The New History of Methodism

Gender, emotion, medicine, electricity, ecology, literacy, rhetoric—these terms are a little thin in the indices of the standard books on John Wesley and the history of Methodism. More typical would be doctrinal entries (“Christian perfection”) or intellectual references (“Epistemology, John Locke”) or sources from church history (“Homilies, Pseudo-Macarian”). But if the books reviewed for this essay are any indication, a new interdisciplinary exploration of the history of Methodism is underway and more room will need to be made in future indices. There will need to be space for “dreaming” after “deism” and for “electrotherapy” before “evangelical.” Somewhere after “lay preaching,” the typesetter will need to find spots for “Leyden Jar” and “literacy practices” too. It seems that religion is integral to more of life in the 18th century than we once thought.

Methodism is a good proving ground for testing the extent to which the modernity of the 18th century was essentially secular. The literary remains of the early Methodist movement in books, pamphlets, and manuscripts are considerable, and much of this is now readily available in critical editions. Moreover, digital collections, such as the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO, pronounced “echo” for the cognoscenti), have opened the rare books of the world’s libraries to the humble scholar working on Methodism at home in his or her pajamas with a cup of coffee beside the computer. This newly accessible material includes a wide range of texts by lay men and women. The availability of reliable sources and the new capacity to search across this whole corpus, or to dig down into it more deeply, is at least part of what allows scholars probe early Methodism in fresh ways. For those willing to travel and to work in the archives, there is more material yet. Taken as a whole, the literature of Methodism offers a nice crosssection of 18th-century society, including its middle and lower orders, and it is open for business, as it were.

But to newly available texts we must add a set of new interdisciplinary questions that might not have interested historians of another generation. A two-volume New History of Methodism was published near the beginning of the last century. What would one look like now? The three books under review in this essay suggest that the new history of Methodism will be concerned, above all, to make connections and to show the relevance of faith to all areas of life for John Wesley and the early Methodist people.

At some point, most books on modernity talk about “agency” or the “capacity to act,” since it seems that much of what we call modern is predicated on a heightened and more widely distributed sense of personal agency. I thus exercise my agency when I participate in democratic politics, in market economies, in the use of technology, in “freedom of speech,” and so on. The notion persists, however, that a hypothetically secular, autonomous self is somehow normative to these developments in the modern world. Phyllis Mack recognizes the need for a more complex model of human agency than this in general, as well as a better account of agency in the context of 18th-century religion in particular. Her book Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment contests the assumption that religious people are somehow anti-modern when they submit their autonomy to God in worship and devotion. Everyday examples help us to appreciate the interplay of assertion and surrender, action and passivity, in normal human experience, and Mack draws on the observations of anthropologists to make this point. The stage-actor, for example, is neither the passive object of the story she is “acting” in, nor is she its author. To renounce one’s self-will need not necessarily compromise or diminish self-expression: “The actor, musician, and the lover exceed their own physical and emotional capacities—their own sense of who and what they are and of what is possible for them—through submitting to and identifying with a tradition, a teacher, or an object of passion.”

This makes perfect sense to me. When I wash my hands, I am alternately agent and patient twenty times before I leave the sink. My left hand is not experiencing some kind of Marxian false consciousness when it lets my right hand wash it, nor is my left hand revolting in a Nietzschean will-to-power when it asserts its agency to wash my right. I’m just washing my hands. I have no doubt that power is regularly and horrifically abused and that the psychological effects of this for the oppressed are insidious and include something like “false consciousness,” but if this becomes a general model for all relationships of assertion and surrender we will have a grossly distorted view of human experience.

