
estrangement in an often terrifying post-Darwinian universe, was cer-
tainly shared by Emily Dickinson. In fact, interrupting both pope and
cardinal, we may return for a moment to Dickinson and to the imme-
diate reception and aftermath of the publication of The Descent of Man.
-
For many theists, Darwin’s Origin of Species and, even more, The
Descent of Man presented a painful, occasionally faith-destroying chal-
lenge. How was one to reconcile a biblical belief in divine creation of
immutable species with Darwin’s account of evolution through natu-
ral selection, especially given the inclusion of human beings among
the creatures that had evolved? Many could not. For others, then and
now, creation and evolution can peacefully coexist. An early compat-
ibilist was Alfred Russel Wallace, the man who proposed, almost con-
currently and independently of Darwin, the origin of species through
natural selection. Articles and reviews in the papers and periodicals
read by Emily Dickinson (and made conveniently available online by
regard to the crucial issue, the descent of man, he took an affably prag-
matic position, less focused on man’s origin than on his destination.
He didn’t “dread” the hypothesis of our animal ancestry. He wanted
only to be shown “how I got clear of monkeys” and to know that, now,
there is a “difference.” In any case, “I had just as lief spring from a
monkey as from some men I know around here.” That earned a laugh
from the congregation, even if the preacher was (inadvertently?) echo-
ing T. H. Huxley’s perhaps apocryphal riposte to the bishop of Oxford
a decade earlier. The Reverend Beecher concluded that he had “not the
least recollection of what happened a million years ago. All my life is
looking forward. I want to know where I am going; I don’t care where
I came from.”9
Not all responses to the impact of Darwin on religious faith were
this ostensibly lighthearted. New England in the 1870s was a central
site in the Darwin wars. The Springfield Republican reviewer of the
English translation of Louis Büchner’s Man in the Past, Present, and
Future (1872) described the book as “Darwinism gone to seed” and
pronounced the results (“as evolved” by Büchner’s self-proclaimed
“consistent and unprejudiced thought”) “simply astounding to the
New England mind.” What was most astounding was that Büchner,
going beyond an endorsement of evolution, denounced all monothe-
istic religions as “zealotic and intolerant.” Buddhism, which “recog-
nizes neither the idea of a personal God, nor that of a personal
duration,” was commended; the rest, including Christianity, were to
be swept away by “that knowledge . . . destined hereafter to replace
explicitly deny to divine providence any truly causal role in the devel-
opment of life in the universe.” The dogmatic conclusion: “An
unguided evolutionary process—one that falls outside the bounds of
divine providence—simply cannot exist.” In effect, John Paul and Car-
dinal Schönborn are addressing the theological issue raised imagina-
tively by Dickinson’s presentation of an omnipotent Overseer she
describes as “an Approving God.”
The head of the 2004 commission was Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope
Benedict XVI. As Schönborn notes in his op-ed, the new pope pro-
claimed in the homily at his then recent installation: “We are not some
casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the thought
of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.”
And Cardinal Schönborn, who happens to be its primary editor, cites
the “authoritative” Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is, “natu-
rally,” in agreement with both pontiffs: “Human intelligence is surely
already capable of finding a response to the question of origins. The
existence of God the Creator can be known with certainty through his
works, by the light of human reason. . . . We believe that God created
the world according to his wisdom. It is not the product of any neces-
sity whatever, nor of blind fate or chance.” In short, and employing
other words, “accidental power” is, in Cardinal Schonbörn’s “Finding
Design in Nature,” part of, but subordinate to, the overall Design cre-
ated by and endorsed by an “Approving God.” In quoting the key
phrases of Emily Dickinson’s “Apparently with no surprise,” I am not,
I should point out, implying that she herself subordinates accident to
Design.
-
The Schönborn op-ed ignited an international firestorm among sci-
entists and even theologians, who saw in it, especially given the car-
dinal’s close relationship with the new pope (whose student he had
once been), less an “opinion” piece than a calculated institutional
regression from the cautiously positive view of evolution expressed by
John Paul a decade earlier.
As indicated earlier, one notable respondent was John F. Haught. In
God after Darwin (2000) and Deeper than Darwin (2003) Haught had
made a powerful case for compatibility, arguing that evolution and
theology complement rather than compete with one another. Reading
Schönborn, he was troubled—both by the original op-ed and by a
front-page article two days later in the Times suggesting that the car-
God and Evolution: The Contemporary Debate 69
dinal’s stance might signal that the apparent truce between Catholi-
cism and evolutionary theory was about to be renounced. In the
August 2005 issue of Commonweal, Haught asked and answered that
question: “Does Schönborn’s essay mean that the church has changed
its position on evolution? In a word, no.” Nonetheless, he added, “it is
a setback in the dialogue of religion and science.” But was the “dia-
logue” just a staking out of separate magisteria? “Today most Catholic
theologians and philosophers agree that it is not the job of science” to
make reference to “God, purpose, and intelligent design,” wrote
Haught. “If some scientists go on to maintain that evolution is there-
fore conclusive evidence of a godless, purposeless universe, this is a
leap into ideology, not a scientifically verifiable truth.” Schönborn was
right, he continued, to defend Catholicism against a materialism
incompatible with faith; but when he “fails to distinguish neo-
Darwinian biology from the materialist spin that many scientists and
philosophers place on evolutionary discoveries,” he “does no service
to the nuances of Catholic thought.”
Nevertheless, Haught insists (and Schönborn would later amplify the
point) that evolutionary theory, providing it does not slip into a meta-
physics beyond its competence, does raise a host of questions theology
must address. “Evolutionary science has changed our understanding
of the world dramatically,” he wrote in God after Darwin, “and so any
sense we may have of a God who creates and cares for this world must
take into account what Darwin and his followers have told us about it.”
Peter Steinfels’s synopsis of Haught’s position seems relevant as well to
the brutal, tragic aspect of such Dickinson poems as “Apparently with
no surprise”: “The role of chance events combined with the ruthless
pruning by natural selection over vast, almost unimaginable expanses
of time gives a picture of ‘life’s long journey as a wide trail of loss and
pain’ that cannot easily be reconciled with any traditional notion of a
divine providential intelligence. [For Haught], arguments for intelligent
design, even apart from their scientific weakness, do no theological
justice to this tragic dimension of evolution.”10
-
10. Haught, God after Darwin: A Theology of Evolution, ix. Steinfels, “Beliefs; A
Catholic Professor on Evolution and Theology: To Understand One, It Helps to
Understand the Other.” Among others troubled by the Schönborn op-ed, Steinfels
reports, was George Coyne, a Jesuit priest and director of the Vatican Observatory,
70 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
God made use of evolution to create all of this. Granted this, how-
ever, the real problem is now on the table: How can God, the merci-
ful one, allow all those frightful attempts and false trails with
thousands of deaths [in the process]? And all these things are sup-
posed to be the means used by his planned creativity? It contradicts
the common picture [image] of God that we have received (as
passed on [transmitted] by the Church). . . . It is certainly high time
for us to look carefully [closely] at the world that God has made in
order to find out how he has really intended it to be. I think no one
yet knows.11
who contested the cardinal’s position in the August 6, 2005, issue of the Catholic
weekly Tablet. In addition, the distinguished British astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees
expressed the hope that the Pontifical Academy of Science, to which he belonged,
would dissociate itself from Schönborn’s remarks.
11. Quoted by Schönborn in Chance or Purpose, 92–93. The book version (trans-
lated by Henry Taylor) differs somewhat from the online translation of the origi-
nal lecture. Though at times I prefer that online translation (http://stephanscom
.at/edw/katechesen/articles), for the reader’s convenience, I cite (with some
bracketed interpolations) from the book version. Subsequent citations, abbrevi-
ated CP, are included parenthetically in the text.
God and Evolution: The Contemporary Debate 71
12. Haught, God and the New Atheism, 105–6; Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 335.
74 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
quote the final words of his Pauline lecture and chapter, we will be
delivered from pain and death because of the sacrifice and resurrec-
tion of “Christ the Redeemer, in whom the sufferings of creation come
to [will find] an end, and in whom the new creation has [will have] its
beginning and its goal” (CP, 102).
-
Revealingly, Emily Dickinson also quotes the eighth chapter of
Romans, not to affirm the deliverance through Christ’s sacrifice of a
world groaning in travail, but to challenge Paul’s rhetorical question:
“if God is for us, who can be against us?” (8:31). Lamenting the killing
of her flowers, first by worms, then by an unexpected “Midwinter
Frost,” in the early autumn of 1881, she quotes Paul: “when God is with
us, who shall be against us,” adding, in a bitter addendum conceding
God’s omnipotence while denying his benevolence: “but when he is
against us, other allies are useless” (L 746). Dickinson’s omnipotent
deity is personal, though more likely to be an antagonist than a friend,
exercising his power unpredictably and often cruelly.13 Even the Son
who suffered and died on the cross is a victim of that power. There is the
crucial difference between those who “keep believing nimble” and
those orthodox/apocalyptic Christians for whom Jesus provides the
supreme example of pain as redemptive, of partial evil leading to a
greater good. For Cardinal Schönborn, it is in the sacrifice of Christ the
Redeemer that “the sufferings of creation will find an end” and a
“goal.” Though attracted to the crucified Jesus, Dickinson is less drawn
to final ends than to painful process, less persuaded of redemptive pur-
pose than of the reality of natural and human suffering.
That emphasis reflects Dickinson’s remarkable capacity, in poems
such as “Apparently with no surprise,” “Longing is like the Seed,” or
“Through the Dark Sod—as Education,” to experience empathetically
what it might be like, for example, to be a flower. It might be the
“happy Flower” cut down by frost. And even in her more “redemp-
13. Given her emphasis on a personal and powerful God operating through
nature, one can imagine Emily Dickinson endorsing the 1997 revision of the U.S.
National Association of Biology Teachers’ official “Statement” on evolution. The
original statement had defined evolution as “an unsupervised, impersonal, unpre-
dictable, and natural process.” Belatedly recognizing the limitations of science and
acknowledging human ignorance of whatever inexplicable, possibly divine, pur-
poses may underlie evolutionary change, the association, in 1997, deleted the first
two adjectives, unsupervised and impersonal. Dickinson would have concurred.
God and Evolution: The Contemporary Debate 75
could come into being solely through the decision and under the
dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. . . . He steers every-
thing, not as a world-soul, but as the Lord of all things. A God lack-
ing in dominion, providence, and final causes is nothing other than
mere fact and mere nature. No possibility of change in things may
76
Design, Challenged and Defended 77
that “feasts on itself,” the paradigm example from nature was the Tas-
manian bulldog-ant. Unlike other killer ants, highly toxic bulldogs
engage in fierce individual combat to the death—a ferocity that takes
the even more relentlessly aggressive form remarked by Schopen-
hauer. If one cuts this insect in half, he notes, “a fight begins between
the head and the tail—each attacks the other with bites and stings, and
this struggle goes on bravely for half an hour, until they die, or are car-
ried away by other ants. This happens every time.”3
The example, also from the insect world, that particularly disturbed
the tenderhearted Darwin, and in fact shocked most Victorians when
they were made aware of it, was that of Ichneumonidae wasps. They are
also known as “assassinator wasps,” though their behavior makes
Dickinson’s “blonde Assassin” benign by comparison. There are some
3,300 species, all of whom reproduce in the same macabre way. The
female wasp stings a prey animal with her ovipositor and lays her eggs
inside the paralyzed prey. The eggs then hatch into larvae, which
slowly devour the living prey from the inside, destroying the less
essential parts first and eating the essential parts (and thus killing the
victim-host) only at the very end, at which point the prey’s shell
becomes a cocoon containing the baby wasps about to hatch. Asa Gray,
a devout Protestant, believed that evolution was compatible with
divine Design, a concept developed in his influential study Darwiniana
(1876). That thought occasionally “pleased” Darwin himself. But in
the 1860 letter to his American friend, Darwin rejected divine Design.
Not for the first time, he set aside his scientific awareness that nature
is not to be judged in terms of human morality, while still—despite con-
fessing himself “bewildered” by a subject “too profound for the
human intellect”—apparently holding the traditional God to account:
3. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will and Representation, vol. 1, sec. 27.
80 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with
mice.4
Papa above!
Regard a Mouse
O’erpowered by the Cat!
Reserve within thy kingdom
A “Mansion” for the Rat!
Snug in Seraphic Cupboards
To nibble all the day,
While unsuspecting Cycles
Wheel solemnly away! (61)
4. Darwin, Life and Letters, 2:105. Gray did not give up easily. The following year,
he raised the crucial issue again. Darwin responded: “Your question what would
convince me of Design is a poser. If I saw an angel come down to teach us good,
and I was convinced from others seeing him that I was not mad, I should believe
in design. If I was convinced thoroughly that life and mind was in an unknown
way a function of other imponderable force, I should be convinced. If man was
made of brass or iron and no way connected with any other organism which had
ever lived, I should perhaps be convinced. But this is childish writing.” In a letter
three months later (December 1861), Darwin, no more able than Gray to “keep out
of the question,” began, “With respect to Design, I feel more inclined to show a
white flag than to fire my usual long-range shot”; yet were he to accept Design, “I
should believe it in the same incredible manner as the orthodox believe the Trin-
ity in Unity” (Life and Letters, 2:169–70, 174).
Design, Challenged and Defended 81
cisely that divine beneficence for which Darwin could find no evi-
dence, and Dickinson precious little, her God often less a playfully
addressed “Papa” than a Blakean Nobodaddy. Darwin noted that he
could not “look at the universe as a result of blind chance”; but—in
this 1870 letter cited by Schönborn—neither could he find “evidence
of beneficent design, or indeed any design of any kind, in the detail.”
In this, he differed from Augustine, Aquinas, Newton, and the author
of Natural Theology (1802), William Paley, whose rooms at Cambridge
Darwin later occupied. Writing to his great friend and fellow scientist
Joseph Hooker on July 13, 1856, he coined a phrase that would later
supply a book title for Richard Dawkins. Playfully yet seriously reject-
ing the concept of divine Design, Darwin exclaimed: “What a book a
Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low
and horribly cruel works of nature.” Agreeing with his friend about
the blundering cruelty of nature, Hooker later informed Darwin (who
had used the same example in a letter to Gray) that he found the idea
of a designed “Creation . . . no more tangible than that of the Trinity &
. . . neither more nor less than superstition.”5
As Cardinal Schönborn acknowledges—or, rather, insists—the recog-
nition of any form of Design “will indeed be difficult on a strictly scien-
tific, quantitative, measure-oriented methodology.” Yet we often depict
nature as purposive. As Schönborn notes (“RSRF,” 24), even strict Dar-
winists can at times speak of nature “in this anthropomorphic manner,
even when they afterward correct themselves and say, with someone
like Julian Huxley, ‘At first sight the biological sector seems full of pur-
pose. Organisms are built as if purposely designed. . . . But as the genius
of Darwin showed, the purpose is only an apparent one.’”
Schönborn doesn’t go into detail on this point in “Reasonable Sci-
ence, Reasonable Faith.” But what Darwin and his followers
“showed,” to the satisfaction of mainstream science, was that the
“apparent” design—the “ingeniously” fine-tuned functioning—of
these organisms was actually attributable to competition and natural
selection. The emergence of even the most improbable complexity
(including the eye, that Creationist favorite) is the result neither of
Design nor of pure “chance” but of countless minute developmental
6. For the 1870 letter, see “RSRF,” 24. Spencer, Principles of Biology (1864), 1:444.
Thirty years later, in his brilliant Evolution and Ethics, T. H. Huxley opposed human
“goodness and virtue” to the “gladiatorial” struggle for existence in the natural
world (81). Defending Darwin and rejecting Social Darwinism’s thesis that the
struggle for existence was an “ethical” competition and that the self-assertive vic-
tors in that struggle somehow “merited” their triumph, Huxley accused Spencer
of “fanatical individualism” and “reasoned savagery.”
Design, Challenged and Defended 83
The Miracle of Theism (1982) exposed with particular force and philo-
sophic rigor the weaknesses in the traditional arguments for God’s
existence, including Kant’s Moral Argument. On the other hand, for
most of us, a reductive materialism seems no more satisfactory—even
if purposive design in its more facile form has indeed been exposed by
“the genius of Darwin” and his followers to be “only apparent.”
-
We will be revisiting that final adjective in its adverbial form, Appar-
ently: the opening and governing word of our main Dickinson poem.
