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Narrated by Edward Lewis
Allen C. GuelzoUnabridged — 18 hours, 26 minutes
Narrated by Edward Lewis
Allen C. GuelzoUnabridged — 18 hours, 26 minutes
Despite tremendous interest in Abraham Lincoln and his place in one of America's most tumultuous historical periods, little has been written about his religious life. This truly fresh look at the nation's sixteenth president relates the outward events of Lincoln's life to his inner spiritual struggles and sets them both against the intellectual backdrop of his age.
This unique intellectual portrait explores the role of ideas in Lincoln's life. Guelzo presents Lincoln as a serious thinker deeply involved in the problems of nineteenth-century thought, including those of classical liberalism, the Lockean enlightenment, Victorian unbelief, and Calvinist spirituality. Lincoln emerges as a philosophical man who appropriates certain religious values without adhering to any religion, who insists on the pre-eminence of self-interest in spite of becoming the Great Emancipator, and who appeals to natural law and natural theology in politics while remaining a classical nineteenth-century liberal in principle. Based on primary materials from a wide variety of archives, this insightful work sheds light on the intellectual conflicts that led to civil war and that still influence today's "culture wars."
One of the subtlest and deepest studies of Lincoln's faith and thought in many years.... Seldom has the complex connection between Lincoln's predispositions and Lincoln's achievements been more insightfully studied than in Allen Guelzo's superb book.
"Guelzo's book, the first true intellectual biography of the man the author calls America's "redeemer president," ranks among the most significant half-dozen studies of Lincoln during a remarkable decade of scholarship.... Especially perceptive is Guelzo's portrayal of Lincoln's odyssey from youthful scoffer to perhaps most religious of US presidents, ever rejecting the ritual and denominational dogma of public worship but increasingly taken with a personal form of Calvinist spirituality culminating in his immortal Second Inaugural Address, arguably the most profound exploration of religious values ever penned by an American author.... Recommended for literate readers at all levels."
Is it possible that amid the voluminous literature on Abraham Lincoln, there is room for yet another study? Allen Guelzo's Abraham Lincoln eloquently proves that there is, since religion has been sorely neglected by historians of Lincoln and the Civil War.
"The number of books about Abraham Lincoln is almost beyond counting.... Unique among this outpouring is Allen C. Guelzo's "Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President," an intellectual biography of a president who was, at bottom, a man of ideas.... Interestingly, for Lincoln the mixing of moralism and politics came rather late....With the approach of the Civil War, he began to make use of religious imagery in his public statements, while the war itself seemed to provoke in him something close to a religious quest to discover its meaning. Dissecting this quest forms the core of "Redeemer President," and the job Mr. Guelzo does of it is masterly.... It is a testament to the strength of "Redeemer President" that the matters it addresses resist easy summary. The value of the book itself, however, is easy enough to state: Out of the countless volumes written about our 16th president, it ranks quite simply among the best."
Out of the countless volumes written about our 16th president, Allen C. Guelzo's Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, it ranks quite simply among the best.
— Wall Street Journal
This rich and subtle of Lincoln's intellectual life well deserves to have received the prestigious Lincoln Prize; it is superb.
— WQ Magazine
The Historical Journal
"Guelzo's is a satisfying portrait, perhaps because he has been a scholar of Jonathan Edwards, so is more conscious of the intellectual and political contexts that preceded and made Lincoln, but less concerned with the retrospective usefulness of Lincoln as a national icon."
Times Literary Supplement
"Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President is the best study of Lincoln's religious thought, and all the better because it situates that thought in the context of Lincoln's whole career. Guelzo's purpose is to take Lincoln seriously 'as a man of ideas.' He succeeds admirably. . . .But it is in his analysis of Lincoln's religious ideas that Guelzo makes his most important contribution."
