Spilt Religion To Some, Heroic Argument To Others

I cannot recall when I first read Meyer Abrams's 1971 classic Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, but it was probably in the mid-1980's. What I do remember is that the effect the book had on me was absolutely electric. This is because I had struggled, since my freshman year in college, to articulate my own (late 20th century sense) of a "double-truth" (a counterpart to the late medieval theory of the Latin Averroists that reason and revelation offered two different kinds of "knowledge" that need not be reconciled). By my junior year in college, I was reading Santayana and had found, in his naturalistic approach to religion, an ally in this quest and a continuing inspiration. But Santayana appeared to me to be sui generis and, in American intellectual history, hopelessly isolated. Had no one else created space for the religious imagination in a way that did not compromise the integrity and self-sufficiency of scientific naturalism? What I learned from Abrams's wide-ranging commentary on Wordsworth's Prospectus to his poetry [see NS, 31] is that the Romantic movement (especially as it had constituted itself among the Lake country poets of 19th century England) could be read to have done just that. And certainly, that is how critics of the Romantics like T. E. Hulme understood their achievement (see Hulme's dismissive definition of Romanticism as "spilt religion" in his essay Romanticism and Classicism).

Wordsworth considered the imaginative "miracle" he was able to produce (reconciling human beings to the "common day" by means of a poetic marriage of mind and nature) his "heroic argument" [NS, 29]. The Blakean Northrop Frye may be said to have offered a similarly heroic argument with his late life notion of a "double vision"--though this is a very tentative suggestion that requires further thought and, if warranted, elaboration.