Lasmeida Metriana Nababan : Emily Dickinson’s Concept Of God In Some Of Her Poems, 2010.
the nature of the world, and could not rely on concepts alone. In Aquinas’s classic Cosmological Arguments, he argues that God is the
necessary condition for the existence of certain pervasive facts about the world.
3. Teleological Arguments The teleological Arguments compares natural objects and systems
to those objects which are known to have originated by intelligent design, such as clocks, engines, etc
2.4 Puritanism
Puritanism was a reform movement within English Protestanism that emerged in the 16th century. The movement proposed to purify the Church of England and to
invigorate the daily practice of religion. For their program of reform, the Puritans were indebted to John Calvin and the example of the Calvinist tradition. Another
source of Puritanism was the Bible, considered the sole authority in matters of faith. The movement remained frustrated until the reign of Charles I 1625 – 1649 ,
when a political crisis led to civil war and Puritans took control of the English Goverment. Meanwhile, Puritans emigrants had colonized New England, founding
Plymouth in 1620 and Massachusetts in 1628 – 1630. The period of the English Revolution of 1610 – 1660 also known as the “Puritan Revolution” marked the
height of Puritan influence. In demanding greater purity and stricter obedience to the will of God,
Puritanism resembled other reform movements in the history of Christianity. Originally Puritanism was a phase of the Protestant Reformation, and the Puritans
wanted England to be reform as John Calvin 1509 – 1564 had reformed Genewa.
Lasmeida Metriana Nababan : Emily Dickinson’s Concept Of God In Some Of Her Poems, 2010.
Most or their religious doctrines were also taken over from Calvinism, including their belief in an all-powerful God. In the 16th century no Protestant doubted the authority
of Scripture, the reality of heaven and hell, or the sinfulness of man. Every living person was guilty of sin because of Adam’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden. Like
other Christians of their time, the Puritans also taught the doctrine of a risen Christ who saved mankind from eternal punishment. Some of the Puritans were
millenarians, which means that they thought of history as coming to an end with they return of Christ, the last Judgment and the establishment of the Kingdon of the God.
The millenarian pleas for reform were based on the expectation that these events would occur fairly soon.
Puritan was entirely English in its origins, yet, the movement achieved its greatest influence in America. Here the Puritans were able to carry out their program
without interference and with less disagreement among themselves. The 17th century colonials in New England represent fullest development of the movement..
The first Puritans to arrived i America were Separatist. A new group of Separatist fled England in 1697 – 1609, among them the Reverend Jhon Robinson and
members of his conggregation. The found refuge in Leiden, Holland from where a portion of the group – known as Pilgrims – emigrated to America, landing at
Plymouth in December 1620. The colony was never large yet its founding commemorated more than that of any other colony in American history. One reason is
the moving history of the venture written in the 17th century by Williams Bradforth, Governor of Plymouth colony. His history of Plymouth plantation is a literary
masterpiece of the American experience. A new champions of Puritan believe and practice, Jonathan Edwards led the
first revival movement in America. The Doctrine of election and original sin were
Lasmeida Metriana Nababan : Emily Dickinson’s Concept Of God In Some Of Her Poems, 2010.
gradually put aside, and through a slow processof Evolution unitariarism emerged out of Congregationlism. The process was complete by 1825.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Amherst and all of western Massachusetts were swept by several waves of the protracted Second Great Awakening. In her teens and
twenties Emily Dickinson witnessed four major religious revivals: one at Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1848 and three at Amhersts First Church in 1844-1845, 1850,
and 1858 Siegfried 63. Although she saw her classmates as well as her father, sister, brother, and future sister-in-law join the church, Dickinson remained distrustful of
revivalistic fervor and rhetoric and never made a formal profession of faith. Her resistance to conversion at Mount Holyoke resulted in a tormented sense of failure L
23, 1848, yet over the next decade the poet seems to have accepted her unconverted state. During the great revival of 1850 she half-skeptically wrote to a friend: Christ is
calling everyone here, all my companions have answered, even my darling Vinnie [Emilys sister Lavinia] believes she loves, and trusts him, and I am standing alone in
rebellion, and growing very careless L 35. Some letters from that period contain anxious references to religion L 36, L 39, 1850, but Dickinsons bemused and ironic
comments on the revival of 1858 are already those of a distanced observer L 194. Soon afterwards she wholly refused to attend Sabbath services, withdrawing into the
tumultuous privacy of her belief just as she withdrew into the privacy of the Dickinson mansion. Indeed, Calvinism functions in her oeuvre in a manner somewhat
analogous to her family home: it is a space into which she was born and in which she has remained; a space that provides her with language, imagery, and a frame for
experience; a space of frequent longing, conflict, and emotional hunger. It is also a space governed by a stem Godhead sometimes indistinguishable from the poets
Lasmeida Metriana Nababan : Emily Dickinson’s Concept Of God In Some Of Her Poems, 2010.
father, Edward Dickinson; and yet, last but not least, a space within which she has negotiated a realm of freedom and independence.
