3 - Religion

Summary

A powerful populist notion of Burns as a pious Presbyterian poet developed during the nineteenth century. Although this myth blatantly ignored awkward aspects of the poet's life and work concerning his attitudes to morality and his satirizing of Scottish Protestantism, it is not entirely without substance. In 1794 Burns wrote the following lines on the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, which was both the attempt by the Scottish Covenanters to impose a Presbyterian system of church government on England and Ireland as well as Scotland, and a document that sought also to set limitations upon crown interference in matters of religious confession:

The Solemn League and Covenant

Now brings a smile, now brings a tear.

But sacred Freedom, too, was theirs;

If thou ‘rt a slave, indulge thy sneer.

(PS 512)

Burns's sentiments here have to be read against post-Enlightenment and post-1789 sensibilities. The Enlightenment historiographical tradition, which was particularly strong in Scotland (found most famously in the work of David Hume), had berated in general terms the tendency towards ‘fanaticism’ in European history. The bloody, internecine disputes of the British seventeenth century, therefore, were to be frowned upon. However, another movement in tandem with this ‘civilized’ historiographical impulse of the Enlightenment was to be found in its interest in understanding psychology. The stadialist impulse found in Scottish commentators such as Adam Ferguson, where the mentality of a culture was estimated in accordance with its stage of development as a society, began to extend a measure of objective understanding to earlier, more ‘primitive’ ages in history. And this effect was compounded by universalist Enlightenment theories of morality. If the most celebrated European version of the latter was to be found in Rousseau's idea of the ‘noble savage’, Scotland had its own influential eighteenthcentury tradition of a ‘moral sense’ innate to humanity and essentially unchanged by cultural or historical location, as described by Presbyterian philosopher Francis Hutcheson. It is against this background that we must understand Burns's retrieval of the previously presumed ‘fanatical’ Scottish Covenanters, whose core impetus, notwithstanding its somewhat severe doctrinal dressing, was the universal desire for ‘Freedom’.