416 - Mark Twain, the Calvinist

Mark Twain, the Calvinist
By William Phipps

Many people think Mark Twain was among the cultured despisers of religion and that he became increasingly cynical about both God and humans as he grew older. If being a Christian includes believing in the infallibility of the Bible, the immutability of the species, holy wars, and literal hellfire, then Twain was indeed not religious, not a Christian, and not a Calvinist. But on looking further, both at his life and his writings, one can see that Twain was deeply sensitive to the sovereignty of God and the weakness of those made in the divine likeness. While Twain rejected passages of the Bible that he regarded as absurd and morally repulsive, he was ever a feisty Christian. He wrote: "All that is great and good in our particular civilization came straight from the hand of Jesus Christ."¹

CALVIN AS A MORAL GUIDE

John Calvin believed that human motivations, more evil than good, could be exposed by the searchlight of the moral God. Calvin provided Twain with standards on faith and ethics. According to Susanne Weil's dissertation, "Twain's rigidly Presbyterian upbringing" influenced him for life. ² While being reared a Presbyterian in Hannibal, Missouri, he considered becoming a minister as a safety precaution. "It never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned," he later acknowledged .³ Along with countless children of Calvinists over the centuries, Twain knew from

William E. Phipps is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Davis and Elkins College in Elkins, West Virginia. His most recent book is The Wisdom and Wit of Rabbi Jesus (1993).

¹ Edward Wagenknecht, Mark Twain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935), p. 206.
² Susanne Weil, "Reconstructing the 'Imagination-Mill'," (University of California dissertation, 1991) excerpted in Mark Twain's Humor, edited by David Sloane (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1993), p. 527.
³ Albert Paine, Mark Twain (New York: Harper, 1912), vol. 1, p. 84.

417 - Mark Twain, the Calvinist

the Shorter Catechism that "man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever." He thought that finding joy and gloriousness in God could be assisted by depreciating the inglorious vices of humans. In his notebook, he lists them as "pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny."

Calvinism enabled Twain to discern more keenly the two sides of human nature. "Everyone is a moon and has a dark side," he quipped. ⁴ The chasm between the ideal and actual provided the incongruity on which much of Twain's humor was based. His religion also gave him a compulsion to ridicule the human propensity for self-righteousness. Biographer Edward Wagenknecht writes: "Unchristian conduct on the part of professing Christians was always shocking to Mark Twain…. He thinks, he jokes in terms of Calvinism … (which) had sunk into the very marrow of his bones." ⁵

During the four decades that Twain lived in Hartford he regularly attended the Asylum Hill Congregational Church, where Joseph Twichell was the pastor. It was mainly because of his close friendship with Twichell that Twain settled in Connecticut's capital and built a house near Twichell. ⁶ Twain called his church the "Church of the Holy Speculators" because many of its members worked for the insurance companies centered in Hartford. Calvinist Twichell found Twain's creed as a mature writer acceptable: "I believe in God the Almighty…. I think the goodness, the justice, and the mercy of God are manifested in His works." ⁷

"Twain was more influenced by the Bible than by any other book."

Twichell wrote this about his companion: "He was not wanting in generous tolerations, high admirations, deep reverences, yes, and deep humilities." ⁸

Calvinists are motivated by their theological commitment to challenge popular piety and social exploitation. Even as Jesus was a prophetic reformer among his fellow Pharisees, Twain's barbs were often directed against his fellow Protestants. Twain described the "pilgrims" touring the Holy Land with him as "the most malignant form of Presbyterianism- that sort which considers the saving (of) one's own paltry soul the first & supreme end & object of life."⁹

⁴ Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, vol. 2, ch. 30.
⁵ Wagenknecht, Mark Twain, pp. 212-214.
⁶  Leah Strong, Joseph Hopkins Twichell (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1966), p.72.
⁷  Paine, Mark Twain, vol. 4, p. 1583.
⁸ Strong, Twichell, p. 90.
⁹ Henry Smith, Mark Twain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 43.

418 - Mark Twain, the Calvinist

TWAIN AND THE BIBLE

Twain was more influenced by the Bible than by any other book. His awareness began as a child when he earned books by reciting Bible verses at his church. ¹⁰ The title of one satire, "To the Person Sitting in Darkness," is one of his frequent biblical allusions. Like Isaiah, Twain longed for an enlightened nation where peace and equity were valued. That satire was written when most Americans thought they were "extending the blessing of civilization" by conquering the Philippines. Twain perceived that the venture was little more than an example of greedy imperialists who believe they "cannot do an unright thing." ¹¹

Living in an era when "the sun never sets on the British empire," Twain commented to a friend In London about the Bible: "That's about the most interesting book I ever read…. Did you ever know that the English people were mentioned in the Bible?. . .  'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.' " ¹²

While Twain criticized missionaries who were an arm of colonialism, he was an advocate of those who advanced the dignity of the people in whose lands they worked. He became alarmed by the internationally publicized testimony of William Sheppard, an Afro-American Presbyterian missionary, about the atrocities of King Leopold in his Congo domain. In order to exploit that region for quick profits from its rubber resources.. many Congolese were tortured and killed. ¹³ Sharing the biblical prophets zeal to denounce unjust monarchs, Twain exposed a king who used his close ties with the Vatican to cloak his insatiable greed. Twain, like Jesus, used humor as a way of expressing indignation over hypocrisy. In his satire titled King Leopold's Soliloquy, Twain focused on the king's efforts in the area of media damage control. Here is a sampling of Leopold's reflections:

In these twenty years I have spent millions to keep the press of the two hemispheres quiet, and still these leaks keep on occurring…. In the early years we had no trouble in getting the press to "expose" the tales of the mutilations as slanders, lies, inventions of busy-body American missionaries…. Then all of a sudden came the crash! That is to say, the incorruptible kodak!. . . The only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn't bribe. Every Yankee missionary and every interrupted trader sent home and got one; and now--oh well, the pictures get sneaked around everywhere, in spite of all we can do to ferret them out and suppress them.¹⁴

The sarcastic laughter of America's greatest humorist was one of the reasons why the Belgians forced Leopold to relinquish his African holdings.