Some scholars have made a case for Dickinsons agnosticism or atheism. David Porter puts forth the strong but one-sided claim that she is a poet of utter negativity whose
desolation as an artist lies at the terrifying depth of thought ... where the final No is reached 170. In a recent study Nina Baym convincingly demonstrates how
Dickinson deployed scientific discourse to unsettle [Amherst] religion and quotes a series of scientifically anti-theological poems which argue the impossibility of
knowledge about an afterlife 148-49. However, Dickinson could also conceive of belief as unproblematic, childlike in its simplicity, as in I never saw a Moor Fr
800 or Some keep the Sabbath going to Church Fr 236, and while such unreservedly optimistic statements are rare and tend to belong to the earlier period,
they reflect the diversity and fluidity of her religious attitudes. Whereas Dickinson relentlessly examines and dismantles her Calvinist legacy, she hardly ever addresses
the question of Gods existence but even in moments of disbelief is ready to stipulate that God is. She presents uncertainty as a prerequisite of faith, conceding that
certainty, were it possible, would make faith redundant Fr 978. She also acknowledges that however disturbing the uncertainty can become, to abandon faith is
even more difficult than to uphold it: The abdication of Belief Makes the Behavior small--Better an ignis fatuus Than no illume at all-- Fr 1581.
The growing inaccessibility of religious experience within the Calvinistic framework and the consequent spiritual alienation of the individual is dramatized in Dickinsons
poetry through the images of a dead or mutilated God: a lifeless Deity Fr 795, the Funeral of God Fr 1112, or, perhaps most memorably, a God whose Right Hand ...
Lasmeida Metriana Nababan : Emily Dickinson’s Concept Of God In Some Of Her Poems, 2010.
is amputated now Fr 1581 Eberwein, Is Immortality 67. Given the desacralization of everyday life, the argument from design endorsed by the
seventeenth-century Puritans or, in Dickinsons time, by the President of Amherst College, geologist and former minister Edward Hitchcock, no longer sufficed as proof
of the workings of Divine Providence. In his works, notably Religion of Geology and Religious Lectures on Peculiar Phenomena in the Four Seasons, Hitchcock combined
science, natural observation, and theology to argue that the organization of nature provides solid evidence of the existence of God and that all natural processes are
emblems of spiritual reality. 2 Dickinson explodes this argument in poems which unmask the impossibility of discerning any divine order in nature: Four Trees--upon
a solitary Acre-- Without Design Or Order, or Apparent Action-- Maintain-- Fr 778; From Cocoon forth a Butterfly As Lady from her Door Emerged ... Without
Design--that I could trace Fr 610. However elaborate intellectually, the project of natural theology fails the test of empirical observation and thus cannot nourish
waveringbelief.
Lasmeida Metriana Nababan : Emily Dickinson’s Concept Of God In Some Of Her Poems, 2010.
CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY OF RESEARCH
3.1 Research Design
Descriptive qualitative method will be used in this study. Natzir :1988 describes that descriptive method is a method of a research that makes the description
of the situation of the events or occurence, so that the method has an intention to accumulate the basic data.
Descriptive design is meant as the procedure of solving the problems by describing the conditions of the object in the present based on the facts and reality. Hadary and
Mimi 1994 : 73 . Best 1982 says that qualitative studies are those in which the description of
observations is not ordinarily expressed in quantitative terms. It is not suggested that numerical measures are never used, but other means of description are emphasized.
Qualitative research does not use sample and population as in quantitative research. Hadary and Mimi 1994 : 73 .
For that reason, this research will be done by using descriptive qualitative method, that find out Emily Dickinson’s concept about the doubt of God existence in
her Poems, The way she describes God and to find out the concept to the background of her life.
I take thirteen poems to analized, after reading some books, there were thirteen popular poems from Emily Dickinson’s poems, they are
1. God is Indeed a jealous God 2. God made a little Gentian
3. I Never Saw a Moor