But at this point it is necessary to return to “Reasonable Science, Rea-
sonable Faith,” specifically to Cardinal Schönborn’s crucial citation of
Thomas Aquinas (“RSRF,” 24). Arguing on the basis of the Summa The-
ologica, Schönborn claims that nature does not merely “act” as if it had
goals. According to the fifth of Aquinas’s proofs of God’s existence, nat-
ural bodies cannot have their own intentions since they lack cognition.
Yet they act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always,
or nearly so, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it
is plain that they achieve their end, not fortuitously, but designedly.
Now whatever lacks knowledge cannot move toward an end, unless
it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelli-
gence; as the arrow is directed by the archer. Therefore some intelli-
gent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their
end; and this being we call God. (Summa I.2.3)
since he judged that order was in every way the better” (Timaeus
29E–30A).
In the Thomistic extension, completing Aristotle with Plato, the Cre-
ator endows nature with immanent, self-unfolding, end-oriented prin-
ciples, and—unlike the Designer of the Greek philosophers or the
impersonal God of Spinoza and Einstein—personally participates in
that creation. What Schönborn calls the “self-evident experience of
nature”—being “directed toward an end, as ordered, and as beauti-
ful”—leads to the question: “Where do these marks of intelligence
come from?” No answer can be expected from what Schönborn calls
evolutionary theory’s “self-limited” methods of “measurable and
mechanical cause” (“RSRF,” 24), but for believers the answer is as self-
evident as the experience of nature itself. The Designer directing this
ordered, beautiful nature, he who does not merely work through natu-
ral laws and biological process but actively “steers everything” as the
archer in Aquinas’s memorable image steers an arrow, “we call God.”
And what if—as in the cases of incomprehensible brutality and
waste earlier noted—nature seems anything but ordered and beauti-
ful? In his exploration of “Suffering in a World Guided by God,” Car-
dinal Schönborn quoted Reinhold Schneider and Wolfgang Schreiner,
believers besieged by doubt. Two other, more skeptical, modern wit-
nesses may serve for many.
Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg summarized his
widely read The First Three Minutes with the much-noted (and much-
debated) declaration that “the more the universe seems comprehensi-
ble, the more it also seems pointless.”7 But his rejection of a Designer
God and a designed universe rests less on purely scientific than on
moral grounds, on his “distress in coping with the existence of evil in
our world, whether it is the Holocaust or the evolutionary struggle for
survival or the starvation of children in Africa or Afghanistan.” By
“God” Weinberg means a deity with “some sort of personality, some
intelligence, who created the universe and has some special concern
with life, in particular with human life.” Speaking in April 1999 at the
Conference on Cosmic Design of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, he said, “You may tell me that you are think-
ing of something much more abstract, some cosmic spirit of order and
7. The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, 154.
Design, Challenged and Defended 85
harmony, as Einstein did. You are certainly free to think that way, but
then I don’t know why you use words like ‘designer’ or ‘God’, except
perhaps as a form of protective coloration.” Speaking in personal
terms, he described his own life as “remarkably happy,” yet he had
seen his mother die painfully of cancer, his father’s personality
destroyed by Alzheimer’s, and scores of second and third cousins
“murdered in the Holocaust”:
8. First published in the New York Review of Books; available in Science and Reli-
gion: Are They Compatible? ed. Paul Kurtz, 31–40 (37–38). Weinberg’s reference is to
Paradise Lost 3:124–28, where God says of humankind, “I formed them free,” and
concludes, “they themselves ordained their fall.” Weinberg’s “moral” objection to
a Designer God was synopsized in a 2001 conference paper by astronomer Owen
Gingerich, “Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?” For Gingerich, as we
have seen, they are. His position is summarized in his 2007 book, God’s Universe.
86 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
9. Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, 248, 258; God’s
Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer.
10. God’s Problem, 198–99, 200, 273–74.
Design, Challenged and Defended 87
fering caused by a tiny worm, the parasite that causes river blindness
(onchocerciasis): the very example cited by David Attenborough when
challenged by viewers of his BBC Nature programs. “People some-
times say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the humming-bird, the
butterfly, the Bird of Paradise, are proof of the wonderful things pro-
duced by Creation?’” He found himself responding with his own chal-
lenge: “Well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy
sitting on a riverbank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm,
a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is
slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, pre-
sumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that diffi-
cult to accommodate.”11
Cardinal Schönborn, though he humanely recognizes that every
child that suffers is “an unrepeatable being with its own destiny,” and
though he repeatedly urges us to “beware of ‘glib’ answers” (CP, 102),
would respond in part by pointing to humanitarians like Carter and
Kristof. “How much love,” he exclaims in “Suffering in a World
Guided by God,” has “come into the world by this way of pain!” The
argument is less than persuasive. “If the world was without any nat-
ural evil and suffering,” argued theologian Richard Swinburne in
2003, “we wouldn’t have the opportunity . . . to show courage,
patience and sympathy.” That dice-loading “any” cannot blunt the
obvious questions about gratuitous suffering, especially when it is
endured by the innocent: “Does God really need so much pain and
suffering to achieve his ends? Is there any conceivably good purpose
behind so many children dying every day of starvation and disease?
How are they helped by the rest of us becoming more sympathetic?”12
Saint Paul finds in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus the
response to a whole world groaning for deliverance. Yet, for many, the
rhetorical questions just posed are hard, perhaps impossible, to answer,
whether we are empathizing with the undeserved suffering of children
or focusing (for the traditional God is supposed to be present in every-
thing, no matter how small), with Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Atten-
borough, on the horrifying micro-world of bulldog ants, Ichneumonidae
13. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, book 22, chap. 30, p.
1091.
Chapter 5
There was to be no mortal nuptial for Emily Dickinson, and this celes-
tial marriage also remained unconsummated. Though she came closest
91
92 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
to being the bride of Jesus, her groom was less the conqueror of mortal-
ity (she was more absorbed by his sacrifice on the cross than by the sal-
vation it entailed) than the Jesus who suffered and died on Calvary.
For the most part, Emily Dickinson distinguished sharply between
Father and Son. Of course, she is hardly alone in making a distinction
between the harsh God of the Hebrew Law and (playing down the
statements of Jesus regarding eternal damnation1) the gentler God of
the Christian gospels. Dickinson did not go as far as the second-
century philosopher-theologian Marcion, who was pronounced
heretic for positing two entirely different deities: the God of the Jews, who
created the world and imposed stringent law on his Chosen People,
and the God of Jesus, who sent his Son into the world to save people
from the wrathful vengeance of the Jewish Creator God. But at times
her position almost resembles that of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,
unbelievers who rejected Christianity as a religion of transcendence
while still admiring Jesus. For Schopenhauer, Jesus was an emblem,
one finally impossible to emulate, of the endurance of existential suf-
fering. Valuing Jesus, while detesting the religion founded in his name,
Nietzsche once said that, based on the criterion of authentically living
up to the standards of the gospels, “There has been only one Christian,
and he died on the cross.”2
In her more orthodox moods, Dickinson’s Jesus is an omnipotent
pardoner who, inviting his “small” petitioner into “my House,”
assures her (as in Luke 9:48) that “The Least / Is esteemed in Heaven
the Chiefest” (964). Jesus is the “Tender Pioneer” who must be fol-
lowed (698). The “brittle” bridge “on which our Faith doth tread” was
“built” by God, who “sent his Son to test the Plank, / And he pro-
nounced it firm” (1433). But her Jesus is far more often the human Suf-
ferer admired by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche than the divine Son of
Jehovah. “When Jesus tells us about his Father,” she notes in a late let-
ter, “we distrust him. When he shows us his Home we turn away, but
when he confides to us that he is ‘acquainted with Grief’ [Isaiah 53:3],
we listen, for that also is an Acquaintance of our own” (L 837). Her
Jesus is less the divine Redeemer than a fellow sufferer, another victim.
Here Dickinson anticipates some modern if more orthodox incar-
national insights. In The Creative Suffering of God (1992), Paul S. Fiddes
devoted a chapter to “the central place of the cross.” In his 1974 book
The Crucified God, theologian Jürgen Moltmann emphasized “the con-
cept of divine participation in creaturely suffering through the cross of
Christ,” a crucified God-man who, in the words of John Polkinghorne,
is “not just a compassionate spectator of the suffering of creatures but
a fellow-sharer in the travail of creation. The concept of a suffering
God affords theology some help as it wrestles with its most difficult
problem, the evil and suffering present in the world.”3 Though the
thought is initially consoling, it is hard to see how the suffering of a
man who is, for the orthodox, also an omnipotent God is at all com-
parable to the suffering of powerless mortals. Dickinson’s response is
more radical. In an 1877 letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson she
insists, sounding like William Blake and W. B. Yeats, “To be human is
more than to be divine, for when Christ was divine, he was uncon-
tented till he had been human” (L 592). Christ’s suffering and death
registered more powerfully than the Resurrection, and even that res-
urrection was to Dickinson testimony to the humanity of Jesus. A late
(ca. 1882) single-quatrain poem insists that it was “Christ’s own per-
sonal Expanse / That bore him from the Tomb” (1543).
Nevertheless, the full trajectory of the Christian paradigm remained
compelling. As Shira Wolosky notes, that “biblical and providential
vision, encoding events in . . . an overarching divine pattern, continued
to be strongly felt in the habits of orthodox, antebellum Amherst.”
Directly descended from the Puritanism of Jonathan Edwards,
Amherst’s Calvinist community was largely immune to the liberalizing
4. The reporter is cited in Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, 1:296.
For Wolosky’s comments on Amherst orthodoxy, see her “Public and Private in
Dickinson’s War Poetry,” 114.
5. Oberhaus, “‘Tender Pioneer’: Emily Dickinson’s Poems on the Life of Christ,”
113.
Emily Dickinson on Christ and Crucifixion 95
Her deepest involvement was with the suffering and death of Jesus,
specifically the crucifixion, whether attended to devotionally or per-
sonalized and poetically transmuted. As the “Queen” or “Empress of
Calvary” (348, 1072), Dickinson sometimes insists that the one
“recorded” crucifixion is not unique: “There’s newer—nearer Cruci-
fixion / Than That” (553). Oberhaus rejects the Brooks-Lewis-Warren
argument that, in “One Crucifixion is recorded—only,” Dickinson
“bend[s] the Biblical vocabulary to an account of her own psychic con-
dition,” a commonsensical reading amplified by Robert Weisbuch,
who argued two years later that Dickinson here finds Christ’s cruci-
fixion “unique only in that it was made historically public,” while
“‘newer-nearer Crucifixion’ [is] most worthy of attention.”7 It is true,
as Oberhaus says, that Dickinson keeps Christ’s Crucifixion “before
the reader’s attention throughout the poem,” and some interpreta-
tions do overstate a secular priority, even exclusivity. Yet in one poem,
somewhat confusing in regard to the antecedents of the final pro-
nouns, Dickinson can go so far as to proudly acknowledge, “See! I
usurped thy crucifix to honor mine!” (1736).
At the same time, it comforted her to know that, through the suffer-
ing of Jesus, God was aware of the human condition; that her own pain
and “renunciation” had the “Flavors of that old Crucifixion” (527).
One substantial, ten-stanza poem, written at the height of her powers,
resembles Blake’s “London,” in which the Bard of Experience, walk-
ing the streets of the fallen city, “mark[s] in every face I meet / Marks
She wonders if the passage of years might “give them Balm,” alle-
viating whatever harm “hurt them early,” or if they “go on aching
still,” perhaps even “Enlightened to a larger Pain— / In Contrast with
the Love.” There are many forms of grief, she has been “told,” with
many causes; “Death—is but one—and comes but once— / And only
nails the eyes.” There is also “Grief of Want—and Grief of Cold— / A
sort they call ‘Despair.’” While she may not be able to precisely “guess
the kind” of grief experienced by others,
yet to me
A piercing Comfort it affords
In passing Calvary—
Hearts” of the apostles, but Jesus’s body “slipped its limit— / And on
the Heavens—unrolled”: a Resurrection-image fusing the stone rolled
back from the tomb with Dickinson’s own lovely though alien image
of the bird who “unrolled his feathers / And rowed him softer home”
than oars dividing an ocean or “Butterflies, off Banks of Noon / Leap,
plashless as they swim” (328). The Resurrection poem ends:
9. Paradise Lost 1.75, 243–55. Borrowing Satan’s phrase, Emerson chose as the
chapter title of a projected book “the mind as its own place”; The Journals and Mis-
cellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 3:316. Margaret Fuller acknowledged
that it was from Emerson “that I first learned what is meant by the inward life . . .
that the mind is its own place was a dead phrase until he cast light upon my mind.”
See Moncure Daniel Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad, 89.
Emily Dickinson on Christ and Crucifixion 101
Their belief in God had become too attenuated, too secularized and
domesticated and comforting, for them to recognize the savage
implications of this element in the myth that formed their faith. The
rich irony of Emily Dickinson’s position was that although she could
not relinquish reason and accept the reassurance of some “birth”
after death, neither could she shake her tenacious belief in the exis-
tence of the God who had become man only to die on the cross. The
strength of this belief impelled her to confront the dark implications
of that execution in the ancient past.11
10. One wonders if looking down upon the agonies of the damned is, as in Ter-
tullian’s On Spectacles and in the Summa, still conceived of as enhancing the bliss
of the saved: an unedifying spectacle chosen by Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of
Morals, to illustrate his crucial concept of ressentiment. Not long before, John Stu-
art Mill, attacking the divine Judge directly, had declared, “I will call no being
good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and
if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, then to hell I will go”
(Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, in The Collected Works of John Stu-
art Mill, 10:103).
11. Wolff, Emily Dickinson, 263. We can only wonder what additional “dark
implications” might have been fleshed out in the extended Dickinson essay that
astute critic Randall Jarrell was contemplating shortly before his death in 1965
(almost certainly by suicide); its tentative title was “The Empress of Calvary.”
102 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
exception of hell) wrought good even out of the worst evil and suffer-
ing. There is no question, even for believers, that this God allows us,
those we love, and—most problematically—the innocent and children
to suffer. The real question is: does one trust that such a God actually
does bring good out of evil and, therefore, that he acts out of love rather
than indifference or cruelty? Both believer and nonbeliever may vac-
illate, but ultimately the former trusts in this God and his provident
care; the latter doesn’t, and so rejects—or denies the existence of—a
“God” who fails to meet at least one of the three criteria mandated by
the traditional definition.
Those in the middle, torn between belief and doubt, wrestle, as
Dickinson did, with the Great Question: given the “apparently” ran-
dom evil and undeserved suffering all too evident in a world often
groaning in vain for deliverance, how could God be simultaneously
omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent? At the outset of his
chapter on providence in Chance or Purpose, Cardinal Schönborn won-
ders “what kind of God” would ignore the tears of the suffering. “Can
God not help? Then he is powerless. Does he not want to help? Then
he is cruel and merciless” (CP, 71). He is silently echoing a famous pas-
sage, itself derivative. As Hume has the more skeptical of his two
spokesmen (“Philo”) note in part 10 of his posthumously published
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), “Epicurus’ old questions
are yet unanswered”: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is
malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then cometh evil?” Of
course, if he is neither able nor willing, why call him God?12
For Christians, even for those simply raised in a Christian tradition,
Jesus is central to any attempt to answer these questions. And for
orthodox Christians, it is not simply a matter of what Jesus said or
taught as a great prophet (the merely humanist perspective), but what
he did as the Son of God: namely, atone for our sins through his sacri-
12. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 75. Compare the three questions posed
by Nietzsche in Daybreak 91, cited as one of my epigraphs (above, p. v). One
(unpersuasive) way around the Riddle is the argument for evil as mere privation,
and so nonexistent. An Epicurus-like exchange is presented by the fifth-century
Christianized pagan Boethius: “‘There is nothing that an omnipotent God could
not do.’ ‘No.’ ‘Then, can God do evil?’ ‘No.’ ‘So that evil is nothing, since that is
what He cannot do who can do anything’” (The Consolation of Philosophy, 290).
Emily Dickinson on Christ and Crucifixion 103
fice on the cross and, by rising, conquer death. To those who believe in
the centrality of Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection, the Problem of
Evil or Suffering seems to be resolved. An otherwise inscrutable moral
mystery—the purpose of an omnipotent and loving God’s apparent
refusal to eliminate evil and suffering—is resolved in the redemptive
suffering and death of Jesus on the cross. In the miracle of his resur-
rection from the dead, believers see a harbinger of their own survival
beyond this vale of tears.
