the soul is dethroned and replaced by something unworthy of its name, something that dons a crown of self-aggrandizing vanity instead of a crown of thorns. By considering the shadowy opposite of the soul, its rival and alter ego, we hope to deepen our understanding of the terms and implications involved in this regime change.
The shifting connotations of pride are further evidence of this altered state of affairs in the modern world. In Andrew Delbanco’s reading, the American self—self-made, calculating, overweening—became increasingly heedless of traditional warnings of pride until it became a god in its own right (the promise of the serpent in Genesis). “Pride of self, once the mark of the devil,” writes Delbanco, “was now not just a legitimate emotion but America’s uncontested god. And since everyone had his own self, everyone had his own god.”66 Just as avarice, once a mark of sin, became a legitimate and vital force in modern economics, pride of self was cleansed of the devil’s shadow and made into a staple of American individualism. The American self thus came into its own in the nineteenth century. By fiercely asserting itself against all odds, dangers, and aboriginal rights, pride of self grew to monstrous proportions and validated the expansionist urges of land-grabbers, settlers, businessmen, whalers, and forty-niners. As S. C. Gwynne puts it in his powerful narrative of the westward push of Americans, the main players in North America, in contrast to the presidio soldiers and missionaries of the Spanish New World, were rugged and obdurate pioneers; the “vanguard was not federal troops and federal forts, but simple farmers imbued with a fierce Calvinist work ethic, steely optimism, and a cold-eyed aggressiveness that made them refuse to yield even in the face of extreme danger. . . . They habitually declined to honor government treaties with Native Americans, believing in their hearts that the land belonged to them. They hated Indians with a particular passion, considering them something less than fully human, and thus blessed with inalienable rights to absolutely nothing.”67 Needless to say, the compulsive belief in manifest destiny, reinforced by the American civil religion of exceptionalism and triumphalism, led to numerous calamities, if not outright genocide, for American Indians.68
In a Christian assessment, these attitudes smack of idolatry: an anthropomorphic god fashioned out of the material of the human ego, and driven by an insatiable appetite for the world’s goods. Those in previous ages had names for this behavior—blasphemy, sin, idolatry—but Americans gave a new spin to this approach, labeling it enterprising, pioneering, and dauntless. This was a conceit so brazen that not only would this expansionist behavior annex Texas, swallow parts of Mexico, seize American Indian lands, and enslave Africans, but even the heavens seemed vulnerable to its oversized willfulness. Captain Ahab in Moby Dick sized up the attitude perfectly: “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man. I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”69 If that century of extraordinary economic and territorial growth apotheosized the self in this way, the principles associated with the classic soul were at risk of going the way of the bison on the Great Plains.
One may choose to embrace the concept of the modern self over the old creed of the soul (this choice itself is one of the hallmarks of modernity), but I am interested in the growing feeling of alarm and foreboding, even outrage, about this decision in favor of the modern self. In nineteenth-century America, dissenting voices—warning of vanity like the preacher of Ecclesiastes—were heard from a host of American isolatoes, from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain. Whether or not they were “voluptuaries of the soul”—Theodore Parker’s description of Transcendentalists—there was a palpable concern among all of them about the survival of the soul in an age of positivism and “gilded” dreams.70 In some cases, showing a clear sympathy for Christian socialism, writers sketched grand capitalists as swindlers, confidence men, and vampire-like creatures, thirsty for the blood of the innocent. In Melville’s novel Redburn, for example, a man of this sort appears in all of his deformed and grotesque glory: “He was an abominable looking old fellow, with cold, fat, jelly-like eyes; and avarice, heartlessness, and sensuality stamped all over him. He seemed all the time going through some process of mental arithmetic; doing sums with dollars and cents; his very mouth, wrinkled and drawn up at the corners, looked like a purse.”71 There is something about this figure that conjures the image of Satan, with his deformed body mirroring his deformed soul. The spell of money has become a trance in the man’s life, and his soul is now comatose, dead to any higher values. If this grim apostle of money is a representative capitalist, Melville’s sketch is a cautionary tale of capitalism gone terribly wrong, a system without humaneness, without beauty. He registers the same concern that his mentor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, had about the United States: “a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, not anything but a commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight.”72
Though evident in most of his novels, the aspersions Melville cast upon capitalism achieve their finest formulation in Moby Dick, especially, in my view, when the author makes an explicit connection between slavery and the business of moneymaking. When Pip, the black cabin boy, is thrown overboard, Stubb can only think of the financial forfeiture if the whale is lost: “We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.” Ishmael’s response captures the species of being that Stubb represents: “Though man loves his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.”73 In recognizing human ambiguity—the capacity for both love and greed—Melville pays some attention here to the noble nature of humankind, but the stronger strain is the animal-like impulses that degrade the human spirit and transform our nature into that of a predatory shark or wolf: homo homini lupus. In business and politics, as in life, these latter propensities have a way of shipwrecking the higher aspirations of the soul.
As the twentieth century set in, the climate for the soul became even more inclement and severe, leading many writers of the age to warn of the soul’s wizening or disappearance altogether. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby can be read in this vein, as a cautionary tale about the high price that the pursuit of fortune exacts from one’s moral character and spiritual integrity. Jay Gatsby has been consumed by the romance of money, and his life has been given to the service of a “vast, vulgar, meretricious beauty.”74 However dazzling and magnificent this dream of wealth appears in his eyes, the novel shows how specious and cheap this mirage of beauty is, how much it can entice and ruin at the same time. Though Fitzgerald never displayed “the conviction of a revolutionary” in his work, he certainly channeled the “smoldering hatred of a peasant” toward the moneyed, leisured classes in America—the beautiful and the damned—in much of his fiction.75 Marius Bewley sums up The Great Gatsby thus: “In the end, The Great Gatsby is a dramatic affirmation in fictional terms of the American spirit in the midst of an American world that denies the soul.”76
This denial of the soul is by no means a temptation of the secular realm alone; for Fitzgerald, the malady had a long reach and spread like contagion into the heart of the church. The words of Beatrice Blaine in This Side of Paradise have much of Fitzgerald in them: “Often she deplored the bourgeois quality of the American Catholic clergy, and was quite sure that had she lived in the shadow of the great Continental cathedrals her soul would still be a thin flame on the mighty altar of Rome.”77
This character wants the warmth, incandescence, radiance, and burning colors of a darker, more mysterious variety of Catholicism. Thus the novelist pines for alternatives to American middle-class values (the cheery optimism, the family values, the worship of financial success, the triumphant God) and at one point declares an attraction to the “Mexican God,” who would be something strangely different, more like a baroque God from a land of “sad, haunting music and many odors . . . where the shades of night skies and sunsets would seem to reflect only moods of passion: the color of lips and poppies.”78 In this exotic mood—describing a dream of the pageantry of the soul—the novel closes with the protagonist throwing his pen and soul to the side of socialism, that most frightening idea for the bourgeois American. The implication is plain in Fitzgerald’s first novel:
