When I was a young teen, I attempted to make an agreement with God, which has given me a low hum of anxiety ever since. This is for the simple reason that I broke it, first in spirit and then eventually in practice. Now, I have no evidence that God did indeed agree to any deal, nor that He would exact the punishment I determined for myself for the breach. (Nor even that He exists to begin with.) Regardless, one consequence of the above is that since then my own innate sense of guilt has been bolstered by the feeling that I am well and truly metaphysically screwed, and that there may be no way out of the trap I both laid myself, and myself fell into, like an overconfident Mephistopheles. Bother though these feelings be, from them I do at least have an enhanced appreciation for tales involving the Faust myth and the idea of a soul eternally sold for earthly powers.
It is a long time since I’ve read such an interesting take on the whole topic as James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. The “justified sinner” of the title is a young man who is convinced that he is one of God’s elect, and thus removed from all moral rules – a position known as antinomianism. It’s in line with some interpretations of Calvinism / the Reformed Church, the faith popular in Scotland at the time. With such convictions, the central character begins a string of unreasonable murders while yet believing himself every bit God’s chosen son.
Based on this description, we might be tempted to dismiss the work as a bit of fun and nothing more. Arguing against a position few of us hold from an unpopular faith, its relevance to us today can only be so great. Even if we extend the central idea concerning morality to bring into play other contexts where we might declare ourselves above its rules, often without being aware of it, such as in the case of radical politics, it still does not seem something meriting a whole novel.
Why then does Hogg succeed? He succeeds because his work is much more complicated than this simple description suggests. A Justified Sinner has a fascinating split structure, with the same tale told twice from different perspectives, a blurring of fact and fiction, and a curious interplay of brazen obviousness and paralysing ambiguity. More than just an argument against extremism, it emerges as a work soaked in the anxieties of an age where the promised clarity of the Enlightenment was being challenged by the ambiguities of experience as people actually lived it.
The Story
The story goes something like this. The Laird of Dalcastle, George Colwan, inherits the family seat in Scotland in 1687. He marries a young woman of strong Calvinist convictions, who spends a single night with him before being so disgusted that she sets herself up in a different part of the estate, with only her friend, the priest Robert Wringham, for company. She gives birth to two sons, one certainly George’s and who takes his name, and one of more uncertain parentage, who is banished alongside her to live with Wringham, and takes the name Robert after him. Once older, the boys come into contact with one another, and in mysterious circumstances, George is murdered. His father dies of heartbreak, and Robert, born in wedlock and hence legitimate, takes over. Some time later, one of the elder George’s former lovers discovers young Robert and an accomplice to have been responsible for the murders and ties the new Laird up, only for him to flee just as the law is making its way to Dalcastle.
Anti-Antinomianism, then and now
The view of Christianity advanced by John Calvin, in Scotland and elsewhere, also known as Reformed Christianity, is easy for outsiders to criticise. It considers humans inherently sinful and that ascension to heaven is available to only a certain few, the “elect”. Importantly, however, election itself has nothing to do with moral merit or good works. It’s a choice God made at the beginning of time, so to speak, and you can’t convince Him otherwise. That means that if you are outside of the elect, or feel you are, you are basically trapped in despair. This idea is illustrated with terrible power by Jack Boughton, in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels, who is convinced of his depravity and powerlessness to stop sinning. The result is that he continues to sin and loath himself, even though, as a human being, Robinson shows him to be as deserving of love as anyone. Perhaps Calvinism’s best popular defender these days is Robinson herself – her non-fiction explores Calvin’s legacy with greater depth and seriousness than I could. (Or indeed, than does Hogg here.)
For Hogg in his novel, the interest in Calvinism is in this idea of the elect and their relation to other obligations. If one is elected, then under certain interpretations of Calvinism, one can really do whatever one wants – because God chose you for election anyway, knowing this. The practical tension that the younger Robert faces is that he has “doubts, that, chosen as he knew he was from all eternity, still it might be possible for him to commit acts that would exclude him from the limits of the covenant.” Unfortunately, he has an accomplice or double or devil for a guide – a being calling itself Gil-Martin. As we learn in the second section of A Justified Sinner, this man is ready and waiting to convince Robert to kill whenever he starts with his worries again. If one is serving God, and one must be as one of the elect, then one can do anything one deems necessary because one can be sure it will be in God’s own service. Including, of course, murder.
