America the Beginning

America the Beginning Commentary by Andrew Hui Cite Share Show Bible Passage Read by Ben Quash ‘In the Beginning, All the World Was America’, John Locke wrote in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Through the course of centuries, there have been many interpretations of the English philosopher’s evocative fantasy of the primordial state of nature. Is he celebrating freedom before property or is there a settler mentality latent in his account? Some 150 years after Locke, Thomas Cole was only 27 years old when he painted his Garden of Eden (1828). As one of the forefathers of the Hudson River School, he celebrated the majesty of the American landscape. In Cole’s time, the project of westward expansion was in full force. Indeed, five years later Cole undertook a Grand Tour of Europe after which he painted a suite of five canvases entitled The Course of Empires, which moves from The Savage State to The Arcadian or Pastoral State, then from The Consummation of Empire to Destruction and finally to Desolation. The parallel between the fallen Roman Empire and the burgeoning American one is clear. All of the ‘New World’ appears as a pure, unspoilt wilderness ready to be populated by a man and a woman. Cole depicts trees that are equally as lofty as the mountains, and a surging waterfall can be seen in the centre. In the foreground are colourful flora; in the babbling brook appear precious stones described in Genesis 2:12–13: gold, bdellium, and onyx stone. The overt Romanticism of Cole’s painting might seem a bit clichéd today, anticipating the dreamscapes of an American middle-class, living-room aesthetic. On the one hand, the painting might represent the simple innocence of our first parents overwhelmed by the sublime grandeur of nature. On the other hand, a contrapuntal reading could take it as an implicit tract for (or critique of) Western expansion. What ideology underlies Cole’s aesthetic? There is no doubt that when Cole maps the Biblical Eden onto America, he imbues the new nation with a sense of destiny and providence. Perhaps if migration was a return to humankind’s origins, America can redeem us from the expulsion from paradise. Or we might wonder whether Cole’s more subtle point is that the Indigenous peoples were the first Adams and Eves of the Americas. Expelled by the incursion of European immigrants, they become victims of yet another phase in humanity’s fallen history.