The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (36 page)

Read The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 Online

Authors: Robert Middlekauff

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Historical, #United States, #Leaders & Notable People, #Religious, #Christian Books & Bibles, #History, #Americas, #State & Local, #Christianity, #Religion & Spirituality, #test

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
10.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 203
senses could never match the life of the spirit, Puritans did not reject the flesh. Accept the creatures, they urged, including yourself and your need for food, drink, and sexand enjoy the satisfaction of the need. But the satisfaction must be tempered, not just by a moderation, but by the knowledge that it is inferior to the experience of the spirit. Indeed, satisfaction of physical requirements, though good and necessary in itself, is intimately linked to human weakness and to sin.
Cotton Mather shared these complex attitudes. His response to physical urges was divided, as he was divided on so much elsehe wanted gratification and he craved denial. Every part of his own physical apparatus fascinated him, and every part hadin his mindto be related to the spirit. The pain in his teeth and the headaches that he endured throughout his life reminded him of his sin; the act of excretion humiliated him and put him to ruminating on the abased condition of man in his vile body. He accepted the contention of Puritan eschatologists that the body would be reunited with the soul on the Day of Judgment but hedged his agreement in a way that reflected his revulsion from the physical side of life. All of his writings on this matter reveal that for him (and for others) the resurrected body was not really a body at all. In the millennial state, it required neither food nor sleep; it felt no pain nor experienced disease; it had no senses; it was incorruptible; and it was completely under the control of the spirit.
27
Yet he agreed that marriage and the marriage bed were among the good things of life, and as a young man he prayed that God would give him a spouse. His prayers were not free of reservations, however; among them the fears that marriage might carry him out of the service of the Lord and that his appeals might be animated by "misguided appetities." A few days after he entered these thoughts in his
Diary
, he had managed to suppress his unease so far as to plead with God to give His approval with the reminder "that Marriage was His Ordinance; and that He had promised, no
good
Thing should be withheld from mee."
28
Pleading on the grounds of legality"Marriage was His Ordinance"could not permanently remove the sexual anxiety that he experienced throughout his life. At the age of fifty-five, when he had been widowed twice and married for the third time, two years before, he put the dilemma he felt in two classic sentences.
 
Page 204
The first expressed his distaste for the physical: "The Diseases of my soul are not cured until I arrive to the most unspotted Chastitie and Puritie." The second, his uneasy delight in it: "I do not apprehend, that Heaven requires me uterlie to lay aside my fondness for my lovelie Consort." There are hints in these and other comments that the sexual strain he experienced did not always focus on his partner in his marriage bed, for in this entry he alludes to his "former pollutions'' and he warns himself to "abhor" the thought of any person save his wife. And finally, in one last admonition, he resolved that he must be temperate in his "conversation'' with her.
29
Mather understood himself better than he did others. With the exception of his self-knowledge, the range of his psychological awareness did not extend beyond conventional Puritan limits. In fact the strength of his perception into himself may have suppressed a more generous understanding of others. In those long hours of introspection, the brooding over pride, the lonely struggles with the demonic which he felt striving to capture his soul, he came to know terror, evil, and guilt better than he knew serenity, good, and innocence. He came to suspect the worst in himselfthe tainted character of his love for his children is only one exampleand the worst in others. He could not see that the men who left his church in 1714 to found the New North acted for the sake of convenience, even though he had to admit that the old North's meetinghouse was overcrowded. They were a "Proud Crue" and it was their pride, their desire for pews, that carried them away.
30
When a group of his relatives attempted to collect debts from him, they did so not simply to secure their money, but to "ruine" him.
31
The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts did not send missionaries to the Indians out of a policy of spreading the faith, but because it wished to subvert the Church order of New England. He saw enemies everywhere: there were those who were bent to bring him down when he was a young man, and by the time he reached old age they swarmed around him like jackals around a wounded lion. They hated him and they had always hated him.
32
All the tension of introspection converged on the problem of his faith and his life in the sinful world. His chief concern about himself had to be what it was for every Puritan, the state of
 
Page 205
his soul. In the language of theology, the problem concerned assurance. How could he know that he, led by the Devil, had not deluded himself in his conversion, wracking though it was? How could he know that he was dear to the Lord? Mather accepted intellectually the doctrine of the perseverance of the saintsonce chosen, a man could be certain that he would not be cast aside by the Lord. But though Mather gained comfort from this doctrine, he sometimes doubted that it applied in his own case, just as he sometimes doubted the fact of his own conversion. Throughout his life he suffered from "deadness," an inability to feel anything about religion, love or hatred of God. We may suspect that these periods arrived as a result of emotional exhaustion induced by strenuous worship, but for Mather they were evidence of his sin. His periods of doubt, which he called atheism, were even more frightening. They did not occur often, but when he was free of them he sometimes found himself questioning the Trinity and even the very meaning of life itself. He once compared man to "a
Bubble
rising on the Top of the Water, and there taking a Dance or two, perhaps with some lesser ones about it. In a
moment
, it bursts asunder, and immediately the Bubble shrinks into its first Principles."
33
These were desperate thoughts, born of a precarious, yet intense, faith. Mather sometimes fell into self-righteousness, but even in that state of mind he was rarely complacent. Faith was too fragile a thing for slackness; zealous as he often was, he knew in his marrow that as a sinful creature he could not sustain it alone. He needed the grace of God: without it, he would burst and shrink to first principles like the bubble rising to the top of the water.
34
Mather rarely found assurance quietly. Like so many of the emotions in his life, its comfort appeared only through vigorous exercise. Whatever the forms his devotions took, and there were many ranging through secret prayers, sacramental meditations, ejaculations, vigils, psalm singing, and daily spiritualizing, they all were marked by a physical strain, emotional pressure, and zealousness. Cotton Mather was incapable of contemplative worship. He sought this intensity in his worship, probably because he sensed that greater satisfactions would emerge from it. For most of his life he set aside six periods in his day in which to worship; four years before his death he increased this number to seven. Most of these devotions found him in an attitude of
 