For others, those for example who admire the Jesus who suffered
and died on the cross without accepting him as the Son of God, and
who see this world as an existential crucible (in Keats’s great
metaphor, a “vale of Soul-making”), the problem is not so much
resolved as movingly epitomized. Keats’s metaphor has been power-
fully evoked by John Hick. Having rejected most of the traditional
attempts to reconcile evil with the concept of a God of love, and
emphasizing the problem of suffering as a particular challenge for
Christians, Hick concludes, “The only appeal left is to mystery.” This
is “not, however, merely an appeal to the negative fact that we cannot
discern any rationale of human suffering. It may be that the very mys-
teriousness of this life is an important aspect of its character as a sphere
of soul-making.”13
-
As prolegomenon to my focus on Emily Dickinson’s poems about
God, especially “Apparently with no surprise,” I have recapitulated
Augustinian-Thomistic-Newtonian arguments as updated by an emi-
nent spokesman for that tradition, one who acknowledges the vul-
nerability at least of the more facile arguments, old and new, for
“Design.” But the Epicurean Riddle, epitomizing the “very mysteri-
ousness of this life,” still resonates, especially with those who, like
Dickinson, “keep Believing nimble.” More generally, this would
include all those who—despite the efforts of someone of the caliber of
Cardinal Schönborn—remain moved by the example of Jesus but
resistant to the Christian “solution” to the primary mystery, the Prob-
lem of Suffering.
13. Letters of John Keats, 2:102; Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 333–34.
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Part II
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Chapter 6
107
108 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
I’ve already noted the gist of the responses I received. The first of
them was also the shortest: “Frost happens.” This seemed wittily suc-
cinct, capturing something of the poem’s this-is-the-way-it-is tough-
ness. This most concise of the responses sent me quickly became the
lengthiest. The following day, an elaboration followed, in the form of
a rapidly recorded flurry of thoughts and surmises. My respondent
had asked his wife for her thoughts,
not expecting surprise, but finding it. Beyond the “frost happens”
remark, I’d say that nature runs its course, raising questions: is God
good? etc. There also seems to be a sexual dimension, with a happy
male flower facing uncertainty, possible danger. But frost does hap-
pen. That frost is totally ignored, unseen; casual, at play, yet cold,
stinging, causing hurt, but leaving the flower, maybe, to rise again,
next spring. Sylvia, however, sees the Frost as young and mascu-
line—careless, thoughtless, wreaking havoc on nature.
Go figure.
Several of these remarks, to which I’ll return, raise the very issues
rehearsed in my preamble. I’ll also return to the “sexual dimension”
in the poem, but it was interesting to note that my friend, presumably
taking the “blonde Assassin” as a castrating femme fatale, empha-
sized a threat to the male, even if it meant identifying with a flower,
more typically thought of as “female.” On the other hand and more
persuasively, his wife saw the Frost as a masculine, destructive force,
wreaking havoc on an implicitly female “nature.” Though the text is
far more supportive of her reading, gender had apparently helped
shape interpretation.
Before unpacking points raised about the course of nature, the dual-
ity of frost, and the crucial question “is God good, etc.,” I should note
that, despite my long contextual preamble, I might have responded to
my own assignment by initially focusing on the textual and biograph-
ical fact that Emily Dickinson jotted the poem, two years before her
death, on the back of an envelope addressed to her aunt Elizabeth Cur-
rier; or on purely intrinsic features: content and genre, as well as the
poem’s structure, meter, rhyme, and so forth. After all, we have before
us an eight-line poem written in the common meter ballad stanza of
Destroyers and Victims 109
book of Genesis: “And God saw that it was good.” Is this the “Approv-
ing God” of this poem? It could well be; indeed, the Latin root of
“approve” is approbare: “to make good, admit as good.” The tradition
we have been discussing makes the same claim: whatever the chal-
lenges presented by post-Darwinian physicists and biologists, what-
ever the brutalities of nature and the problems that arise from human
suffering, the universe created by this God must be, ultimately, “good.”
Certainly, the God presiding over the world of Dickinson’s poem
regards its operations favorably. Viewing things from the aspect of eter-
nity (sub specie aeternitatis), unlike mortals of limited understanding,
this God presumably comprehends (in all senses of the word) the whole
of his creation: a designed and providential cosmos in which—as
Augustine, Aquinas, and Cardinal Schönborn insist—good is brought
forth even out of evil, real or “apparent.”
But if Dickinson’s Deity in this poem regards all favorably, how do
we regard him? This was the question raised in most of the responses I
received. Does God’s approval of what seems in this poem to be a ran-
domly cruel process—the “accidental” beheading of a “happy
Flower”—make him seem less benign than indifferent (like the
“unmoved” sun)? Or, worse yet, “cruel” himself: “an Approving God”
as smiling sadist. In a bitter poem in which the speaker at first prays,
somewhat tongue in cheek, for the fulfillment of “but modest needs—
/ Such as Content—and Heaven,” she is greeted by just such a derisive
expression: “A Smile suffused Jehovah’s face— / The Cherubim—
withdrew.” And so
1. The remark, by his biographer Jay Parini, that Robert Frost’s poems “live on
that perilous fault line between skepticism and belief” applies as well to Emily
Dickinson. Having focused on Frost’s spider, I should add that, in her own poetic
handling of that emblematic arachnid, Dickinson emphasizes not its destructive
but its constructive, aesthetic role, its intricate artistry: a “female” weaving, though
her spiders are invariably male. Such poems—605, 1138, 1423, and especially 1275
(“Neglected Son of Genius / I take thee by the Hand”)—offer a welcome respite
to those we are examining.
Destroyers and Victims 113
2. Judith Farr, The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, 116. Farr’s plural “gardens” (in this
beautifully produced book) include the “actual spaces” where Dickinson culti-
vated her plants and flowers; the “imaginative realm of her poems and letters”;
and “the ideal Garden of Paradise” (1).
114 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
also written in two abcb quatrains, but an even more powerful and con-
centrated lyric than Dickinson’s:
3. Keats to John Hamilton Reynolds, February 18, 1818 (Letters of John Keats,
1:232–33).
116 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
crimson roses, waste their riches when the beloved, the “Bright Absen-
tee,” is not there:
directed the invisible worm that “flies in the night” to “his” victim in
“her bed of crimson joy,” it certainly does not seem to be the Thomistic
or Newtonian God, who “steers everything”: that Cosmic Intelligence
who directs, as an archer does his arrow, all natural things toward a
benignly intended, ultimately “good” goal.
-
In the next two chapters, we will explore the tension between
Design and Accident as it seems to play out in “Apparently with no
surprise,” focusing on Frost as the blonde Assassin performing,
“apparently,” at the behest of a God who approves of its exercise of
“accidental” but nevertheless lethal power.
Chapter 7
1. Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt: A History, xii. Though “Emily Dickinson” con-
cludes the list of “Great Doubters” in Hecht’s second subtitle, she receives in the
body of the book only two (perceptive) paragraphs (425–26). The Housman poem,
perhaps his most haunting, is “Tell me not here, it needs not saying” (Last Poems,
XL, in The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman). Czeslaw Milosz—responding to
118
Design and Accident 119
Blake, Goethe, and Erich Heller’s The Disinherited Mind—is also sensitive to the
“Romantic crisis of European culture” unleashed by “the dichotomy between the
world of scientific laws—cold, indifferent to human values—and man’s inner
world” (The Land of Ulro, 94).
2. Taylor, A Secular Age, 19–21, 26, 251–52, 367; Lundin, Emily Dickinson and the
Art of Belief, 154.
120 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
5. Behe introduced the term irreducible complexity in 1996 in Darwin’s Black Box:
The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. A conservative-evangelical Christian organ-
ization, the Discovery Institute, promotes and often funds the work of both Behe
and his colleague William Dembski. For devastating refutations of Intelligent
Design, see the essays in Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design
Movement, ed. John Brockman; Science and Religion, ed. Kurtz; and “The Great
Mutator,” a New Republic review by Jerry A. Coyne of Behe’s last-ditch defense of
ID, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism (2007).
122 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
Where he is floorless
And does no timidity betray
But nature is a stranger yet;
The ones that cite her most
Have never passed her haunted house,
Nor simplified her ghost.
To pity those that know her not
Is helped by the regret
That those who know her, know her less
The nearer her they get. (1400)
which the Flower and Frost know nothing, but whose own perspective
is limited. Thus, the Flower is apparently both “happy” and unsur-
prised, the decapitating Frost apparently deploying “accidental
power,” the Sun apparently unmoved, God apparently approving. As
Charles R. Anderson notes, “‘Apparently’ not only modifies the open-
ing words but controls the whole poem. This is not necessarily the way
things are, merely the way they appear to the mortal view.”8
Here Anderson makes explicit what is implicit in Dickinson’s open-
ing word: her intuitive acceptance (“apparently”) of Kant’s epistemo-
logical version of the Copernican Revolution, his insistence that things
correspond to thoughts, rather than the reverse. But the shaping,
orchestrating power of the human mind comes at a price. Limited by
our own modes of perception, we live, Kant informed all subsequent
philosophy, in a phenomenal world of “appearances,” cut off from
knowledge of the ding an sich, things as they “really are,” the noumena.
What Anderson refers to as the control of the “whole poem” by its
opening word extends, I would add, to sound, for “Apparently” initi-
ates the plosives that recur in all but the penultimate line (surprise,
happy, play, power, passes, proceeds) and that culminate in the crucial
description in the final line of God as “Approving.” This alliterative
design would appear to be not “accidental.”
-
Approval is one response to what is observed; but there are others,
which vary depending on one’s vantage point. All such responses may
indeed be subsumed under that opening adverb, reducing the events
and reactions described to merely the way they appear to the mortal
view. Like the victim, the other players in the drama go about their
business, while God looks on approvingly—from on high, but with no
more “surprise” than that attributed to the lowly Flower. If, in con-
trast, the author and her readers are moved, it is precisely because
everything else is emotionally unmoved, playing their assigned roles
as in a “play.” For some teleological readers, ranging from unsenti-
mental naturalists to the hopefully religious, the “play” of Frost and
Flower may seem a single scene excerpted from a larger trajectory—
part of a seasonal drama that may be interpreted as but one aspect of
an annual, and perhaps divine, comedy. To quote the sentence with
9. Ibid., 179.
10. Applied to the Frost, play evokes a mythical dimension, archaic-vegetative
and “Yeatsian.” Violent death as play, both as part of a theatrical-mythical-cycle
and as nonchalant behavior, is a motif in two Yeats poems and plays, all adopting,
as the Dickinson speaker does in part, an impersonal perspective. In the first, one
of “Two Songs” accompanying the unfolding and folding of the curtain for his
Dionysian-Christian play The Resurrection, Yeats places the sacrifice of the specific
victim in the cyclical context of seasonal and divine displacement and rebirth. In
response to the crucifixion of Jesus and the dismemberment of his Frazerian
brother Dionysus, “all the Muses sing / Of Magnus Annus at the spring, / As
though God’s death were but a play.” In the second poem, from Yeats’s 1923
sequence Meditations in Time of Civil War, an IRA officer comes to the door of the
poet’s tower cracking jokes about the ongoing Irish Civil War, “As though to die by
gunshot were / The finest play under the sun.” Wielding figurative sword rather
than gun, Dickinson’s “blonde Assassin” similarly engages in lethal “play,” as
though beheading were the most amusing thing under the sun—as it almost is in
Yeats’s alternately grisly and comic Salome-variation, A Full Moon in March.
Design and Accident 127
11. Dickinson is presumed to have had no knowledge of Blake, though her gno-
mic poetry has often been compared with his Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
Here, as in earlier citations of Blake, I am primarily interested in analogy and
mutual illumination; but it is perhaps worth mentioning that Blake’s Songs were
available in New England in the Wilkinson edition the remarkable Elizabeth
Palmer Peabody began to sell in 1837.
128 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
of the Wind are few.” In the Ode, Shelley presents the West Wind as
dialectical: in autumnal form, a male “Destroyer and Preserver”; as
the vernal West Wind, “thine azure sister of the Spring,” a female Cre-
ator who “shall blow / Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth.” It is she
who will resurrect the “buried” (sleeping, not dead) seeds and so
green the earth with renewed life. In the final stanza, Shelley invokes
the wind to “Drive my dead thoughts over the universe / Like with-
ered leaves to quicken a new birth!” and concludes with a question
that is rhetorical on the level of Nature, desperate in terms of human
depression and the longed-for revival of personal and political hope:
“O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” He hopes for
the wind said by Emily Dickinson, in “The duties of the Wind are few,”
to “Establish March . . . / And usher Liberty” (1137).
Though the Dickinson family library included the 1853 Philadelphia
edition of Shelley’s Poetical Works, we hardly need “Ode to the West
Wind” (or, for that matter, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience)
to confirm what is implicit in “Apparently with no surprise”: that life
and death are not only natural but human issues. In Dickinson’s poem
this bond is dramatically emphasized by the violent nature of the cen-
tral act. So while it is true that the gap between Nature and Man
accounts in part for the apparent tonal and perspectival detachment in
Dickinson’s poem, an empathetic bond is also reaffirmed. However
nonchalant and detached the poem seems, its dramatic crux is the bru-
tal beheading of a happy Flower by a sudden, stealthy killer, an
“Assassin, hid” (670). Lulled by the dependent clause and the depic-
tion of the Flower as “happy,” we, unlike the flower, are “surprised,”
as we are meant to be, by that violent act. The impact of the pivotal
moment is reinforced by a technique characteristic of Dickinson: the
use of emphatic alliteration and familiar words in an utterly unex-
pected context (beheads . . . / blonde Assassin) in order to shock us into
surprised attention. Similarly, the use of personification and pathetic
fallacy humanizes the scene, so that we cannot help but respond to
what happens from a mortal and engaged rather than a distanced and
omniscient—God’s-eye—perspective.
From that mortal vantage point, not merely registering what is
“apparently” happening, we feel a shared sense of mutability. Flowers
seem to be, for Dickinson as for Wordsworth, the one natural form
from which we can never be estranged. The freezing of a flower, a form
of murder in Emily Dickinson’s world, is made to seem to us not only
Design and Accident 129
automatic and “natural” but also touching and even tragic. The
poem’s central action, a decapitation by Frost, evokes not only the
death and decapitation of Orpheus, which his mother, the “Muse her-
self,” is helpless to prevent (Calliope could do nothing for her enchant-
ing son “Whom universal nature did lament, / When by the rout that
made the hideous roar / His gory visage down the stream was sent”
[“Lycidas,” 57–62]), but also the sudden death of short-lived “Man.”
Born of woman and “of few days . . . He cometh forth like a flower, and
is cut down” (Job 14:1–2). And the biblical author doubtless has frost in
mind; as Cynthia Griffin Wolff has noted,
The Book of Job had taught Dickinson that God resides in the North
and rejoices in ruination . . . God’s frigidity can even become per-
versely intermingled with the generative force that moves creation.
“Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of heaven,
who hath gendered it? . . .” (Job 38:29). Divinity seems to applaud
nothing so much as a devastation by cold, for “By the breath of God
frost is given” (Job 37:10); and this lesson was reenacted with invari-
able regularity in Emily Dickinson’s own garden.12
Wolff then quotes in full (and this is her single reference to the poem)
“Apparently with no surprise.” There, emphasizing this floral-human
analogy, as well as the role of an “approving” if not quite “applaud-
ing” God, Dickinson endows the “happy” victim with human feelings
and gives more detached but still human attributes to Frost and Sun,
actors in an eternal recurrence that explains why the Flower’s destruc-
tion comes as “no surprise.” To quote again the Hebrew text closest to
Job, “There is no new thing under the sun,” including “the evil work
that is done under” it (Eccles. 1:9, 4:3). Dickinson also presents an
anthropomorphic God, depicted as “Approving” this recurrent
process. In glossing the engendered frost in Job, Wolff remarks that
“God’s frigidity can even become perversely intermingled with the
generative force that moves creation,” and we know that frost can revi-
talize as well as kill. But despite the possibility of an ultimately benign
interpretation, divine “approval” of the whole trajectory of the natu-
ral cycle, there is certainly no overt emphasis here, as there is in Shel-
ley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” on future rebirth.