This is where Mack does such a tremendous job, providing a sophisticated account of early Methodism as a movement that was not simply in reaction to modernity but a part of the process of modernization itself. Like many observers of Methodism since E. P. Thompson, she is aware of the psychic and social tensions that gave Methodism its torque, but she steers clear of the temptation to reduce these tensions to Freudian, Marxist, or Foucauldian categories. Instead, she provides a richly contextual and historically specific account of how religious people in the 18th century actually negotiated the tensions in their lives between the compulsion they felt to yield to God’s love and power on the one hand, and to assert themselves in sanctification and service on the other. Aware that the paradox of strength in weakness is an old Christian theme, she shows the new historical significance that this paradox acquired in the 18th century for Methodists. Mack’s overarching argument is that “their struggle to fuse self-transcendence and agency … enabled these introspective religious people to become activists, mobilizing the energy that allowed the abolitionists and missionaries of the nineteenth century to feel both commanded and creative.” To make this argument she turns not in the first instance to modern social theory or psychology but to archives, and one of the many strengths of her book is the depth and breadth of research in sources such as letters, diaries, and hymns—even recipes, accounts of dreams, and rules for housekeeping—all of which bring to life the everyday experience of lay people, both public and private.

It is a commonplace of hermeneutics that texts are not simply given but require interpretation. Mack takes this a step further, showing that this is also true of emotions, gender, dreams, and pain, and that early Methodist men and women worked out the tension between agency and passivity as they came to terms with their religious experience across each of these dimensions. For example, she notes that “what Methodists were learning through introspection, writing, and collective worship was not repression, by which emotions become inaccessible to consciousness, but a method of analyzing and modifying their emotions, including the unconscious impulses expressed in dreams.” This was Methodist religious experience, but it was also “part of the process of modernization itself.”

Dreams are a good case in point, since in the modern period the belief that dreams emanated from within, as an aspect of subjectivity, became the norm, rather than that dreams came from the spirit world. Early Methodist dreamers seem to have been, as so often, at a transition point between these two conceptions. One can see this in the life of Mary Fletcher (née Bosanquet), who noted some 35 dreams in her autobiography; for her, dreams provided both self-awareness and divine guidance. The significance of dreams was also refracted through gender. Men would typically see their dreams as a means to allay anxiety or solve problems; women viewed them as visionary and revelatory. Men generally stopped reporting dreams once they took on the role of public preaching; women continued to report dreams and to share them with one another.

Mack is attentive to gender throughout her analysis. The lives of the male lay preachers in Methodism, for example, displayed a tension between the public ideal of themselves as a band of brothers, energetic and detached from day-to-day concerns, and the private anxieties expressed in letters and diaries over their experience as husbands and fathers. “Domesticity,” says Mack, “was central and formative for men’s religious identity, far more so than the printed sources indicate.” But as they worked through these tensions, they generated “the particular kind of agency they were finally able to exercise as preachers, comrades, and heads of families.”

The narratives of the women Methodist leaders, on the other hand, suggest that, on the whole, they were more at ease with the language of dependency and self-emptying than men were, and they displayed a more sociable spirituality rooted in intimate female friendship. Moreover, their spiritual convictions led many of these women to behave in often radical ways by writing and preaching sermons, living in community with other women, or exercising financial independence. Though this might be celebrated by feminist historians, Mack notes that it was often a source of anxiety for women such as Mary Fletcher, who worried that her increasing independence might lead her to forget her dependence upon God. Both women and men, in their different ways, sought to traverse the modern terrain of agency as religious people—to discern how the call to action and to passivity, to assert and to surrender oneself, was to be heeded in the particular exigencies of their experience.

This tension was felt with respect to bodily pain too. Charles Wesley once wrote, “Young and healthy Christians are generally called to glorify God by being active in doing his will; but old and sick Christians in suffering it.” Easier said than done. Here too the Methodists could seem both modern, in their appreciation that one ought to be proactive in improving the body’s well-being through medicine and regimen, and traditional, in their desire to submit to the purifying catharsis of bodily pain. The tension, though, was to discern when pain required medicine, and when it was itself medicine for the soul: “Protecting one’s health and healing the sick implied agency and activity, while the goal of the suffering was passivity and acceptance.” Again, men did not relate the salvation of their souls as directly to their bodily experience as women, and women had a greater role as healers and visitors of the sick, sharing especially the unique challenge of the pain of childbirth and motherhood. Methodist women found the pierced Christ a source of maternal power and protection, and they responded in ways both passive and active as “both infant and mother, victim and rescuer, malleable and powerful.”

