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4 - The pursuit of the double

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2010

Susan Manning
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Summary

By inquiring out of the proper way, I mean when puny man endeavours to penetrate to the hidden recesses of the divine wisdom … in order that he may understand what final determination God has made with regard to him. In this way he plunges headlong into an immense abyss, involves himself in numberless inextricable snares, and buries himself in the thickest darkness.

(John Calvin)

For this is the nature of a guilty conscience, to fly and to be terrified, even when all is safe and prosperous, to convert all into peril and death.

(Martin Luther)

[I] feel that every thought, every cause, is bipolar & in the act is contained the counteract. If I strike, I am struck. If I chase, I am pursued. If I push, I am resisted.

(R.W. Emerson)

The paradox of the puritan–provincial mind is that it knows it cannot know the hidden truth of the ‘centre’, and yet must strive for knowledge. Inscrutable appearances both torment and fascinate. The centre of significance seems always veiled by the surfaces of nature and of language; truth and knowledge are forbidden secrets which must be fathomed in opposition to the tyrannous will at the heart of things. The puritan's or the provincial's search for knowledge is thus also a bid for independence, an attempt to shed the abject state of distanced ignorance and to live apart from the forces which seem to control existence.

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The Puritan-Provincial Vision
Scottish and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century
 , pp. 70 - 105
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1990

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