12. Emily Dickinson, 314. See also Paula Bennett, My Life a Loaded Gun, 91–94.
130 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
Indeed, in making the argument that in this poem there is “not even
any indication of an ordered plan,” Charles Anderson adds: “For frost
can come prematurely, as here, killing flowers before the seed stage has
been reached and a cyclical purpose served.”13 This seems to me the
only plausible reading, making “Apparently with no surprise” a less
hopeful poem than many readers, and perhaps most who consider
themselves religious, would seem to prefer: that is to say, a poem
resistant to any facile conception of either a painless natural teleology
or a providential Design. The Flower may be resigned or indifferent to
its fate, or simply unconscious of it; the human speaker in the poem,
and we its human readers, respond to that decapitation with the recog-
nition that, whatever the differences between the natural and the
human orders, we all perish, we all come forth and are cut down, often
prematurely. In the case of Emily Dickinson, that poignant connection
between the flowers she cherished and the people she loved was
instinctive.
In lesser hands, this botanical/human analogy could deteriorate
into maudlin and didactic allegory. As Anderson notes, Dickinson is
not exploiting “untimely death in nature solely for its human analogy,
the sentimental shock when a person is cut off in the full flower of his
days.”14 Emily Dickinson is not Robert Burns, who, in his elegy for
“Highland Mary,” lamented “fell death’s untimely frost, / That nipt
my flower sae early.” Yet, in Dickinson as in Milton and in Words-
worth, the analogy is there—not didactic or sentimental, but
poignant. In a letter to Elizabeth Holland, whose son (her “little
Byron”) had suffered a crippled foot, she wrote: “To assault so minute
a creature seems to me malign, unworthy of Nature—but the frost is
no respecter of persons” (L 369). Though he cites this letter, Anderson
undercuts its incipient sentimental shock value, noting that “even
there she modified her emotional reaction by ‘seems’ and by the frost
image, which translate nature’s apparent cruelty into indifference: it
is hostile to man and flower only in not being designed wholly to
accommodate their flourishing.”15
This is a salutary antidote to Romantic indulgence, applicable, as
we are meant to infer, to any full reading of “Apparently with no sur-
that nature can be truly “cruel” and “indifferent” [only] in the utterly
inappropriate terms of our ethical discourse—because nature does
not exist for us, didn’t know we were coming (we are, after all, inter-
lopers of the latest geological moment), and doesn’t give a damn
about us (speaking metaphorically). I regard such a position as lib-
erating, not depressing, because we then gain the capacity to con-
duct moral discourse—and nothing could be more important—in
our own terms, free from the delusion that we might read moral
truth passively from nature’s factuality.16
16. Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, in The Richness of
Life, 602.
Chapter 8
132
Frost, the Blonde Assassin 133
flower and the sun as an irresistible male oppressor. They have “often
touched upon,” but “been strangely silent upon this subject,” she tells
Susie, repressing it “as children shut their eyes when the sun is too
bright for them.”
You have seen flowers at morning, satisfied with the dew, and those
same sweet flowers at noon with their heads bowed in anguish
before the mighty sun; think you these thirsty blossoms will now
need naught but—dew? No, they will cry for sunlight, and pine for
the burning noon, tho’ it scorches them, scathes them; they have got
through with peace—they know that the man of noon, is mightier
than the morning and their life is henceforth to him. Oh Susie it is
dangerous. (L 210)1
1. See Wendy Barker, “Emily Dickinson and Poetic Strategy,” in Martin, ed., The
Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson, 81–82. Dickinson associates the sun,
Barker observes, with prose, patriarchal religious sermons, and restraint: the anti-
floral, one might say.
134 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
But the promise of vernal rebirth implicit in the hopeful adverb briefly
is not always fulfilled, as suggested by the opening line’s strenuous
and perhaps impotent striving. When spring’s South wind is more tur-
bulent than usual (echoing “strives,” it “stirs” the ponds and “strug-
gles” in the lanes), Summer’s “Heart misgives her for her Vow,” and
she “pours” soft elegiac “Refrains”
A Symptom of alarm
In Villages remotely set
But search effaces him
Till some retrieveless Night
Our Vigilance at ease
The Garden gets the only shot
That never could be traced.
This alien Frost, a kind of sniper haunting the outskirts armed with
lethal force, is “never seen” until it is too late, and then becomes
emblematic of all the mysterious forces of earth and air:
the snake is death, frost, and (presumably) the devil in one. As such,
it epitomizes the destructive potential which Dickinson seems to
have believed was latent in all forms of masculine power, including
God’s. It is God, after all, who ordains frost, death, and snake. They
are the instruments of His will, the means through which His ordi-
nation comes to pass.3
3. Bennett, Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet, 73–74. The young woman was Susan
D. Phelps. See Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily
Dickinson, 509–10.
138 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
-
And that is what happens in “Apparently with no surprise.” Leaving
the execution scene, the Frost “passes on,” evaporated by the Sun—
which, in turn, passes on. Oxymoronically enough, the Sun “proceeds
Frost, the Blonde Assassin 139
the famous “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” the “Hour of
Lead” is remembered, if “outlived,” as a form of death: “As Freezing
persons recollect the Snow— / First—Chill—then Stupor—then the let-
ting go—” (341). But in her poems and letters, it is not snow but, specifi-
cally, frost that is obsessively equated with death—often as graphically
if seldom as dramatically as in the decapitation by the blonde Assassin.
In “I cannot live with you” (640), Dickinson asks how she could
stand by and watch her beloved “freeze” without her own “Right of
Frost— / Death’s privilege.” In an earlier poem, she refers to those
long dead as “The bosoms where the frost has lain / Ages beneath the
mould—” (132). In an 1865 letter, she describes the grave in which
Susan’s sister had just buried her second child as an “ice nest” (L 444).
In an attempt to re-collect the dead, she tries to recall recently deceased
friends once pleased by something one said: “You try to touch the
smile, / And dip your fingers in the frost—” (509). A poem respond-
ing to the death of a fallen soldier begins: “Victory comes late— / And
is held low to freezing lips— / Too rapt with frost / To take it—” (690).
Searching for metaphors to express “Despair,” she initially remarks,
“It was not Frost,” only to concede that, while it is “most, like Chaos,”
despair also resembles “Grisly frosts” that on autumn mornings
“Repeal the Beating Ground” (510). This repeal of the pulsating life of
summer allies human death and despair with floral death-by-frost.
We might end this chilly obituary with the “Darwinian” poem
referred to in my Introduction. “There is a flower that Bees prefer”
(380) praises the purple clover, a flower both early blooming (“She
doth not wait for June”) and heroically “sturdy,” yet doomed:
144
Dickinson’s Death-Haunted Earthly Paradise 145
2. Keats was writing to a pious friend, Benjamin Bailey. Letters of John Keats,
1:184–86.
146 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
and sounding water, and the whole world awake and wild with joy. . . .
I wanted all to sparkle and dance, in a golden jubilee.”3
Such passages explain Dickinson’s reverence of “gigantic Emily
Brontë” (L 721), one of whose poems, a favorite of Emily Dickinson’s,
was appropriately read at her funeral service. Wonderful as it is,
Brontë’s description of a naturalized “heaven” or “paradise”—a world
in motion, natura naturans, in which the speaker actively and joyfully
engages in her surroundings—is both Keatsian and Wordsworthian.
The final gathering (waves, breeze, woods, water, the whole world
awake and joyous), especially Cathy’s wanting “all to sparkle and
dance, in a golden jubilee,” unmistakably recalls Wordsworth’s (and
Dorothy’s) “host of golden daffodils, / Beside the lake, beneath the
trees, / Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” Those flowers, which
outdo “the sparkling waves in glee,” comprise “a jocund company” in
whose presence a “poet could not but be gay,” a joy recalled whenever
“They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude; / And
then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils.”4
-
Had God, like that flower girl Ophelia, “seen the things that I have
seen” this summer, Dickinson surmises, he would “think His Paradise
superfluous.” Emerson claimed that the only thing “certain” about a
possible heaven was that it must “tally with what was best in
nature, . . . must not be inferior in tone, . . . agreeing with flowers, with
tides, and the rising and setting of autumnal stars.” “Melodious poets”
will be inspired “when once the penetrating key-note of nature and
spirit is sounded,—the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat, which makes
the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood, and the sap
of trees.” Like Keats’s “a finer tone,” Emerson’s “not . . . inferior in
5. See The Excursion 2:710; “Tintern Abbey,” lines 104–5; the “Prospectus” to The
Recluse, lines 43–55; and The Prelude 11:140–44. Emerson is quoted from his Swe-
denborg essay in Representative Men (Emerson: Essays and Lectures, 686–87).
6. Peter Bell, lines 49–56. The poem has often been ridiculed—even by
Wordsworth’s admirers, including Emerson, who despised it, and Shelley, who
parodied it. In an interview (reprinted in the Chicago Tribune, January 10, 1874), in
which Emerson repeated his favorite bon mot about Wordsworth (that in his
inspired writing of the Intimations Ode “a way was made through the void by this
finer Columbus”), he added, “Wordsworth is the great English poet, in spite of
Peter Bell.” More famously, Shelley mocked the nature lover’s sexual timidity in
the poem: “He touched the hem of Nature’s shift, / Felt faint—and never dared
148 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
uplift / The closest, all-concealing tunic” (“Peter Bell the Third,” lines 314–17, in
Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 335).
7. L 195; italics in original. The editors do not catch the Miltonic echo (Paradise
Lost 5.573–76). Whatever his archangel thought, Milton himself seemed open to
the idea of heaven as a projection of earthly happiness. In his fusion of the Classi-
cal and the Christian in “Lycidas,” he leaves us free to imagine the risen man as
either “saint” in heaven or the “genius of the shore,” drowned but now, through
the power “of him that walked the waves,” mounted to a place “Where other groves
and other streams along, / With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves” (172–75; ital-
ics added).
Dickinson’s Death-Haunted Earthly Paradise 149
In two letters of 1873, Dickinson subverts Paul’s text (“For this cor-
ruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on
immortality”) about the dead being raised and changed as a conse-
quence of Christ’s Resurrection (1 Cor. 15:52–53). In the first letter
(April 1873), she pronounces the novelist George Eliot (revealed by
the Springfield Republican in 1859 to be a woman, Marian Evans) a
“mortal” who “has already put on immortality,” adding that “the mys-
teries of human nature surpass the ‘mysteries of redemption,’ for the
infinite we only suppose, while we see the finite” (L 506). Later that
year, in a letter to Elizabeth Holland, she notes that her sister Lavinia,
just back from a visit to the Hollands, had said her hosts “dwell in par-
adise.” Emily declares: “I have never believed the latter to be a super-
natural site”; instead, “Eden, always eligible,” is present in the
intimacy of “Meadows” and the noonday “Sun.” If, as Blake said,
“Everything that lives is holy,” it is a this-worldly truth of which
believers like her sister and father are cheated: “While the Clergyman
150 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
tells Father and Vinnie that ‘this Corruptible shall put on Incorrup-
tion’—it has already done so and they go defrauded” (L 508).
Paul, the perpetrator of the “fraud,” insists, most dramatically in
1 Corinthians 15, that the resurrection of Jesus heralds the imminent
coming of the imperishable Kingdom of God in which pain and suf-
fering will be no more and death will be swallowed up in victory
(1 Cor. 15:54–55). For Emily Dickinson, paradise remains an earthly
rather than a “supernatural site.” In a notably legalistic affirmation of
earth, included in an 1877 letter to a lawyer, her increasingly skeptical
brother Austin, she goes even further:
Wallace Stevens, who imagines his female persona asking if she shall
not “find in comforts of the sun,” in any “balm or beauty of the earth /
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?” insists elsewhere
that “poetry / Exceeding music must take the place / Of empty heaven
and its hymns”; that we must live in “a physical world,” the very air
“swarming” with the “metaphysical changes that occur, / Merely in liv-
ing as and where we live.”8 Stevens seems to be recalling Wordsworth,
Emerson, and Nietzsche; he might as well have been thinking of Emily
Dickinson and her audacious, even blasphemous preference for the tan-
gible things of this earth, to be cherished above thoughts of an other-
worldly heaven, an abstract place offensive to our nature. Dickinson
never accepted the Death of God, which is the Nietzschean premise for
Zarathustra’s imperative that, instead, we must love, and remain faith-
ful to, the earth. Still, when she was only fifteen, Emily confided in her
friend Abiah Root that the main reason she was “continually putting off
8. Stevens, “Sunday Morning” (19–22); “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” section
5; “Esthetique du Mal,” section 15. Compare Wordsworth’s “Prospectus” to The
Recluse (42–55) and much of Emerson’s Nature.
Dickinson’s Death-Haunted Earthly Paradise 151
9. Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, 363. With only slightly more jus-
tification than critics who have attacked Wordsworth for omitting from “Tintern
Abbey” any details about upstream pollution in the River Wye, Domhnall
Mitchell is disturbed that Dickinson’s letter reveals her insensitivity to “poor stan-
dards of health and housing,” which she could hardly have known at the time
contributed to the ravages of fever. The title of Mitchell’s paper—“A Little Taste,
Time, and Means”—indicates his emphasis on Dickinson’s leisured elitism.
152 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
her roses than for” such human but distant “victims of cruelty and injus-
tice” as those who perished in the Armenian genocide. But the best
response, it seems to me, is that by Judith Farr. After acknowledging the
“insensitivity it projects,” she reminds us that “Austin’s [serious] illness
and the coming of winter are also equated” in the letter. She then makes
her central point, one I have been making all along in regard to “Appar-
ently with no surprise,” and make again in the Appendix, discussing
Derek Mahon’s humanizing of a colony of neglected mushrooms in an
extraordinarily empathetic poem expressing precisely what Farr calls
the “communion and equality of all living forms”:
To begin with, it is simply the case that Emily Dickinson loved flow-
ers quite as much and as if they were human; her implicit compari-
son was . . . not intended to diminish the “little girl,” as she is rather
tenderly called. . . . With the cadences of Ecclesiastes and the Eliza-
bethans always vivid in her ear, it was only natural that Dickinson
should express the communion and equality of all living forms in
death. Indeed, her letter’s zinnia and child commingling in Death’s
grasp calls up such lines as Cymbeline’s “Golden Lads, and Girles all
must, / As Chimney-sweepers come to dust.” . . . Not snobbery, but
the power of the aesthetic impulse to which she was subject is chiefly
manifested in Dickinson’s much-discussed letter.10
I would add only that Dickinson’s equation, not limited to the influ-
ence of Ecclesiastes and Shakespeare, also had Romantic auspices.
Between Death’s “grasp” on a proud flower in her royally purple gar-
den and the death of the little child of a servant there is no more gap
than we find in “Threnody,” Emerson’s elegy for his little boy, Waldo.
Also a victim of scarlet fever, dead at the age of five, that “hyacinthine
boy” and “budding man” was never to blossom, though his father
prepares for him, in the conclusion of the elegy, an appropriate heaven:
not “adamant . . . stark and cold,” but a rather Wordsworthian or
Keatsian “nest of bending reeds, / Flowering grass and scented
weeds” (“Threnody,” lines 15, 26, 272–75).
A less discussed but similar letter to Elizabeth Holland, whose
child had suffered a crippling injury, is, as we have seen, mentioned,
and dismissed, by Charles Anderson in connection with “Apparently
10. Farr, Gardens of Emily Dickinson, 126–27. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 88.
Dickinson’s Death-Haunted Earthly Paradise 153
13. Job 25:2–6. Edwards, The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners (1734),
“Application,” pt. I, p. 2.
Dickinson’s Death-Haunted Earthly Paradise 157
So much for Bildad-like groveling! Like the image of the worm, that of
dust reflects the Calvinist estimate of human worthlessness. But here the
“worm” turns, with the “sinful” creature finding fault with the Creator.
Despite his seeming straightforwardness, God committed a dubious act
(an inconsistency emphasized by the alliterated candid and contraband).
In fashioning us as he did, he set up, between dust and immortal spirit,
not so much a creative tension as a radical contradiction. He thus stands
accused of double-dealing, and any “apology” we make to so duplici-
tous a God will be less an acknowledgment of our own guilt, or a seek-
ing of pardon, than a self-justifying defense—an apologia in the form of
j’accuse directed against a divine adversary. That vindictive God himself
supplied the right word. “For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, vis-
iting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children” (Exod. 20:5). Dickin-
son, who often relishes the role of lawyer for the plaintiff when it comes
to amassing evidence against God’s providence, has the children of
Dust visit the charge of injustice upon an anything-but-paternal Heav-
enly Father, accusing him—blasphemously, though appropriately,
given his supreme power—of “the supreme iniquity.”