It is tempting to laugh at such ideas, which are not the standard view in Calvinism, but we encounter people setting themselves outside of consistent moral rules almost every day. Religions are full of hypocrites, but so too are the irreligious, whose behaviour is conditioned by considerations of purity, something we see all too often in our decaying political discourse, especially on the internet. As soon as we learn someone is outside of our political group, we excuse ourselves of the responsibility of treating them as fully human and with the kindness and consideration we would someone of our own group. We dismiss them, denigrate them. Heaven forbid we should encounter them online, for we will then go through their entire post history to find something that gives them away as an enemy. In A Justified Sinner, there is a direct parallel in young Robert asking the older Robert about the spiritual qualities of a man he plans to murder to find the “gotcha” that proves it’s right to end his life.
The Novel’s Criticism of Antinomianism
If the criticism of antinomianism were only the dead that dot the novel’s pages, A Justified Sinner would be preaching to the converted, as I imagine the majority of its readers have never seriously contemplated murdering anyone. Yet the novel does much more than that in arguments against extremism, which does much to extend its interest today. The first way it does this is its emphasis on human fallibility through the courts and the priests, because for all young Robert’s interest in heavenly justice, the novel he inhabits is much more concerned with justice of an earthly sort. Among other situations, young Robert and George end up in court after a fight, there’s an investigation into George’s murder, and the elder George’s lover must disclaim knowledge of some stolen goods to save another woman’s life.
Each of these situations puts a crack in our idea of justice as a kind of idol. In the first, “the sheriff was a Whig,” and we hear that though it is “well known how differently the people of the present day, in Scotland, view the cases of their own party-men, and those of opposite political principles”, the situation at the time of the narrative was still worse. In the second case, the wrong man, a friend of George’s, is convicted of his murder, with contrary evidence being discounted, while in the third case, the pursuit of legal truth has to be neglected for the pursuit of moral truth and the discovery of Robert’s true purposes.
In a similar way, the treatment of religious discourse is such that we come to doubt the reliability of those who represent it. The priest Robert is a nasty man, more ready to “doom all that were aliens from God to destruction” than to wish them well, for example. And whenever the younger Robert doubts his obligation to murder, Gil-Martin always has a counterargument using scripture to get him back on track. Jesus himself came “with a sword”, so why shouldn’t young Robert? Alas, the Bible, being a big book, provides plenty of opportunities for crafting a more violent set of obligations upon Christians than we prefer to see these days.
One final point that is as obvious to me as it is impossible to consider for the younger Robert – how on earth does someone know they are one of the elect? In the younger Robert’s case, the only evidence is that his own probable father declares he is. But how can the priest be sure? We need not doubt the idea of election or the religious truth of Calvinism to doubt that it is practically possible to establish who is elected, and who is not. If we can’t trust authorities we have to trust our own consciences. This seems to be what A Justified Sinner is getting at, morally. Even young Robert, led astray by the devil, has one of those.
Narration and the Search for Truth
A Justified Sinner thus makes an argument against extremism first through its murders, then through its demonstration of the fallibility of scriptural interpretation and court justice. But where the book is most fascinating is at a still more fundamental level – the level of narration and structure themselves. This is because the entire book’s structure is itself an argument about the elusiveness of truth and hence an argument for moderation and carefulness.
A Justified Sinner is broken up into two main parts, with a final section tying them together. The first version of the story is “the editor’s narrative”, and details the version of the story that they could find from “history” and “tradition”. As a narrative, it covers the Story section earlier in this post. The narrator is largely a background presence, but his judgement against “the rage of fanaticism” of the events comes forth above all in his language. This is hard to miss – A Justified Sinner is at times anything but a subtle book. Young Robert is like a “demon”, a “devilish-looking youth” with a “malignant eye”. The narrator never says outright that either Robert or his familiar are devils, but they may as well do.
It’s not an ambiguous book, might be our conclusion from the first part of the work. But then the second section, the “Confessions”, begins, and things become a lot stranger. For here, the narrator is young Robert himself. He is convinced that he is guilty of no evil at all, and that what he did he did “in the faith of the promises, and justification by grace.” Through his condemnation of his brother (“ungodly and reprobate”) and father, and his black and white thinking, Robert’s narration provides a mirroring of the editor’s while relating many of the same events. Both, in their biases, cannot be true reflections of the world. By making the biases so obvious, it seems in fact that the text wants to make clear that neither is a true reflection.
The book does more than place two unambiguous texts against one another, for in Robert’s telling there’s also the problem of Gil-Martin. This creature, who has the ability to shapeshift, meets young Robert on the very morning when the priest has declared him one of the elect. The text allows a certain amount of uncertainty about who Gil-Martin really is, indeed whether he really exists at all beyond Robert’s mind: “I was a being incomprehensible to myself. Either I had a second self, who transacted business in my likeness, or else my body was at times possessed by a spirit over which it had no control, and of whose actions my own soul was wholly unconscious”.
The overall result is that the narration is both real and unreal, both obvious and totally obfuscated at different moments. Robert is the subjectivity that becomes increasingly deranged, while the narrator is the attempt at objectivity that never quite works in spite of its best efforts. A Justified Sinner even contains a real letter from Hogg himself and features him as a minor character. It seems real, but it is so far from containing a simple truth that the only argument we can get from the text is that things will never be as certain as we want them to be. This, in turn, becomes an argument for moderation.
A Romantic Reaction
This line of method and argumentation also places A Justified Sinner within the context of other Romantic works. While the bulk of the novel is set in the early years of the 18th century and deals, indirectly, with a climate of significant religious tensions in Scotland at the time, its real thematic interests are Romantic. Specifically, they are anti-Enlightenment.
A Justified Sinner shares with writers like the German E.T.A. Hoffmann an engagement with the strangeness of perception. In Hoffmann’s Sandmann, a work full of looking-glasses and different perspectives – in this case, an epistolary section and a more impersonal narrative section – there is also a man who goes mad and acts violently out of a personal conviction. The anxiety as a whole likely leads back to a mixture of Kant and the Terror in France, where, in the latter case, the idea that all could be made rational led only to the guillotine. In A Justified Sinner, we have the sensible young George, who tries to reason with his brother and make peace with him, pitted against the thoroughly irrational Robert.
There are dark forces in the subconscious, and in the world itself. This was one key Romantic idea, as was the idea of the sublimity of subjective vision of the sort that Robert’s attitude embodies. In A Justified Sinner, the forces of unreason are stronger – first because Robert kills George, and then because he is driven mad himself. (More mad than mere murder). “Unreason”, though, has perhaps more negativity than what we really see here. What the novel suggests is just that there are forces beyond reason at play in the world, for good and for ill. The former is not too obvious unless we consider the work as a whole. In the final section, we return to the editor’s narrative to hear how he came across Robert’s Confessions. These were, we learn, miraculously preserved alongside his body in the grave of his eventual suicide.
In other words, God has intervened to bring us the anti-extremist message of this work. There’s a further irony, a further mystery. If God did do this, then perhaps the younger Robert was right all along – his life was serving God in an indirect way, because through A Justified Sinner we receive a text that reminds us of our obligations to follow His commandments. Whether this is the right interpretation, we shall never know – as with the rest of the book, it’s shrouded in the fog of mystery.
Conclusion
It’s by no means a perfect work, is Hogg’s. The language and characterisation, in particular, is at times so poor that I myself could have written it. (I learned since that Hogg had a thing against editing his works owing to a belief that he was a genius – I have taken this to heart as a warning). But the ideas here, the innovations of structure and narrative, make this a fine work to study, all the same. Plus, as a Scot myself who has barely read a thing by his fellow countrymen, it was a good place to start. Any other recommendations beyond Burns are welcome in the comments.