Choice
"Guelzo's book, the first true intellectual biography of the man the author calls America's 'redeemer president,' ranks among the most significant half-dozen studies of Lincoln during a remarkable decade of scholarship. . . . Especially perceptive is Guelzo's portrayal of Lincoln's odyssey from youthful scoffer to perhaps most religious of US presidents, ever rejecting the ritual and denominational dogma of public worship but increasingly taken with a personal form of Calvinist spirituality culminating in his immortal Second Inaugural Address, arguably the most profound exploration of religious values ever penned by an American author. . . Recommended for literate readers at all levels."
Publishers Weekly
"Is it possible that amid the voluminous literature on Abraham Lincoln, there is room for yet another study? Allen Guelzo's Abraham Lincoln eloquently proves that there is, since religion has been sorely neglected by historians of Lincoln and the Civil War."
The Wall Street Journal
"The number of books about Abraham Lincoln is almost beyond counting. . . Unique among this outpouring is Allen C. Guelzo's 'Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President,' an intellectual biography of a president who was, at bottom, a man of ideas. . . Interestingly, for Lincoln the mixing of moralism and politics came rather late. . . With the approach of the Civil War, he began to make use of religious imagery in his public statements, while the war itself seemed to provoke in him something close to a religious quest to discover its meaning. Dissecting this quest forms the core of 'Redeemer President,' and the job Mr. Guelzo does of it is masterly. . . It is a testament to the strength of 'Redeemer President' that the matters it addresses resist easy summary. The value of the book itself, however, is easy enough to state: Out of the countless volumes written about our 16th president, it ranks quite simply among the best."
The Weekly Standard
"One of the subtlest and deepest studies of Lincoln's faith and thought in many years. . . Seldom has the complex connection between Lincoln's predispositions and Lincoln's achievements been more insightfully studied than in Allen Guelzo's superb book."
Wilson Quarterly
"This rich and subtle study of Lincoln's intellectual life well deserves to have received the prestigious Lincoln Prize; it is superb."
The Historian
"With the freshness of insight often afforded scholars who cross disciplinary boundaries, the author, a student of intellectual and religious history, makes an important contribution to the field of Lincoln studies. . . This is a thoughtful, engaging, and provocative book that will enlighten both Civil War specialists and students of American history."
The Filson Club History Quarterly
"This co-winner of the 1999 Lincoln Prize is a subtle, insightful, and convincing analysis of Abraham Lincoln. . . .Guelzo's analysis is sound and generally convincing. . . This is one of the most important books in a decade rich in Lincoln scholarship."
The Journal of Southern History
"Is there really a place for yet another wo
| BN ID: | 2940169909890 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/10/2011 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
from the Introduction (pages 18-21)
Abraham Lincoln would become, personally and publicly, one of the most determined and eloquent apostles of liberal capitalism, and a stalwart of the Whig party, the enemies of the Jeffersonian legacy. At the same time, Lincoln would also become the president best known through the nineteenth century for pouring public policy into the molds of religious thought, the one most often claimed after his death as "the Christian president"; and he would conduct a lifelong dalliance with Old School Calvinism which attempted to acknowledge the significance of religion in a republic's character without surrendering to the fiery agenda of New School evangelicalism.
Yet, his place in these contexts was complex, shifting, and not always consistent. His life was a pursuit of transformations in his rise from the son of a Baptist dirt-farmer to a cultured corporate lawyer, but he sought transformation while all the while denying that he had sought anything, that he was "an accidental instrument, temporary" and "a piece of floating driftwood." While liberal capitalism was supposed to expand the horizons of one's choices and opportunities, Lincoln insisted all through his life that he did not believe in free choice, but rather in a "doctrine of necessity." Intellectually, he was stamped from his earliest days by the Calvinism of his parents. But he rebelled vigorously against that influence in adolescence, declined to join his parents' church, and turned instead toward the Enlightenment as his intellectual guide, toward "infidelity," "atheism," and Tom Paine in religion, to Benthamite utilitarianism in legal philosophy, and to "Reason, all-conquering Reason" in everything else.
