The “Western religious imagination,” like the “West” itself—as an entity separate and distinct from the Afro-Eurasian oikumene—is a “modern” (i.e., post-Medieval) invention. Romanticism, a product of Protestant Europe, offered a modern interpretation of the Western religious imagination that has found its way—with much lost in translation—into religious and political movements and discourse in “West” and “East” alike.
In the 18th and 19th centuries CE, Romantic Orientalism looked “East” in a way that was continuous with its critical stance towards the European Enlightenment. 19th century Romantic Orientalism in the American grain (e.g., that of the New England Transcendentalists and fellow travelers of the “American Renaissance”) assumed a similar posture towards “East” and “West” but appealed to “Eastern enlightenment” as a corrective to the prevailing forms of American Protestant religiosity. Paul Zweig summarizes the point this way:
The nineteenth century transposed the religious
quest for salvation into a variety of secular idioms. Emerson’s poet, as the “complete man,” was also the saved man, delivered from partialness and dependency, Emerson’s version of original sin. This was Whitman’s idea, too. It is worth noting that Leaves of Grass was written during one of America’s periodic religious revivals. In a personal note, Whitman referred to his book as a “New Bible”….
Zweig, Walt Whitman (1984), pp. 12-13. See also M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (1971).
For Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, and others of the American Renaissance, Romantic Orientalism became a means of creating a uniquely American (and, at the same instant, cosmopolitan) alternative to what they experienced as the majoritarian view of Christianity. Literary critic (and life-long student of Romanticism) Harold Bloom calls this majoritarian view the “American Religion”—where the Divinity is subsumed in the figure of Jesus Christ who loves each and every American individually and with whom each and every American can have a personal relationship and, thereby, enter the charmed circle of grace. This Jesus in turn underwrites American understandings of democracy, capitalism, and freedom (these terms are NOT synonymous, though they are often used interchangeably in informal conversation). In this religion, American government and way of life are presumed to be Divinely sanctioned and the “Myth of American Exceptionalism” receives religious justification. Contemporary critics of this ideology continue to draw upon the writers of the “American Renaissance” for inspiration. See also Bloom, The American Religion (1992) and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005).
In an effort to invigorate their efforts to de-stabilize the “American religion” and what they came to regard as its reductively economic view of the individual and God (as Bloom puts it, slightly tongue-in-cheek, the God of the American religion has been transfigured over time into “Jesus Christ, CEO”), the American Romantics appealed to “Asian religions” (Islam included among them). Many found in the Persian poetry produced by Muslims from 1050 CE to 1600 CE (Emerson’s dates) an expansive view of the Divine—at once imminent and yet always beyond reach—a view consonant with Romantic notions of life as a visionary quest (or, as in the work of world historian Marshall Hodgson, religion as an imaginative [ad]venture).
Hodgson chose one of the Romantics’ “Asian religions,” Islam, to be the subject of an epic study. He brought to this study an appreciation for the American Romantic’s expansive visionary religion (perhaps most forcefully articulated in Emerson’s writings and in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass) tempered by sobering evidence gathered in historical research. For Hodgson, history showed that Muslims were/are as culturally and religiously creative as any human beings, but they face challenges unique to the modern period; nevertheless, despite his deep sympathies, he felt that the jury is still out as to whether Islam (or, indeed, any religious tradition), in its institutional or presently instantiated form, has the wherewithal to meet those challenges. Perhaps my favorite line in all of Hodgson:
But if there are Muslims whose confidence in God Himself is strong enough so that they dare risk everything, even community prestige or solidarity, for the sake of truth, then for such Muslims, facing historical realities and coming to terms with even the most painful of them is encouraged by the Islamic tradition itself. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Volume 3, pp. 437-438.
In the Prophet Muhammad, the historian found an exemplar of three virtues which, he felt, would ensure the continuing vitality of the tradition into the future, if modern Muslims cultivated them: magnanimity, imaginative piety, and personal courage. One might compare here S. H. Nasr’s essay “The Prophet and Prophetic Religion” (1967). Hodgson’s appreciation of Islam is less idiosyncratic than that of the “American Renaissance” writers but, so far, it has had a negligible impact upon its American audience.
In my own experience with and among Muslims, I have found no shortage of magnanimity and personal courage. But the Romantic emphasis upon imaginative piety is as underdeveloped among Muslims today and—indeed, among all people of faith—as it was when Hodgson wrote four decades ago. If anything, the last three decades have witnessed the ascent among people of faith of an imaginatively impoverished textual literalism and exclusionary communalism. The results of the neglect of this aspect of the Romantic genius are to be seen everywhere and will no doubt remain with us for generations to come.
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