Our apology to God for his “own Duplicity” allies the poem with
the most blasphemous of Omar Khayyám’s quatrains addressed to
God, at least as adapted by Edward Fitzgerald in a translation the Vic-
torian world accepted with a shock of recognition:
-
For all our immortal longings, we are haunted, and angered, by the
death implicit in our originating dust—in the case of Emily Dickinson,
14. McIntosh, Nimble Believing, 47; and in correspondence, January 16, 2008;
Eberwein, Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation, 82.
15. Zapedowska, “Wrestling with Silence,” 385. Dickinson’s poem would have
found favor with another major American writer. In a late notebook (June–July
1896), Mark Twain proposed a deity to “take the place of the present one.” Twain’s
“improved” God “would recognize in himself the Author & Inventor of Sin, &
Author & Inventor of the vehicle for its commission; & would place the whole
responsibility where it would of right belong: upon Himself, the only Sinner”
(quoted in Ray B. Browne, Mark Twain’s Quarrel with God, 13).
Dickinson’s Death-Haunted Earthly Paradise 159
what Byron called “fiery dust.” And if the “Heavenly Father” who pre-
sides over this beautiful but doomed world really is “an Approving
God,” Dickinson seems to care less for him and for a posthumous, per-
haps empty heaven than for this earthly paradise—the perishable
beauty that must die, everything she wishes could “transcend the ‘frost’
of death.” When she does project an earthly eternity, it is, characteristi-
cally, in the form of a blossoming season. “No fear of frost to come”
would “Haunt the perennial bloom— / But certain June!” (195).
Chapter 10
160
Flowers, and Thoughts Too Deep for Tears 161
amazing sense
From ordinary Meanings—
And Attar so immense
it. Noting, in 1866, the seasonal change from February to March, she
tells Elizabeth Holland: “Here is the ‘light’ the Stranger said ‘was not
on sea or land.’ Myself could arrest it, but we’ll not chagrin him” (L
449). Why she calls him the Stranger I don’t know, but here Dickinson
is alluding to Wordsworth’s description of the creative imagination as
“the gleam, / The light that never was, on sea or land” (“Elegiac Stan-
zas,” lines 13–14). Seven years later she would summon up the phrase
again, this time quoting the famous second line accurately (L 510). But
in 1866, she not only alluded to Wordsworth on the imagination as
“light” but also claimed equal power, even a paradoxically belated
precedence. In the poem, she may “wonder it was not Ourselves /
Arrested it—before”; in the letter, she claims she (“Ourselves”) “could
arrest it, but we’ll not chagrin” Wordsworth, embarrassing him by
playing one-upsmanship with him. It is another reminder that, though
Dickinson “is recognizably a post-Wordsworthian poet,” the “Ameri-
can difference is as strong in her as it is in Whitman or Melville.”4
While she never cites him as a precursor, it is Wordsworth more than
any other poet who in his approach to nature complements Emily
Dickinson’s own love of actual flowers. As Judith Farr observes, “Like
Wordsworth, she chooses spring flowers, often woodland flowers, the
first growth of hillsides and meadows to praise.” Quoting Dickinson’s
early poem, “I robbed the Woods” (41), Farr accurately identifies it as
“a distinctly Wordsworthian poem,” with “echoes” of the poet’s
“guilt” in “stealing the little boat” in the famous episode in the
opening book of The Prelude. Perhaps; though I would propose
Wordsworth’s poem “Nutting,” originally intended to appear in that
opening book but published separately and never incorporated in the
seasonal episodes of the epic. (In the Dickinson poem, the speaker
“robbed” trees described as “trusting” and “unsuspecting.” She won-
ders what hemlock and oak might “say” once she “grasped” and “bore
away” what she chose to steal. In “Nutting,” the Wordsworthian
speaker, “forcing” his way into a virginal nook in the woods, suddenly
ravages and mutilates the calm bower. At first exultant, he is finally
4. Bloom, Genius, 345. We “still,” he adds (349), “have not worked out her com-
plex relation to Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats.” By an odd coincidence, the
unusual word Dickinson uses as a verb, chagrin, was once employed by Emerson
as a noun to express the inner disturbance he sometimes felt in reading a man he
also acknowledged to be the major poet of the age: “I never,” he exaggerated,
“read Wordsworth without chagrin” (Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, 4:63).
Flowers, and Thoughts Too Deep for Tears 163
7. Hazlitt, Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 11:88. The Letters of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, 7:148–49. For the comments of the critic (William Gifford?), see anony-
mous, “Wordsworth’s White Doe” (italics in original).
8. Pater, “Wordsworth,” 48. Emerson, Nature (Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed.
Porte, 47). For Mary’s comments, see Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the
Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History, 151–52. For Wadsworth’s change of
opinion on the ode, documented in sermons delivered in 1857 and 1865, see
Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, 332–33, 704n.
166 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
life—its joys and suffering, either the whole trajectory of life and
inevitable death, or, worse, early death, being “cut down” in one’s
prime. Obviously, for Dickinson as for Wordsworth, it was more than
wildflowers, gentians, and zinnias that “perished by the Door.” The
flowers she cherished in life were intimately associated by Dickinson
with death. In an 1850 letter to Abiah Root, she imagined her own
death, anticipating an “early grave; . . . I shall love to call the bird there
if it has gentle music, and the meekest-eyed wild flowers” (L 103).
When, thirty-six years later, she did die it was, appropriately, Susan
who prepared her body for burial, choosing both familiar and exotic
flowers. She “arranged violets and a pink cypripedium [an orchid, like
the flower on the jacket of this book, a “lady’s-slipper”] at Emily’s
throat and covered her white casket with violets and ground pine.”
And in her obituary (“Miss Emily Dickinson of Amherst”), printed in
the Springfield Republican, Susan spoke of her friend’s “gentle tillage of
the rare flowers filling her conservatory, into which, as into the heav-
enly Paradise, entered nothing that could defile, and which was ever
abloom in frost or sunshine, so well she knew her subtle chemistries.”
Susan, who knew Emily Dickinson as well or better than anyone,
pays tribute to the gardener who loved the flowers she cultivated and
preserved from autumn frost in the “camp” of her conservatory.
Though her obituary was insightful enough to have served as an intro-
duction to the 1890 edition of Dickinson’s poems (Higginson’s sug-
gestion was overruled by Mabel Loomis Todd, Austin’s mistress),
Susan was at times less understanding of the work of the poet who
often juxtaposed, while seldom reconciling, flowers and a frost repeat-
edly associated with that ultimate defilement, death. The blonde
Assassin of our poem strikes down its innocent victim “in accidental
power”; it may be no “accident” that “Apparently with no surprise”
was written at the end of a decade marked by a series of devastating
deaths, including those of both her parents, her nephew, and four
beloved friends: Samuel Bowles in 1878, J. G. Holland in 1881, Charles
Wadsworth in 1882 (the year her mother died), and, in 1884, Otis
Phillips Lord, the only man Emily Dickinson may ever have been
tempted to marry. The correspondence with Judge Lord became pas-
sionate following the death of his wife in 1877 (see L 614–18); after
Lord’s death, Dickinson wrote to Elizabeth Holland: “Forgive the tears
that fell for few, but that few too many, for was not each a World?” (L
816). To call it a “late-blooming” love seems more than metaphorical;
168 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
in an 1878 letter in which Dickinson says she will “withhold and not
confer” her sexual favor, she employs garden imagery: “for your great
sake—not mine—I will not let you cross [the “Stile”], but it is all
your’s, and when it is right I will lift the Bars, and lay you in the Moss”
(L 617).
Of all those who meant most to her, only Austin, Vinnie, and Susan
were spared. Reporting on her shattered “nerves,” she asked rhetori-
cally, “who but Death had wronged them?” “The Dyings have been too
deep for me,” she confided to an acquaintance, “and before I could raise
my Heart from one, another has come” (L 843). The letter was written in
the fall of 1884, the year she also wrote “Apparently with no surprise.”
-
Most potentially relevant to the untimely cutting down of a “happy
Flower,” there was, in the preceding autumn, the sudden death by
typhoid of her seven-year-old nephew, the charming and gifted
Gilbert, Emily’s favorite of Austin’s and Susan’s three children.10 The
sun may proceed “unmoved,” but in the case of human beings, even
for poets too strong to succumb to merely sentimental analogizing,
there are limits to emotional detachment. Nature’s frost may be “no
respecter of persons,” like the poem’s indifferent Assassin, whose
power is “accidental” rather than deliberately cruel. But the power “to
assault” the vulnerable, children in particular, is a different matter and
would “seem” to come under the auspices of the Omnipotent: an
“Approving God” for whom nothing is accidental and whose
approval of such assaults may be interpreted, depending on perspec-
tive, as either benign or—as it seemed to Emily Dickinson in the letter
earlier cited, in which she discreetly transferred the responsibility
from God to nature—“malign.”
As early as 1859, Dickinson had expressed empathy for doomed
children. Innocents “too fragile for winter winds,” they are brought to
an early and “thoughtful grave,” a personified grave depicted as “ten-
derly tucking them in from frost.” But if the grave is tender, God is
indifferent to the little ones: “Sparrows unnoticed by the Father— /
Lambs for whom time had not a fold” (141). This neglect by a mascu-
10. Her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, reports that Emily was impressed by
an evening prayer in which Gilbert balanced dependence with the sort of self-
sufficiency she admired: “O Lord, you take care of me some tonight, and I’ll take
care of myself some.” Quoted by Zapedowska, “Wrestling with Silence,” 391.
Flowers, and Thoughts Too Deep for Tears 169
11. In an 1862 poem probably written with Sue in mind, “Jesus—raps” at the
door, seeking access to “the lady’s soul.” When Jesus retires, chill or weary, there
will be “ample time for—me—Patient upon the steps—until then— / Heart! I am
knocking—low at thee” (317).
Flowers, and Thoughts Too Deep for Tears 171
12. Peter Kreeft, Making Sense Out of Suffering, 103. A variation, almost fusing
door and hole, occurs at the climax of “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” where Tolstoy
uses the image of a black sack the suffering Ivan finally breaks through into the
light.
172 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
on earth were “O, that beautiful boy!”), cherished until her own death
the lost child as a living presence: “The little boy we laid away never
fluctuates, and his dim society is companion still” (L 827).
The death of little Gilbert was an emotional loss from which a grief-
stricken Emily Dickinson never fully recovered.13 But, while we have
to allow for the fact that Emily is acting as a consoler, ministering to
Susan’s grieving and to her own, this famous letter suggests that the
boy’s death was not without spiritual recompense. A few months
before that death she had asked a friend: “Are you certain there is
another life? When overwhelmed to know, I fear that few are sure” (L
779). Even in response to Gilbert’s final cry about those “waiting for
me” beyond the “door,” she wondered “who was waiting for him. . . .
All we possess we would give to know” (L 803). For once, though,
there appeared to be light in the darkness, and a possible answer to the
problem of suffering. The “Mystery” of death remains a riddle; but in
the case of little Gilbert the much-knocked-upon door seemed finally
to open. In its visionary ecstasy, this letter-poem, even taking its imme-
diate function to console into consideration, seems antithetical to the
bleak, coldly understated vision of “Apparently with no surprise.”14
13. Several biographers date Dickinson’s own final decline as beginning with
her response to the death of this much loved child. See, for example, Habegger, My
Wars Are Laid Away in Books, 621, and Farr, The Passion of Emily Dickinson, 4.
14. A more recent letter of consolation comes to mind. In Letter to a Man in the
Fire (1999), the southern novelist and poet Reynolds Price also employed the
“door” as a religious image. In the course of an expanded, public response to a let-
ter from Jim Fox, a young man dying of cancer (Fox died some months prior to the
publication of the book dedicated to him), Price, himself a cancer survivor,
explored the apparent absence of God in the face of human suffering and its con-
verse: occasional healing in answer to prayer. Apologizing that he can do no more,
he advises the young man to “go on waiting as long as you can at the one main
door, requesting entry from whatever power may lie beyond it” (34). Price’s own
faith in that power, he tells us, was grounded on childhood “openings” and “intu-
itions.” In his youth, he experienced certain rare, mysterious, luminous
“moments,” which seemed to him intimations of the soul’s immortality and man-
ifestations of a benign divinity. He adds: “Wordsworth’s accounts, in The Prelude
and other poems, of similar findings in his youth are the classic description, as I
learned years after my own began” (27–28). Prominent among those “other
poems” would be the Intimations Ode, the “classic description” of Wordsworth’s
epiphanic “findings in his youth.”
Chapter 11
174
Questioning Divine Benevolence 175
Assassin of a Bird
Resembles to my outraged mind
The firing in Heaven,
On Angels—squandering for you
Their Miracles of Tune— (1102; italics added)
pulled the sluice to release the flow of grace that sustained Emily Dick-
inson in ‘the Balm of that Religion / That doubts as fervently as it
believes’ [1144].” In accord with this compensating balance, her sec-
ond textually based observation expands from a minute, close reading
of the poem’s metrics to the cosmic. If we “think of this poem as a
response to the implosion of the traditional argument for God’s exis-
tence based on orderly design evident throughout the universe,” we
have to take into account the poem’s
proof-text, the poet, or the dramatic speaker, “senses less order in the
universe than the poem directly acknowledges,” perhaps “no illume
at all.”
Of course, religious faith is not the only source of light. Though she
was always acutely conscious that Reason alone cannot satisfy our spir-
itual needs, especially the immortal longings in us, there are occasions
when Dickinson endorsed the “illumination” specifically associated
with science and the Enlightenment. On such occasions, she displays
an appropriately satiric, epigrammatic wit. In his own version of muti-
lation, Jesus had admonished us that, “if thy right eye offend thee,
pluck it out, and cast it from thee” rather than risk the whole body
being cast into Hell (Matt. 5:29). Benjamin Franklin had his own sar-
donic proverb: “The Way to see by Faith is to put out the Eye of Rea-
son.” Almost precisely a century after the publication of Franklin’s Poor
Richard’s Almanac in 1758, Dickinson seems to recall Franklin’s appar-
ent reversal of Jesus in an epigram that honors the rational skepticism
of her countryman, a paragon of the Age of Reason who was famed for
both worldly wisdom and scientific experimentation:
You are growing wiser than I am, and nipping in the bud fancies
which I let blossom—perchance to bear no fruit, or if plucked, I may
find it bitter. The shore is safer, Abiah, but I love to buffet the sea—I
can count the bitter wrecks here in these pleasant waters, and hear
the murmuring winds, but, oh, I love the danger! You are learning
control and firmness. Christ Jesus will love you more. I’m afraid he
don’t love me any! (L 104)
It was not only the ways of “men” that parted on this issue. Though
Dickinson’s “is very much a poetry of the religious imagination,” and
religion “continues to be a fundamental paradigm through which she
interprets her world,” this is “not to claim that Dickinson is an ortho-
dox religious poet. On the contrary, her work offers a forceful and orig-
inal critique of traditional metaphysics in ways that recall her near
contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche. Religion is in many ways a para-
digm that fails Dickinson, and yet she never completely discards it. If
she is not devout, she is also not secular.”4 Emily Dickinson never for-
mally joined the church and stopped attending services altogether
around 1860, by which time she was a virtual recluse. In an 1862 letter
to Higginson, describing her religious position in relation to the rest of
her family, Dickinson expressed her rebellious doubt with a clarity and
irony, poignancy and pride, worthy of one of Nietzsche’s lonely devo-
tees of painful truth: “They are religious—except me—and address an
Eclipse, every morning—whom they call their ‘Father’” (L 404). As
Roger Lundin observes in his biographical tracing of her “art of belief,”
Dickinson “agonizingly approached the threshold of conversion but
never passed over it; and throughout her adult life she brilliantly med-
itated upon the great perennial questions of God, suffering, the prob-
lem of evil, death, and her ‘Flood subject’ [L 454] immortality.”5
-
Emily Dickinson never relinquished her empathy with the human,
crucified divinity, Jesus. And there is sporadic evidence that she became
somewhat more prayerful in her final years. What she refused to assent
3. This letter from the twenty-year-old Nietzsche to his sister deserves its place
as the first item in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann. Nietzsche’s later,
virtually unreserved praise of Emerson may be found in his Nachlass, dating to
1881–1882, when he was writing The Gay Science, a book originally dedicated to
Emerson.
