Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

the passions beyond reason. Edwards, in his sermon, “Sinners in the Handsof an Angry God,” did not hesitate to proclaim that the “God that holds youover the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insectover the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.” 4 In the other polarityof the mid-eighteenth century, Edwards defended the Calvinist doctrine ofpredestination against the “insidious” but irresistibly spreading Arminiandoctrine of free will. (Jacobus Arminias was a Dutch minister and divinityprofessor in Leyden around 1600.)As the Great Awakening subsided by the 1750s, the settlers wereconsumed with their struggles for economic, legal, and political independence.One could say that the essential literary energy of the nation fightingto be born was distilled into two documents, The Declaration of Independence,July 4, 1776, and the Constitution, 1789. One articulated the spirit ofthe new nation; one articulated the form of the new nation. It is as thoughthe political thinkers of the time worked with their rational minds and theirimaginations, in accord with each other, with the spirit of the English language,and with the being of the new nation, in a mighty labor to fashion aconceptual body that would allow the new nation to form and to grow ina balanced way, honoring both individual and democratic mass, workingtoward executive, legislative, and judicial interaction, restraint, and support.At this time in world history, the great ideals of the French Revolution,“Libertè, Egalitè, Fraternitè,” exploded into terrorizing bloodshed,begetting the ideals’ opposite, Emperor Napoleon, within ten years. Onehas to imagine the quality of concentration, imagination, and clear thinkingthat allowed a number of individuals in this raw, uncultured frontiernation to find the words to embody the ideas that would allow them to livehealthily in what has become the longest enduring democracy in worldhistory. Not many poems, stories, plays, novels have been written duringlabor. What a great, future-engendering labor that was. Nevertheless, longafter geographical and religious independence, it was to be a whole lifetimeafter the declaration of economic, legal, and political independence, a wholelifetime later, that the new United States of America finally called for, andbegan to articulate, artistic independence.Before paying attention to that call for literary independence, let usfirst become aware of the American frame of mind in relation to languagein the late 1700s and early 1800s. The Declaration of Independence and theConstitution, perhaps two of the best offerings of the age, were fashionedduring the height of the Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment. In orderto understand the mind being born, we must understand the mind of the150