UC Berkeley

Theological trends in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries influenced the development of prose fiction generally and the sentimental novel in particular. In 1667, Latitudinarian clergyman Simon Patrick claimed the Eucharist was like a “History or Romance” because of its ability to evoke sympathy—a unique way of putting the common notion that one ought to meditate on the life of Christ and become Christ-like. Sympathy then is morally good insofar as it causes one to become Christ-like and become morally good like Him. Pierre Hadot and Peter Sloterdijk have emphasized the capacity of philosophy’s literary form to inculcate spiritual practices; I argue that early novelists understood their work as inculcating a practice of sympathy that could be directed toward Christ. Clarissa not only alludes to but also adapts Jeremy Taylor’s 1650 Holy Living and Holy Dying, a representative of the imitatio tradition of Thomas à Kempis. However, the novel is Janus-faced, simulating secularity in Clarissa’s displacement of Jesus Christ. The sympathy inculcated by the eighteenth-century novelists evolves into a broad, diffuse sympathy of all with all, the novel genre amounting to a site of public theology. Characters such as Richardson’s, in moral conflict and reaching ethical conclusions, rely on a soteriology of prevenient grace, associated with the Latitudinarians, according to which God endows all with an impulse toward Him. In this way this dissertation explains the role of moral impulses in sentimental texts, arising not from Humean sympathy but from the Grace of God. In the twentieth century, Philip K. Dick demonstrates the continued disposition of the novel and of the moral regime toward a perilous form of sympathy.