4. Wolosky, “Public and Private in Dickinson’s War Poetry,” 115–16.
5. Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, 4. Lundin’s own art of (Christian) belief is
manifest in his 2006 From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural
Authority.
182 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
to, what she struggled with and often defiantly rebelled against, was
the conventional, “optimistic” depiction of God: that Judeo-Christian
Father-God who was traditionally defined—despite the appalling evi-
dence of suffering and disease, death and blight—as omnipotent,
omniscient, and all-loving. Augustine, Aquinas, and others might argue
that God was—must be—all three. But how could he be simultaneously
all of these? Epicurus, whose famous riddle I cited earlier from Hume’s
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, is only one of many skeptics who
have challenged this traditional conception of God.
Whatever philosophy she read, Emily Dickinson certainly read
Shakespeare, Pope’s Essay on Man, and Wordsworth, along, of course,
with Wordsworth’s principal American disciple, Emerson; and she
knew by heart much of Milton and, obviously, Scripture. But where
others found (in the Bible, in human life, in Nature, in the Great Chain
of Being) evidence of a benevolent Deity whose Design was ultimately
providential, Dickinson found an essentially inscrutable God often
less compassionate than capricious, even cruel, and often less bounti-
ful than stingy. The latter charge is made in a moving letter written to
the Hollands in the autumn of 1859 in which Dickinson manages to
bring together cold, poverty, God—and, of course, frost and flowers.
“We have no fires yet,” she begins, “and the evenings grow cold. To-
morrow, stoves are set. How many barefoot shiver I trust their Father
knows who saw not fit to give them shoes.” Like Lear, experiencing
“houseless poverty” on the storm-swept heath and pitying all “poor
naked wretches” undefended “from seasons such as these,” Dickinson
too would wish “the heavens more just” (King Lear 3.4.26–36). Her ten-
tative and partly ironic “trust” in God’s omniscience is inseparable
from her direct challenge to his benevolence, a sardonic observation
followed by a report that her sister Vinnie was “sick tonight, which
gives the world a russet [sober] tinge.” Then comes this remarkable
sentence, personalizing the charge against a God who allows sickness
and a Father who denies shoes to his poorer children, leaving them to
shiver barefoot in the cold: “God was penurious with me, which
makes me shrewd with Him” (L 353).
This miserly God had yielded little to her. (As she put it in an unfin-
ished poem, “the Door” to that “old mansion,” Paradise, has been
“reversed,” for “Bliss is frugal of her Leases / Adam taught her Thrift
/ Bankrupt once through his excesses—” [1119]). Feeling barren and
abandoned, she, in turn, was shrewd with him: a word that will appear
Questioning Divine Benevolence 183
an assured belief
That the procession of our fate, howe’er
Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being
Of infinite benevolence and power;
Whose everlasting purposes embrace
All accidents, converting them to good.
—The darts of anguish fix not where the seat
Of suffering hath been thoroughly fortified
By acquiescence in the Will supreme
For time and for eternity; by faith,
Faith absolute in God, including hope. (Excursion 4.1–22)
6. Joel Pace, who has studied the relation of Wordsworth’s poetry to social
reform in nineteenth-century America, notes that lines 10–93—excerpted under a
title borrowed from Wordsworth’s own prose “Argument”—were used by more
conservative Unitarians to blunt reform. See Romantic Praxis Circle Series,
http//www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/.
7. Farr, The Passion of Emily Dickinson, 51. Farr adds that this was a “chief prin-
ciple of [John] Ruskin,” the great art historian who insisted he owed his “eye” to
Wordsworth, especially the Wordsworth of The Excursion. Another disciple of
Wordsworth, the American painter Thomas Cole, is emphasized by Farr as an
influence on Dickinson. Cole may have met with Wordsworth in London in 1832,
when he was befriended by Coleridge and De Quincey. Cole’s 1836 painting Tin-
tern Abbey is an obvious homage.
8. Louise Bogan, “A Mystical Poet,” 28–31.
186 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
have gone beyond the merely aesthetic verdict on these lines that we
find in another observation by Arnold on Wordsworth.
In the influential essay introducing his 1879 selection of Words-
worth’s poems, Arnold (whose earlier Essays in Criticism had been read
and marked by Emily Dickinson) quotes skeptic Leslie Stephen’s sur-
prising encomium that Wordsworth’s “poetry is precious” because his
“philosophy is sound,” his “ethical system” as “distinctive and capa-
ble of exposition as Bishop [Joseph] Butler’s.” Very well, says Arnold,
“let us come direct to the center” of Wordsworth’s philosophy as “an
ethical system as . . . capable of systematical exposition” as that of the
bishop many consider Britain’s greatest moral philosopher. He then
quotes the opening six lines of this passage from The Excursion, ending
with that omnipotent and benevolent Being whose “everlasting pur-
poses embrace / All accidents, converting them to good.” “That,” says
Arnold, “is doctrine such as we hear at church, too, religious and philo-
sophic doctrine; and the attached Wordsworthian loves passages of
such doctrine, and brings them forward in proof of his poet’s excel-
lence. But however true the doctrine may be, it has, as here presented,
none of the characters of poetic truth, the kind of truth which we require
of a poet, and in which Wordsworth is really strong.”11
At various times and in various moods, that nimble believer Emily
Dickinson would feel differently as to how “true the doctrine may be.”
But she would concur with Matthew Arnold (along with most admir-
ers of this unquestionably “strong” poet) that Wordsworth fails, in
such pious and didactic passages, to present “poetic truth.” One can
admire the capacity exhibited here—as in Alexander Pope’s philo-
sophic poem and exercise in theodicy, An Essay on Man—to synthesize
received doctrine. But, as Emerson reminds us, nothing is got for noth-
ing, and to recognize the falling off in terms of “poetic truth,” one has
only to compare these lines from The Excursion with those earlier cited
from the “sublime” passage of “Tintern Abbey.”
It was less the “assured belief” in an omnipotent and benevolent
God, placed in the mouth of his Wanderer, than the mysterious sens-
ing of an indefinable “Presence” (in lines encapsulating Spinoza and
12. Here I repeat the observation of Charles Taylor (A Secular Age, 607) cited in
my Introduction. As an “orthodox Christian,” Taylor would be more aligned with
the Wordsworth of religious certitude who speaks through the Wanderer than
with the poet of mysterious “intimations,” of self-contradictory ambiguity and
vacillation. It is this Wordsworth (who appealed to less doctrinaire believers, even
atheists) with whom I associate Emily Dickinson.
Questioning Divine Benevolence 189
13. The unpublished poem and the letter to Beaumont (italics in the original) are
cited in Juliet Barker, Wordsworth, 242.
190 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
Emily Dickinson’s quarrel was not with troubled hope but with
complacent certitude. Whatever its provenance, and whoever was
promoting what Wordsworth’s Wanderer called “assured belief” in a
Being of “infinite benevolence and power,” Emily Dickinson was not
buying it. That life was tragic did not make it meaningless; but in the
world of circumstances the clear-eyed poet saw all around her—a
world of natural violence, of sickness and death—there were “acci-
dents” that could not always be converted into good, let alone accom-
modated in any grand and benevolent “Design.” Dickinson’s response
to the death of little Gilbert, in which emotional devastation was
accompanied by imaginative and spiritual compensation, would seem
to be something of an exception to the rule. For the most part, human
suffering and death could not be so easily theologized away.
For Emily Dickinson, the Epistle to the Romans notwithstanding,
God seemed less often “with us” than “against us” (L 746). In a letter
written a year and a half before her own death, she expressed condo-
lences to her Aunt Catharine Sweetser that went well beyond the con-
ventional expression of sympathy after an illness. Again subversively
echoing Paul, this time 1 Timothy 1:17, she wrote: “It is very wrong
that you were ill, and whom shall I accuse? The enemy, ‘eternal, invis-
ible, and full of glory’—But He declares himself a friend!” (L 851). In a
191
192 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
That last line refers to all those lost friends seized by God, laid up in
his keeping, but perhaps (in accord with the tongue-in-cheek tone of
the preceding stanza) never returned to us. God’s promised Heaven
offered infinitude, but since God also “stole away the looks and lives
of all those one loved,” Dickinson “could not support any sweeping
attribution to God of every benefit.”1 If he is benevolent (“If God is
Love”), if he is omnipotent (“If ‘All is possible with’ him”), then he
ought to be able to “refund” to us those we loved. But God’s healing
powers, or his compassion, are limited; instead of a refund, we are told
that a debt is owed to the celestial treasury! The late poem to which I
am alluding raises, and sardonically responds to, two questions based
on what “They say,” what “They speak of”:
Is Heaven a Physician?
They say that He can heal—
But Medicine Posthumous
Is unavailable—
Is Heaven an Exchequer?
They speak of what we owe—
But that negotiation
I’m not a Party to— (1270)
4. The Everlasting Man, 34–35. As we have seen, in poem 313, Dickinson echoes
Jesus’s own echo of Psalm 22.
196 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
5. Taylor, A Secular Age, 727, 684. Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, 187; see also
189, 192–94, 199, 202. Long before she died (in 1997), she had asked that her pri-
vate papers be destroyed. Given their contents, it is remarkable that church supe-
riors overruled her request. For a harrowingly ambiguous yet redemptive
dramatization of God’s silence amid unspeakable torture, see the historical novel
Silence (1966) by the Japanese Christian writer Shusaku Endo (New York:
Taplinger, 1980).
6. In this sonnet, “Carrion Comfort,” Hopkins insists he will not “cry I can no
more. I can”; and he will “not choose not to be.” Rejecting suicide, he endured
and, like Mother Teresa, continued a life of often onerous duties.
The Final Dialectic: Believing and Disbelieving 197
The poem began with God’s hiding game, and the word play, soon
to be repeated, sets up the cruel and lethal joke developed in the
remainder of the poem, with the speaker’s tone, following the pivotal
“But” that divides the poem in two, growing increasingly caustic and
accusatory:
Of Course—I prayed—
And did God Care?
He cared as much as on the Air
A Bird—had stamped her foot—
And cried “Give Me”—
My Reason—Life—
I had not had—but for Yourself—
’Twere better Charity
To leave me in the Atom’s Tomb—
Merry, and Nought, and gay, and numb—
Than this smart Misery. (376)
“power” of this “remarkable” poem almost entirely “in its voice, its
tone,” a level of “laconic constraint” established by the archness of that
quietly furious phrase, “He is presumed to know.”7
Beginning satirically, the poem ends contemplatively, though its tonal
shift is partially subsumed by the unusual prolongation of a single
oblique rhyme: forgiven, hidden, Prison, heaven. As in “I know that He
exists,” something is hidden from us. In this case, it is the original
“Crime” of which we are supposedly guilty. To judge from this and
other late poems, notably “ ‘Heavenly Father’—take to thee” (1461),
Emily Dickinson rejected the doctrine of original sin. We are, as Eber-
wein has noted, limited by our radical finitude, but since that is God’s
doing, the blame is his, not ours. Thus, despite the opening petition that
“we may be forgiven,” this speaker does not really consider herself
party to that primordial, inherited guilt that can cause “us”—subordi-
nating adjective to noun, life’s magic to imprisoning constraint—to cen-
sure earthly happiness whenever it seems to rival that of the promised
heaven. Dickinson here participates, in her unique way, in the familiar
secular-Nietzschean critique of a Christianity depicted as scorning “the
real, sensual, earthly good for some purely imaginary higher end, the
pursuit of which can only lead to the frustration of the real, earthly good,
to suffering, mortification, repression.”8
Yet, beneath the irony and the human anger, some form of faith per-
severes, and “we” still ask of God forgiveness. Like “they” in her
repeated formulations of what “they say,” the plural “we” and “us”
(instead of the usual “I”) suggest a separation between the religiously
orthodox and Dickinson herself—an implication reinforced by the let-
ter accompanying this poem. Writing to her friend and champion
Helen Hunt Jackson, who had seriously injured her leg, Dickinson
remarks, “Knew I how to pray, to intercede for your Foot were intu-
itive, but I am but a Pagan” (L 867).
In a related but tonally different poem, Dickinson uses botanical
imagery to dramatize what appears to be (the opening pronoun, “This,”
is left deliberately ambiguous) the tension between faith found and
faith lost. Religious belief or doubt, like the universe itself, seems to be
a mysterious process reflecting either divine Design or mere accident.
her wrestling with God to the limit. But, in the final analysis, even
though “the Brain—is wider than the Sky,” “deeper than the Sea,” and
“just the weight of God” (632), the inquisitive mind has its limits. Here,
one might say, cosmology, epistemology, and biology converge. Pre-
cisely because of our evolutionary history, we have to acknowledge
the limits of human understanding—especially of our capacity to
achieve complete insight into what may be ultimate metaphysical
mysteries. God and his purposes, his hidden “Design,” were, Dickin-
son concluded, ultimately inscrutable—as the mystery of the universe
would later seem to Einstein, for whom, “behind all the discernible
laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible, and
inexplicable.” In “Their Height in Heaven comforts not,” Dickinson’s
vantage point is only apparently more local. Surveying with “my nar-
row Eyes,” and acknowledging “I’m finite—I can’t see / The House of
Supposition” and “the Acres of Perhaps,” she concludes: “This timid
life of Evidence / Keeps pleading—‘I don’t know’” (696).
Her questionings and acknowledgment that some things were ulti-
mately unknowable did not make her a thoroughgoing “agnostic,” a
term coined by T. H. Huxley. Taking up her own phrase, which sup-
plies the title of his book, McIntosh, as we’ve seen, defines “nimble
believing” as “believing for intense moments in a spiritual life without
permanently subscribing to any received system of belief.” Writing a
third of a century earlier, Denis Donoghue accurately observed that
“of her religious faith virtually anything may be said, with some show
of evidence. She may be represented as an agnostic, a heretic, a skep-
tic, a Christian.” Christina Rossetti, as earlier noted, judged the Dick-
inson poems sent her “remarkable” but often “irreligious.” And Allen
Tate once observed, only half-facetiously, “Cotton Mather would have
burnt her for a witch.”10
One thing is certain. Despite the transferred epithet suggesting the
“timid life” of the finite “I” in “Their Height in heaven comforts not,” we
have abundant “evidence” in other poems and letters demonstrating
10. McIntosh, Nimble Believing, 1. Donoghue, Emily Dickinson, 14; Donoghue also
quotes (15) the letter in which Dickinson famously says of her family, “They are
religious—except me—and address an Eclipse, every morning—whom they call
‘Father.’” Rossetti’s judgment, earlier cited in Chapter 1, may be found in Lubbers,
Emily Dickinson: The Critical Revolution, 30. For Tate’s remark, see his Man of Letters
in the Modern World: Selected Essays, 1928–1955, 226.
204 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
11. The first statement is from Richard Robinson, An Atheist’s Values, 117; the sec-
ond from J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence
of God, 261.
Conclusion
Multi-Perspectivism in Interpretation
205
206 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
2. Jim Holt, “Beyond Belief,” 12; Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis, 221.
Conclusion 207
ing “too much misery in the world,” too much gratuitous suffering,
especially by the innocent, to justify belief in a providential Design and
a benign God. Such nonbelievers may either be braced by the detached
viewpoint implicit in an understanding of science, the “cold bath” advo-
cated by Stephen Jay Gould, or be inclined to resist the related, tough-
minded point Charles Anderson made in regard to “Apparently with no
surprise”: that we do not live in an anthropocentric universe, that
“nature’s apparent cruelty . . . is hostile to man and flower only in not
being designed wholly to accommodate their flourishing.”3
Such detachment is hard to achieve, let alone maintain. So how is a
reader of a poem like “Apparently with no surprise” to deal with his
or her own beliefs, perspectives, worldviews, feelings—everything
that makes us living, breathing human beings and that necessarily
affects how we read the texts we read? Surely, however difficult it may
be, it is best to make the effort, suspending our own belief or disbelief,
to do what we can to temporarily put aside our own religious orienta-
tion, in order to submit ourselves to the poem, allowing it to do its aes-
thetic work before we do it the Procrustean injustice of imposing on the
text our own doctrinal convictions, or lack thereof. Once we have
given the poem breathing room, and allowed it to possess us, we are
free to bring to bear whatever we believe likely to illuminate the text.
