American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
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the ‘‘personal and spiritual needs of people’’ were paramount, and he found himself moving away from ‘‘the typical Calvinist and Reform Church position’’ in order to appeal to his American parishioners. Through this process he discovered that he preferred the latter; he was ‘‘interested in the personal problems of people’’ and liked relating to them in more intimate terms.12 In embracing a distinctly American and liberal Protestant homiletics, Muste departed from the tradition in which he had been raised and from what he was learning at New Brunswick.
Muste’s evolving views on homiletics relates to the most important advantage of attending New Brunswick Theological Seminary: its location in the New York metropolitan area, which gave him access to the theological and philosophical currents and controversies of the early twentieth century. In fact, it was exposure to American ministers in Manhattan that provided him with a model for the personal style of preaching he practiced in Albany.13 Most crucially, he was able to take advantage of an agreement between the seminary and New York University and Columbia University that allowed students in high standing to pursue postgraduate degrees for free. Interested in philosophy, Muste traveled two hours by train once or twice weekly to take graduate courses at New York University and, later, Columbia in an effort to fill his ‘‘hunger’’ for knowledge.14
Muste began taking classes in the philosophy department at Columbia University at an exciting time. Since being hired in 1902, Nicholas Murray Butler, the ambitious president of the university, focused on shifting its curriculum away from undergraduate education and the classics to graduate and professional education. As part of this modernizing effort, Butler had recently hired John Dewey.15 The pragmatist joined a faculty of ‘‘friendly critics,’’ philosophers of diverse schools who together offered a well-rounded curriculum. The head of the department was F. J. E. Woodbridge; the other members of the faculty were Felix Adler, William P. Montague, and Wendell T. Bush. In later years, Dewey’s pragmatism would exercise a tremendous influence on Muste’s thought and politics. At this point, however, it was Woodbridge who made ‘‘the deepest impression.’’ Like Dewey, Woodbridge espoused naturalism, a distinctly modern approach to philosophical problems that draws upon the methods of the empirical sciences. However, rather than embrace the democratic creed of pragmatism in which he saw traces of idealism, Woodbridge turned back to Aristotle and classical philosophy. Woodbridge thus provided the young Calvinist Muste an entrée into modern thought without completely challenging his worldview. As Muste commented of Woodbridge’s appeal, ‘‘I was definitely a Platonist. This tied in with my Calvinism.’’16
Even so, Muste’s exposure to naturalism and pragmatism subtly shifted his Calvinist worldview. William James’s ideas about religion particularly affected him.17 In Varieties of Religious Experience and his other writings, as well as at several public lectures Muste attended, James defended religious belief against the ‘‘intimidation’’ of positivistic science and, indeed, suggested that religion and science could be reconciled.18 He pointed out that science, like religion, was a human creation; personal inclination and social context shaped scientific knowledge, making it no more ‘‘true’’ than other truth claims. And he called upon science to evaluate religious belief using the scientific method of inquiry in which experience and results determine the truth of a hypothesis. Based on this criteria, James insisted, religious belief was as real as empirical science because it could ‘‘make a genuine difference in our moral life.’’ He made the same demand upon religion, dismissing tradition and doctrine as paths to truth, and emphasizing the ‘‘fruits’’ and consequences of beliefs. James was uninterested in ‘‘secondhand religious life’’ because it was based on tradition, not experience, and he drew his readers’ attention to the mystical tradition of spiritual inwardness and direct experience with the divine.19
James pointed Muste toward a more modern religiosity and sensibility. Unlike his contemporaries, and certainly unlike his professors and peers at New Brunswick Theological Seminary, James defined religion broadly and inclusively. Religion was ‘‘the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.’’20 Indeed, James must be identified ‘‘with the Christian ‘modernism’ of his milieu, according to which religion was a fine thing but specific theological doctrines were felt to be something of a distraction.’’21 The impact on Muste was subtle yet dramatic. As he recalled, Varieties of Religious Experience ‘‘opened up to me a great variety of approaches to life and in that way . . . laid the groundwork for wrestling with . . . the theology [with which] I was brought up.’’22 In particular, James’s stress on experience over form, and his celebration of spiritual inwardness and mysticism, suggested the possibilities of a religious life stripped of theology and the church.
James further bequeathed to Muste the notion that it was possible to be both an idealist and a realist. Throughout Muste’s long career, the ideal of ‘‘human brotherhood’’ and the imperative to bring it about on earth, drove his activism, whether that ideal was rooted in Christianity or socialism (or both). Still, drawing upon pragmatic theory, he insisted that ideals, to be meaningful, had to be grounded in practical analysis and activity. ‘‘Ultimate values, ideals which are essential,’’ he reflected in an interview about his early career as a minister and an activist, ‘‘have to operate in some political and economic situation and not in a vacuum, not [in the] abstract.’’ Bringing the ideal and the real together and ‘‘effecting some kind of an integration . . . is a perpetual and very difficult problem, but it seems to me that this is the problem of human existence and therefore in some way or other I’m trying to work at it all the time.’’23
Muste’s move toward a more modern, pragmatic worldview and theology was gradual. For a while he seemed to live in two different worlds. One was in New Brunswick where he continued to see himself as preparing for a life serving the Reformed Church and the Dutch American community. The other was the intellectual and cultural life of the great modern metropolis. There, as we have seen, he took seminars with leading philosophers who stressed the diverse ways of knowing and being. Moreover, as a supply preacher at a Reformed church in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the summer of 1908, he delighted in the ‘‘seething’’ culture of ‘‘Italian, Polish, Jewish, recently arrived immigrant[s], children, babies all over the streets and the steps [of tenements].’’ Reflecting his roots in industrial Grand Rapids, he felt comfortable among the city’s immigrant, working-class residents. He ‘‘never had the feeling that some people do[,] that New York is a terrible place to live in. I can put up with almost anything in New York.’’24 In this respect Muste differed from the Progressive Era reformers with whom he is often linked. Although he shared their Protestant heritage and commitment to a life of service, his ease in the culture of urban America marks him as part of the modernist generation, which was more ethnically diverse and which celebrated the possibilities of the city.25
In 1908–9, of course, Muste had not yet embraced a modern credo, but his inclination was forward rather than backward. His choice of pulpit is illustrative. As valedictorian, he was offered three choice pulpits: one was the newly founded Fort Washington Collegiate Church in the Washington Heights neighborhood of northern Manhattan, and the other two were older, established churches in rural settings outside of the city. The president of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary had also offered him funding for doctoral study in Europe and the promise of an academic position at the seminary when he returned. He made the decision ‘‘that New York was the place for me’’ without ‘‘too much difficulty.’’ In the first place, Fort Washington Collegiate Church was only a few blocks away from where the Yankee ballpark was then located. For another, academic life held little appeal: ‘‘I was too much interested in action.’’26 He would also be able to continue his education, since Washington Heights was located just north of Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary. Finally, the New York church was especially wealthy and well established, with roots in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, but it had shed its exclusively Dutch cast, while its Presbyterian structure and Calvinism attracted non-Dutch Protestants. With a single classis (the local governing body, known as a presbytery in the Presbyterian Church)