CHRIST IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
otherwise futile. In a secular age, Christ had become the symbol
of man's immortality.
Actually, the humanization of Christ had been foreshadowed in
his
Calvinist role as "second Adam." To understand this, we must
remember that the Puritans had continued,
if
only in a limited
way~
a peculiar line of medieval thought: the typological or figural inter–
pretation of the Bible, according to which persons and events of the
Old Testament were held to mean and, in a very real sense, to pre–
figure those of the New Testament, notably Christ. Typology thus
is
a system of parallels, and the American Puritan's favorite parallel
was that of Adam and Christ. It was the most frequently and most
carefully worked-out analogy, because it bore on the story of the fall
of man and on the Puritan conception of human salvation, which
was seen as a drama in three acts, marked by the encounters of
Adam and Satan, Satan and Christ, and by Satan's final overthrow
by Christ. Thus in the American tradition Christ from the beginning
was seen as closely linked to man struggling with evil; in his role as
"second Adam" he was more a divine brother to humanity, and a
symbol of human salvation, than a member of the holy trinity. Thus
a union was established foreshadowing the humanization of Christ by
Emerson as well as the later appearances of Christ in American
Jiterature as the other, immortal incarnation of man. In
his
recent
study,
The American Adam,
R.W.B. Lewis has traced the influence
of this model in the writings of such different authors as Charles
Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Holmes, and others.
III
On a purely aesthetic level, the appearance of Christ in
the American novel is part of the modern movement of symbolism,
which, in America as well as in Europe, must be considered the
dominant creative mood of the past hundred years. Symbolism
is
now
also
the canon of criticism. The symbolic structure of a work of art,
as it has been defined by modern criticism, consists of a number of
~entially
spontaneous and autonomous elements, which, precisely
because of their independence and slight incongruity, gain the power
of infinite suggestion. The use of the Christ figure is related to this
dominant form of symbolism, but is an essentially independent crea-