But illumination is not the same as resolution. Even after devoting
much thought and analysis to a poem as seemingly simple as “Appar-
ently with no surprise,” some readers may find themselves surprised to
discover that, far from plucking out the heart of the poem’s mystery,
they have generated as many questions as answers. But ending in
ambiguity is not what I take to be the result of my own eclectic
approach or what may make such an approach potentially useful to
other readers, including, but hardly limited to, Dickinson scholars.
Instead, I am interested in whatever seems useful in reaching the most
plausible interpretation.
In seeking that most plausible reading, and specifically in terms of
approximating, even if we can never attain, what E. D. Hirsch calls “objec-
tive interpretation,” our primary Dickinson text summons up one final
Wordsworth comparison. I have in mind a poem to which Emily Dick-
inson would have been, and perhaps was, as Richard Gravil has sug-
gested, particularly attracted for reasons both formal and thematic (the
Perhaps the best known and certainly the least susceptible to con-
clusive interpretation of the so-called Lucy poems, “A slumber did my
spirit seal” pitted two distinguished elder critics, Cleanth Brooks and
F. W. Bateson, in a celebrated controversy that has continued to divide
readers. Even before we get to the point of dispute, we notice many
ironies in this little poem. A spiritual or imaginative slumber deludes
the speaker into thinking his beloved an inanimate “thing” that
“seemed” unable to “feel” the touch of earthly years. That was Then.
Now that beloved’s mortality, her entrance into the sleep of death, awak-
ens him to a belated recognition of the pathos of mutability. Yet, since
she died young, he was inadvertently right: she did “not feel / The
touch of earthly years.” Now, though she no longer feels at all (bereft
of force, hearing, and sight), and has “no motion,” she is caught up in
a greater “motion” (the word epitomizing the Wordsworthian Sub-
lime), in which she is “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course / With
rocks, and stones, and trees.”
So—and this is the crux of the Brooks-Bateson debate—is the poem
a bleak, epitaphic recording of the finality of death, and of the stunned,
elegiac anguish of the desolated lover? Or does it—with the final
stanza’s rolling sublimity, in which everything organic and inorganic is
7. Wolff, Emily Dickinson, 586n3; Waggoner, American Poets from the Puritans to the
Present, 204.
212 Emily Dickinson’s Approving God
But in even the most adventurous reading, the text should not be
reduced to a Lockean tabula rasa on which we merely do our own writ-
ing. All minds are perspectival; but only the ideological mind—limited
to its own perspective, closed off from the claims of others—will force-
fully impose itself on a text, even “deforming” it, unconcerned about
whether or not one is being “faithful or unfaithful” to the author.10
-
In the case of an aesthetic artifact such as a poem, then, we are deal-
ing not with a metaphysical hypothesis or a thing of nature but with a
work of art: something created and essentially if not entirely shaped
(for, finally, interpretation must play a role) by a demonstrably existent
Designer. At times, as every writer can testify, language may exert a
will of its own, and the text will escape the “indispensable guardrail”
of authorial intention. But, for the most part, the ordered, beautiful
thing we call a poem is directed by a Designer who “steers” it—in the
Thomistic image earlier noted (Summa Theologica, I.2.3)—“as an archer
does an arrow.” The guiding Intelligence and Celestial Craftsman
whom Aquinas says “we call God” we call, in this aesthetic context, by
another name for a creator. In this case, it is a name proudly claimed by
Emily Dickinson herself; and no one who has been pierced by this
archer’s bolts of melody can have any doubt that—in her chosen
dramatization of her lifelong wrestling with God, her nimble dialectic
between belief and disbelief—“This was a Poet.”
10. Michel Foucault, here quoted on how one should read Nietzsche himself:
“The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely to use it, to
deform it, to make it groan and protest. And if commentators then say that I am
being faithful or unfaithful to Nietzsche, that is of absolutely no interest” (“Nietz-
sche, Genealogy, History,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writ-
ings, 1972–1977, 53–54).
Appendix
Derek Mahon’s “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”
215
216 Appendix. Derek Mahon’s “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”
The poem was written after Bloody Sunday, the day in 1972 when
British paratroopers fired into a crowd of Catholic protesters, initiat-
ing the most violent stage of the Troubles in the North. Mahon wants
his readers to associate that event with the Partition of Ireland back in
1922 and the subsequent Civil War. His deeply humane, obliquely
political poem is considered by many (general readers and critics
alike) to be the single greatest lyric to have come out of Ireland since
the death of Yeats—high praise, considering the quality of the poetry
produced over the past three decades by Ireland’s preeminent con-
temporary poet, Seamus Heaney.
Mahon’s “disused shed” is found on the grounds of “a burnt-out
hotel,” burned down during “civil war days.” Since then, the mush-
rooms in that long-abandoned shed “have been waiting for us”—wait-
ing precisely “a half-century, without visitors, in the dark.”
Registering loss, violence, and suffering in a world groaning for deliv-
erance, Mahon’s empathetic heart goes out to these neglected mush-
rooms: shut-ins he tenderly and persuasively makes emblematic of all
those who have suffered and struggled in solitude, abandoned and
dispossessed. Surely poet and gardener Emily Dickinson, whose key
term Circumference incorporated all forms of life, human, natural, and
spiritual, and whose empathetic imagination was expressed in poems
she struggled with in solitude, albeit self-chosen, would have read
Derek Mahon’s poem with a shock of recognition.
-
Mahon begins with various “places” where a “thought might,”
almost organically, “grow.” Those he mentions, before he homes in on
218 Appendix. Derek Mahon’s “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”
1. King John, Shakespeare’s poisoned and dying wretch of a monarch, cries out
in the final scene of the play, “Now my soul hath elbow-room” (King John, 5.7.28).
But Mahon’s welcome note of jocularity is much likelier an echo of the exuberant
exclamation given by Arthur Cuiterman to America’s expansive Kentucky fron-
tiersman: “‘Elbow room!’ cried Daniel Boone.”
220 Appendix. Derek Mahon’s “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”
They are begging all of us who read and permit ourselves to be pos-
sessed by this uncanny poem to “do” something, anything; or, if we fail
2. Polkinghorne, Science and Providence: God’s Interaction with the World, 64.
Appendix. Derek Mahon’s “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” 221
touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same
time the unsympathetic reality of the world to which that nature is
constantly exposed. The form of the poem . . . is crucial to poetry’s
power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry’s
credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our conscious-
ness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around
it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of val-
ues, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as
they too are an earnest of our veritable human being.3
225
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236 Bibliography
237
238 Index of First Lines
He fumbles at your Soul (315/477), I should have been too glad, I see
175 (313/283), 96–97, 195n4
He gave away his Life (567/530), 97– It always felt to me—a wrong
98 (597/521), 30, 126–27, 174
He preached upon “Breadth” till it I tend my flowers for thee—
argued him narrow (1207/1266), (339/367), 115–16
202 It’s easy to invent a Life— (724/747),
His Bill is clasped—his Eye forsook— 174
(1102/1126), 141, 175 It was not Death, for I stood up, (510/
“Hope” is the thing with feathers— 355), 143
(254/314), 184 I would not paint—a picture—
How brittle are the Piers (1433/1459), (505/348), 193
93
How far is it to Heaven? (929/965), Just Once! O least Request! (1076/
92n1 478), 174
Just so—Jesus—raps (317/263),
I bring an unaccustomed wine 170n11
(132/126), 143
I cannot live with You (640/706), 99– Life—is what we make it— (698/727),
100, 143 92–93
I cannot meet the Spring unmoved— Like Time’s insidious wrinkle
(1051/1122), 139 (1236/1264), 138
I dreaded that first Robin, so Longing is like the Seed (1255/1298),
(348/347), 95, 118 74–75
I dwell in Possibility (657/466), 32
If anybody’s friend be dead (509/354), Mama never forgets her birds,
143 (164/130), 169
I had been hungry, all the Years More than the Grave is closed to me—
(579/439), 97n8 (1503/1532), 112
I had some things that I called mine My life closed twice before it closed—
(116/101), xiii, 26–27, 28 (1732/ 1773), 100
I heard a Fly buzz—when I died— My period had come for Prayer—
(465/591), 179 (564/525), 195
I know a place where Summer strives
(337/363), 134–35 “Nature” is what we see— (668/721),
I know that He exists (338/365), 2, 43, 145
54, 170, 193–94, 196–97 Nature—sometimes sears a Sapling—
I meant to have but modest needs (314/457), 64
(476/711), 110–11, 183
I measure every Grief I meet Obtaining but our own Extent
(561/550), 95–96 (1543/1573), 93
Immortal is an ample word Of Course—I prayed— (376/581), 198
(1205/1223), 151 Of God we ask one favor, (1601/1675),
I never lost as much but twice, 198–99
(49/39), 194 One crown that no one seeks
I never saw a Moor— (1052/800), (1735/1759), 92n1
210–11 One Crucifixion is recorded—only
I robbed the Woods— (41), 162–63 (553/ 670), 95
“Is Heaven a Physician? (1270/1269), One need not be a Chamber—to be
192–93 Haunted (670/ 407), 128
Index of First Lines 239
241
242 General Index
116; awareness of, 122, 124–25, 143– 108, 167, 173, 191, 196; deaths of
44; beauty fused with, 134–35, 145; loved ones, 137, 142–43, 151, 163,
as challenge to divine benevolence 167–69, 173, 192; depiction of God
of God, 192–93; of children, 168–69, as cruel or indifferent by, 17, 91, 111,
172–73; Dickinson’s, 167; of 170; depictions of God by, 60, 91,
Dickinson’s loved ones, 137, 151, 174–76, 182; education of, 119;
163, 167–69, 192; in Dickinson’s empathy for Jesus, 101, 181–82;
poetry, 3, 18, 33, 40, 80, 95, 96, 119, equation of flowers and people, 130,
122, 127, 130, 136–37, 143, 155, 156– 166–67, 206; equation of flowers and
59, 168–69, 175, 179, 181, 192, poems, 160–61, 183; faith and doubt
196–97, 201; as doorway to eternity, of, 171, 178–79, 201–2; faith of, 181,
169–71; equation of flowers with, 203, 210; fear of Godlessness, 176;
26, 28, 32, 99, 130, 134–35, 151–53, feeling abandoned by God, 170,
166–67; Frost as, in Dickinson 182–83; focused on crucifixion
poems, 32, 134–37, 142–43, 144, 151; rather than resurrection of Jesus, 90,
God’s approval or indifference to, 92; funeral of, 204; gardens of, 33,
175; in God’s cruel play with 113, 127, 151–53, 160–61; on God,
humans, 197; as human concern, 80–81, 91; hoping for immortality,
128; injustice of, 212; and loss, 163– 176–77; identification with Milton’s
64; as mystery, 173, 201; in nature, Eve, 138; influence of Calvinism on,
128–29; as play, 126n10, 197; rebirth 2, 13, 36–39, 60, 94–95; influence of
and, 102–3, 129–30, 134, 141–42; Darwin on, 2, 13–14, 64–66;
ruining Earthly Paradise, 151; influence of Wordsworth on, 3–4,
seasonal transitions as, 154–55; 18, 190, 220; influences on, 2–3, 14,
Spirit triumphant over, 156–57; as 31, 94, 127n11, 146, 187; on Jesus,
ultimate change, 140; Wordsworth 91–93; loss of faith of, 38–40; nature
and, 188–90, 208–9 and, 64, 73n13; nimble religious
Dembski, William, 11, 121n5 beliefs of, 38–39, 178–79, 200–203;
Dennett, Daniel C.: Breaking the Spell not abandoning hope, 176–77, 184,
by, 58; neo-atheists and, 5, 56, 60; on 191, 210; not committing to church,
science studying religion, 52 181, 199; personal God of, 40, 54,
Derrida, Jacques, on authorial 73n13; posthumous publication of
intention as “guardrail,” 212 Poems by, 40; as post-
Design. See Intelligent Design Wordsworthian Romantic, 162–63,
Determinism, Einstein’s belief in, 47– 185; prayers and, 35, 196–98;
48 purpose in writing “Apparently
Dewey, John, on compatibility of with no surprise,” 141–43, 166;
science and religion, 55 reading of, 14, 128, 182; rebellion
Dickinson, Austin (brother), 153; against religion, 109, 148–49, 211;
death of son, 168; Mabel Loomis reclusiveness of, 33, 160n1, 169, 181,
Todd and, 167; skepticism of, 150, 217; rejection of Original Sin, 2, 199;
154; surviving death, 168 relationship with God, 1, 36–38, 169,
Dickinson, Emily: on afterlife, 92n1, 183, 198–99, 202–4; relationships of,
146–48; challenging benevolence of 91–92, 167, 179; reverence for
God, 157, 182–83, 191–93; nature, 146–49, 155; Romantic
challenging God, 26–27, 33, 206; tradition and, 3, 119, 165–66, 175;
“circumference” in the work of, 75; “shattered nerves” of, 168;
compared to other authors, 160n1, skepticism about afterlife, 149–51,
162–64, 180, 185, 207–8; competing 155; skepticism about religion, 52,
with other women authors, 160n1; 179, 189; suffering and, 95–97, 185;
conception of self of, 119; death of, on suffering of Jesus, 95–98;
General Index 245
evolution with, 78–79; evolution vs., Justice, 27–28; in Book of Job, 28–29;
59; God in Arguments from Design, death lacking, 212; social, 184–85
25, 37–38; history of argument, 77;
perfection vs. imperfection in, 72; Kant, Immanuel: The Critique of
Schönborn on, 56–57, 81 Practical Reason by, 11; The Critique of
Intimations Ode (“Ode: Intimations of Pure Reason by, 10–11, 53n20; Failure
Immortality from Recollections of of All Philosophic Attempts at Theodicy
Early Childhood”). See by, 21n19; Moral Argument of, 82–
Wordsworth: Intimations Ode 83; on proof for existence of God, 82;
Iran, 19 on purposiveness without purpose,
Iraq, war in, 18–19 140; separating faith and reason, 10–
Ireland: Civil War in, 217–18, 221; 11, 50–51, 55–56; on things
Troubles in, 217, 221 corresponding to thoughts, 125
Isaacson, Walter, Einstein: His Life and Kashmir, religion in struggle over,
Universe by, 42 19n18
Islam: God of, 35–36; in wars in Keats, John: on crucifixion and
Afghanistan and Iraq, 18–19 resurrection, 103; Dickinson and, 3,
74, 162n4; “A Disused Shed in Co.