Mack’s final chapter points forward, aware that the era of Methodism’s most significant numerical growth and global expansion was to follow in the next century. Yet she grounds this worldwide extension and missionary drive in the dynamic tensions worked out by 18th-century Methodists: “From a community of believers seeking emotional authenticity and self-improvement, Methodism became a movement of spiritual extroverts: heads of families, citizens, activists, and missionaries eager to improve the rest of the world.” Methodism emerged “streamlined for modernity,” though ironically this led to a renewed concern with hierarchy and the submerging of women’s public roles. Even the memory of women’s lives and work in the 18th century largely died away.

Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment is a path-breaking work of meticulous scholarship and shrewd analysis, and its arguments are strongly conceived. Several of its individual chapters deliver more historical insight than whole monographs. Yet, I am left with a few questions. The dynamic tension that Mack and others, such as David Hempton, have so rightly observed in Wesley and his followers is often contrasted with the relative passivity of the Calvinist evangelicals and the Moravian Brethren, since Wesley himself often charged them with fatalism or quietism. But how unique was Methodism in its expression of modern agency? The 19thcentury missionary dynamism to which Mack points as a feature of Methodism was surely a prominent feature of these other movements too, both in the centrifugal energy of Moravian mission overseas and in the enterprising activity of Calvinists in New Dissent at the end of the century.

Some of the features of Methodism that Mack so effectively historicizes seem at points over-historicized. For example, the dialectic between the active life and the contemplative life has a long history in Christianity, as does the tension between overcoming bodily pain and submitting to it. The continuity of Methodists with earlier Christian experience in these areas is not Mack’s theme, but this continuity would have been of real concern to Wesley and many of his followers. After all, they almost all read The Imitation of Christ. Moreover, for the Methodists as for Thomas à Kempis, these tensions were addressed by turning to Christology in very particular ways, and though Mack does note the Methodist identification with the figure of the suffering Christ, her approach is generally anthropological rather than theological. Yet I wonder if we can gain a full appreciation of the experience of Methodist spirituality without giving more attention to the unique object of their faith and obedience. If a fulcrum is well placed, tremendous forces can be kept in balance, and it was in Christology that Methodists found the Archimedean point in their universe with all its tensions. The grace of God in the atoning death of Christ as the one who was, par excellence, both victim and savior, provided the key to their own experience of self-yielding and self-confidence. Mack acknowledges that others have done good work on Methodist theology, and her goal in Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment was to do something else—to show how this Methodist faith worked out on the ground as religious people played a part in the very constitution of modern society. And this she has done better than anyone. I wonder, though, if even a historical account needs to describe the fulcrum as well as the levers of change to get the whole picture.

Some years ago at Hay-on-Wye in Wales, I bought a small calf-bound volume of John Wesley’s sermons that dated from the 18th century. The hinges were weak and the front board separated from the bound pages, but for ten pounds sterling (about 16 American dollars) I thought it wasn’t a bad deal. When I got home I was surprised to read the inscription: “These volumes of sermons were given by the late John Wesley to my Uncle, the Revd John King [etc.].” Even better deal. Unawares, I had bought a presentation copy of Wesley’s sermons for ten pounds. But the inscription tells us something. Wesley gave these sermons personally to John King—handplaced them, if you like, and this started a chain reaction of spiritual literacy that on the flyleaf of my book extended to at least four generations (five if you include me), and that included a young woman, a “daughter” mentioned at the end of the inscription.

Vicki Tolar Burton would no doubt appreciate this inscription, since she has given close attention in her book Spiritual Literacy in John Wesley’s Methodism to the remarkable rhetorical culture that Wesley superintended. Like Phyllis Mack, she is interested in the way religion could unleash a new kind of agency for ordinary people, but her focus is on the particular practices of reading, writing, and speaking. For Wesley, such practices were not isolated skills; literacy and fluency were directed toward the end of spiritual formation. Although there have been various bookish studies of Methodism interested in what people read and what they wrote, and even at how reading could be a “means of grace” for Wesley and his people, Tolar Burton’s rhetorical approach appreciates that reading, writing, and speaking are all 18th-century practices. One of the advantages of looking at Methodism from the perspective of the history of rhetoric (“the art of persuasion”) is that we become much more aware of the way that literacy involves human intentions. Why do I read or write or speak? To what end? It has been one of the great achievements of rhetorical critics in our own time, such as Wayne Booth and the Chicago School, to turn attention beyond pure linguistics to the ethics of reading and writing.

