Sam Ryan

Last semester, a required reading for one of my classes was the final chapter of George Santayana’s book Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion. The gist of this chapter, which is actually a lecture Santayana delivered at UC Berkeley in 1911, is that America started out as a Calvinist nation (in philosophical terms – concerned with guilt, salvation, etc.) and that subsequent philosophers from Franklin to Emerson failed to break free of that constraint, even as they chipped away at it. Santayana says that only William James finally managed a clean break from the Calvinist “Genteel Tradition” with his conception of Pragmatism.

The name of the book stuck with me as a good phrase, even though Santayana is a very confusing writer. I tend to remember good phrases and pick them up again in different contexts, in the same way that newly learned words will often appear to us in magazines or commercials where they hadn’t been before.

Plugging along through Carl Sandburg’s epic Abraham Lincoln: The War Years a few weeks later, I saw the same phrase. Sandburg gives a perfectly written character sketch of Senator Charles Sumner (he of the Sumner-Brooks Affair – more on that in a later post), in which he both admires Sumner for his anti-slavery crusading and complains of his impracticality. His lack of pragmatism, I guess you could say.

To the Southern counsel “Put thine own house in order,” to the allegations of Rhett of South Carolina and of Toombs of Georgia that a master class in Massachusetts had gathered fortunes out of a socially lower and economically meaner class of wage slaves, Sumner replied with a complete silence. The exposition and analysis were in character. Once when asked, “Have you never looked on the other side of slavery?” Sumner replied, “There is no other side.”
…
The winds of doctrine roared in the caverns of his mind. [107-110]

So there are two instances of the “winds of doctrine,” one from 1911 (Santayana) and one from 1936 (Sandburg), in quite different contexts. At this point I decided to look actively for other references to the phrase.

One much older source is John Milton, who used the “winds of doctrine” in his Areopagitica, a 1644 pamphlet defending freedom of the press during the English Civil War. Milton expresses a charmingly Mulderian confidence in the supremacy of truth:

Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple: who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? [Source.]

But the winds of doctrine are older than Milton. It turns out the original use is biblical, found in St. Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians.

That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive… [Ephesians 4:14, KJV]

This Bible passage has been recycled and interpreted by thousands of Christians over the years. Here is a Christian blogger, “Sister Donna,” on the winds of doctrine:

Wind is powerful, it is commanding, and it can be friend or foe. Therefore, it is with doctrine. It can be full of truth or full of lies depending on who is spreading the doctrine. Our Bible is our doctrine of Christ, His words are there, and it is truth. False doctrine is spread by false shepherds, elders of the church and others who take the Word of God and twist it for their own advantage. [Source.]

Here is another reference to the winds of doctrine – this time from 1767, in the notes of Samuel Eaton, a preacher in the Maine countryside of the Massachusetts Bay Colony:

[My parishioners] are an open Prey to every Impostor. Missionaries… were never more needed than at this Day. I have found some, I believe, who know genuine religion, who are clear & distinguishing in their notions, & are not carried about by every Wind of Doctrine. [Spelling modernized. Source.]

The use of “the winds of doctrine” in Christian writing, it seems, has been consistent over at least the last 300 years. The phrase refers to ideas or teachings that don’t match up with the writer’s own established religious practices. I don’t find these references as interesting as Carl Sandburg’s use of the phrase on Charles Sumner. After all, the “doctrine” of anti-slavery is pretty well established today.

“The winds of doctrine roared in the caverns of his mind.” Sandburg is of course a poet, and knows what he is doing with words. Given the obvious respect for Sumner’s courage and intelligence in the rest of the chapter, I think we can reject the possibility that he’s calling him an airhead, someone with nothing but wind between the ears. Both men are pretty likely to have read both Milton and the New Testament, and so the dual implication here is that (as St. Paul says) Sumner is distracted by his hatred of slavery from some kind of divine Truth, or teleological End, and that (as Milton says) no matter what Sumner says or writes, that same Truth will out, that End will come.

My theory is that the reality obscured here by the winds of doctrine is the dismal aftermath of the Civil War, that Sandburg chastises Sumner for his inflexibility not because he sympathizes with Sumner’s enemies, but because of what went wrong post-1865. (Briefly: Sumner and other Radical Republicans lost their political consensus and mandate on the need for a military presence in the South, and federal troops withdrew in 1877, paving the way for a very bad 90 years for black Southerners.) Sumner’s great failing was that he could not imagine the consequences of his rhetoric, could not anticipate that, in Lincoln’s words, “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” that eliminating the clear evil of slavery would not be a cure for the deeper evils of human nature. Sumner was consumed, Sandburg seems to suggest, by his hatred of the moral hypocrisy of slavery, and it turned him into the proverbial dog chasing the car (who, once he gets his prey, doesn’t know what to do with it.) Blinded by the righteousness of his cause, Sumner couldn’t anticipate the consequences of abolition.

Perhaps at this point, having thoroughly lost my train of thought, I should circle round to where I started, which was George Santayana talking about William James. Here is James describing one of the tendencies of Pragmatism:

… An attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts. [Source.]

Amen. An flexible and curious mind is the best protection we have against ourselves. Thanks for reading.