Jackson, Helen Hunt, 199 Wexford” compared to, 220; The Fall
James, William, on compatibility of of Hyperion by, 206; on life as a “vale
science and religion, 55 of Soul-making,” 103; “Ode to
Jarrell, Randall, 101n11 Melancholy” by, 115; “Ode to
Jesus: abandoned by God, 195; Psyche” by, 115; on opening to love,
atoning for our sins, 102–3; 115; on Paradise, 145–46; “To
conquering death, 102–3; Autumn” by, 154
crucifixion and resurrection of, 73– Kempis, Thomas à, Imitation of Christ
74, 92, 95–98, 101, 200; crucifixion by, 94
and resurrection of, as resolution of Khayyám, Omar, Rubáiyát of, 157–58
suffering, 35, 87, 90; Dickinson on, Kirkby, Joan, on Dickinson and
91–93; Dickinson’s empathy for, 91, Darwin, 14n13, 65
101, 181–82; Dickinson’s Kitzmuller v. Dover, 6–7
relationship with, 2, 194; divinity Krauthammer, Charles, on evolution
vs. humanity of, 93; evil conquered and religion, 12–13
by, 71; love as message of, 99; Kristof, Nicholas, “Torture by Worms”
resurrection of, 92, 97–98, 149–50; by, 62, 86–87
as self-revelation of God, 89;
suffering of, 91, 95, 161; Words- Leibniz, G. W., on “theodicy,” 1, 72
worth less interested in than Lemaître, Georges-Henri, proposer of
Dickinson, 189 Big Bang Theory, 55
Job, Book of: frost in, 2, 3, 89, 109, 111, Life affirming: in Dickinson poems,
141, 156, 198; God’s frigidity in, 129; 115–16; Nietzsche on, 92n2, 205–6
justice in, 28–29; suffering in, 28–30 Lifton, Robert Jay, 18n17
John, gospel of, 11, 28, 89 Lilla, Mark, on Great Separation, 8–9
John Paul II, Pope, acceptance of Lord, Otis Phillips: death of, 167;
evolution, 63–64, 67–68 Dickinson’s correspondence with,
Johnson, Phillip, 11 14, 38, 67, 179
Johnson, Thomas H., 27, 74 Love: Dickinson and, 98–100, 167–68;
John Templeton Foundation, survey God’s, 97–99, 189, 192
on purpose of universe by, 7 Lundin, Roger: on Dickinsonian
Jones, John E., III, 6 religious beliefs, 181; on
250 General Index
and, 27–28, 31, 41, 46; God and O’Connell, William Henry Cardinal,
cruelty of, 110–12, 129, 175; God 49
found in secrets of, 48; as God’s Onfray, Michel, on Kant, 10n9
creation, 40; God’s involvement in, Original Sin, Dickinson rejecting, 2,
17, 42–43, 73n13, 83–84, 125; heaven 199
fused with, 144–50; humans and,
122, 124, 128–29; imperfection of, 72; Pakistan, 19
laws of, 46, 51; mystery in, 123–24; Paley, William, Natural Theology by, 81
neutrality of, 34, 207; poems Pantheism, 44–45, 49
equated with flowers, 160–62; Parini, Jay, on Frost’s poems, 112n1
purpose in, 81–84, 122, 140; rebirth Pascal, Blaise: on human misery
in, 134; seasonal transitions in, 154– without the biblical God, 44; Pensées
55, 162; violence in, 25, 34, 64, 118; by, 124
Wordsworth on, 162–63; worship of, Pastoral elegies: “Apparently with no
155 surprise” as variation on, 31;
Neo-atheists, 5; criticisms of, 16n16, Milton’s, 32
56; defenses of God in response to, Pater, Walter: on Wordsworth’s
16–17, 62; distinctions among, 60; elevation of the insignificant, 32,
popularity of books by, 58 165, 222
Newton, Benjamin Franklin: death of, Paul, Saint, 90, 127, 220; on crucifixion
188–89; mentor to Dickinson, 3, 188, and resurrection as resolution of
189 suffering, 87; Dickinson’s
Newton, Isaac, 88; on creation, 76–77; subversive echoings of, 149, 150,
God of, 78; Schönborn on, 76–77; 191; perpetrating fraud on
Wordsworth on, 88 believers, 149–50
Nietzsche, Friedrich: on affirmation of Paul, Saint, Epistles of: Corinthians,
life, 205–6; The Antichrist by, 92n2, 99, 149, 150, 219; Romans, 73–74, 75,
213; on cycles, 140; Daybreak by, 76, 206, 215, 219; Timothy, 191
102n12; on death of God, 200; Pauli, Wolfgang, 46
Dickinson compared to, 38; On the Peacocke, Arthur, rejecting split of
Genealogy of Morals by, 101n10, 212– science and religion, 55
13; influence of, 2, 175; influences Perfection, of God vs. nature, 72
on, 43, 180–81; interpretation of, Perse, Saint-John, conversation with
214n10; on loss, 164; on loss of faith, Einstein, 53
38, 92, 176; The Will to Power by, Perspectivism, 212–14
212–13 Phelps, Susan D., 137n3
Niles, Thomas, 40 Pius XII, Pope, Humani Generis by, 63–
Norcross, Frances (cousin), 169, 172 64
Norcross, Lavinia (aunt), 169 Planck, Max, 46
Norcross, Louisa (cousin), 169, 172 Plantinga, Alvin, rejecting split of
Norton, Charles Eliot, 158 science and religion, 55
Nuclear weapons, and religious Plato: Timaeus by, 77, 83–84
extremism, 18–19 Play, cruelty in, 126–27, 197
Poems: authorial intention in, 212–14;
Oberhaus, Dorothy Huff: on conflicting interpretation of, 208–9;
Dickinson’s religious beliefs, 39, 94– depth of emotions from, 164–65;
95; Emily Dickinson’s Fascicles by, 39 equated by Dickinson with flowers,
Objectivity: engagement vs., 18; 160–62; limitations to interpretation
multiperspectivism approximating, of, 211–12; music in, 221–22;
213; of nature, 26, 34 personal beliefs influencing
252 General Index
interpretation of, 207, 209–10; 55–56; limitations of, 178, 203; pure
perspective in interpretation of, vs. practical, 10–11. See also Science
212–13 Rees, Martin, critical of Schönborn’s
Politics: danger of religious extremism “Finding Design in Nature,” 69n10
in, 18–20; influence of religion in, 8– Relativists, 46
9; science vs. religion in, 15–16 Relativity, general theory of,
Polkinghorne, J. C.: Quantum Physics reconciled with quantum
and Theology by, 55–56; rejecting mechanics, 61n5
split of science and religion, 55–56; Religion: atheists seeing allure of, 61–
Science and Providence by, 220; on 62; belief and skepticism in poetry
suffering, 93, 220 of Robert Frost, 112n1; belief as
Pollak, Vivian R., Emily Dickinson: The mystery, 199–200; believers cheated
Anxiety of Genre by, 39 by, 149–50; challenges to Christian
Pontifical Colloquium on Creation beliefs, 37–38, 157–58; criticisms of,
and Evolution, 76–77 49n12, 66–67; current debate in
Pope, Alexander, 88; An Essay on Man America over, 1, 58–60; danger of
by, 28, 182, 187; couplet on Newton, absolutism in, 18–19; defenses of,
88 16–17, 49n12, 157–58; Dickinson not
Pound, Ezra, Hell Cantos by, 177 committing to, 192–93, 199, 202, 210;
Power, God’s, 29, 205 Dickinson rejecting church in favor
Prayers: answered and unanswered, of nature, 148–49; Dickinson’s
59, 194–97; Dickinson’s, 196–97, 199; background of, 94, 210; Dickinson’s
Dickinson’s parodies of, 197–98 nimble beliefs, 200–203; Dickinson’s
Price, Reynolds, Letter to a Man in the occasional certitude in, 210–11;
Fire by, 173n14 Dickinson’s rebellion against, 211;
Problem of Suffering. See Suffering, Dickinson’s rejection of certitude in,
Problem of 202, 204; Dickinson’s skepticism
Public vs. private, in Dickinson’s about, 100, 179; Dickinson’s tension
poetry, 32–33 between belief and doubt, 178–79;
Puritanism: Calvinism descended Dickinson’s unwillingness to make
from, 93–94; on God as public confession of faith, 179, 181;
unknowable, 54; humans as worms effects of beliefs on responses to
in, 155–56 poetry, 177–78; effects on responses
Purpose: of creation, 35; God’s, 36, to “Apparently with no surprise,”
184, 203; lack of, 44, 112, 119–20, 33–34, 205, 207, 209–10; efforts to
122, 140; as mystery, 89, 203; in reconcile science and, 66n9, 69;
nature, 81, 83, 122, 140; in universe, Einstein questioned about beliefs,
7–8, 34, 140–41. See also Meaning 42, 48–50; evolution’s relation to,
12–13; God vs. Jesus in, 92;
Quantum theory: Einstein on, 46–47, influence on Dickinson’s poetry, 39–
77n2; relativity and, 61n5 40, 94–99, 154–55, 181; Kantian split
of science and, 10–11, 50–51, 55–56;
Realism, vs. Romanticism, 175 in politics and wars, 8–9, 15–16, 18–
Reality: independent of our 19, 19n18; prevalence of faith in
observation, 46; relation of things U.S., 8, 36, 40, 58; rejection of, 43,
and thoughts, 125. See also Kant 66–67; science and, 11–12, 15–16,
Reason: faith and, 16, 178; faith as 50–52, 55; Wordsworth’s changing
safer than, 180–81, 204; faith in, 19– beliefs in, 183–84, 188n12, 189, 193.
20; Kant splitting from faith, 10–11, See also Faith; God
General Index 253
Religious impulse, positive aspects of, 11; on Mother Teresa, 196; on Pope
9 John Paul II’s acceptance of
Rizzo, Patricia Thompson, “The evolution, 63–64, 67–68; reactions to
Elegiac Modes of Emily Dickinson” “Finding Design in Nature” by,
by, 172 49n12, 62, 68–71; “Reasonable
Roethke, Theodore, “greenhouse Science, Reasonable Faith” by, 5–6,
poems” by, 74 76–78, 81, 83; on suffering, 87, 102;
Romantic tradition: British vs. “Suffering in a World Guided by
American, 3; Dickinson and, 3, God” by, 70, 78–79, 84, 87
175; differences of Dickinson Schopenhauer, Arthur: on affirmation
from, 165–66, 185–86; on Earthly of life, 92n2; on cruelty in nature,
Paradise, 145; gap between 71, 78–79; rejection of Christianity,
humans and nature and, 123; 92
gender in, 3; natural Schreiner, Wolfgang, on chaos in
supernaturalism in, 144; new creation, 70, 72
secularity vs., 119; optimism of, 37, Science: compatibility vs. antagonism
185–86; post-Wordsworthian, 185; between religion and, 11–12, 50–52,
Providence and, 184–85; Realism 55, 65n8; detachment from, 207;
vs., 175; Wordsworth in, 165 Dickinson torn between faith vs.,
Root, Abiah, 150–51; Dickinson’s 175; Dickinson’s acumen in, 160–61;
correspondence with, 167, 179–80 efforts to reconcile religion and, 50,
Rossetti, Christina, on Dickinson’s 53, 66n9, 69; Einstein trying to
“remarkable” but “irreligious” reconcile with personal God, 50, 53;
poems, 40, 203 Einstein’s inspired by “faith,” 50;
Roughgarden, Joan, Evolution and God and, 50, 53, 55–56; Kantian split
Christian Faith by, 65n8 from religion, 10–11, 50–51, 55–56;
Rowling, J. K., Harry Potter series by, limitations of, 6–7; monotheistic
58n1 conclusion based on, 77; polarization
Ruse, Michael, on compatibility of of religion and, 15–16. See also
science and faith, 65n8 Reason
Scientists: deferring to theologians, 52;
Sacrifice: crucifixion as, 97–98; in history of being secular, 50; reaction
natural cycles, 126n10 to defense of theism, 49n12;
Schneider, Reinhold, on cruelty of religious faith among, 8, 47–48, 53
nature, 71–72, 78 Self: autonomous, 119–20; Dickinson
Schönborn, Christoph Cardinal: on, 204; in nature, 73–74
becoming Catholic spokesman on Sexuality: in Blake’s “The Sick Rose,”
creation and evolution, 62–63; 114; in Dickinson’s poems, 99, 138;
Catechism of the Catholic Church by, in interpretations of “Apparently
68, 71; on challenges in theory of with no surprise,” 108, 113, 135
designed universe, 88–90; Chance or Shakespeare: Dickinson alluding to,
Purpose: Creation, Evolution, and a 172, 182; King Lear by, 30–31, 126;
Rational Faith by, 56–57, 70, 72, 89, Sonnet 94 by, 139
102; on crucifixion and resurrection Sharpton, Al, Hitchens debating, 60
of Jesus, 73–74; “Finding Design in “Shaw,” in Dickinson’s “I had some
Nature” by, 9–10, 63–64, 67–68; things that I called mine,” 27
looking for scientific proof of Shaw, Lemuel, 27n1
Intelligent Design, 81; merging Shelley, Percy Bysshe: Dickinson and,
Kantian pure and practical reason, 128, 162n4; “Ode to the West Wind”
254 General Index
195–96; Schönborn on, 196; Taylor 65; death of, 167; Dickinson drawn
on, 195 to, 210; visit to Dickinson, 98
Tertullian, On Spectacles by, 101n10 Waggoner, Hyatt, on Dickinson
Theodicy, 1; Kant on, 21n19; Steiner holding different points of view, 211
on, 21n19; Wolosky on, 32 Wallace, Alfred Russel: on
Thomas Aquinas, Saint: arguments for compatibility of creation and
existence of God, 83–84; Summa evolution, 64–65; Natural Selection:
Theologica by, 77, 83, 214 What It Cannot Do by, 65
Thoreau, Henry David, 94 Warren, Rick: debating Sam Harris on
Thought: and gap between humans existence of God, 59
and nature, 122–24; as human state, Weinberg, Steven: The First Three
118–19. See also Reason Minutes by, 84; on suffering and the
Todd, Mabel Loomis, 160, 167 existence of God, 84–85, 206–7
Transcendentalists, 166, 185 Weisbuch, Robert, on Dickinson’s
Twain, Mark, quarrel with God, 158 “One Crucifixion is recorded—
only,” 95
Uncertainty principle (Heisenberg), White, Fred, on Dickinson’s fear of
Einstein’s rejection of, 46 God’s absence, 193–94
Unified field theory, Einstein’s search Whitman, Walt, Dickinson compared
for, 61 to, 74
Unitarians, 184–85 Whitney, Maria, Dickinson’s
United States: debate over religion in, correspondence with, 153–54
1, 58–59; popularity of books by Wickedness. See Evil
neo-atheists in, 58; prevalence of Wilberforce, Samuel, vs. Huxley, 66n9
religious belief in, 8, 36, 40, 58; wars Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, 186; on
in Afghanistan and Iraq by, 18–19 Dickinson’s empathy with crucified
Universe: complexity as argument for Jesus, 101; on Dickinson’s religious
Design, 121; design as proof of beliefs, 39, 211; Emily Dickinson by,
God’s existence, 177–78; goodness 39; on God’s frigidity, 129
of, 110; laws of, 44, 46, 48, 53–54, 61; Wolosky, Shira: on Dickinson’s
as mystery, 203; perfection of, 73; religious beliefs, 39, 94–95; Emily
purpose in, 7–8, 34, 119–20, 140–41 Dickinson: The Voice of War by, 39; on
influence of Calvinism, 93; on
Veblen, Oscar, 54 theodicy in literature, 32
Violence: Allah sanctioning, 35–36; in Wordsworth, Catherine (poet’s
“Apparently with no surprise,” daughter), 189
115–16; in Blake’s “The Sick Rose,” Wordsworth, Dorothy (poet’s sister),
114–15; and cruelty in nature, 78–80, 146
84, 87–88; Dickinson attributing to Wordsworth, John (poet’s brother),
sun, 132–34; God allowing, 72; death at sea and religious impact on
man’s proclivity to, 19–20; in poet, 188–90
nature, 25, 64, 118, 128; as play, Wordsworth, Thomas (poet’s son),
126n10; as theological problem, 1, death of, 189
10 Wordsworth, William, 128; benevolent
Virgil, the “tears in things,” in The God of, 120–21, 183–84;
Aeneid, 166, 220 botanical/human analogies by, 130;
Voltaire, François-Marie, Candide by, changing religious beliefs of, 183–
72 84, 188n12, 189, 193; conception of
self of, 119; on creative gleam, 162;
Wadsworth, Charles, 98, 165; approval deaths of loved ones, 188–90;
of Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode, Dickinson and, 3–4, 18, 182, 190;
256 General Index
Dickinson compared to, 162–64, “Tintern Abbey” by, 44–45, 48, 124,
207–8; “Elegiac Stanzas” by, 189–90, 151n9, 187
219–20; Emerson’s respect for, 165;
The Excursion by, 147, 183–84, 186– Yeats, W. B., 20, 217; A Full Moon in
87, 189, 193; focus on small and March by, 126n10; Irish Civil War
commonplace, 164–66, 222; on and, 126n10, 221; Meditations in Time
heaven, 145–46; “I wandered lonely of Civil War by, 126n10; “Nineteen
as a cloud” by, 146; influence of, 3– Hundred and Nineteen” by, 20,
4, 183–88, 190; Intimations Ode by, 169–70; “Prayer for My Daughter”
163–65, 172, 173n14, 222–23; on by, 141; The Resurrection by, 126n10;
nature, 43, 124; “Nutting” by, 162– “The Second Coming” by, 20; “A
63; Peter Bell by, 147; Poetical Works Stare’s Nest by My Window” by,
by, 3–4; on poets, 185–86; “Preface” 221; “Two Songs” by, 126n10; on
to Lyrical Ballads by, 186; The Prelude violence and death as play, 126n10
by, 20, 156, 162; “Prospectus” to The
Recluse by, 124; sister’s Zapedowska, Magdalena, “Wrestling
contributions to, 146n4; “A Slumber with Silence” by, 37, 158, 168n10
did my spirit seal” by, 208–9, 211;