Young Genius Hawthorne.

“What if the Devil himself should be at my very elbow!”
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown –

Today is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s birthday.
He is 201.
He was born on July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, the descendent of a long line of Puritan ancestors, including John Hathorne, [no, I did not forget a “w” there] a presiding magistrate in the Salem witch trials. After his father was lost at sea when he was only four, his mother became overly protective and pushed him toward more isolated pursuits. Hawthorne's childhood left him quite shy and bookish, and molded his life as a writer. It is said that he chose to spend one-third of his adult life in self-imposed isolation. He is perhaps best known for his novel “The Scarlet Letter.”
By the time he came to write the story which I will be discussing today, he was 31 years old. The year was 1835.
And the story is called Young Goodman Brown.

It is my favorite of a collection of Hawthorne short stories I recently read. It stands out in my mind as being the best example in literature (that I am currently aware of) of what is most wrong (today) with moralistic and redemption-based, Western religion. Specifically Christianity.
The story is set squarely in the context of 17th Century New England Puritanism, and tells of Young Goodman Brown’s journey into the dark forest with the Devil as guide. Here, Brown’s illusions about the goodness of his society are crushed when he discovers that many of his fellow townspeople, including religious leaders and his wife, are attending a Black Mass. Was it a dream? A nightmare? Reality? Whether or not the vision in the woods existed as reality or dream does not matter. The important thing is the very real effect it had upon Goodman Brown.
Greatly summarizing here now, when he leaves his dear wife Faith (metaphorically named?) and enters the forest, Goodman Brown is filled to the brim, indoctrinated, if you will, with all of the Puritan ideals of his time and community. At the very foundation we might place the somewhat contradictory supposition that all of mankind, while inwardly totally depraved from birth onwards, is somehow outwardly perfected through conversion. In fact, “perfect” may be a better word than “perfected.”
Early on in the journey through the forest, Brown happens upon seeing the old woman, Goody Cloyse. He is scandalized at seeing her in a sort of tete a tete cohoots with the Devil [who is in the guise of Brown’s own father] and he exclaims “That old woman taught me my catechism.” The author tells us that “there was a world of meaning in this simple comment.”
What does he mean by “a world of meaning”?
What exactly was the catechism being referred to?
Well, Hawthorne was alluding to John Cotton’s catechism of the time. It was the Puritan belief that man must be instructed to realize his own depravity, and therefore at childhood the education began. An irreducible, and essential part of the catechism consisted of the following interrogation, for which only the foregone (prescribed) response was acceptable:

Q: What hath God done for you?
A: God hath made me, He keepeth me, and he can save me.
Q: Who is God?
A: God is a Spirit of himself, and for himself.
Q: How many Gods be there?
A: There is but one God in three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Q: How did God make you?
A: In my first Parents holy and righteous.
Q: Are you then born holy and righteous?
A: No, my first Father sinned, and I in him.
Q: Are you then born a Sinner?
A: I was conceived in sin, and born in iniquity.
Q: What is your Birth-sin?
A: Adam’s sin imputed to me, and a corrupt nature dwelling in me.
Q: What is your corrupt nature?
A: My corrupt nature is empty of Grace, bent unto sin, and only unto sin,
and that continually.
Q: What is sin?
A: Sin is the transgression of the Law [the Ten Commandments].

This catechism (to me) is the breeding ground of a life of mistrust and doubt. Especially when it is coupled to the idea that a conversion experience will (ipso facto) reverse all of the ill effects of such alleged inborn depravity.
Because it simply ‘taint so! Neither premise (the former or the latter) is so.
We may believe that is it so. Yes.
But oh! I declare that we will be disillusioned if we do so. If we really try to maintain a stranglehold upon these illusions, we will at some point, be disillusioned. The only other option available to us being a life of hypocritical delusion.
This story, is a story of not only the disillusionment, but how the maintenance of “religion” afterwards, only exacerbates the problem.

In short, and again greatly summarized, in the depth of the forest, Goodman Brown observes many persons familiar to him, here engaged in various degrees of deviltry. These are persons in whom he has placed an inordinate amount of trust regarding their inward (post-conversion) purity. He has the unhappy experience of even observing his dear wife Faith, among this revelling throng.
Dream or reality? It does not matter.
Hawthorne tells us that from that time forward, Goodman Brown became “a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man...”
And the important question becomes this: Why is this so?
Is it not mostly because of the unrealistic expectations that his “religion” had placed upon the other people in his life.... yea, and upon even himself? Is it not because he has adopted (ingested) these unrealistic expectations into his own perception of humanity in general? Have the people he goes home to become any different than they were before he went into the forest?
To this last question, the answer is obviously and emphatically, No.
But have they changed, in his mind?
Oh dear me yes, and irretrievably so.
Why?
Is it not because of the false religiously-induced expectations he had of them prior to his disillusionment?

We see in the story that as Goodman Brown goes home to his wife and tries to go on unconditionally loving her and his fellow man, he cannot do so.
What has changed?
It is incredibly important to realize that nothing in THEM has changed.
Only something in HIM has changed.
And that something.... is, and always WAS.... an illusion!

All he seems to focus upon is that they were all there in the forest.
What he fails to realize is that he was there too.
To see them.
And what (or who) led him there but the same temptation (or Tempter) to whom the others were susceptible?

It never ceases to amaze me that a religion (Christianity) that claims to consider as sacred the words of its leader, (Jesus) can so often fail to see the true depth of His words, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” [Matt.7:1-2]
Why is it that His followers (of which imperfected group I consider myself to be a member) can tend to be the MOST judgmental after they imagine that they themselves have been the recipients of grace and forgiveness?