Slothrop's Nativity & Religion.1

[Terrance]

Douglas Lannark wrote:
> 
> Hello Paul!
> 
> Thank you too for responding to my latest eMail concerning Slothrop’s plausible birthday - twice as a matter of fact.
> 
> Well, to clear up the matter of his religious upbringing (definitely not Catholic, nor TP’s either!), on p. 26-7 the Congregational churchyard is mentioned. Now just how „Puritan“ the Congregational Confession is is a matter beyond my competence - any religious minds out there?

"My folks were Congregationalist," Slothrop offers, "I
think." GR.682

But TRP didn't go to Harvard, Slothrop did. TRP didn't go to
WWII, he cruised around ina communications vessel after the
war and returned to Cornell in Ithica, not in Cambridge. The
early works of both Pynchon and Farina demonstrate that
these boys went to church and confession. 


> 
> And looks like that other report (about a Catholic upbringing) was mistaken. 

Why? 

>If Pynchon had any Catholic upbringing, it surely would be more noticeable in his books.

Like what do you mean by noticeable? 

I have the opposite impression. 




Also, Pynchon read Weber's "Protestant Ethic", it's an
important source, the distinction Weber makes between
Catholics and Protestants in "PE" is represented in GR.
Also, check out Norman O. Brown.  

Also, Here are some other catholic authors, how noticeable
is catholicism in the works of some of the writers that
influenced Pynchon?  


Marshall McLuhan, influenced, as Pynchon was, by Catholic
philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, converted to
Catholicism in
1937. Pynchon's early heroes include, Dante, Hemingway,
Fitzgerald,, James Joyce,  all were catholic,  in fact the
chain that connects   T.S. Eliot (a major influence) and
Joyce to Dante and St. Augustine, Aquinas and Henry Adams is
so
obvious I don't know why critics have neglected to even
mention it. Oh yes,  what about his dear friend with the
cross-eyed Sabastian and the
headless Virgin, Cuban/Irish brooklyn born Farina? What can
we make of Pynchon's early stories? They are loaded with
catholic references. 


Notes: 
Adams was the product of Boston's Brahmin class, a cultured
elite that traced its lineage to Puritan New England. He was
the great-grandson of John Adams and the grandson of John
Quincy Adams, both presidents of the United States.
While in France, Adams pushed further into the recesses of
history in search of "a fixed point . . . from which he
might measure motion down to his own time." That point
became medieval Christendom in the 13th century. In
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (printed privately, 1904;
published, 1913) he described the medieval world view as
reflected in its cathedrals. These buildings, he believed,
expressed "an emotion, the deepest man ever felt--the
struggle of his own littleness to grasp the infinite."
Adams' attraction to the Middle Ages lay in the era's
ideological unity; a coherence expressed in Catholicism and
symbolized by the Virgin Mary. 
The Education of Henry Adams (printed privately, 1906;
published 1918) was a companion volume to Chartres. The
Education remains Adams' best known work and one of the most
distinguished of all autobiographies. In contrast to
Chartres, the Education centred upon the 20th-century
universe of multiplicity, particularly the exploding world
of science and technology. In opposition to the medieval
Virgin, Adams saw a new godhead--the dynamo--symbol of
modern history's anarchic energies. The
Education recorded his failure to understand the centrifugal
forces of contemporary life. The book traced Adams'
confrontations with reality as he moved from the
custom-bound world of his birth into the modern, existential
universe in which certainties had vanished. 
Neither history nor education provided an answer for Henry
Adams. Individuals, he believed, could not face reality; to
endure, one adopts illusions. His attempt to draw lines of
continuity from the 13th to the 20th century ended in
futility. Adams concluded that all he could prove was
change. 
In 1908 Adams edited the letters and diary of his friend
John Hay, secretary of state from 1898 to 1905. His last
book, The Life of George Cabot Lodge, was published in 1911.
In two speculative essays, "Rule of Phase Applied to
History" (1909) and Letter to American Teachers of History
(1910), Adams calculated the demise of the world. Basing his
theory on a scientific law, the dissipation of energy, he
described
civilization as having retrogressed through four stages: the
religious, mechanical, electrical, and ethereal. The
cataclysm, he prophesied, would occur in 1921. How literally
Adams intended his prediction remains a point of dispute.