"Fitted to receive the word of God": emotions and scientific naturalism in the Religious Revivals of the 1830s

Charles Grandison Finney render free of accessed his series of weekly discourses on Revivals of Religion that he delivered in fresh York in 1835 by asserting that, employing the "laws of nature," a religious revival could be induced among a clump of people with the same certainty as individual might cultivate a crop of grain. As the foremost figure in a wave of early nineteenth-century religious revivals commonly referr to as the next to the first Great Awakening, Finney played a lock opener role in formalizing both the theology and the tactics of the motion Like many other social reformers and religious revivalists of the day, Finney engageed the language of "science" to support his views. Likewise, many competitors of this new revival diction particularly Hosea Faxon Ballou, utilized this language of scientific naturalism to support their views. one as well as the other Finney and Ballou provide a means of gaining greater insight into what part emotions played in the broad shift in American tillage toward viewing human beings as part of the natural world, and thus explain their behavior according to its laws. Accordingly, this article situates the close attention of conceptual frameworks within the connection of specific people, institutions, and occurrences examining the particular ways in which different collections appropriated the notion that natural laws dictated moral norms and social practices. similar a method of inquiry allows single to avoid the extremes of sweeping abstractions about revivals, through se, on the one hand, and antiquarian specificity, upon the other.

by dint of studying specific appropriations of scientific naturalism single can arrive at two valuable conclusions. First, building upon the historical scholarship that has demonstrated that antebellum Americans did not consider science and religion to be in opposition, single can demonstrate that emotions formed a lock opener component of both spiritual and scientific thinking. This claim calls into question many of the oppositions between rational and affective faculties, between "head" and "heart," that have guided plenteous of the social scientific analysis of the dynamic between science and religion. Secondly the dynamics of nineteenth-century debates upon the interplay of emotions and scientific naturalism can shed a certain quantity of light on the present-day renaissance of interest among social scientists in a variety of fields in the character of emotions. Then, as now, the variety of positions regarding the character of emotions is due to the various appropriations of the language of affect and of naturalism, and not to be paid to any fundamental opposition between them.

More than twenty years of fine scholarship has established that in the half hundred before the Civil War, learned Americans accompanyed to view scientific inquiry and scriptural doctrine as mutually reinforcing--they were sum of two units aspects of the same universal verity (1) To date, however, the principal make subordinates of studies of antebellum science and religion have usually been theologians, scientists, philosophers, and others who were typically based in bodys and seminaries, and who carried on the outside their discussions in relatively highbrow periodicals and publications. through expanding our vision of the two science and religion beyond learned debates, we can divest of covering some of the ways in which these more far-ranging cultural dialogues provided many of the conceptual lineaments for scholarly arguments. Chief among these is the displacement of intellect by means of the affections as the central constituent of human nature, a shift typically coupl with the extension of "scientific" methodology to managing human affairs that shifted the means of self-restraint from the will to an environmental fashioning of emotions.

Charles Finney and the Revivalist pursuit of Naturalism

Although Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875) was born in Connecticut, in 1794 his large farming family joined in the westward migration that followed the American Revolution. As a effect he spent most of his youth in of recent origin York's Oneida County. Like many young men of middling status in the early republic, Finney tried his hand at several different careers. Initially preparing to attend association he turned instead to teaching institute in New Jersey. After solitary two years in this endeavor, he go [i]or[/i] come backed to New York, where he apprenticed to a local justice in preparation for admittance to the bar. In 1821 at age twenty-nine, and near the extreme point of his legal studies, he experienced a religious conversion and make go rounded to the ministry, apprenticing with a Presbyterian minister and becoming ordained in 1824 allowing he would later become an instructor, and then president, at Oberlin guild in Ohio, it was Finney's activities in the decade following his ordination that gained him national consider (2)

Finney came of age in an era in which Americans were struggling to maintain a faculty of perception of individual moral responsibility smooth as their understanding of human nature increasingly emphasized the determining character of the cultural and material environment in shaping individual character. At the extreme point of the eighteenth century, individual finds theologians, moral philosophers, and others striving to reconcile the triangular relationship between naturalism, at liberty will, and divine sovereignty that increasingly present the appearanceed to threaten the idea of self-govern individuals (and, by the agency of extension, community). Their efforts eventually supported an emphasis on emotions as the principal constituent of human moral agency. No longer subordinate to rational intellect, emotive dispositions were taken to be a primary determinant of a person's actions. Emotive dispositions were shaped by the agency of one's body and its environment. The influence of a person's passions, material substance and environment need not undermine either self-determination or moral accountability, however, since individual was responsible for arranging their have environment and behavior so as to cultivate virtuous dispositions. similar a view of human nature provided the conceptual foundations for the era's many efforts at institutional (penitentiaries, asylums, poor houses, schools) and individual (diet, dres exercise) reform. (3)