¹⁰ The Autobiography of Mark Twain, edited by Charles Neider (New York: Harper, 1959), p. 74.
¹¹ Reprinted from North American Review (1901) in Sloane, Mark Twain's Humor pp. 489-496.
¹² The Ladies' Home Journal, October, 1898, p. 6.
¹³ William Phipps, The Sheppards and Lapsley (Louisville: PCUSA Publishers, 1991), pp. 77-107.
¹⁴ Mark Twain, King Leopold's Soliloquy (Boston: Warren, 1905), pp. 5, 39, and 40.

419 - Mark Twain, the Calvinist

MARK TWAIN'S GOD

In the nineteenth century, people on both sides of the Atlantic seemed especially prone to divorce the performance of faith from the profession of faith. Twain described counterfeit worship this way:

He (God) pronounced his work "good.". . . Daily we pour out freshlets of disapproval, dispraise, censure, passionate resentment, upon a considerable portion of the work-but not with our mouths. No, it is our acts that betray us, not our words…. For ages we have taught ourselves to believe that when we bide a disapproving fact, burying it under a mountain of complimentary lies, He is not aware of it, does not notice it, perceives only the compliments, and is deceived. But is it really so?… Is it not a daring affront to the Supreme Intelligence to believe such a thing? Does any of us inordinately praise a mother's whole family to her face, indiscriminately, and in that same movement slap one of her children? Would not that act turn our inflamed eulogy into nonsense? ¹⁵

Twain did not regard holiness as an enemy of hilarity, and he even ranked humor as one of God's chief attributes. ¹⁶ Accordingly, as one made in the divine image, Twain said, "I am God's fool." ¹⁷ He regarded laughter, conveyed by his fictional and non-fictional writings, as the most effective way of dealing with human foibles. While seriously trusting in God, he laughed at lesser commitments to Bible and sect-and the world laughed with him. Finding much pretense and little Christian substance in the character of his New England contemporary, Mary Baker Eddy, he devoted a book to an examination of the founder of Christian Science.

"Mark Twain's God was of colossal proportions-so vast, indeed, that the constellated stars were but molecules in his veins."

Twain denounced William Sabine, a leading New York clergyman who refused to permit the use of his Madison Avenue church for the funeral of George Holland, simply because the man had been a play-actor. Sabine referred Holland's friends to a "a little church around the corner" that served as a sanctuary for the poor. Twain called Sabine a "slimy, sanctimonious, self-righteous reptile" for attacking the theater as immoral. While crediting pulpits such as that of "The Little Church Around the Corner" (as it is still called) with "disseminating the meat and marrow of the gospel of Christ," Twain found the theater "just as legitimate an instrument of God." He then eulogized Holland "whose theatrical ministry had for fifty years softened hard hearts, bred generosity in cold ones,

¹⁵ Letters from the Earth, edited by Bernard De Voto (Greenwich: Fawcett Publications, 1962), p. 174.
¹⁶ Paine, Mark Twain, vol. 4, p. 1556.
¹⁷ Wagenknecht, Mark Twain, p. 130.

420 - Mark Twain, the Calvinist

kindled emotion in dead ones, uplifted base ones, broadened bigoted ones, and made many and many a stricken one glad and filled it brim full of gratitude." Twain was convinced that more Christian kindness is spread by actors, journalists, and novelists than by preachers with "cancerous piety" who intone "vapid platitudes from the pulpit." ¹⁸

Albert Paine, who lived with Twain while composing his official biography, commented: "Mark Twain's God was of colossal proportions-so vast, indeed, that the constellated stars were but molecules in His veins." ¹⁹ Witness to this belief is Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, Twain's rollicking treatment of the traditional provincial and literal notions of heaven. His God is too grand to be comprehended by the puny cosmic conceptions of earthlings. Twain had this to say about "the authentic Creator of the real universe:" "Let us now consider . . . that God of unthinkable grandeur and majesty, by comparison with whom all the other gods whose myriads infest the feeble imaginations of men are as a swarm of gnats scattered and lost in the infinitudes of the empty sky." ²⁰

Two of Twain's three children, as well as his wife, preceded him in death. Those personal tragedies prompted this jotting on divine suffering:

When I think of the suffering which I see around me, and how it wrings my heart; and then remember what a drop in the ocean this is, compared with the measureless Atlantics of misery which God has to see every day, my resentment is roused against those thoughtless people who are so glib to glorify God, yet never to have a word of pity for Him. ²¹

Although never certified as a cleric, Twain fulfilled his childhood ambition. Near the end of his life, he wrote: "I have always preached…. If the humor came of its own accord and uninvited I have allowed it a place in my sermon, but I was not writing the sermon for the sake of the humor." ²²

¹⁸ New York Herald, Dec. 28, 1870; reprinted in The Outrageous Mark Twain, edited by Charles Neider (New York: Doubleday, 1987), pp. 119-123.
¹⁹ Paine, Mark Twain, vol. 4, p. 1582.
²⁰ Neider, The Outrageous Mark Twain. p. 42.
²¹ Mark Twain's Notebook, edited by Albert Paine (New York: Harper, 1935) p. 128.
²² The Autobiography of Mark Twain, p. 273