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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
When the Reverend Mr. Wilson confronts the little girl Pearl in The Scarlet Letter (Chapter 8), his mind is stymied by the fullness of her being, but his imagination responds to what she is and nostalgically recalls a religion and its sacramental art that could comprehend in her what baffles the Puritan and Ramistic approach of either/or: “Methinks I have seen just such figures, when the sun has been shining through a richly painted window, and tracing out the golden and crimson images across the floor. But that was in the old land.” It seems that ever since the Puritan logic of exclusion our major writers have longed for such an “imagined place” as the floor of the church in the old land,
Where finally the way the world feels
really means how things are,
in dear detail,
by ideal light all around us.
1. Stafford, William, “In Dear Detail, by Ideal Light,” Traveling Through the Dark (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 92.Google Scholar
2. Cf. Fausset, Hugh, The Proving of Psyche (New York: Harcourt, 1929), p. 261Google Scholar: “Such an interpretation of Jesus' teaching robbed it of its central revelation, reimposing the very dualism which he convincingly resolved. And not only the earlier, but the sounder tradition of the Church, emphasized the truth that the material and the instinctive are not necessarily divided by a deep cleft from the divine, that the ascetic, whether as medieval monk or Puritan moralist, destroyed life's sacramental wholeness no less than the sensualist…. The truest Christian tradition … has discriminated between the natural and the spiritual, but its ideal has been to harmonize them.”
3. Buber, Martin, I and Thou (New York: Scribner's, 1970), pp. 69–70.Google Scholar
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