The history of protestant theology is complex and difficult for a non-specialist to effectively conceptualize. Many of the central conflicts of Protestantism were between Calvinism and numerous other views which fundamentally opposed the determinism of the Calvinist view. One such theological movement that was in opposition to Calvinism was Arminianism, a movement based on the teachings of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius. Arminius influenced a great deal of Protestantism, including John Wesley and the rather vague and dynamic movement referred to as Methodism. In America, Arminianism had a significant influence on Unitarianism and the loosely defined, but important movement we know as transcendentalism.
Arminius
Unitarianism split from orthodoxy not just in theological terms but in its whole outlook on human experience. Dissenters in England were pushed into political radicalism both by their exclusion from the political life of the nation (an exclusion that applied to anyone who refused to sign the 39 articles), and by their view that humans were responsible for their own relationship with God and their own views of the world. This was a naturally radical outlook because it relied on a fundamental attitude of equality rather than the hierarchical outlook that grew out of the Church of England and its traditional support of social stratification. In America, where much of the traditional hierarchies had already been torn asunder, Arminianism, through its effect on Unitarianism, was embracing a melioristic world view, a view that pictured humans are improvable, perhaps infinitely so.
This view is important not only to one's outlook on religion and politics, but also on the arts, because one who is not encumbered by Calvinist inevitability and dour piety, and is at the same time full of the promise of an unbridled human future, is likely to embrace an exploratory attitude towards the arts. Lawrence Buell writes, in his book on literary transcendentalism, that "the main impetus behind the Unitarian departure from Orthodoxy - the shift from a Calvinist view of human nature as depraved to an Arminian view of man as improvable - also helped to produce a climate of opinion more favourable to the arts."
In America, this expanding attitude arguably led directly to the flowering of transcendentalism in the work of various Unitarians (like Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Peabody, and James Clarke) who wrote everything from literary essays to poetry, and to bigger names in American literature like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. But it also had a knock-on influence on writers like Nathanial Hawthorn, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. In England, Arminianism and the Methodism that grew from it, undoubtedly inspired much of the radicalism of the 1790s as well as to the growth of English Romanticism. Though the first generation of English Romantics eventually returned, opportunistically, to the fold of the Church of England, the second generation, especially Percy and Mary Shelley, were considerably more philosophically adventurous.
Emerson
I think a major aspect of both transcendentalist and Romantic literature was the idea of exploring the possibilities of human experience and potential, which had both been extremely limited in Catholic and Calvinist ideologies. And it was dissenters and those who opposed orthodoxy that were the first to advocate for the literary endeavours that were not simply and straightforwardly edifying. As late as 1808 the religious magazine the Panopolist condemned nine-hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand novels as "positively seductive and corrupting" at best, and "a contemptibly frivolous...criminal waste of time" at worst. This reflected the view among the orthodox that literature should, at its heart, be morally instructive. But the dissenting generations like the Romantics and the transcendentalists were explorers, and literature often became a map of their travels. And these explorations were not prohibited to some Calvinist, preconceived and limited idea of what people could be.
The shift in outlook toward the arts during the 19th century in the US (and I think it applies to the late 18th century in England), was described by Willam Charvat as a shift from "the negative principles of religious restraint, " to "the positive principle of moral idealism," This idealism was embodied in much of the work of Emerson or Whitman in the US, and in Blake and Shelley in England.
Mary and Percy Shelley
The rise of Methodism and Unitarianism and their effects on literature is complex subject that could be, and probably is, the subject of a long and interesting book. Thinking about it makes me wonder what kinds of effect the general decline in religious consciousness might be having on our cultural products in contemporary society. I think that Methodism and Unitarianism opened up horizons for aesthetic explorations of the human soul. Are the horizons now so open that we are simply wandering aimlessly with little sense of a goal in mind, like a flâneur in an empty city?
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