The Pietist Impulse in Christianity by Christian T. Collins Winn

Author:Christian T. Collins Winn [Winn, Christian T. Collins]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781621890621
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2015-11-24T08:00:00+00:00

59. Ibid., 461.

60. Works (Jackson) 11:453.

13

The “Strangely Warmed” Mind

John Wesley, Piety, and Higher Education

Shirley A. Mullen

It might seem odd to begin a discussion of piety and John Wesley with a reference to David Hume, but I do so, for two reasons: first, to remind us of the dominant flavor of intellectual life in the eighteenth century (at least as it is remembered today), and to locate Wesley’s life and impact alongside his more widely known contemporary. (Hume lived from 1711–1776 and Wesley from 1702–1791.) It would no doubt surprise and annoy both John Wesley and David Hume to realize that the two men actually shared a great deal in common. They were both empiricists, struck by the limits of Reason rather than its efficacy for answering life’s most significant questions and for shaping the fundamental beliefs necessary for navigating the daily circumstances of the human condition. Wesley and Hume were both politically conservative. They were both suspicious of the “enthusiasm” in either politics or religion that they associated with the breakdown of political authority in seventeenth century Britain. They both read and loved the classics of Greece and Rome. Finally, they both believed very much in the eighteenth century idea of “progress,”—that the world was getting better and better—rather than in the alternative contemporary notion that the best days for the human race were in the context of some mythical and long gone “golden age.”

In one of the more light-hearted of Hume’s brief essays, entitled “On Essay Writing,” he identifies himself as a self-appointed ambassador between two worlds that he calls the world of the “conversible” and the world of the “learned.” The “learned” are those who “have chosen for their portion the higher and more difficult operations of the mind, which require leisure and solitude, and cannot be brought to perfection, without long preparation and severe labour.”1 “The “conversible” are those of a “sociable disposition and a taste for pleasure, an inclination to the easier and more gentle exercises of the understanding, to obvious reflections on human affairs, and the duties of common life, and to the observations of the blemishes or perfections of the particular objects, that surround them.” He suggests that the separation of the “learned” from the “conversible” is one of the chief “defects of the last age.” According to Hume, both learning and conversation are impoverished, when learning goes on in the “colleges and cells” and without the benefit of community and real life experience—and when conversation in public circles is divorced of reference to history, poetry, politics and philosophy.2

One might pause here to note that very little seems to have changed in the two and a half centuries since Hume wrote. The academy is not known as the “ivory tower” without reason—and is still contrasted unfavorably with the “real world” of human experience. But this is not my main point. I want to go on to draw attention to Hume’s reason for wanting more active “commerce” between the “dominions” of the “learned” and the “conversible.

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