None of this would have been a surprise to John Wesley. Tolar Burton’s repeated refrain is that Methodists practiced reading, writing, and speaking to believe. In this, Wesley offered a radical alternative to the belletristic ideals of contemporary rhetorical manuals which aimed to transform upwardly mobile provincial males into refined men of taste. “He understood the relationship between habits and change. By sponsoring reading, writing, and speaking as daily habits of the Christian life, Wesley taught the people called Methodists to live differently.” Because of his religious concerns, not in spite of them, he made readers, writers, and speakers of ordinary men and women. If traditionally the authority to speak might derive from socially conferred status or talent, Wesley’s rhetorical culture presented a radical alternative, allowing women and the poor to speak as never before. “Agency,” says Tolar Burton, “was a key concept in Wesleyan rhetoric.” In due course, this would have radical social consequences as the agency instilled in spiritual literacy passed into political contexts of working-class activism.

Tolar Burton is less reliable on church history (Thomas à Kempis was not a “church father,” and Samuel Wesley was not a “prelate”), and there are surprising omissions in her sources (such as Samuel Richardson on epistolary theory). For some historians, she will also appear too self-conscious and theoretical in her analysis, but her main point is an important one: religion had a vital role to play in the emergence of modern literacy.

Deborah Madden has edited a collection of essays, ‘Inward and Outward Health’: John Wesley’s Holistic Concept of Medical Science, the Environment and Holy Living, that gives detailed attention to another of the modern themes treated by Phyllis Mack where there could be tension between Enlightenment and Christian values. But here too we see the connectedness of religion to all of life in the 18th century.

The excellent essay by Laura Bartells Felleman on the body-soul connection in Wesley got me thinking about a passage in Jonathan Edwards. When Edwards described affections as “the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will of the soul,” he was, as always, being quite exact. We may fail to appreciate, though, how precisely Edwards conceived of these “vigorous and sensible exercises” in physiological terms, as the soul interacted with the body through what was called in the 18th century the “animal spirits.” Edwards wrote that “the actings of the soul are with that strength that (through the laws of the union which the Creator has fixed between soul and body) the motion of the blood and animal spirits begins to be sensibly altered; whence oftentimes arises some bodily sensation.” So if the soul acts strongly enough it will affect the blood and animal spirits, and we may even feel this in our body, especially around the heart and vital organs. When the membrane between the soul and body is thus passed by means of animal spirits we experience “what are called the affections.” Edwards mentions animal spirits likewise another dozen times or so in the Religious Affections, and several more times in his earlier works on revival.

I doubt that many of today’s new Reformed or charismatic readers of Edwards on the Religious Affections spend much time thinking about 18th-century theories about the relationship between the mind and the body, but Edwards had read the physician George Cheyne and otherwise picked up the contemporary theories that the soul adheres to the blood as flame does to lamp oil; that animal spirits form as blood warms; and these animal spirits act as the “nervous juices” that ooze through the body, translating rational exercises into physical ones and relaying physical sensations back again.

John Wesley had also read Cheyne and the theories of other contemporary physicians, but he exercised a certain reserve about the exact way the mind and body might be correlated, saying “the Union of the Soul and Body is another of those things which human Understanding cannot comprehend.” We have our own theories nowadays about how psychological and physiological states are related, though I am not at all sure we have got much farther in solving these questions than they did in the 18th century. At the end of the day, Wesley was much more empirical than he was theoretical. It was obvious to him that physical events such as concussions could affect the mind, just as it was obvious that one’s bare thinking could influence bodily states. When I got my new heart-rate monitor along with my GPS watch for running, I put it on and sat down in my chair. After my heart rate had steadied to a constant level, I closed my eyes and thought hard about someone I really disliked. Sure enough, I gained ten beats per minute. This is just Edwards or Wesley on the affections. It works empirically, and you can probably take or leave the bits about animal spirits.

