Because Potter uses the word vitriolic to characterize Melville's tone and attitude in Clarel, I should point out here that Melville himself uses the capitalized term Vitriolist(s) three times pejoratively in the 1991 edition of Clarel: pages 126 (Line 112), 183 (Line 48), and 218 (Line 178). So by characterizing Melville as vitriolic in Clarel, is Potter suggesting that Melville himself should be lumped together with the Vitriolists he himself rejects?
On page 32, Potter says, "It is precisely these kinds of attitudes that Melville takes so severely to task in his withering critique of America throughout Clarel." Ah, withering critique strikes me as a fair and accurate characterization of Melville's centennial poem.
(2) On page xvii, Potter says, "Some [nineteenth-century Christians], such as Cardinal [John Henry] Newman, steadfastly refused to accommodate the discoveries of science and clung obstinately to their religious beliefs, but they were very few." But Potter provides no accompanying note to support his allegation about Newman's take on science.
In Walter Jost's 1989 book Rhetorical Thought in John Henry Newman (University of South Carolina Press), Jost discusses Newman's various views of science (pages 142-143, 162-169, 275n58, 276n63, and 279nn27-28). In Ian Ker's massive 1988 800-page book John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford University Press), Ker discusses Newman's various views of science and religion (pages 258, 395-396, 541, 624, 669, 704, 729-730, 734-735, and 744).
(3) On pages 26 and 50, Potter quotes an historical source from Miller. However, in his Works Cited, Potter lists no Miller. Thanks to the database WorldCat, and to Potter's specific statements on pages 26 and 50, I have identified the source as Perry Miller's The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (Harvard University Press, 1950).
However, it strikes me that Miller's 1939 book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Harvard University Press) is most relevant to Potter's interest in American Protestants, especially Miller's detailed discussion of the Protestant educational reformers Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and Omer Talon (c.1510-1562) (see the index for specific pages references ). Miller tried to understand their thought to the best of his ability, but he ended up calling for further study of their thought.
About a decade later, the American Jesuit Walter J. Ong (1912-2003) stepped forward to undertake his doctoral studies at Harvard, with Miller as the director of his massively researched doctoral dissertation - which Harvard University Press published, slightly revised, in two volumes in 1958: (1) Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (2) Ramus and Talon inventory, a briefly annotated listing of more than 750 volumes that Ong had tracked down in over 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe by Ramus and Talon and their allies and critics.
Briefly, the Art of Discourse in the subtitle of Ong's book includes the use of reason by medieval Roman Catholic philosophers and theologians such as the Italian Dominican St. Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274) - which will be rejected in the Age of Reason because of its alleged mysticism. By contrast, what Ong refers to as the Art of Reason refers to reason as Potter uses the term throughout his book.
I am sorry to report that Potter is not the only American scholar who is not familiar with Miller's 1939 book and Ong's 1958 books. In the American Jesuit philosopher and theologian Donald L. Gelpi's 2000 book Varieties of Transcendental Experience: A Study in Constructive Postmodernism (Collegeville, Minnesota: A Michael Glazier Book/ Liturgical Press), Gelpi discusses what he refers to as the American Protestant dialectical imagination, which is more accurately understood as the Ramus and Talon dialectical heritage in American Protestantism (pages 82, 132, 164, 172, 174, 192, 193, 206, 223, 224, 280, 281, and 282) - which Gelpi contrasts with the Roman Catholic analogical imagination.
(4) Now, on page 39, Potter says a number of things that deserve comment. For example, he says, "In its theoretical implications, Protestantism was a revolt of reason against (Catholic) mysticism, a revolt that tacitly allied with much of the endeavor of Renaissance humanism, which had similarly striven to conceive and comprehend the world according to a rational basis."
But what is this supposed Catholic mysticism? Certain Protestant thinkers, such as Kant, operationally defined the metaphysical thought of medieval thinkers such as Aquinas as mysticism! However, Kant evidently never studied Aquinas' thought. the use of reason by medieval Roman Catholic philosophers and theologians such as the Italian Dominican St. Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274).
Potter goes on to quote Vassilis Lambropoulos as claiming, not entirely accurately in my estimate, that Renaissance humanists saw Protestant religious reformers as allies with the humanist educational reformers "in the struggle of their educational movement against scholasticism."
But what was this scholasticism against which the Renaissance humanist educational reformers saw themselves as struggling? Potter does not operationally define and explain this term - which he himself later uses, as we will see momentarily.
Moreover, there was a phenomenal Renaissance educational movement among Roman Catholics, spearheaded by the recently founded Jesuit order. Concerning the remarkable spread of Jesuit education, see the American Jesuit church historian John O'Malley's 1993 book The First Jesuits (Harvard University Press, esp. pages 200-242). Concerning Renaissance humanism as an educational movement, see the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist Walter J. Ong's 1967 encyclopedia entry on "Humanism" that is reprinted in volume four of Ong's Faith and Contexts (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999, pages 69-92).
Potter also says, "In contrast to mysticism and the authority of Rome, Protestantism, in its most fundamental implications, required that its adherents regard the natural world according to the dictates of the intellect and reason [but not reason as discussed by Aquinas], since it was maintained that the natural world had been deliberately designed and arranged by its creator in such a fashion as to enable it to be 'deciphered' accordingly" (my emphasis).
Then Potter adds a note in which he offers the only instance in his book of a flash-forward to our contemporary American scene. On page 215, in note 2, Potter says, "This view [of God's design of the natural world], the so-called argument from design, is still employed by [Protestant] fundamentalist and creation Christians, usually in an effort to show that the universe was created by an intelligent being (and thus to negate theories of evolution)." That much is true about certain American Protestant fundamentalists who advance the argument by design. However, it is also possible for certain other Christians and Jews to embrace God as the creator of the universe and embrace, at least in broad outline, evolutionary theory - as Ong, for one, does.
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