Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

colonies. In the Boston area one of the dominant influences, streams, becamethe Unitarians in the 1700s. Believing in one God, denying the divinity ofChrist, oriented toward social deeds, inspired by John Locke, the Unitariansfelt the Calvinist emphasis on the sinfulness of man to be inconsistent withreason. Eventually the Unitarians split from the Presbyterians in 1805, and,led by Rev. William Ellery Channing, formed their own American UnitarianAssociation in 1825. The scope of this article does not include attention to theCatholic culture of Maryland, because it does not seem to have contributedin any primary way to the altering American mind which gave birth finallyto an American literature in these early centuries.It is fair to characterize the general American theological mind ofthe turn of the century as earnest, thoughtful, rational, relatively literal inrelation to the Bible, cautiously extending beyond reason at the most to allegory,in which one image in the Bible or in nature, serves as a type for onespiritual truth. A good example of this frame of mind appears in the recentnovel, Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier, portraying the attitude of a CivilWar wife toward nature and God. Ada is venturing through the Blue RidgeMountains; her husband Monroe has been away in the war for several years.After a time they crossed a black creek, stepping with care on thedry backs of humped stones. Ada looked at the way the creek wasseizing up with a thin rim of bright ice along its banks and aroundrocks and fallen trees and nubbles of moss, anything that hinderedthe flow. In the center of the creek, though, the fast water rippedalong as always.Where it ran shallower and slower, then, were the places proneto freezing. Monroe would have made a lesson of such a thing, Adathought. He would have said that the match of that creek’s partswould be in a person’s life, what God intended it to be the type of.All God’s works but elaborate analogy. Every bright image in the visibleworld only a shadow of a divine thing, so that earth and heaven,low and high, strangely agreed in form and meaning because theywere in fact congruent.Monroe had a book wherein you could look up the types. Therose—its thorns and its blossom—a type of the difficult and dangerouspath to spiritual awakening. The baby come wailing to theworld in pain and blood—a type of our miserable earthly lives, soconsumed with violence. The crow—its blackness, its outlaw nature,its tendency to feast on carrion—a type of the dark forces that waitto overtake man’s soul.152