For all the tensions within Methodism, Wesley had a remarkably balanced and integrated view of the complementary relationship between divine healing and medical healing. As Randy Maddox, Deborah Madden, and Robert Webster point out in their essays, Wesley did not set the supernatural and natural in opposition to each other, and he appreciated the complex psychosomatic relationship between physical health and emotional or spiritual well-being. He was happy to advocate consulting a good physician as necessary, but he was also keen to distill his own broad reading in medicine for his followers in Primitive Physic and to provide health advice and medical care as widely as possible, especially for the poor. His preference was for remedies that were tried and tested (most often using himself as guinea pig), and he preferred simple common plants over exotic or compound medicines. This practical empiricism was as characteristic of his religious advice as of his medical counsel. Above all, however, he was an advocate of traditional regimen, drawing on the ancient non-naturals (that is, not innate to the body) that were within your control to regulate—things such as air, food, exercise, sleep, and hygiene. When I read through his 25-year correspondence as spiritual director to the young Anne Bolton of Witney, I remember how surprised I was to find that more than a third of his advice to her was concerned with addressing her bodily health. He was often telling her to get out and get exercise or, if she was unable to get out, to at least ride the “wooden horse,” a plank set up indoors with a saddle on it, as a kind of 18th-century cross between an exercise bike and a jolly-jumper.

No wonder that Wesley has been celebrated by some today as the hero of naturopathic and alternative medicine, or a prescient advocate for integrative balance in health care and a holistic model of salvation. But Wesley was not in his own period offering remedies alternative to those of an established medical canon. His attempt to deploy an ancient empiricist standard in tandem with the best medicine of his day was mainstream, and this was directly analogous to his theological method more generally, combining the ideals of primitive Christianity with present experience. If he was unusual, he was unusual in the degree to which he maintained hope for the divine healing of body and soul in the present.

Where Wesley appears most modern, perhaps, is in his interest in electricity, “this curious and important subject” on which he read widely. He published his own book on electricity in 1760 with the hopeful title, The Desideratum. He saw the medicinal possibilities of electricity as an “unparalleled remedy,” simple and cheap and available to all, and he theorized how electricity in the body might fit with contemporary theories of the nerves as vessels transmitting a “nervous juice.” This bodily use of electricity Wesley related to the presence of electricity everywhere around us, passing through air and water. Electricity seems to use these things like a soul uses a body. Wesley was not far off from the present view of electromagnetism as one of the fundamental forces in the universe in his enthusiasm for electricity as the “constant, active, and powerful Principle, constituted by its Creator, to keep the heavenly bodies in their several courses, and at the same time give support, life, and increase to the various inhabitants of the earth.” But as Linda Schwab observes, he displayed a certain reserve in his theorizing, always expressing caution about the limits of human understanding, something which has not always been characteristic of modern science.

In the end, Wesley’s book was based largely on firsthand experiment, including experiment on himself. I used to get cheap laughs from audiences by quoting remedies in Wesley’s Primitive Physic that involved “electrifying” the patient. No more, though. Now I will argue that Wesley was a pioneer of the very electrotherapy techniques used by my physiotherapist when he is trying to rehab my torn calf muscle. And when I find myself discouraged that my leg is in pain, and it is not healing properly, I may find myself in the tension that Phyllis Mack identified: When do I seek medical remedy for my pain, and when do I submit to the pain as part of God’s plan for the healing of my soul? The problems of agency negotiated by the early Methodists are evidently still my problems too. And here I may turn to the introductory pages of Wesley’s Primitive Physic, where he gives this last point of advice: “Above all, add to the rest (for it is not labour lost) that old unfashionable medicine, prayer. And have faith in God, who ‘killeth and maketh alive, who bringeth down to the grave and bringeth up.'” Religion still has to do with the whole of life and death, despite all the tensions of the modern world.