Awe governed it.Īn epiphany is supposed to be immobilizing and transforming. It was, quite literally, an awful moment. An epiphany, in a traditional religious context, was the showing forth of the divinity of the Christ child. A moment of radiant vision brings forth the sensation if not the content of meaning. The veil of appearances is pulled back and an inner truth is revealed. This absolutism of the present, as Charles Baxter writes in “Against Epiphanies,” always implies that messages come down to us on Jesus rays through the clouds, complete:
This has made the song a useful and disarming tool in nonviolent resistance movements, as Mahalia Jackson used it in the 1960s, but it has also, concurrently, created a psychic model for self-transformation that Americans use in all possible contexts, from discovering a new makeup regime to choosing a health insurance plan: revelation beams down out of the sky, illuminates my present unhappy state, and changes my life inalterably, at that moment. It’s about the performance of humbling (which should be distinguished from humility) in the presence of God but also the public. In a way, “Amazing Grace” is not about seeing at all, but being-seen: about the spotlight falling on you, for a distinct moment, maybe not entirely unlike Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame, “the hour I first believed.” In church revivals, where “Amazing Grace” plays a prominent part, the spotlight literally falls on the individual sinner making her way up the aisle to the pulpit. This is a text about seeing myself: as Newton emphasized, over and over, the wretchedness and disgrace of the individual sinner, and the gift of grace even when it is not desired, understood, or wanted.
In a way that seems obvious if I step back a little from the overfamiliar language of the text, the song’s insistence on the singular speaker is its most exaggerated feature: “me,” “I,” “I’m,” “I,” “my,” “my,” “my,” “I,” just in the first two verses. In late 18th-century England Newton’s use of the first person seemed crass and unsophisticated, and “Amazing Grace” went almost unnoticed until it reappeared 40 years later in the United States during the Second Great Awakening. What exactly is the quality of sight implied by the intercession of grace? Newton was a Calvinist who believed in predestination, meaning that anagogia was not strictly speaking accessible to him in a sense the concept of grace itself is a way of leapfrogging over the darkness or occlusion of the Calvinist vision, in which salvation itself is a mystery. Neither that experience, nor a near-death experience during a shipwreck, convinced Newton to leave the trade he worked as a sailor until he was too physically injured to continue, at the age of 30.Īlthough “Amazing Grace” is almost universally interpreted as an epiphany about the evils of enslavement, and Newton campaigned for the abolition of the trade later in life, he never described the hymn that way he wrote it as a meditation on 1 Chronicles 17:16-17, where the prophet Nathan promises David that God will keep his family line intact for all time-a promise Christian theology interprets as foretelling the birth of Jesus.
Newton’s activity in the slave trade is well documented, including an incident when he was aboard ship for insubordination, then actually enslaved himself and forced to work on a plantation in what is now Sierra Leone. “Amazing Grace,” the song that informs all generic American notions of epiphanic thinking, was written by the English curate and former slave trader John Newton in 1772.
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