Taking these as the principal guideposts for understanding Abraham Lincoln asks that we do something with Lincoln which virtually no modern Lincoln biographer has managed to do, which is to read Lincoln seriously as a man of ideas. As Mark Neely has complained, Lincoln biography tends to travel either the road of personality-history (as blazed by William Henry Herndon) in which Lincoln's achievements are explained in terms of temperament or genealogy; or else the road of public-history (the model for this being the ten-volume biography by Lincoln's White House secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay) in which Lincoln is lauded mostly for his public management skills as a president, a politician, or a commander-in-chief. The fruits beside these roads are not inconsiderable; nor is it going to be claimed here for the sake of difference that Lincoln was a philosopher, a theologian, a mystic (all of which have been tagged on Lincoln for reasons that have more to do with self-interested authors than with Lincoln). In particular there is no intention here to add to the delusive mythology that seeks to baptize (literally or figuratively) Abraham Lincoln as an evangelical Protestant (which he was not) or as a devout believer in Swedenborgianism, Universalism, Presbyterianism, or even Freemasonry (he was not any of those, either).
What is sought here is to take Lincoln at his own word when he declared in the spring of 1860 that great political questions could not be answered by mere political solutions. "Whenever this question shall be settled," Lincoln wrote about slavery, "it must be settled on some philosophical basis. No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained." For Lincoln, a "philosophical basis" was not a school-philosophy; but it was certainly a coherent intellectual scheme of things which transcended mere policies. Lincoln, it is true, was a professional politician, and not an intellectual; but he was not a mere politician. Poorly schooled (by his own definition) and too poor in his youth to afford either college training or even the law-office tutoring which educated most of his fellow lawyers in the 1830s and 1840s, he was gifted with an amazingly retentive memory and a passion for reading and learning. "A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others," Lincoln believed, and his reading provided three large-scale contexts for his intellectual maturation. The first of these was the rigid Calvinism in which he was raised during his early years in Kentucky and Indiana. It was, as William Barton once wrote, "a Calvinism that would have out-Calvined Calvin." It was also a Calvinism which Lincoln rejected, partly because it was his father's religion, partly because he could make no ultimate intellectual sense of it; and yet it was ingrained so deeply into him that his mental instincts would always yield easily to any argument in favor of determinism or predestination, in favor of the helplessness of humanity to please God, in favor of melancholy as the proper estimate of the human condition.
The second of these contexts was the Lockean Enlightenment, which made Lincoln religiously skeptical, suspicious of the Rousseauean passions (he confessed that he had never read a novel, and failed to get more than halfway through that paragon of Romantic novels, Ivanhoe), convinced of the supremacy of individual rights over community conventions. And yet, whatever skeptical nourishment Lincoln derived from reading religious "infidels" like Tom Paine and Robert Burns, he also arrived chronologically at the very end of the "long Enlightenment" and lived most of his life as a Victorian. This meant that, like Carlyle and Mill and George Eliot, the loss of faith was not for Lincoln a triumphant emancipation but instead the source of what A. N. Wilson calls a "terrible, pitiable unhappiness" and a wearying sense of "metaphysical isolation" that could be stanched only by sub-mission to "impersonal and unrecompensing law."
The last of these contexts was classical liberalism, especially the economic liberalism which in Lincoln's decades seemed so full of promise of liberation and mobility for the talented and morally self-restrained, and the Benthamite utilitarianism which he accepted as finding a rational—and thoroughly deterministic—cause for human conduct in self-interest. And yet he would come at the end of his liberal's progress to see that liberalism could never achieve its highest goal of liberation and mobility without appealing to a set of ethical, even theological, principles that seemed wholly beyond the expectations and allowances of liberalism itself. While he would hold organized religion at arm's length, he would come to see liberalism's preoccupation with rights needing to be confined within some public framework of virtue, a framework he would find in a mystical rehabilitation of his ancestral Calvinism and an understanding of the operations of divine Providence.
Looking at Lincoln in this way, we may address Neely's complaint about the bifurcation of Lincoln biography by understanding Lincoln's ideas, and the cultural scaffolding that emerged around them, as the bridge by which we can reunite the mysterious fascination we have with Lincoln's inner personality with the public life that guided the republic through its direst political crisis.