Page 206
beseeching, begging, and pleading with all the intensity he could muster. Sometimes he stretched himself prone on the floor of his study; and many times he went without food and sleep. This regime did not satisfy him as he grew older and in his fortieth year he began his midnight vigils, all night assaults on the Lord, filled with prayer and hymns. These planned devotions were only one side of his worship: he also relied on spontaneous prayers, ejaculations in Puritan terminology, which saw him dart brief appeals to God for His blessings and His aid. The sight of almost any person or of any event could evoke an ejaculatory prayer. A tall man brought, "Lord, give that Man,
High Attainments
in Christianity: lett him fear God,
above many;
" a lame Man, "Lord, help that Man to
walk uprightly.
" Short men, ministers, merchants, the young, the old, a man carrying a package, a man on horseback, and thousands of others (by Mather's count) received the benefits of his prayers. Awareness of the condition of his own mind also produced ejaculations. When he detected a proud thought in himself, he pleaded for abasement; when he experienced an impure one, he asked for a holy one. To the reader of his
Diary
the list appears endless. Mather also seems never to have entered a room without praying that he might not leave it until the people there had received some benefit from exposure to him. One other technique was the spiritualization of ordinary objects, extracting the holy significance from the creatures.
35
The result of this nearly constant application was an intense, and uneven, religious life. He obtained frequent "particular faiths," promises by God that a particular desire would be granted in the future. A particular faith was not given to everyone, rather "but
here
and
there
, but
now
and
then
, unto those whom a
Sovereign
GOD shall Please to Favour with it." Mather received many; as he described the experience after strenuous prayer, "The Impression is born in upon his mind, with as clear a Light, and as full a Force, as if it were from Heaven
Anglically
, and even
Articulately
declared unto him." He also experienced the crucifixion of Christ; he had interviews with angels. In such experiences his joy was ''unuterable," he knew raptures and afflatus. The most gratifying climax of all occurred when he re-experienced his conversion, an event that was repeated many times in his secret devotions. After humbling himself, he passed through the familiar stages of the conversion process which
 
Page 207
ended with the assurance that he was one of the Lord's chosen.
36
To sustain his assurance, he had to actinwardly and outwardly. Anxiety, he discovered from experience, could be endured only if it gained release. Hence the relentless activity of his inner and outer life and his attempts to extract meaning from the most trifling events. For years he suffered from a cough when he rose in the morning. The phlegm that he raised in his throat reminded him that he should seek to cast out his lusts. The "Evacuations of Nature" reminded him of man's resemblance to the brutes and he resolved to think "abasing" thoughts whenever he relieved himself. When he suffered from a headache the barrenness of his head and of his pious activity troubled him. The usual resolve to improve himself followed. Snuffing out a candle put him to thinking of how much brighter men might shine in the service of the Lord. The theft of his papers filled him with thoughts of his approaching death. These same occurrences, or ones similar to them, stimulated him to shouting ejaculatory prayers to Heaven.
37
Just as the ordinary acts of his life had to be examined for their Providential significance, and spiritualized, so also did the events around him. Most, of course, were beyond his control, a death, a fire, a theft, a drought, a storm, a depression in trade. Yet he felt compelled to draw out their religious significance. The longer he did this the greater the conviction was that he could little affect the circumstances of life in New England.
38
Cotton Mather's personality was complete in its essentials by the time he reached his twentieth year. It deepened, and developed slowly after that. It remained one that required mental and emotional exercise; it thrived on activity.
The most important line of psychological development in Mather's life followed the road of Christian ascetics. There was a kind of voluptuousness in Cotton Mather's immersion in denial, sacrifice, and finally as an old man, in martyrdom. As he grew in fame as a Puritan divine, he increasingly found fulfillment in humility, especially in the imitation of Christ. In his moments of ecstasy he demanded abasement and dreamed of being swallowed by Christ. As he grew older, his dreams of this union in the Kingdom of God permeated his entire psyche and provided the framework for his greatest satisfactions.
39
This personality leaned on, as it reinforced, Cotton Mather's
 
Page 208
intellectual development. His propensity to deny himself, to sacrifice what was dearest to him filled the theory of worship that he elaborated for all the chosen of God. His own feverish piety, and all the techniques he devised to nourish it, animated his revivalistic designs and his plans for the active life of doing good. His abasement of himself and his craving for union with Christ inspirited his dream of the New Jerusalem and gave his study of the prophecies its awful urgency. Mather's inclination was always to translate his private experience into his ideas, especially when that experience bore on worship and religious psychology. But little of his thought on any question escaped the impress of his life. This relationship helps explain the emotion that his ideas carried. Cotton Mather experienced the world passionately; he could not have divorced his ideas from that experience had he tried. The history of his life indicates that he did not try.

Other books

Pasadena by David Ebershoff
Undead Chaos by Joshua Roots
Fangs And Fame by Heather Jensen
Teach Me To Ride by Leigh, Rachel
Heroes by Susan Sizemore
Miss Kane's Christmas by Caroline Mickelson
Everything Is Broken by Emma Larkin
Addicted to Love by Lori Wilde