December 25, 2006

Dear Colleague:

    The three chapters of Andrew Delbanco's Massey lectures at Harvard are God, Nation, and Self. Neat meta-narratives, aren't they? Of course, meta-narratives are no longer fashionable, and Delbanco is fully aware of that. The last lecture on Self demonstrates, in fact, what it might be like when one no longer has one story to tell, when the one story one does attempt to tell collapses into the incoherence of competing voices, rather like the din of a cocktail party.

    The three narratives cover roughly (1) the Puritan period, lasting some two hundred years; (2) the period when the idea of sacred union and, later, civil religion, came into existence, lasting some one hundred and fifty years; and (3) our period, which began in the 1960s. Each period is flavored by melancholy which, in the formulation of Alexis de Tocqueville, is a consequence of diminishing hope. Hope--that starry-eyed expectation that something good will come out of a venture--is more ingrained in Americans than perhaps in any other people. Hence, a failing of hope, a souring of expectation, a surge in melancholy, is also more ingrained.

    Calvin's doctrine of sin burdened the Puritans. Baptism was never a guarantee of salvation. Feeling saved, far from meaning that one was saved, might be the surest sign of damnation. (What will the born-again Christians of our time think of that?) The intensity of one's feelings said nothing about one's spiritual condition. In the end, the only thing that mattered, the only way to overcome one's imprisonment in self-love and in the melancholy that ensued was to love God and other persons. "Go public," was a common advice. Be "instruments of publique good in the place where they live," said John Cotton (1584-1642). But how narrow was the Puritan notion of public--one that excluded women in many spheres. And how broad was their notion of "where they live"--one that took no account of where the Indians lived.

    Abraham Lincoln was an archetypal figure of the second period--Nation. He seemed to have been afflicted with chronic melancholy. "Melancholy dripped from him as he walked," said his friend Billy Herndon. The idea of America as a sacred union was sacred to Lincoln, but how could it be sacred, even decent, when the institution of slavery was written into the Constitution itself? A great hope was blighted by this core evil, and a recurrent drama of American history has been the struggle to force this core evil into the light of day. The Puritans were on guard against hypocrisy. Won't the followers of Enlightenment be equally on guard? Apparently not. Slaves labored in the field right before Jefferson's eyes, yet it was not of them, but of white farmers, that he used the words, "those that labor on the earth are the chosen people of God." Hypocrisy was one way to deal with melancholy. Another was the acquisition of wealth. The third--Lincoln's way and one that America came to adopt in the second period--was to transform a weakened Christian symbolism into the symbol of a redeemed and redeeming nation.

    The third period sees a consolidation of the rights that women and African-Americans have won earlier, and an extension of rights to groups that were formerly excluded such as the handicapped and homosexuals. Not, however, without back-sliding, as when an American president urged that the second-class citizenship of homosexuals be written into the Constitution. Such curtailment of hope, such mean spiritedness, makes for melancholy. Another factor, unique to our time, that contributes to melancholy is a proud selfishness, a narrowing of loyalty to family, kin, and ethnic group (Delbanco, The Real American Dream, 1998).

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu