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Modern religion modern race 1st Edition Vial Digital
Instant Download
Author(s): Vial, Theodore M
ISBN(s): 9780190212551, 0190212551
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 2.84 MB
Year: 2016
Language: english
Modern Religion, Modern Race
 Modern
Religion,
Modern Race
z
THEODORE VIAL

1
 1
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Title: Modern religion, modern race / Theodore Vial.
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1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For Nancy
[W]‌hat is commonly assumed to be past history is actually
as much a part of the living present as William Faulkner
insisted. Furtive, implacable and tricky, it inspirits both
the observer and the scene observed, artifacts, manners and
atmosphere and it speaks even when no one wills to listen.
Ralph Ellison, “Introduction,” Invisible Man
(New York: Vintage, 1991), xvi
 Contents

Acknowledgments xi
List of Abbreviations xv

Introduction 1
1. Kant and Race 21
2. On Religion: To Schleiermacher’s Theoretical Despisers 55
3. Chips from Another German Workshop: Friedrich Max Müller
and Friedrich Schleiermacher on Language and Religion 93
4. Modern Communities, National and Religious 125
5. Herder and Schleiermacher as Unfamiliar Sources of Racism 155
6. The Dark Side of Modern Religion 189
7. Modernity and Teleology 221

Bibliography 255
Index 271
 Acknowledgments

This project began to take its current shape in 2007 when the faculty
of color at Iliff proposed a joint project to the faculty as a whole: each of
us would look at the history of our subdisciplines in the academic study
of religions and theology on the topic of race. At the time my main insti-
tutional home at the American Academy of Religion was the Nineteenth-​
Century Theology Group. A review of its records showed that there had
never been a panel or paper explicitly addressing nineteenth-​ century
theology and race. In the fall of 2008 the Iliff faculty suffered through
an early and inadequate paper I prepared for our faculty retreat. I would
like to thank the faculty for providing the environment for this research
and for responding to three chapters in various stages of development at
three separate faculty colloquia. I would like to thank the faculty of color
at Iliff for sending me down the path of this research project, and all my
colleagues for helping Iliff to work through some of the issues I raise in
this book.
My research assistant Tracy Temple tracked down and obtained the
permissions for the image of Bennilong. Iliff’s Dean, Albert Hernández,
provided generous funding for the images, as well as an excellent research
environment. Will Wedow, in Iliff’s amazing IT department, saved my
bacon at least twice.
Several years ago I joined a faculty writing group, and the fact that
I have a completed manuscript is due, in large part, to the encourage-
ment, criticism, and deadlines of Pam Eisenbaum, Mark George, and
Jacob Kinnard. Having waded through at least three versions of every part
of this manuscript, I wonder if they are having second thoughts about
forming the group.
Sheila Davaney retired from Iliff early in the life of this project to go
to the Ford Foundation. But she has remained willing to read the whole
xii Acknowledgments

manuscript, and has played a large role in shaping the argument and artic-
ulating it clearly, including the very order of the chapters.
Edward Antonio has read the manuscript at least twice, and has been
an insightful conversation partner over the years about the ideas I try to
articulate here.
I have received invaluable comments from students in two classes.
The masters and PhD students in my fall 2011 “Religion and Race” class
read a very early version of the manuscript. The PhD students (and one
masters student, just for fun) in my winter 2015 “Schleiermacher as
Resource for Contemporary Theology” read a more polished version. It
is not easy responding to the work of the person grading you. I thank
these students for the classroom conversations and for their comments
on the manuscript. In particular Joshua Bartholomew, Robyn Henderson-​
Espinoza, Kerry Holton, Benjamin Peters, Anthony Roberts, Ben Sanders,
Dave Scott, Brandon Stark, and Jared Vazquez gave helpful criticism and
engaged in useful conversations over the years. Sarah Scherer read the
manuscript though she was not in these classes. An important part of my
argument in ­chapter 7 clicked for me in a conversation with Mary Ragan.
I am constantly surprised and humbled by the willingness of col-
leagues at other institutions to invest valuable time and brain cells to help
others improve their work. They do this for no reason other than a com-
mitment to good scholarship. Terry Godlove and Wayne Proudfoot gave
helpful comments on ­chapter 2. My argument is on much firmer grounds
because of them. There are important topics on which I still have disagree-
ments with each of them, so flaws in that chapter should not be laid at
their feet. I look forward to continuing conversations.
Mark Mikkelsen (Jon), one of the leading scholars on Kant and race,
responded to the academic equivalent of a cold call with five single spaced
pages of comments and suggestions on c­ hapter 1. He helped me frame
what I was and was not claiming about Kant, and saved me from some
embarrassing errors. I am deeply grateful. I know there are aspects of that
chapter with which he will still disagree (including the need for a chapter
on Kant and race at all). I hope I have not disappointed him too much.
Oxford University Press sent several chapters to anonymous readers
(I have a hunch who one of them is). Their comments helped me revise
the manuscript into a much better, more complete, and more thoroughly
documented argument.
One could not ask for a better editor than Cynthia Read. Her experience,
insight, and efficiency have made this a better book. She is also patient.
 Acknowledgments xiii

James Forman took time from his own deadline for a book on race
and the legal system to comment on my Introduction. It is much more
balanced and clear because of his generosity and insight. A long conversa-
tion with him, Dimitri Christakis, and Evan Westerfield, who also read the
Introduction simply because they are good friends, helped me articulate
my general argument more strongly.
Nancy Walsh read two versions of the Introduction, helping me to say
what I meant much more concisely. She saved me from oversights, errors,
and clunky language. She saved you from a long, tedious version. Talking
through the issues raised in this book, often when we were not explicitly
talking about this book, has shaped my thinking and arguments to a very
great extent.
It is encouraging to see how much more open my children, Aubrey,
Isha, and Vaughn are than my generation was at their age. It is also fas-
cinating to see the ongoing tenacity of the categories of religion and race
in their world, despite or in conjunction with this openness. Talking with
them about this has helped my thinking on an almost daily basis. Their
awareness of and reminders about my many missed deadlines kept this
project moving to completion. I sometimes wondered if they were on
Cynthia Read’s secret payroll. Most of all, because this project required
constant awareness of hard things and undermined easy confidence in the
prospects for the future, I am deeply grateful to Nancy, Aubrey, Isha, and
Vaughn for making life good.
My father died while I was writing this book. He was an effective advo-
cate for integrated affordable housing in a time and place where that was
not necessarily popular. I wish religion and race intersected in more peo-
ple the way they did in him.
A project like this covers a lot of territory. There is always more to read,
better thinking to be done, revisions to be made that would clarify the
argument and improve its articulation. I am torn between wanting to get
this thing off my desk, and wanting to work on it forever. So, without in
any way comparing myself to Ludwig Wittgenstein, it is encouraging to
read his own words in the Preface to the Philosophical Investigations:
“I should have liked to produce a good book. It has not turned out that
way, but the time is past in which I could improve it.”1

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Preface” to the Philosophical Investigations, rev. 4th ed., trans G.
E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009), 4.
 List of Abbreviations

Ak Immanuel Kant. Gesammelte Schriften “Akademieausgabe.”

Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: Georg
Reimer, 1900–​1922; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1922–​.
KGA Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Edited
by Hans-​ Joachim Birkner, Gerhard Ebeling, Hermann Fischer,
Günter Meckenstock, Kurt-​Victor Selge, et al. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 1983–​.
 Introduction

Race and religion are conjoined twins. They are offspring of the mod-
ern world. Because they share a mutual genealogy, the category of reli-
gion is always already a racialized category, even when race is not explicitly
under discussion.
That, in brief, is the argument I make in this book. Race and religion1
are fundamental conceptual building blocks of modernity, two of the most
important categories we rely on to organize our social worlds and to create
identity, both personal and collective. They are sources of the modern self.
Race and religion undergo significant reshaping in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, such that what we mean by race and reli-
gion is not the same as what earlier generations in the West meant. Many
scholars point to the role of the Franco-​British Enlightenment in con-
structing modernity. The Enlightenment has also received the lion’s share
of the attention in scholarship on the construction of the categories of race
and religion. I argue that modernity is not fully in place at the end of the
Enlightenment. If we stop our genealogies of race and religion there, we
do not have a full understanding of how they operate as part of our lived
reality. The story of modern race and religion needs another chapter, a
chapter on Germany in the post-​Enlightenment.

1. Gender and nation are also categories central to modern identity, also undergo significant
shifts at the same time, and are linked to race and religion. All four (I make no claim that the
list is exhaustive, but these four are clearly on any list of important modern categories) are
on the ground floor of how the modern West makes sense of itself and the world. Despite
the legitimate need for “intersectionality,” I keep the focus in this book on race and religion,
with some mention of nation in ­chapter 4. My next project will turn its focus to gender
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Previous publications have analyzed
Schleiermacher and emerging theories of the nation.
2 Modern Religion, Modern R ace

It has become common in recent decades to point out the racist and colo-
nial nature of the early days of religious studies as an academic enterprise.
I cite some of this literature below. The arguments are important, but they
can function as distancing techniques. It is easy to dismiss old language
about religion that strikes us as racist. I want to raise the question of just
how much distance there is between us and our religious studies ancestors.
Race and religion are concepts that are both so obvious and so slippery that
it is hard to get a handle on them. We continue to use them, even as we
become more aware of their slippery nature. To the extent that the problems
of the racialization of religious studies in the past have to do not merely with
the personal flaws of the scholars but with the shape and relationships of the
categories they used, we are caught in some of the same traps that they were.
There are heroes as well as villains among our forerunners, first and fore-
most Johann Gottfried Herder, but also figures like Friedrich Schleiermacher
and Friedrich Max Müller. They represent a real and admirable openness to
diversity sorely lacking in many of their colleagues. They struggled, as we
struggle, to find a way to do comparative religion that is not infected with
racism. But, I argue, there is something about the structure of the concepts
of race and religion that tends toward value-​laden hierarchies. Our struggles
reinscribe the problems with which we grapple. If the West at its best as well
as at its worst compared religions by means of racial hierarchies, we cannot
simply tuck the uncomfortable language of our predecessors into the safe bed
of history, insulating ourselves with claims of personal bias and outmoded
social context since overcome. We continue to use the categories bequeathed
to us, and so, I argue, despite our best efforts, continue to racialize our dis-
cussion of religion in ways that reinscribe the racism of our forerunners.

Race and Religion: Individual, Social, and

Academic Categories
One of my earliest memories of race as a set of categories is from elementary
school. I grew up in a fairly small town with a university. Demographically,
my school was majority white students, with significant percentages of
African Americans and Asian Americans. One day a student from South
Asia, whose parents were at the university, joined our class. I can still
recall my sense of bafflement, the uncanny feeling this provoked in me.
Dark skin, straight hair. I did not know what he was. As I grew older,
thinking back on this, I often thought that my problem was simply living
in too sheltered a town, not being exposed to the full variety of peoples in
 Introduction 3

the world. But there is a more interesting set of questions than how many
racial categories white children in small towns in the United States in the
1970s had. Where do these categories come from in the first place? Why
do we sort by race at all? And why is it unsettling when our taxonomies are
inadequate to the human facts on the ground?
These questions are in no way innocent. If race is one of the basic cat-
egories we use to “place” people, and if its origins are so opaque as to seem
natural, race also has huge social and political impacts. This past year the
news has been full of protests across the United States over the decisions
of a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, not to indict Officer Darren Wilson
in the shooting death of Michael Brown, and the decision of a grand jury
in Staten Island, New York, not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the
choking death of Eric Garner. Both police officers are white, both dead men
black. Riots broke out in Baltimore in April following the death of Freddie
Gray in police custody. The June murder of nine members of the Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston by a white supremacist
began a movement to remove the Confederate battle flag from the state cap-
itol grounds in South Carolina. We have not moved to a postracial society.
In the Ferguson case there are conflicting eyewitness accounts, and
differing interpretations of the forensic evidence. Perhaps it would not
be possible, “beyond a reasonable doubt,” to find Darren Wilson guilty
of murder or manslaughter. But before the facts of this case, and before
the legal definitions and standards, and before the eyewitness testimonies,
there seems to be something else, something deeper, that is fundamentally
flawed. In his grand jury testimony, Officer Wilson described feeling like
“a five-​year-​old holding onto Hulk Hogan.” Describing their encounter, he
recalls Brown as making “a grunting, like aggravated sound,” “The only
way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.”2
These cases raise all sorts of issues, ranging from the proper use of
grand juries, to policing techniques and policies, to the relationships of
police forces to the communities they serve, to historical patterns of dis-
criminatory housing practices, to histories of economic marginalization.
These cases also raise wider issues of the ways people of color and whites

2. Testimony of Officer Darren Wilson in “State of Missouri v. Darren Wilson.” Full

testimony from the New York Times online article of November 25, 2014 (http://​www.
nytimes.com/​interactive/​2014/​11/​25/​us/​darren-​wilson-​testimony-​ferguson-​shooting.html).
Dr. Tracie Keesee raised with me the possibility that the “demon” language is coded language
provided by Wilson’s attorney to lay the groundwork for a claim of justifiable shooting based
on the officer’s fear for his life (personal communication).
4 Modern Religion, Modern R ace

relate to each other and see each other in the United States. Polls show
that most whites believe the Ferguson grand jury reached the proper deci-
sion; most blacks do not. There may be policies that can have a positive
impact on these issues. This book is not about solutions at this level. These
police cases are manifestations of a deeper problem. At the root is a system
of concepts and practices, a way of applying those concepts, that lead us
not only to classify but to draw conclusions about personality, behavior,
aptitude, and so on. It can lead us literally to demonize. I do not know of
a policy that can address that. Rather, we need to analyze why we think
in racial terms in the first place. In the texts of the eighteenth-​and early
nineteenth-​century Protestant intellectuals I analyze we see the roots of
the pervasiveness and demonic character of race.
By the time the copyediting, typesetting, proofing, indexing, printing,
and distribution of this book are complete, these cases and the protests
about them, most likely, will have faded from the news. But I am sadly
confident that this introduction will not seem dated.3
Empirical and statistical evidence for the theoretical and anecdotal case
I am making can be found in a study of implicit attitudes by researchers
at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Washington.4 In a test that asks
subjects first for explicit attitudes toward whites and blacks, and then tests
implicit attitudes by timing responses to words with negative and positive
associations paired with images of white and black faces, whites report
an explicit preference for whites over blacks, and demonstrate an even
stronger automatic (implicit) preference for white over black. Blacks state
a stronger explicit preference for black over white than whites have for
white over black, but on implicit tests blacks sometimes show a prefer-
ence for white over black (the preference is weaker than it is in whites).5

3. Susannah Heschel argues that the tenacious nature of racism is linked to its emotional
appeal, in particular to the erotic language in which it is often expressed. This is an impor-
tant argument that I do not highlight as much as I perhaps should. I focus on the con-
cepts of race and religion. But because I take Herder and Schleiermacher seriously, I do not
want to be misread as thinking that race and religion are primarily intellectual phenom-
ena. Concepts shape our experience and emotions. We act out of them, they are formed by
and shape our habitus, whether we are aware of them in theory or not. See “The Slippery
Yet Tenacious Nature of Racism: New Development [sic] in Critical Race Theory and Their
Implications for the Study of Religion and Ethics,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics
35, no. 1 (2015), 14–​15.
4. The test is available at https://​implicit.harvard.edu/​implicit/​takeatest.html.
5. Brian A. Nosek, Mahsarin R. Banaji, and Anthony G. Greenwald, “Harvesting Implicit
Group Attitudes and Beliefs from a Demonstration Web Site,” Group Dynamics: Theory,
 Introduction 5

Humans are apparently hardwired to prefer their ingroup, but the mark-
ers of what constitutes in or out are historically contingent, and the level
and content of the preference are subject to cultural influence.
The sheer violence of the Ferguson and Staten Island and Baltimore
and Charleston cases has forced a national public discussion about race,
but race functions all the time everywhere in less dramatic, if not less vio-
lent, ways. The poet Claudia Rankine writes,

You take in things you don’t want all the time. The second you hear
or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the mean-
ings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see,
come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you
just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently
tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along
shouldn’t be an ambition.6

I am interested here in the way race affects “some ordinary moments” in

the study of religions.
Race also shapes the way we undertake our academic work, not just
as an object of study but in the categories we use and in the business
of organizing our departments and schools. I work at an institution that
is very self-​consciously progressive on issues of social justice. In 2016,
more than half of the tenured and tenure-​track faculty will be scholars
of color.7 This ranks us as the place (or one of very few places) with the
most racially diverse faculty to study religion in the United States. And
yet we do not seem to be able to stop struggling with issues of race in
our academic lives together. Memories of unfair treatment by past deans
surface in arguments over promotion and tenure. Search committees are
always under scrutiny for doing too little, or perhaps too much, to develop
a diverse pool of applicants. We raise, but seem unable to sort out, the
question of whether the norms we use in giving critical feedback on each

Research, and Practice 6, no. 1 (2002): 101–​115, at 105. The black implicit preference for whites
is weaker than it is in whites. It is therefore tragic but not surprising that the issues between
communities of color and police are not solved when the police are black, as Ta-​Nehisi
Coates poignantly illustrates with the story of his friend from college, killed by a black police
officer. Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015), 83.
6. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2014), 55.
7. Eight identify as faculty of color, seven as white. When nontenure track faculty are
counted, there are eleven white faculty.
6 Modern Religion, Modern R ace

other’s scholarship are norms of a particular (German) scholarly tradition,

if they are universally applicable, and if not, what the appropriate norms
are. Race (and gender) clearly influences classroom interactions—​what is
the appropriate way to evaluate this when teaching evaluations play a role
in determining merit-​based raises?
Religion, like race, has not disappeared as sociologists in the 1960s
predicted it would.8 As Tomoko Masuzawa observes about world religions,
“[c]‌ollege students with no previous instruction on the subject seem to
understand what it is when they decide to enroll in a course by that name.”9
We seem to know what religion is, what religions are out there that one
could be, and how to sort people into religions.
Religion, like race, organizes our personal experience, our social and
political relations, and our academic work. An important moment in my
own education about religion occurred when I was a teenager, and discussed
with my parents whether or not I ought to go to church (they were pro, I was
anti). I grew up in a very Presbyterian house, and my parents’ lives have
been shaped by generations of a communal network of Presbyterian family
and friends and congregations. One of my arguments was that the resur-
rection was so implausible to me, and such a central belief of Christianity,
that it would be hypocritical for me to attend church. At one point I asked
my father, a chemist and one of the most thoughtful and rational people
I have known, if he believed in the resurrection. He said yes, but not before
pausing a long, long time. I got the sense that he had never asked himself
this question directly. I sometimes date my interest in studying religion to
this moment, because it was my first inkling that there was something far
more interesting going on than I had thought. I had gotten religion back-
wards. Far from being a set of intellectual propositions about the world to
which one had more or less to assent, religion was membership in a com-
munity. That membership might entail certain beliefs, but clearly in the
case of my father, membership was about other things as well.
When my wife and I lived in southern Virginia, a place where religion is
often more publicly expressed than in my present location of Denver, it took

8. “[I]‌n a surprise-​free world, I see no reversal of the process of secularization produced

by industrialization… . The traditional religions are likely to survive in small enclaves and
pockets and perhaps there will be pockets of Asian religion in America too.” Peter L. Berger,
“A Bleak Outlook Is Seen for Religion,” New York Times, February 25, 1968, 3. Berger later of
course retracted this prediction.
9. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was
Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1.
 Introduction 7

us a while to get acclimated to the fact that one of the questions parents on
the sidelines of our kids’ sporting events asked each other as they met and
got acquainted (What do you do? Where are you from? How many kids do
you have?) was “What church do you attend?” Most people assumed that
everyone must belong to some kind of religion, but when I did not name a
church, I presented fellow parents with the same taxonomical puzzle that
the South Asian elementary student presented to my younger self. Most
eventually asked about my synagogue (though they never asked my wife
about synagogues). Having done the research for this book, I am finally in
a position to understand the interest in placing us religiously, and to under-
stand the link between certain characteristics of mine (we never asked
which ones: college professor? New Jersey speech patterns? My [then] curly
dark hair?) and the assumption that if I was not Christian I must be Jewish.
Like race, religion is not simply a taxonomic parlor game played out on
real and metaphoric sidelines; it does real work in today’s world. Religion
is in the news as much as race. Debates about what religion is and what
forms of it are legitimate swirl in the wake of the murders of the staff of
the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Al-​Qaida in Yemen claimed
responsibility for the attacks, attacks that they more commonly direct
against Muslims they see as apostate than against non-​Muslims. Social
media was full of debates on whether Islam does or does not forbid por-
trayals of the Prophet Muhammad. Muslim public intellectuals in France
argued that the attacks were not by real Muslims; rather they were by fanat-
ics. Some in the West equate Islam with extremism and violence, arguing
that Islam is essentially out of place in European and American societies.
German chancellor Angela Merkel argues that Islam belongs to the heart
of Germany. President Obama’s speech at a national prayer breakfast in
February 2015 provoked strong reactions when he called the Islamic State
“a brutal vicious death cult,” but went on to argue that Islam is not the only
religion with violent extremists. In particular, he cited Christian complic-
ity in Jim Crow laws in the United States. Jim Gilmore, former governor
of Virginia, stated, “The president’s comments this morning at the prayer
breakfast are the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my
lifetime.” There is an implicit debate here about what “good” religion is
and how Christianity and Islam measure up to this standard. The move of
several prominent evangelical churches to drop their opposition to same-​
sex marriage has thrilled some, angered others. Debates in the United
States about the extent to which the United States is or is not “a Christian
nation” are not debates driven by historical interest. They are tied directly
8 Modern Religion, Modern R ace

to women’s rights, school curricula, immigration, health care, economic

policy, and land use where mining and ski-​resort companies and recre-
ational users of parks conflict with the claims of American Indians to
sacred space—​the examples could be multiplied indefinitely—​issues that
directly affect the lives of millions.
Religion also influences our academic work in hidden ways, not just
as an object of study but in the way we go about our business. As Robert
Orsi writes,

the hallways of religious studies departments are thick with

ghosts—​the minister father, the tongue-​speaking mother, the nuns
and priests who taught us, the born-​again brother—​who are our
invisible conversation partners, as real as the saints and spirits and
ancestors of the religious worlds we study.10

The trend, in the time that I have been teaching religious studies, has
moved from an affected neutrality in the classroom and in our scholarship,
to a moral duty to reveal our own social and religious locations. In either
case the judgments we are called on to make about religion as public intel-
lectuals are clearly influenced by the backgrounds and comfort levels with
particular beliefs and practices that predate our professional callings.
I have offered mostly negative examples of how race and religion operate
in our world, in my effort to illustrate how prevalent and significant they are
to the way we experience and act in our world. But they play positive roles
too. Lucius T. Outlaw argues that race offers “communities of meaning,”
and can be useful for mobilization and civic participation, not just exclu-
sion.11 Religion can form identity, endow meaning, build community, and
make possible the structures of social engagement, as it did for my father.
Scholars of religion are fond of quoting what Justice Potter Stewart once
wrote of hard-​core pornography. In a case about obscenity, Stewart writes,
“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I under-
stand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps
I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”12

10. Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the
Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 14.
11. Lucius T. Outlaw, “Against the Grain of Modernity,” in On Race and Philosophy
(New York: Routledge, 1996), 135–​57.
12. Mr. Justice Stewart, concurring in Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 US 184 (1964).
 Introduction 9

Religion is slippery. Attempts to reach consensus on a definition have failed.13

Scholars tell us it is a constructed category, more social invention than natu-
rally occurring object. But we know it when we see it. The same could be said
of race. It is slippery, hard to define, not a biological fact but a social construct.
But we know it when we see it. Religion and race feel natural.14 Why?

Race and Religion in the Modern West

Because the categories of religion and race are so basic—​the lenses, so to
speak, through which we see the world—​it is difficult to turn our critical
gaze and look at them directly. The best approach to analyzing them is to
take a running historical start to see how our categories were put together.
As Foucault asked about doing history, are we simply interested in the
past? “No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of
the present. Yes, if one means writing the history of the present.”15 In

13. Two essays by Jonathan Z. Smith provide an orientation to the issues of definition, and the
voluminous literature on the definition of religion: “Fences and Neighbors: Some Contours of
Early Judaism,” in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1982), 1–​18, and “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies,
ed. Mark C. Taylor, 269–​84 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998): 269–​284; reprinted
in Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004), 179–​96. Ours is not the first generation to notice the problem. W. L.
Distant argued in 1877 that anthropologists should discard the use of the word “religion.” It
lacked a general definition and carried too many theological connotations. A true science of
religion would require that we “give the word ‘religion’ some universal definition, cease to use
it altogether, or in its place … substitute a term alike capable of being conceived and incapable
of being misunderstood”; see W. L. Distant, “On the Term ‘Religion’ as Used in Anthropology,”
Journal of the Anthropological Institute 6 (1877), 68; quoted in David Chidester, Empire of
Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014),
12. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholars tried Distant’s first proposal,
arguing over the best definition of religion. One of the reasons Friedrich Schleiermacher plays
such an important role in the construction of modern religion is that he makes one of the most
influential attempts to identify the essence of religion. More recently some scholars have taken
up Distant’s third proposal, suggesting for example “cosmographic formations” or “social
formation” as more adequate substitutes. See Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of
Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology, trans. William Sayers (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2007); and Russell T. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the
Public Study of Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).
14. “Americans believe in the reality of ‘race’ as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural
world. Racism—​the need to ascribe bone-​deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce,
and destroy them—​inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is ren-
dered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage
or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon
that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men”; Coates, Between the World and Me, 7.
15. Foucault is referring here specifically to a history of the prison. Michel Foucault, Discipline
and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1995), 31.
10 Modern Religion, Modern R ace

returning to discussions of race and religion in the late eighteenth and

early nineteenth centuries we are looking at ourselves.
Why do we need to push past the Enlightenment in our genealogies
of religion and race? It is true that during the Enlightenment religion
became differentiated from other human activities such as science, eco-
nomics, and politics, as José Casanova has argued.16 Talal Asad agrees that
religion becomes defined in the West as differentiated and universal dur-
ing the Enlightenment.17 But there is more going on than mere differentia-
tion. Tomoko Masuzawa, in The Invention of World Religions, notes that up
to the eighteenth century the most common Western taxonomy of religion
was fourfold: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Heathenism. But by the
beginning of the twentieth century everyone seems to know that there are
eleven or twelve “living world religions” that are roughly equivalent and
comparable.18 I count her as an ally in the argument that the concept of liv-
ing world religions is a product of the nineteenth century. But in focusing
on British materials, Masuzawa leaves unanalyzed the central site of the
construction of modern religion: Germany.
Histories of the idea of race also tend to end in the Franco-​British
Enlightenment or, in some cases, Kant. Examples of important schol-
ars whose histories end before or during the Enlightenment include

16. José Casanova, “Secularization, Enlightenment, and Modern Religion,” in Public

Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 11–​39.
17. Talal Asad, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category” in Genealogies
of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, ND: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1993), 27–​54, especially 40–​42. See also Talal Asad, “Reflections
on Cruelty and Torture,” in Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 100–​124, especially 107. Asad argues that Clifford Geertz,
the twentieth-​century anthropologist, has basically inherited this idea of religion as differenti-
ated from politics and as universal, and he severely criticizes Geertz’s definition. Geertz defines
religion as “(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-​
lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of
existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods
and motivations seem uniquely realistic”; “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation
of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 87–​125. Asad critiques the idea of religion as a uni-
versal, and as a system of symbols: “The basic problem … is … with the assumption that
there are two separate levels—​the cultural, on the one side (consisting of symbols) and the
social and psychological, on the other—​which interact.” “From being a concrete set of practical
rules attached to specific processes of power and knowledge, religion has come to be abstracted
and universalized.” Religions that have not differentiated themselves from social forces and
processes of power and knowledge look less legitimately religious, or less modern; Asad, “The
Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,” here 32 and 42.
18. Masuzawa, Invention of World Religions, 46.
 Introduction 11

Cornel West,19 Charles Long,20 Thandeka,21 J. Kameron Carter,22 Robert

Bernasconi,23 and Willie James Jennings.24 But Susannah Heschel hints at
a later important development. She argues that there is a link between race
and the rise of historicism associated with Herder and his generation. Just
when we “recognize[d]‌the temporalizaton of human experience … we
began speaking of race as a fixed and static definition of human nature.”25
I agree that this essentializing of race as a core part of human nature
rises ironically with antiessentializing historicism in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. What do Herder and his generation bring

19. “I try to hold these factors constant and focus solely on a neglected variable in past explan-
atory models—​namely, the way in which the very structure of modern discourse at its incep-
tion produced forms of rationality, scientificity, and objectivity as well as aesthetic and cultural
ideals which require the constitution of the idea of white supremacy”; Cornel West, Prophecy
Deliverance! An Afro-​American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982),
47 (emphasis in original).
20. “When African slaves were imported to North America in the seventeenth century
the idea of categorizing purely on the basis of race applied to African and Indian alike”;
Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1986; Aurora CO: Davies Group, 1995), 115.
21. Thandeka argues that “race” in the American colonies originally meant something closer
to what “class” means today, and that “race” changes over the seventeenth and early eigh-
teenth centuries, taking shape as a way for ruling elites to drive a wedge between groups of
indentured servants and freedmen; Thandeka, Learning to Be White: Money, Race, and God in
America (New York: Continuum, 1999), especially chap. 3, “Class,” 42–​56.
22. Carter begins his theological history of race early, with Irenaeus’s fight against
Gnosticism in the second century, and carries his analysis of the relationship of theology
and race through Kant; J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008).
23. Robert Bernasconi, “Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Racism,” in Philosophers on
Race: Critical Essays, ed. Julie K. Ward and Tommy L. Lott, 145–​66 (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2002), and “Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment
Construction of Race,” in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi, 11–​36 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001).
24. “I join the chorus of voices that spy out racial formation before the Enlightenment,
before common notions of modernity’s beginnings, and in the earliest moments of modern
colonialism”; Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of
Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 289.
25. Heschel, “Slippery Yet Tenacious Nature of Racism,” 6. Heschel points to the linking of
historicism and “the rise of the geographical imagination” by literary scholar Chenxi Tang.
Heschel writes, “the historicization of human existence was accompanied by a racial immu-
tability and a link of human beings to the spatial.” She also points out that “[i]‌nstead of
‘race,’ we sometimes speak today of ‘cultural values, or ‘ethical principles,’ attributing to
them a similarly fixed and static nature.” I tie together here, in a rather loose fashion, histori-
cism, Romanticism, expressivism, and the idea that history is progressive. Of course the pic-
ture is messier. Sheila Greeve Davaney (citing the philosopher Thelma Lavine) argues that
12 Modern Religion, Modern R ace

to the table of race? Is it related to what they bring to the table of living
world religions? I argue it is.
Enlightenment thinkers are not in a position to say what the link is
between physical characteristics and the intellectual and moral predisposi-
tions we include in our modern category of race. Why do those who argue for
the equality of races continue to maintain that the races are culturally distinct,
and that humanity would be impoverished should the melting pot theory be
true? Equality is not equivalence. Why are people committed to religion in a
way that goes far beyond giving intellectual assent to certain ideas? What was
my father thinking about in the gap, to me an eternity, between my question
about the resurrection and his answer? Why are race and religion two of the
primary ways to answer the question, Who am I? The answers lie in the way
these categories take shape in a group of mostly German thinkers associated
with Romanticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Full-​blown modern concepts of religion and race rest on post-​Enlightenment
ideas about culture, history, and human nature. All of the basic modern con-
ceptual categories of identity rest on a fundamental shift in theological anthro-
pology (a shift in the sense of what it means to be human). Our modern sense
of what it means to be fully human is based on a specific concept of agency—​
the ability to effect actions in history, whether on a scale large or small. In the
writings of the early German Romantics (a group associated with historicism
and with expressivism) we see how race and religion are redefined in fixed
and static ways. I will take as two important figures of this generation Johann
Gottfried Herder (1744–​1803) and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–​1834). I will
also consider the relationship of Schleiermacher to a later scholar of religion,
Friedrich Max Müller (1823–​1900).
Modern religion and race are the offspring of a new theological anthro-
pology. This anthropology recreates race and religion because it refor-
mulates the relationship between individual and group. It makes group
membership an organic part of personal existence and identity; it shows
how the individual is shaped by the group to which the individual belongs.
It leads moderns to infer certain expectations about behavior, about moral
dispositions, and about intellectual abilities based on group membership.

modernity is “cognitively pluralistic” and should be characterized as “divided within itself”;

Pragmatic Historicism: A Theology for the Twenty-​First Century (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2000), 11. Lavine sets up her groupings such that historicist thinkers are
separated from thinkers who assume history is progressive. While I agree that there is great
diversity of thought in this era, I will argue in ­chapters 5 and 7 that even a full-​fledged his-
toricist like Herder cannot avoid assumptions of historical progress.
 Introduction 13

Religion in the nineteenth century becomes a matter of culture—​that is, a

matter of the group in which one is raised—​as much as a matter of true and
false belief. Race too, which had been seen as an order of the divine creation
of the world, and then as a matter of biology (this is what Kant tries to think
through), becomes a matter of culture. It has as much to do with history
and experience and language as it does with genetically inherited traits.
Throughout the history of scholarship in the modern world as people have
compared racial groups and religious groups they have ordered them hierar-
chically. The criteria by which the hierarchies are constituted shift over time,26
but the hierarchies themselves display remarkable consistency. We in con-
temporary religious studies are uncomfortable, and for the most part reject,
these hierarchies from the history of our discipline. But because we rely on
the concepts of religion and race shaped by the anthropology of expressivism,
we have our own criteria that generate their own hierarchies. We tend not
to think of religion as a racialized category, but in our comparative work the
same hierarchies of Kant, Herder, Schleiermacher, and Müller continue to
reappear. The category of religion is racialized in ways that are not obvious.
A word here about the complex role Kant plays in my argument. I will
argue that Schleiermacher is more Kantian, in terms of epistemology, than
he is normally portrayed. I will argue that concepts for Schleiermacher (and
for Herder) are linguistic in a way they are not for Kant. If Schleiermacher
is close to Kant epistemologically, he is far from Kant as a theorist of reli-
gion. Schleiermacher explicitly rejects Kant’s arguments that religious ideas
(God, the soul, immortality) are by-​products of our moral experience. I will
argue that Kant plays an important role in defining race, but that he does
not have a fully modern notion of race because he does not have a theory of
culture in the way that Schleiermacher and Herder do. Kant theorizes about
race because Kant holds that nature does everything for a reason, with care.
Kant argues that we must assume this in order to do science. He argues that
history is too chaotic to draw under any set of relationships of cause and
effect (that is, history is too chaotic to do history) unless we impose some
sort of structure, itself not found in history. We must assume that history is a
teleological process aiming at a far-​off goal (despite ambiguous empirical evi-
dence). In other words, we work under the assumption that history is moving
toward some particular end. Kant is right that we need to impose structure.
Not every culture imposes the same structure. One of the distinguishing

26. Is monotheism better than polytheism? Are inflected languages more creative than
agglutinative languages? Is autonomy better than communitarian coercion?
14 Modern Religion, Modern R ace

features of modernity is that we have by and large adopted Kant’s historical,

linear, progressive structure (though not everyone assumes that the telos is
some form of peaceful cosmopolitanism).
In the modern world we do think and speak and act as though history
has a teleology. We do this even when we are suspicious of such imposed
structures. The result of this is that when we as scholars of religion do com-
parative work, we theorize difference by placing groups on a trajectory of
progress toward some goal. We have tried to expunge our conceptual tool-
boxes and our language of the racist language of the founders of our disci-
pline, but when we look at our placement of groups on this trajectory from
premodern to modern to future, we find that our categories recapitulate
the racial hierarchies of our predecessors. The figures on whom I focus in
this book challenge much of Kant, but in doing so they take up Kant’s teleo-
logical view of history. I have colleagues who would like to expunge Kant
and other modern European theorists from what we teach our students.
But these thinkers, for better and for worse, have become part of our own
conceptual warp and woof. Extending our genealogies of race and religion
show them to be linked categories in ways we have not yet fully examined.
I have referred several times to this book as a work of history or of
genealogy. It is fair to ask what kind of history I think I am doing. I do not
have a trickle-​down theory, in which Kant defines race one day in his office
and one or five or twenty years later everyone on the streets of Königsberg
is using it the same way by some process of osmosis. Nor is religion a
product of Schleiermacher’s study in this sense.27 But neither do I think
that Kant and Herder and Schleiermacher are simply epiphenomena of
economic or political shifts. They are products of their time to be sure. They
serve as windows into the concepts of race and religion at a critical moment
of development. But they are privileged windows. By examining their writ-
ings we can see what these categories comprise, what factors and ideas go
into them, and how they are structured conceptually. To borrow a term from
the title page of Schleiermacher’s systematic theology, we can unpack how
the concepts housed under race and religion “hang together.” We can see the
reasons for their being shaped as they are, and gain some perspective on
categories that still form the basis of our own worldview and habitus.28

27. See Jonathan Z. Smith, “Introduction,” in Imagining Religion, xi.

28. The kind of history I am doing bears some relationship to the kinds of history done
by Charles Taylor. Taylor writes of his book Sources of the Self that what he is doing can-
not be classified as historical explanation, which would entail an attempt at “diachronic
 Introduction 15

The Structure of the Argument

In ­chapter 1 I enter into the debates about Kant’s role in the construction
of the modern category of race. Here it is important to consider both what
Kant said about race and why he wrote about race in the first place. For
the former, I detail Kant’s definition of race, and sketch out his theory of
the origins of race. I agree with much of the secondary literature that Kant
plays an important role in defining what before him was a loose term with
a wide range of usages, though I will argue that a fully modern notion of
race is not yet present in Kant.
But why does Kant take up the question of race in the first place? Kant
argues that humans must place certain teleological frameworks onto

causation”; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 202. His task is rather a “less ambitious” one. It is
an attempt to answer the interpretive question of what draws people to certain identities.
“What this question asks for is an interpretation of the identity (or of any cultural phenom-
enon which interests us) which will show why people found (or find) it convincing/​inspir-
ing/​moving, which will identify what can be called the ‘idées-​forces’ it contains”; Taylor,
Sources of the Self, 203. One of the shortcomings of Taylor’s magisterial work is that race
makes almost no appearance, yet race clearly is one of the sources of the modern self. But
my interpretive endeavor here, like Taylor’s, is not a causal explanation. I want to lay bare
the inner, often hidden connections, to try to make explicit some of the implicit patterns
of our social imaginary, in an attempt to achieve a certain degree of critical self-​awareness.
Explicating texts of those who stand at the head of the modern river in which we still swim
is one way into this project.
One of the anonymous reviewers of this book for Oxford University Press expressed
some concern that at times I made it seem as though one had to have a PhD in German
philosophy to be a racist. It is true that my discussions of race and religion center on the
people that PhDs in German philosophy study. (And let me simply note here the irony
that a book, half of which is about race, centers on four white men.) But I analyze the texts
of these philosophers and theologians as a way into the social imaginary of their contem-
poraries. My goal is to use them to get at the social imaginary of the modern West, at the
way “ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings,” an imagination that makes pos-
sible (even obvious) “common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy”; Charles
Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007),
171–​72. I take “social imaginary” to be a rough equivalent of “worldview,” though Taylor’s
definition of social imaginary brings out the way it is linked to the obviousness of certain
social practices.
I find Taylor’s work illuminating, but there is a kind of naïve innocence to the way his-
tory unfolds as an intellectual conversation for Taylor. There is a lot of power tied up in the
common practices and shared sense of legitimacy of any given time. One of my arguments
in this book is that what we take for granted about race and religion functions to create
hierarchies that privilege some and harm others. In this way, my project is also related to the
genealogical work of Michel Foucault. Foucault argues that power is not simply a matter of
domination. In every society there are “processes through which the self is constructed or
modified by himself”; Michel Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the
Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth,” Political Theory 21, no. 2 (1993): 204. What is the range
16 Modern Religion, Modern R ace

nature and history to organize the laws under which natural phenomena
fall and to make sense of historical events. (Kant calls these frameworks
subjective regulative principles.) Without these super-​added constructs,
found not in nature or history but in our minds, nature and history would
be too complex and chaotic for humans to begin to undertake scientific
or historical investigations into causes and effects. Race is an important
example for Kant of such a framework.
Chapter 2 tacks to religion. I push back against what I call the standard
reading of Schleiermacher in Anglophone secondary literature. This lit-
erature reads Schleiermacher as trying to protect religion against Kantian
criticism, and scientific explanation in general, by making religion into
something private, internal, and ineffable. It takes Schleiermacher to be
doing an end run around the careful epistemological boundaries set by
Kant, claiming a point of direct contact with the divine that lies at the
base of every religion. Such readings see Schleiermacher as the origina-
tor of a trajectory in religious studies that leads to Rudolf Otto and Mircea
Eliade among others, a trajectory that has come in for severe criticism over

of possibilities available in a given society for being a self? The range will vary from society
to society.
Going back to do an archeology or a genealogy can show us the range in which we oper-
ate. Gary Gutting writes,
The premise of the archaeological method is that systems of thought and knowledge
(epistemes or discursive formations, in Foucault’s terminology) are governed by rules,
beyond those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of individ-
ual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the bound-
aries of thought in a given domain and period. (Gary, Gutting, “Michel Foucault”, The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, winter 2014, http://​plato.stan-
ford.edu/​archives/​win2014/​entries/​foucault/​)
The grammar of how we think about ourselves, the boundaries of our thought, is a gram-
mar of race and religion in our own society. This grammar plays out again and again, as we
saw at the beginning of this Introduction, as we sort out our personal, societal, and institu-
tional lives. The possibility of acting in a different way requires that we critique the grammar
and logic out of which we act now. Foucault writes,
This kind of method entails going behind the institution and trying to discover in a
wider and more overall perspective what we can broadly call a technology of power.
In the same way, this analysis allows us to replace a genetic analysis through filia-
tion with a genealogical analysis—​genealogy should not be confused with genesis
and filiation—​which reconstructs a whole network of alliances, communications,
and points of support. (Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures
at the Collège de France, 1977–​1978, trans. Graham Burchell [London: Picador,
2009], 117)
 Introduction 17

the last thirty years. I argue in contrast that Schleiermacher is far more
Kantian than has been acknowledged.29
Chapter 3 compares and reconsiders the roles that Schleiermacher and
Friedrich Max Müller have played in the way scholars of theory in religion
understand their history. Schleiermacher, based on the standard reading
I critique in ­chapter 2, is often used as a placeholder for dangerous theories
of religion, while Müller stands for a scientific, nontheological approach to
the study of religion that is appropriate at a secular university. Aside from
enjoying some delicious ironies of intellectual history, this chapter moves
my argument forward by showing that religion in the modern world is
essentially social, tied to language, and therefore tied to social groups. We
also see that Müller’s school of philology, though it uses language groups
rather than biological criteria to classify humans, ends up with a taxonomy
and hierarchy of groups that resembles Kant’s racial classifications to a
large degree.
Chapters 4 and 5 show how race and religion are connected. In ­chapter
4 I compare Schleiermacher’s and Herder’s theories of language and
theories of group formation. In many ways Schleiermacher and Herder
are in agreement on these topics. Both argue that thought “clings to” lan-
guage, in Herder’s apt phrase. If Herder has a fuller account of the origins
of human language, Schleiermacher has a fuller account of the ways in
which language forms the concepts that shape our experience and thought.
Because of these theories of language and group formation, Herder and
Schleiermacher both become early and important theorists of national-
ism, in the sense that both argue that humans are naturally divided into
language and culture groups (Völker), and that these groups form a key
part of a person’s identity. In their discussions of nations we see the ways
that individuals are formed by the groups to which they belong. This will
clearly be an important factor in the ways that we conceive of race and
religion in the modern world.

29. In so arguing, I continue an effort that Andrew Dole and I in the United States and Peter
Grove in Germany, among others, have been making in recent years to achieve a more bal-
anced reading of Schleiermacher as a theorist of religion. See Andrew Dole, Schleiermacher
on Religion and the Natural Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Theodore Vial,
Schleiermacher: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury T. & T. Clark, 2013); Peter
Grove, Deutungen des Subjekts: Schleiermachers Philosophie der Religion (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 2004). This reevaluation is made possible in part by the constant stream of excel-
lent critical editions of Schleiermacher’s works that have been coming out from Walter de
Gruyter press since the 1980s.
18 Modern Religion, Modern R ace

Chapter 5 makes the theological anthropology underlying modern

ideas of race and religion explicit. I show that, though Schleiermacher
does not write much at all about race, and Herder explicitly criticizes
Kant’s definitions and theories of race, the expressivist anthropology
championed by these two plays an important role in modern race think-
ing. Kant can define race and give an account of why nature brought it
about. Kant stereotypes groups based on race. But Kant cannot say what
the connection is between the group and the stereotype. What about the
fact of (racial) group membership would lead an individual to be predis-
posed to behave and think in certain ways? The answer to this question
lies at the heart of modern conceptions of race. Modern race is not merely
a system of human classification; it connects the classes to expectations
of moral and intellectual behaviors of members of that group. Without
this connection race can neither demonize nor be celebrated. The theo-
logical anthropology of the expressivists, an anthropology I take to be
the default or assumed anthropology of the modern West, also shapes
our sense of what a “living” religion is. In particular this anthropology
shapes our judgments about what a healthy modern religion looks like,
what a religion looks like that contributes to rather than violates human
flourishing.
Chapter 6 is where the rubber meets the road in my argument. It brings
together race and religion, which have been discussed by and large sepa-
rately to this point. In ­chapter 6 I examine two works Schleiermacher writes
at precisely the same time that he is writing his Speeches—​the Speeches that
played such a large role in c­ hapters 2 and 3, and that played such a large
role in the construction of modern religion. In a series of open letters on
the debate in Prussia about full citizenship for Jews, Schleiermacher (while
arguing that there is no reason to demand that someone be a Christian
to be a Prussian citizen) indicates that the Judaism of his day is not a
healthy religion. His model of religion, one which, based on expressivism,
allows for full human flourishing, may have great theological advantages
in rethinking Protestantism in the changing modern European political,
economic, and scientific contexts. Schleiermacher plays a large role in the
manufacture of what Masuzawa calls living world religions. But when this
model is made the basis of comparative work across non-​Christian reli-
gions, those religions can come up looking out of place, or premodern,
or simply degraded. Schleiermacher’s suggestions for how to rethink a
Judaism that would be at home in the modern West are illuminating of his
criteria, or ranking, of religions.
 Introduction 19

Schleiermacher also undertook a history of the British settlement of

New South Wales (Australia) at the same time. This work, never finished
or published, is extant only in fragments. In three of those fragments
Schleiermacher discusses the original peoples of Australia. Once again,
for reasons very different than for the Jews, the Australians end up very
low on the scale of good or healthy religion.
Chapter 6 shows race at play in comparative religion. Given the
anthropology of expressivism, and given what Schleiermacher has said
about modern religion, we see that, without ever explicitly bringing up
the subject of race, his hierarchical taxonomy of religions reinscribes
almost exactly the same groupings and rankings that we saw in Kant’s
race classes and (looking to the future) Müller’s language families. To
the extent that modern religion is something like what Schleiermacher
argues it is (and I think this extent is large), the category of religion that
continues to underpin our comparative work in religious studies is a
racialized category.
A conclusion to a book like this could go one of several ways. I could
offer a solution to the problems entailed by our modern categories of race
and religion. Or I could survey recent literature in religious studies with an
eye toward pointing out the ways that religion continues to be a racialized
category, even when we do not think we are talking about race. Instead, I opt
for a third way in ­chapter 7, one that demonstrates why the first option is not
viable, and why the second option will remain an important future endeavor.
I make the case by way of concluding that our modern social imaginaries,
our modern conceptual architecture, continue to rely on teleological prin-
ciples. We are led, despite our best efforts (here we are like Herder) to theo-
rize difference by comparing groups based on their proximity to a historical
telos. When we rank parts of the world by how developed or progressive
or modern they are, by how compatible their religions are with democracy,
and when we notice what color the people are who live there, we find that
our categories are not so different from Kant’s and Müller’s. Our options
here are to stop comparing (Herder toyed with this) or to compare in full
awareness of the structure of the concepts we use to compare. I look at a few
of the contemporary scholars who are beginning to take the second option
seriously. This kind of critical self-​awareness on the part of scholars and stu-
dents of religions has the potential to change our small corner of the world,
and eventually influence other corners.
Figure 1.1 Immanuel Kant (1724–​1804), an engraving from 1859. Engraved by
unknown artist and published in Meyers Konversations-​Lexikon, Germany, 1859.
Georgios Kollidas © 123RF.
 1

Kant and Race

In 1770, at the age of forty-​six and having published many important

works, Immanuel Kant (Fig. 1.1) was appointed to the professorship of
logic and metaphysics at the Albertina (the University of Königsberg). He
published his inaugural dissertation.1 In 1771, he published a book review.2
And then, the story goes, begins “the silent decade.” The next book pub-
lished was The Critique of Pure Reason, in 1781. At a contemporary univer-
sity, Kant’s silence might be taken by the administration as an argument
against tenure.
Of course, if the years 1771–​81 were thin in terms of publications, they
were not unfruitful intellectually. The Critique of Pure Reason was the first
of three critiques, and was a true turning point in the history of philoso-
phy. Contemporary faculty might take this as an argument for the value
of time to think without the constant pressure to publish. More broadly,
Kant’s critical philosophy (the body of work that includes The Critique of
Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason [1788], and The Critique of the
Power of Judgment [1790]) is an important moment in the construction of
the conceptual architecture of the modern world.

1. Immanuel Kant, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis [On the form
and principles of the sensible and the intelligible world], Ak. 2:385–​419. I cite Kant’s works
(except for the 1777 version of “Of the Different Human Races”) in the definitive Akademie
edition of his works (Ak.), available online at http://​www.korpora.org/​kant/​verzeichnisse-​
gesamt.html.
2. Immanuel Kant, “Recension von Moscatis Schrift: Von dem körperlichen wesentli-
chen Unterschiede zwischen der Struktur der Thiere und Menschen” [Review of Moscati’s
work Of the Corporeal Essential Differences between the Structure of Animals and Humans],
Königsbergsche Gelehrte und Politische Zeitungen 67 (August 23, 1771), 265–​66; Ak. 2:423–​25.
22 Modern Religion, Modern R ace

But it turns out that the silent decade was not completely silent. Kant
published a course announcement for his lectures on physical geography
in 1775 entitled “Of the Different Human Races,” which he expanded and
published in 1777 in an edited volume that featured the leading “popular
philosophers” of Kant’s day.3 These are the only two publications that came
out under Kant’s name in the silent decade.4
The silence of the silent decade, then, was not a complete silence, but
a whitewashed silence. Until about 1990, very little attention was paid in
the secondary literature to Kant’s essays on race.5 Most scholars simply
ignored them, or dismissed them as occasional pieces, or as unfortunate
expressions of the biases of Kant’s culture, or as atavisms of Kant’s pre-
critical period fortunately purged by the great moral vision of the critical
project. But the argument that the race essays reflect only Kant’s precritical
thinking does not hold water, because Kant published two further essays

3. On popular philosophy, see John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). The volume in which Kant’s 1775 essay “Von
den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen” appeared is entitled Der Philosoph für die Welt. The
1777 version is republished as “Von den verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen,” in Immanuel
Kant, Werke, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, vol. 11, Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie,
Politik und Pädagogik 1, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, 11–​30 (Frankfurt: Insel, 1964).
4. Kant also published, anonymously, “Aufsätze, das Philanthropin betref-
fend,” Königsbergsche Gelehrte und Politische Zeitungen (March 28, 1776, and March 27,
1777) Ak. 2:447–​52. Kant also wrote a Latin commentary on the inaugural lecture of a profes-
sor of poetry that was published posthumously, “Concerning Sensory Illusion and Poetic
Fiction” (translated into German by Bernhard Adolf Schmidt and published in “Eine bisher
unbekannte lateinische Rede Kants über Sinnestäuschung und poetische Fiktion,” Kant-​
Studien 16 [1911], 5–​21); Ak. 15:903–​35. English translation by Ralf Meerbote, “Concerning
Sensory Illusion and Poetic Fiction,” in Kant’s Latin Writings, ed. Lewis White Beck, 169–​83
(New York: Peter Lang, 1992).
5. Jon M. Mikkelsen provides a helpful overview of the literature on Kant and race in the
“Translator’s Introduction,” in Kant and the Concept of Race: Late Eighteenth-​Century Writings,
trans. and ed. Jon M. Mikkelsen, 3–​18 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013). The
most important work on Kant and race includes: Robert Bernasconi, “Kant as an Unfamiliar
Source of Racism,” in Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays, ed. Julie K. Ward and Tommy L. Lott,
145–​66 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), and “Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role
in the Enlightenment Construction of Race,” in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi, 11–​36 (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2001); J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008); Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Achieving Our Humanity: The Idea of the
Postracial Future (Oxford: Routledge, 2001); Thomas E. Hill Jr. and Bernard Boxhill, “Kant
and Race,” in Race and Racism, ed. Bernard Boxhill, 448–​71 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001); Mark Larrimore, “Sublime Waste: Kant on the Destiny of the ‘Races,’” in
“Civilization and Oppression,” ed. Catherine Wilson, special issue, Canadian Journal of
Philosophy suppl. vol. 25 (1999): 99–​125; Robert Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational
Beings to Human Beings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Susan Meld Schell,
The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community (Chicago: University
 Kant and Race 23

on race in 1785 and 1788.6 These essays remain committed to the central
features of Kant’s argument in the earlier, 1775 and 1777 essays.
The question of Kant and race is pressing for Kant scholars because of
the tension between his moral and political philosophy (see, for example,
Towards Perpetual Peace), and statements about non-​European races he
makes in passing in his essays on race (but also in Observations on the
Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Physical Geography, and Anthropology
from a Pragmatic Point of View). Part of what it means to be human for Kant
is to possess reason, which means that humans can (though they often do
not) act on rational principle rather than on desire. This is autonomy, and
the possession of autonomy is the source of human dignity.7 Kant’s moral
philosophy holds out the possibility that humans can treat each other as
ends and never as means only (to quote the second formulation of the
Categorical Imperative).
How can the philosopher who teaches human dignity based on univer-
sal human reason also write the following?

The fact that someone was completely black from head to toe was
clear proof that what he said was stupid.8
Humanity is in its greatest perfection in the white race. The yel-
low Indians already have a lesser talent. The Negroes are far lower,
and on the lowest stands a part of the American peoples.9

of Chicago Press, 1996); Tsenay Serequeberhan, “The Critique of Eurocentrism and the
Practice of African Philosophy,” in Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader, ed.
Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, 141–​61 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997); Allen W. Wood, Kant’s
Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
6. “Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrasse” [Determination of the concept of a
human race, 1785] and “Über den Gebrauch teleologischer Principien in der Philosophie”
[On the use of teleological principles in philosophy, 1788]. Translations from the German are
mine unless otherwise indicated. I have given page references to good English translations
where available (almost all cases). I use the Akademie edition for the 1775, 1785, and 1788
essays but the Akademie edition does not clearly distinguish the 1775 and 1777 essays; for the
1777 essay, see above, note 3.
7. See Immanuel Kant, Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? Ak. 8:33–​42; English
translation, What Is Enlightenment? in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What Is
Enlightenment? trans. Lewis White Beck, 2nd ed. Library of Liberal Arts (Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995).
8. Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen, Ak. 2:255;
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, ed. Patrick Frierson
and Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 261.
9. Immanuel Kant, Physische Geographie [Physical geography, 1802], Ak. 9:316.
24 Modern Religion, Modern R ace

But that [American Indians’] nature achieved no full suitability

for any single climate, one can take from the fact that hardly any
other ground can be given why this race—​too weak for hard labor,
too blasé for industrious [labor], and incapable of all culture despite
the nearby sufficient example and encouragement—​stands even
lower than the Negro, which occupies the lowest of all the other
rungs that we have named racial differences.10

Endorsing an infamous footnote of Hume’s, Kant writes

not a single Negro was ever found who presented anything great
in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though
among whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble,
and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamen-
tal is the difference between these two races of human beings, and
it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color.11

In the critical philosophy Kant writes as if all humans, regardless of

race or gender, have reason. Yet in writings about non-​Europeans and
women, many people seem to be deficient in reason. My task here is
not to resolve this tension, and I am less concerned in this chapter with
racism than I am with race. But of course one, if not the, major reason
to undertake an investigation of the category of race is that it under-
pins the uses of race, most perniciously racism, that have infected the
modern world.
The stakes are high because Kant cannot safely be entombed in the mau-
soleum of intellectual history. As Maurice Olender writes, “the word [race]
has closed like a trap around generations of scientists.”12 Human rights
discourse, which has been dominant since the end of the Second World
War, is a discourse that stems fairly directly from Kant’s moral philosophy.

10. Immanuel Kant, “Über den Gebrauch teleologischer Principien in der Philosophie,” Ak.
8:175–​76. A good English translation is “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy
(1788),” in Kant and the Concept of Race: Late Eighteenth-​Century Writings trans. and ed. Jon
M. Mikkelsen, 169–​94 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013). References to the
translations in Mikkelsen’s volume are hereafter “trans. Mikkelsen.”
11. Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen Ak. 2:253;
translation in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 58–​9.
12. Maurice Olender, Race and Erudition, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2009), 2.
 Kant and Race 25

Some have even claimed that human rights is the religion of modernity.13
The retrieval of Kant accomplished by John Rawls and others in the lat-
ter third of the twentieth century made Kant once again one of the most
important sources for contemporary political thought. It is worth spend-
ing some time on Kant and race not because Kant is at fault but because
his efforts to reconcile his moral thought with his “anthological-​historical
functionalism,” as Thomas McCarthy writes, “render apparent and sharp
the tensions between liberal universalism and liberal developmentalism,
which lesser theorists have attempted to downplay or disguise.”14
This chapter begins to reconstruct the particular modern portion of the
genealogy of race. I want to be clear, as I stated in the introduction, that my
project is not a causal history. I am not trying to determine the extent to
which Kant caused our modern concept of race.15 I am concerned to show
how race hangs together in Kant’s thinking with other important parts of
the modern social imaginary, in particular in this chapter the modern faith
in teleological progress. This genealogy runs parallel to the genealogy of
modern religion I am reconstructing in ­chapters 2, 3, and 6. Race, reli-
gion, progress, human nature are linked in modernity. By the end of the
book I hope to have demonstrated that the genealogies of race and religion
are not merely parallel, but mutually constituting.
I have four tasks in this chapter. First, I make the case that race is
neither a biological category, nor did it exist in its present form in all

13. See for example Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights
(Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013).
14. Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 15.
15. I will consider below the question of how important race is to Kant’s philosophical
system. That is a different question than the importance of Kant’s writings on race to the
development of modern race thinking. Kant has been called by some the “inventor” of race
(Robert Bernasconi, most prominently; see “Who Invented the Concept of Race?”). Works on
the history of race and biology do not focus much on Kant. See for example Marjorie Grene
and David Depew, The Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004). Grene and Depew argue that Kant is important in the definition of
terms, but that he “worked out his concept of race in order to support a strong, potentially
‘anti-​racist’ version of monogenism” (119). Lenny Moss discusses the importance of Kant’s
“germs” in the development of the idea of genes, but does not take up Kant’s theories of
race (What Genes Can’t Do [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003]). Racist philosophers such
as Christoph Meiners and John Stewart Chamberlain either do not draw on Kant at all, or
do not mention Kant’s writings on race. I am grateful to Mark (Jon) Mikkelsen for these
references, and for helping me sort out my conceptual-​structural arguments from causal
arguments (personal communication, October 16, 2014).
26 Modern Religion, Modern R ace

times and places (it is historically contingent). Second, I examine Kant’s

definition and theory of race. Third, I enter into the debates in the sec-
ondary literature about the relationship of Kant’s essays on race and his
critical philosophy. I argue that race is connected to Kant’s philosophy
in ways that have not yet been quite correctly analyzed by Kant’s inter-
preters. Fourth, I begin to make my argument that, insofar as Kant is an
example and architect of the modern social imaginary, race plays a role
as one of the main building blocks of that modern conceptual structure.
I want to be very clear about the implications of this. We are offended
by what Kant has to say about race. Yet if my argument is correct, we
cannot help but think and experience the world in the terms, including
the racial terms, that we see in Kant. So that I am not misunderstood,
I reiterate here what I wrote in the introduction—​this is not a causal
history, in which I assess the degree to which Kant is responsible for the
way we think about race. This is a genealogy in which, in Kant, we see in
an important moment of the construction of modernity how race “hangs
together” with assumptions moderns make about nature, history, and
identity.
In ­chapters 4 and 5 I will argue that a full-​blown modern category of
race is not yet complete in Kant, but requires the addition of the genera-
tion following Kant (here Herder, ironically, is one of the central figures).
Chapter 7 extends this argument by showing that, though we have moved
beyond Kant in some ways, the concept of race is connected to the concept
of progress, without which modernity cannot exist.

What Race Is Not

That everyone has a race seems obvious, a natural feature of the world. We
automatically sort people into races, and race is one of the most important
concepts around which we form our personal and social identities. Race
seems so obvious that in order to show that we need a genealogy of it in
the first place I need to make the case that race is not a biological category,
nor have humans in other historical contexts used race as the basis of clas-
sifications of subgroupings of humanity.
First, biology. While there are clearly heritable physical characteris-
tics (skin, hair, bone), human groups do not have clear-​cut boundaries.
As Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, “we … know that none of the major
population groups have been reproductively isolated for very many gen-
erations. If I may be excused what will sound like a euphemism, at the
 Kant and Race 27

margins there is always the exchange of genes.”16 To take skin color as

an example (but the same is true of any physical feature of humans), if
we lined up humanity from darker to lighter, the change in tone between
any two people in line would be imperceptible. Human color is spread
out on a chromatic analog spectrum. Racial categories (black, white, etc.)
are digitally imposed by the classifier. Kant himself is very clear that mere
observation of nature does not present us with the concept of race. Race is
a concept we must apply to nature.17
More importantly, aside from the obvious morphological characteris-
tics just mentioned, other biological characteristics are not concentrated
in certain groups. “Every reputable biologist will agree that human genetic
variability between the populations of Africa or Europe or Asia is not
much greater than that within those populations.”18 The obvious physical
characteristics that we use as markers of membership in racial groupings
are not correlated in any statistically significant way with other heritable
characteristics. If by “race” we mean not just heritable physical features,
but heritable features that cluster together in predictable ways and that
determine things like behavioral predispositions and mental aptitudes, it
does not exist.
If race as a category is not biologically sustainable, neither is it very
old. There is a wide scholarly consensus that there was no equivalent to
our concept of race in antiquity.19 Eric Voegelin argues that the building

16. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 38.
17. “The word [race] is not at all in any systematic description of nature, so presumably
the thing itself is also not in nature. Just the concept that this expression denotes is well
grounded in the reason of an observer of nature”; Kant, “Über den Gebrauch teleologischer
Principien in der Philosophie,” Ak. 8:163; trans. Mikkelsen, 176.
18. Appiah, In My Father’s House, 35. Appiah relies on M. Nei and A. K. Roychoudhury,
“Genetic Relationship and Evolution of Human Races,” Evolutionary Biology 14 (1983): 1–​59.
Expressed genetically, the odds that a given locus of a chromosome of a “Caucasoid” in
England is occupied by a specific gene is about 0.857; for the whole human population,
0.852. “The chances, in other words, that two people taken at random from the human
population will have the same characteristic at a random locus are about 85.2 percent,
while the chances for two (white) people taken from the population of England are about
85.7 percent” (36).
19. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Vintage, 1978), 124; Hannah Arendt, “Race-​Thinking before Racism,” in The Origins
of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951), 158–​84; Appiah, In My Father’s
House, 11–​12; Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1995), 19; Frank M. Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the
28 Modern Religion, Modern R ace

blocks of race—​a certain concept of nature, of organism, and of human

nature—​were creations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We
will return to Voegelin’s important argument in c­ hapter 5, on Herder. But
other scholars, coming from different disciplines, agree. Ivan Hannaford
argues that the Greek words which sometimes have been read by moderns
as referring to race denoted very different concepts to the Greeks.

The noun genos is frequently translated as “race,” but its prime

meaning is to do with those seen to be bound together by descent in
families, clans, and tribes in a historical sequence from generation
to generation. … A group held together only by custom and habit is
said to live in ethos, inhabiting a capricious realm of natural neces-
sity (physis). Those, like the Greeks, who have invented poleis occupy
two spheres—​the one they cannot escape, the private monotony of
the endless, purposeless cycle of household, and the other they have
chosen, the public world of the agora governed by nomos. Those
who live outside poleis, and govern their affairs hierarchically (like
households, solely according to custom and habit, observing the
judgments of the forebears … ), are said to be ethnos.20

Genos and ethnos refer more closely to what we would call in contemporary
English households or clans and their traditions.
Hannaford argues that when Greeks speak disparagingly of non-​
Greeks (barbarians, for example), they refer not to groups defined by any
biologically transmitted essences, but to groups that have not organized
themselves as a polity.

The transition from kith and kin to polity, from blood relationship to
political relationship … depended on human action and … sprang
from logos, or reason. Thus, the emergence of political life and law
(polis and nomos) was the outcome of a heated and controversial

Greco-​Roman Experience (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970);
Lloyd A. Thompson, Romans and Blacks (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989).
Hannaford lists William L. Westermann, R. B. Onians, Moses Hadas, Clyde Kluckhohn,
Herschel Baker, Alfred E. Zimmern, Moses Finley, Walter Bagehot, Benjamin Jowett, and
Lord Acton as also sharing this view. This view is not universal. See for example Thomas
F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University
Press, 1963), 6.
20. Hannaford, Race, 22.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
[205]

[Contents]

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

I.—I publish the following legal documents—the first articles for which I have to
expend any of St. George’s money,—intact: venturing not so much as the
profanity of punctuation. The Memorandum is drawn up by one of our leading
counsel, from my sketch of what I wanted. The points on which it may need
some modification are referred to in my added notes; and I now invite farther
criticism or suggestion from the subscribers to the Fund.

“2, Bond Court, Walbrook, London, E.C.,

“June 15th, 1875.

“St. George’s Company.

“Dear Sir,—According to the promise in our Mr. Tarrant’s letter of the 11th, we
now beg to send you what Mr. Wm. Barber, after reading your sketch, has
approved of as the written fundamental laws of the Company,—though we shall
be quite prepared to find that some alterations in it are still necessary to
express your views correctly.
 “We are,
“Dear Sir,
“Yours faithfully,
“Tarrant & Mackrell.

“Professor Ruskin, Corpus Ch. Coll., Oxford.”

[206]

[Contents]

MEMORANDUM AND STATUTES OF THE COMPANY OF

ST. GEORGE.

The Company is constituted with the object of determining and instituting in

practice the wholesome laws of agricultural life and economy and of instructing
the agricultural labourer in the science art and literature of good husbandry. (a)
With this object it is proposed to acquire by gift purchase or otherwise plots or
tracts of land in different parts of the country which will be brought into such
state of cultivation or left uncultivated or turned into waste or common land and
applied to such purposes as having regard to the nature of the soil and other
surrounding circumstances may in each case be thought to be most generally
useful.

The members of the Company shall be styled Companions of the Company of

St. George (b) Any person may become a Companion by subscribing not less
than £ in money to the funds of the Company or by making a gift to the
Company of land not less than £ in value (c) and by having his name entered
on the Roll of Companions with due solemnity.

The name of every Companion shall be entered on the Roll of Companions

either by himself in the presence of two witnesses of full age who shall attest
such entry or if the Companion shall so desire by the Master of the Company
with the same formalities. The Roll of Companions shall be kept in safe custody
within the walls of the College of Corpus Christi in Oxford or at such other safe
and commodious place as the Companions shall from time to time direct.

Each Companion shall by virtue of the entry of his name on the Roll be deemed
to have bound himself by a solemn vow and promise as strict as if the same
had been ratified by oath to be true and loyal to the Company and to the best of
his power and might so far as in him lies to forward and advance the
[207]objects and interests thereof and faithfully to keep and obey the statutes
and rules thereof yet so nevertheless that he shall not be bound in any way to
harass annoy injure or inconvenience his neighbour.

Chief among the Companions of the Company shall be the Master thereof who
so long as he shall hold office shall have full and absolute power at his will and
pleasure to make and repeal laws and byelaws (d) and in all respects to rule
regulate manage and direct the affairs of the Company and receive apply and
administer funds and subscriptions in aid of its objects and to purchase acquire
cultivate manage lease sell or otherwise dispose of the estates and properties
of the Company and generally direct and control the operations thereof.

The Master shall be elected and may from time to time and at any time be
deposed by the votes of a majority in number of the Companions in General
Meeting assembled but except in the event of his resignation or deposition
shall hold office for life. The first Master of the Company shall be John Ruskin
who shall however (subject to re-election) only hold office until the first General
Meeting of the Companions.

The Master shall render to each Companion and shall be at liberty if he shall so
think fit to print for public circulation a monthly report and account of the
operations and financial position of the Company.

No Master or other Companion of the Company shall either directly or indirectly

receive any pay profit emolument or advantage whatsoever from out of by or by
means of his office or position as a member of the Company.

The practical supervision and management of the estates and properties of the
Company shall subject to the direction and control of the Master be entrusted
to and carried out by land agents tenants and labourers who shall be styled
Retainers of the Company. [208]
The name of each Retainer in the permanent employ of the Company shall be
entered in a Register to be called the Roll of Retainers and to be kept at the
same place as the Roll of Companions. Such entry shall be made either by the
Retainer himself in the presence of one witness of full age who shall attest the
entry or if the Retainer shall so desire by the Master with the same formalities.

No pecuniary liability shall attach to any Retainer of the Company by virtue of

his position as such but each Retainer shall by virtue of the entry of his name
on the Roll be deemed to have bound himself by a solemn vow and promise as
strict as if the same had been ratified by oath to be true and loyal to the
Company and faithfully to keep and obey the statutes and rules thereof and the
orders and commands of the officers of the Company who from time to time
may be set over him.

Each land agent and labourer being a Retainer of the Company shall receive
and be paid a fixed salary in return for his services and shall not by perquisites
commissions or any other means whatever either directly or indirectly receive
or acquire any pay profit emolument or advantages whatever other than such
fixed salary from out of or by means of his office or position as a Retainer of the
Company.

The rents and profits to be derived from the estates and properties of the
Company shall be applied in the first instance in the development of the land
(e) and the physical intellectual moral social and religious improvement of the
residents thereon in such manner as the Master shall from time to time direct or
approve and the surplus rents and profits if any shall be applied in reduction of
the amount paid by the tenants in proportion to their respective skill and
industry either by a gradual remission of rent towards the close of the tenancy
or in such other way as may be thought best but in no case shall the
Companions personally derive any rents or profits from the property of the
Company. [209]

All land and hereditaments for the time being belonging to the Company shall
be conveyed to and vested in any two or more of the Companions whom the
Master may from time to time select for the office as Trustees of the Company
and shall be dealt with by them according to the directions of the Master. (f)

The property of the Company shall belong to the Companions in the shares
and proportions in which they shall have respectively contributed or by
succession or accruer become entitled to the same.

Each Companion shall be entitled by writing under his hand during his lifetime
or by will or codicil to appoint one person as his successor in the Company and
such person shall on entry of his name on the Roll of Companions in
compliance with the formalities hereinbefore prescribed become a Companion
of the Company and become entitled to the share of his appointor in the
property of the Company. (g)

Each Companion shall at any time be entitled to resign his position by giving to
the Master a Notice under his hand of his desire and intention so to do.

If any Companion shall resign his position or die without having appointed a
successor or if the person so appointed shall for calendar months after the
date when notice of such resignation shall have been received by the Master or
after the date of such death as the case may be fail to have his name entered
on the Roll of Companions in compliance with the formalities hereinbefore
prescribed his share in the property of the Company shall forthwith become
forfeited and shall accrue to the other Companions in the shares and
proportions in which they shall inter se be for the time being entitled to the
property of the Company. (h)

The Company may at any time be dissolved by the Votes of three-fourths of the
Companions in General Meeting assembled and in the event of the Company
being so dissolved or being [210]dissolved by any other means not hereinbefore
specially provided for the property of the Company shall subject to the debts
liabilities and engagements thereof become divisible among the Companions
for the time being in the shares and proportions in which they shall for the time
being be entitled thereto yet so nevertheless that all leases agreements for
leases and other tenancies for the time being subsisting on the property of the
Company shall bind the persons among whom the property comprised therein
shall so become divisible and shall continue as valid and effectual to all intents
and purposes as if the Company had not been dissolved.

Notes on the above Memorandum.

(a) This sentence must be changed into: “such science art and literature as are
properly connected with husbandry.”
(b) In my sketch, I wrote Companions of St. George. But as the existence of St.
George cannot be legally proved or assumed, the tautologically legal phrase
must be permitted.

(c) This clause cannot stand. The admission into the Company must not be
purchaseable; also many persons capable of giving enthusiastic and wise help
as Companions, may be unable to subscribe money. Nothing can be required
as a condition of entrance, except the consent of the Master, and signature
promising obedience to the laws.

(d) This clause needs much development. For though the Master must be
entirely unrestrained in action within the limits of the Laws of the Company, he
must not change or add to them without some manner of consultation with the
Companions. Even in now founding the Society, I do not venture to write a
constitution for it without inviting the help of its existing members; and when
once its main laws are agreed upon, they must be inabrogable without the
same concurrence of the members which would be necessary to dissolve the
Society altogether. [211]

(e) To the development, and enlargement, of the Society’s operations, also.

(f) I do not think the Master should have the power of choosing the Trustees. I
was obliged to do so, before any Society was in existence; but the Trustees
have to verify the Master’s accounts, and otherwise act as a check upon him.
They must not, therefore, be chosen by him.

(g) A questionable clause, which I have not at present time to discuss.

(h) Partly the corollary of (g). The word ‘forfeited’ is morally, if not legally,
objectionable. No idea of forfeiture ought to attach to the resolved surrender of
transferable claim; or to the accidental inability to discover a fitting successor.

Reserving, therefore, the above clauses for future modification, the rest of the
Memorandum fully expresses what seems to me desirable for the first basis of
our constitution; and I shall be glad to hear whether any of the present
subscribers to St. George’s Fund will join me on these conditions.

II.—I should willingly have printed the letter from which the following extracts
are taken, (with comments,) as a ‘Fors’ by itself; but having other matters
pressing, must content myself to leave it in the smaller print. The more
interesting half of it is still reserved for next month.

“What long years have passed since my eyes first saw the calm sweet scene
beyond Wakefield Bridge! I was but a small creature then, and had never been
far from my mother’s door. It was a memorable day for me when I toddled a full
mile from the shady up-town street where we lived, past strange windows, over
unfamiliar flags, to see the big weir and the chapel on the Bridge. Standing on
tiptoe, I could just see over the parapet and look down-stream.

“That was my first peep into fair, green England, and destined [212]never to be
forgotten. The gray old chapel, the shining water below, the far-winding green
banks spangled with buttercups, the grove-clad hills of Heath and Kirkthorpe,—
all seemed to pass into my heart for ever.

“There was no railway then, only the Doncaster coach careering over the
Bridge with a brave sound of horn; fields and farmsteads stood where the
Kirkgate station is; where the twenty black throats of the foundry belch out
flame and soot, there were only strawberry grounds and blossoming pear-
orchards, among which the throstles and blackbirds were shouting for
gladness.

“The chapel lay neglected in a nest of wild willows, and a peaceful cobbler
dwelt in it. As I looked at it, Duke Richard and King Edward became living
realities to me; the dry bones of Pinnock’s Catechism started suddenly into life.
That was the real old chapel of the fifteenth century. Some years after, they
ousted the cobbler, pulled down the old stones, restored it, and opened it for
ritualistic worship; but the cheap stonework has crumbled away again, and it
now looks as ancient as in days of yore. Only, as I remember it, it had a white
hoariness: the foundry smoke has made it black at the present day.

“Some of my companions had been farther out in the world than myself. They
pointed out the dusky shape of Heath Hall, seen through the thinly-clad elm-
trees, and told me how old Lady ——‘s ghost still walked there on stormy
nights. Beyond was Kirkthorpe, where the forlorn shapes of the exiled Spanish
nuns had been seen flitting about their graves in the churchyard.

“There on the right was the tree-crowned mound of Sandal Castle, which
Cromwell had blown down; the dry ditch was full of primroses, they told me;
those woods bounded Crofton, famous for its cowslip fields; and in Heath wood
you would see the ground white with snowdrops in March.

“I do not think that it is the partiality of a native that makes me think you could
hardly find a fairer inland pastoral scene [213]than the one I beheld from
Wakefield Bridge the first time I stood there. On the chapel side there was the
soft green English landscape, with woods and spires and halls, and the brown
sails of boats silently moving among the flowery banks; on the town side there
were picturesque traffic and life; the thundering weir, the wide still water
beyond, the big dark-red granaries, with balconies and archways to the water,
and the lofty white mills grinding out their cheering music.

“But there were no worse shapes than honest, dusty millers’ men, and browned
boatmen, decent people; no open vileness and foul language were rampant in
our quiet clean town in those days. I can remember how clean the pavement
used to look there, and at Doncaster. Both towns are incredibly dirty now. I
cannot bear to look at the filthy beslavered causeway, in places where I
remember to have never seen anything worse than the big round thunder-
drops I used to watch with gleeful interest.

“In those days we were proud of the cleanness and sweet air and gentility of
Wakefield. Leeds was then considered rather vulgar, as a factory town, and
Bradford was obscure, rough, and wild; but Wakefield prided itself in refined
living on moderate means, and cultured people of small income were fond of
settling there.

“Market day used to be a great event for us all.

“I wish that you could have seen the handsome farmers’ wives ranged round
the church walls, with their baskets of apricots and cream cheese, before
reform came, and they swept away my dear old school-house of the
seventeenth century, to make an ugly barren desert of a market ground. You
might have seen, too, the pretty cottagers’ daughters, with their bunches of
lavender and baskets of fruit, or heaps of cowslips and primroses for the wine
and vinegar Wakefield housewives prided themselves upon. On certain days
they stood to be hired as maid-servants, and were prized in the country round
as neat, clean, modest-spoken girls. [214]
“I do not know where they are gone to now,—I suppose to the factories.
Anyhow, Wakefield ladies cry out that they must get servants from London, and
Stafford, and Wales. So class gets parted from class.

“Things were different then. Well-to-do ladies prided themselves on doing their
marketing in person, and kindly feeling and acquaintanceship sprang up
between town and country folk. My Wakefield friends nowadays laugh at the
idea of going to market. They order everything through the cook, and hardly
know their own tradespeople by sight. We used to get delicious butter at
tenpence a pound, and such curds and cream-cheese as I never taste now.
‘Cook’ brings in indifferent butter mostly, at near two shillings.

“As for the farmers’ wives, they would not like to be seen with a butter-basket.
They mostly send the dairy produce off by rail to people whom they never see,
and thus class is more sundered from class every day, even by the very
facilities that railways afford. I can remember that the townspeople had simple
merry-makings and neighbourly ways that this generation would scorn. Many a
pleasant walk we had to the farms and halls that belted the old town; and
boating parties on the Calder, and tea-drinkings and dances—mostly
extempore,—in the easy fashion of Vicar Primrose’s days.

“But pleasure must be sought farther off now. Our young folks go to London or
Paris for their recreation. People seem to have no leisure for being neighbourly,
or to get settled in their houses. They seem to be all expecting to make a heap
of money, and to be much grander presently, and finally to live in halls and
villas, and look down on their early friends.

“But I am sorry for the young people. They run through everything so soon, and
have nothing left to hope for or dream of in a few years. They are better
dressed than we were, and have more accomplishments; but I cannot help
thinking that we young [215]folks were happier in the old times, though shillings
were not half so plentiful, and we had only two frocks a year.

“Tradespeople were different, too, in old Wakefield.

“They expected to live with us all their lives; they had high notions of honour as
tradesmen, and they and their customers respected each other.
“They prided themselves on the ‘wear’ of their goods. If they had passed upon
the housewives a piece of sized calico or shoddy flannel, they would have
heard of it for years after.

“Now the richer ladies go to Leeds or Manchester to make purchases; the town
tradesmen are soured and jealous. They put up big plate-glass fronts, and
send out flaming bills; but one does not know where to get a piece of sound
calico or stout linen, well spun and well woven.

“Give me back our dingy old shops where everything was genuine, instead of
these glass palaces where we often get pins without points, needles without
eyes, and sewing thread sixty yards to the hundred—which I actually heard a
young Quaker defend the other day as an allowable trade practice.”

III.—I venture to print the following sentences from “a poor mother’s” letter, that
my reply may be more generally intelligible. I wish I could say, useful; but the
want of an art-grammar is every day becoming more felt:—

“I am rather ashamed to tell you how young he is (not quite eleven), fearing you
will say I have troubled you idly; but I was sincerely anxious to know your views
on the training of a boy for some definite sort of art-work, and I have always
fancied such training ought to begin very early,—[yes, assuredly,]—also, there
are reasons why we must decide early in what direction we shall look out for
employment for him.”

(I never would advise any parents to look for employment in art as a means of
their children’s support. It is only when [216]the natural bias is quite
uncontrollable, that future eminence, and comfort of material circumstances,
can be looked for. And when it is uncontrollable, it ceases to be a question
whether we should control it. We have only to guide it.)

“But I seem to dread the results of letting him run idle until he is fourteen or
fifteen years old—[most wisely]—and a poor and busy mother like me has not
time to superintend the employment of a boy as a richer one might. This makes
me long to put him to work under a master early. As he does so little at book-
learning, would the practical learning of stone-cutting under the village
stonemason (a good man) be likely to lead to anything further?”
I do not know, but it would be of the greatest service to the boy meanwhile. Let
him learn good joiners’ work also, and to plough, with time allowed him for
drawing. I feel more and more the need of a useful grammar of art for young
people, and simple elementary teaching in public schools. I have always hoped
to remedy this want, but have been hindered hitherto. [217]

Moutard—not -arde; but I can’t give better than this English for it. ↑
1
Fate, and the good novelist, thus dismiss poor grandmamma in a passing sentence,—
2
just when we wanted her so much to live a little longer, too! But that is Fors’s way, and
Gotthelf knows it. A bad novelist would have made her live to exactly the proper moment, and
then die in a most instructive manner, and with pathetic incidents and speeches which would
have filled a chapter. ↑
This paragraph implies, of course, the existence of all modern abuses,—the story dealing
3 only with the world as it is. ↑
A minute Evangelical fragment—dubitable enough. ↑
4
Primarily, because it is untrue. The respect of a child for its parent depends on the
5
parent’s own personal character; and not at all, irrespective of that, on his religious
behaviour. Which the practical good sense of the reverend novelist presently admits. ↑
We keep the metaphor in the phrase, to ‘give a dressing,’ but the short verb is better. ↑
6
Untranslateable. ↑
7
It was unworthy of Gotthelf to spoil his story by this vulgar theatrical catastrophe; and
8his object (namely, to exhibit the character of Hansli in riches as well as poverty,) does
not justify him; for, to be an example to those in his own position, Hansli should have remained
in it. We will, however, take what good we can get: several of the points for the sake of which I
have translated the whole story, are in this part of it. ↑
“Fidèle à toute épreuve.” ↑
9
“Patraque,”—machine out of repair, and useless. ↑
10
[Contents]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
 LETTER LVI.

I believe my readers will scarcely thank me for printing, this month,

instead of the continuation of the letter from Wakefield, a theological
essay by Mr. Lyttel. But it is my first business, in Fors, to be just,—
and only my second or third to be entertaining; so that any person
who conceives himself to have been misrepresented must always
have my types at his command. On the other side, I must point out,
before entering further into controversy of any kind, the constant
habit in my antagonists of misrepresenting me. For instance; in an
article forwarded to me from a local paper, urging what it can in
defence of the arrangements noticed by me as offensive, at Kirby
Lonsdale and Clapham, I find this sentence:

“The squire’s house does not escape, though one can see no reason
for the remark unless it be that Mr. Ruskin dislikes lords, squires, and
clergymen.”

Now I have good reason for supposing this article [218]to have been
written by a gentleman;—and even an amiable gentleman,—who,
feeling himself hurt, and not at all wishing to hurt anybody, very
naturally cries out: and thinks it monstrous in me to hurt him; or his
own pet lord, or squire. But he never thinks what wrong there may be
in printing his own momentary impression of the character of a man
who has been thirty years before the public, without taking the
smallest pains to ascertain whether his notion be true or false.

It happens, by Fors’ appointment, that the piece of my early life

which I have already written for this month’s letter, sufficiently
answers the imputation of my dislike to lords and squires. But I will
preface it, in order to illustrate my dislike of clergymen, by a later bit
of biography; which, at the rate of my present progress in giving
account of myself, I should otherwise, as nearly as I can calculate,
reach only about the year 1975.

Last summer, in Rome, I lodged at the Hotel de Russie; and, in the

archway of the courtyard of that mansion, waited usually, in the
mornings, a Capuchin friar, begging for his monastery.

Now, though I greatly object to any clergyman’s coming and taking

me by the throat, and saying ‘Pay me that thou owest,’ I never pass
a begging friar without giving him sixpence, or the equivalent
fivepence of foreign coin;—extending the charity even occasionally
as far as tenpence, if no fivepenny-bit chance to be in my purse. And
this particular begging friar having a [219]gentle face, and a long white
beard, and a beautiful cloak, like a blanket; and being altogether the
pleasantest sight, next to Sandro Botticelli’s Zipporah, I was like to
see in Rome in the course of the day, I always gave him the extra
fivepence for looking so nice; which generosity so worked on his
mind,—(the more usual English religious sentiment in Rome
expending itself rather in buying poetical pictures of monks than in
filling their bellies),—that, after some six or seven doles of
tenpences, he must needs take my hand one day, and try to kiss it.
Which being only just able to prevent, I took him round the neck and
kissed his lips instead: and this, it seems, was more to him than the
tenpences, for, next day, he brought me a little reliquary, with a
certificated fibre in it of St. Francis’ cloak, (the hair one, now
preserved at Assisi); and when afterwards I showed my friend Fra
Antonio, the Assisi sacristan, what I had got, it was a pleasure to see
him open his eyes, wider than Monsieur the Syndic at Hansli’s fifty
thousand crowns. He thought I must have come by it dishonestly; but
not I, a whit,—for I most carefully explained to the Capuchin, when
he brought it me, that I was more a Turk than a Catholic;—but he
said I might keep the reliquary, for all that.
Contenting myself, for the moment, with this illustration of my
present dislike of clergymen, I return to earlier days. [220]

But for the reader’s better understanding of such further progress of

my poor little life as I may trespass on his patience in describing, it is
now needful that I give some account of my father’s mercantile
position in London.

The firm of which he was head partner may be yet remembered by

some of the older city houses, as carrying on their business in a
small counting-house on the first floor of narrow premises, in as
narrow a thoroughfare of East London,—Billiter Street, the principal
traverse from Leadenhall Street into Fenchurch Street.

The names of the three partners were given in full on their brass
plate under the counting-house bell,—Ruskin, Telford, and Domecq.

Mr. Domecq’s name should have been the first, by rights, for my
father and Mr. Telford were only his agents. He was the sole
proprietor of the estate which was the main capital of the firm,—the
vineyard of Macharnudo, the most precious hillside, for growth of
white wine, in the Spanish peninsula. The quality of the Macharnudo
vintage essentially fixed the standard of Xeres ‘sack’ or ‘dry’—secco
—sherris, or sherry, from the days of Henry the Fifth to our own;—
the unalterable and unrivalled chalk-marl of it putting a strength into
the grape which age can only enrich and darken,—never impair.

Mr. Peter Domecq was, I believe, Spanish born; and partly French,
partly English bred: a man of strictest [221]honour, and kindly
disposition; how descended, I do not know; how he became
possessor of his vineyard, I do not know; what position he held,
when young, in the firm of Gordon, Murphy, and Company, I do not
know; but in their house he watched their head-clerk, my father,
during his nine years of duty, and when the house broke up, asked
him to be his own agent in England. My father saw that he could fully
trust Mr. Domecq’s honour, and feeling;—but not so fully either his
sense, or his industry: and insisted, though taking only his agent’s
commission, on being both nominally, and practically, the head-
partner of the firm.

Mr. Domecq lived chiefly in Paris; rarely visiting his Spanish estate,
but having perfect knowledge of the proper processes of its
cultivation, and authority over its labourers almost like a chief’s over
his clan. He kept the wines at the highest possible standard; and
allowed my father to manage all matters concerning their sale, as he
thought best. The second partner, Mr. Henry Telford, brought into the
business what capital was necessary for its London branch. The
premises in Billiter Street belonged to him; and he had a pleasant
country house at Widmore, near Bromley; a quite far-away Kentish
village in those days.

He was a perfect type of an English country gentleman of moderate

fortune;—unmarried, living with three unmarried sisters—who, in the
refinement of their highly [222]educated, unpretending, benevolent,
and felicitous lives, remain in my memory more like the figures in a
beautiful story than realities. Neither in story, nor in reality, have I
ever again heard of, or seen, anything like Mr. Henry Telford;—so
gentle, so humble, so affectionate, so clear in common sense, so
fond of horses,—and so entirely incapable of doing, thinking, or
saying, anything that had the slightest taint in it of the racecourse or
the stable.

Yet I believe he never missed any great race; passed the greater
part of his life on horseback; and hunted during the whole
Leicestershire season;—but never made a bet, never had a serious
fall, and never hurt a horse. Between him and my father there was
absolute confidence, and the utmost friendship that could exist
without community of pursuit. My father was greatly proud of Mr.
Telford’s standing among the country gentlemen; and Mr. Telford was
affectionately respectful to my father’s steady industry and infallible
commercial instinct. Mr. Telford’s actual part in the conduct of the
business was limited to attendance in the counting-house during two
months at Midsummer, when my father took his holiday, and
sometimes for a month at the beginning of the year, when he
travelled for orders. At these times Mr. Telford rode into London daily
from Widmore, signed what letters and bills needed signature, read
the papers, and rode home again: any matters needing deliberation
were referred to my father, [223]or awaited his return. All the family at
Widmore would have been limitlessly kind to my mother and me, if
they had been permitted any opportunity; but my mother always felt,
in cultivated society,—and was too proud to feel with patience,—the
defects of her own early education, and therefore (which was the
true and fatal sign of such defect) never familiarly visited any one
whom she did not feel to be, in some sort, her inferior.

Nevertheless, Mr. Telford had a singularly important influence in my

education. By, I believe, his sister’s advice, he gave me, as soon as
it was published, the illustrated edition of Rogers’ ‘Italy.’ This book
was the first means I had of looking carefully at Turner’s work: and I
might, not without some appearance of reason, attribute to the gift
the entire direction of my life’s energies. But it is the great error of
thoughtless biographers to attribute to the accident which introduces
some new phase of character, all the circumstances of character
which gave the accident importance. The essential point to be noted,
and accounted for, was that I could understand Turner’s work when I
saw it; not by what chance or in what year it was first seen.

Poor Mr. Telford, nevertheless, was always held by papa and

mamma primarily responsible for my Turner insanities.
In a more direct, though less intended way, his help to me was
important. For, before my father thought it right to hire a carriage for
the above mentioned [224]Midsummer holiday, Mr. Telford always lent
us his own travelling chariot.

Now the old English chariot is the most luxurious of travelling

carriages, for two persons, or even for two persons and so much of
third personage as I possessed at three years old. The one in
question was hung high, so that we could see well over stone dykes
and average hedges out of it; such elevation being attained by the
old-fashioned folding-steps, with a lovely padded cushion fitting into
the recess of the door,—steps which it was one of my chief travelling
delights to see the hostlers fold up and down; though my delight was
painfully alloyed by envious ambition to be allowed to do it myself:—
but I never was,—lest I should pinch my fingers.

The ‘dickey,’—(to think that I should never till this moment have
asked myself the derivation of that word, and now be unable to get at
it!)—being, typically, that commanding seat in her Majesty’s mail,
occupied by the Guard; and classical, even in modern literature, as
the scene of Mr. Bob Sawyer’s arrangements with Sam,—was
thrown far back in Mr. Telford’s chariot, so as to give perfectly
comfortable room for the legs (if one chose to travel outside on fine
days), and to afford beneath it spacious area to the boot, a
storehouse of rearward miscellaneous luggage. Over which—with all
the rest of forward and superficial luggage—my nurse Anne
presided, both as guard and [225]packer; unrivalled, she, in the
flatness and precision of her in-laying of dresses, as in turning of
pancakes; the fine precision, observe, meaning also the easy wit and
invention of her art; for, no more in packing a trunk than commanding
a campaign, is precision possible without foresight.
Posting, in those days, being universal, so that at the leading inns in
every country town, the cry “Horses out!” down the yard, as one
drove up, was answered, often instantly, always within five minutes,
by the merry trot through the archway of the booted and bright-
jacketed rider, with his caparisoned pair,—there was no driver’s seat
in front: and the four large, admirably fitting and sliding windows,
admitting no drop of rain when they were up, and never sticking as
they were let down, formed one large moving oriel, out of which one
saw the country round, to the full half of the horizon. My own
prospect was more extended still, for my seat was the little box
containing my clothes, strongly made, with a cushion on one end of
it; set upright in front (and well forward), between my father and
mother. I was thus not the least in their way, and my horizon of sight
the widest possible. When no object of particular interest presented
itself, I trotted, keeping time with the postboy—on my trunk cushion
for a saddle, and whipped my father’s legs for horses; at first
theoretically only, with dexterous motion of wrist; but ultimately in a
quite practical and [226]efficient manner, my father having presented
me with a silver-mounted postillion’s whip.

The Midsummer holiday, for better enjoyment of which Mr. Telford

provided us with these luxuries, began usually on the fifteenth of
May, or thereabouts;—my father’s birthday was the tenth; on that
day I was always allowed to gather the gooseberries for his first
gooseberry pie of the year, from the tree between the buttresses on
the north wall of the Herne Hill garden; so that we could not leave
before that festa. The holiday itself consisted in a tour for orders
through half the English counties; and a visit (if the counties lay
northward) to my aunt in Scotland.

The mode of journeying was as fixed as that of our home life. We

went from forty to fifty miles a day, starting always early enough in
the morning to arrive comfortably to four-o’clock dinner. Generally,