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

Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (4 page)

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page xix
CONTENTS
Book I
Richard Mather (1596-1669): History
1
The Founder
3
2
The Antichrist
20
3
The Church
35
4
The Word
58
Book II
Increase Mather (1639-1723): Typology
5
An Unripened Puritan
79
6
The Invention of New England
96
7
The Church of the Pure
113
8
The Invisible World
139
9
The Word in Boston
162
10
Chiliasm
179
 
Page xixx
Book III
Cotton Mather (1663-1728): Prophecy
11
The Virtuous Epicure
191
12
Christian Union and the Meaning of New England
209
13
The Psychology of Abasement
231
14
Christ and the Covenant
247
15
The Failure of Reformation
262
16
The Experimental Philosophy
279
17
The Experimental Religion
305
18
The Prophecy of Joel
320
19
"On the Borders of Paradise"
350
Notes
369
A Note on the Sources
426
Index
429
 
Page 1
BOOK ONE
RICHARD MATHER (1596-1669)
HISTORY
 
Page 3
1
The Founder
The question "who am I?" is often in the mouths of men in the twentieth century. Uncertain of their values, men today feel root-less and lament their inability to locate themselves by fixed points in the world. A part of their plight, they recognize, lies within themselves: they distrust themselves, their ideas, their motives, and their impulses. But the world is suspect too: it offers no stability, only change, unthinking and, what is worse, unfeeling change. Ransack it for meaning as they will, they discover that the world will not answer the question of their identity. And so they continue to search and to suffer. At their most desperate, they resemble Saul Bellow's Gene Henderson, who listened to an unsuppressible voice in his heart saying only "I want, I want, I want!"
Puritans did not ask the question of the moderns, "who am I?" but they seem to have endured a similar anxiety. Like men today, they were fascinated by their own mental states; and this absorption with themselves yielded great uneasiness. But the resemblance is superficial. Modern men yearn to find themselves, they search for values, and they want to discover how to live. Puritans shared none of these concerns. They knew who they
 
Page 4
were; man, after all, was elaborately described in Scripture, and the scholastic psychology and Reformed theology also told them much about themselves. Nor were values unclearthe word in the modern connotation would have bewildered themGod's will shone in the Scriptures. In fact they had at hand in the body of belief we call Puritanism an explicit philosophy covering all aspects of human existence. This philosophy defined man's place in the world with absolute clarity: it told him who he was and what he might become; and it told him what God expected of him. But if man's fate was clear, the fate of individuals was not. In its doctrines of predestination and election, Puritanism offered a man the assurance that his future had been decided. But it gave him no infallible indication of the nature of the decision. All he could know with absolute certainty was that God in His justice had predestined some men for salvation and others for damnation.
Predestination summed up a set of ideas conventionally identified with the Christian inheritance. In the form of Calvinism that permeated New England's culture, predestination took its meaning in the context of the relationship of God and man. God was sovereign and omnipotent: man was dependent and helpless, sunk in original sin. The Puritan knew that it had not always been so: God created Adam in His image, endowed him with free will, and charged him to live within the covenant of works. With Adam's fall, free will was lost and man was left without power, his fate locked in an iron determinism: whether he would live eternally or burn forever was decided not by himself, by his own merit, or anything he did or could do, but rather by the pleasure of Godalmost, Richard Mather once observed"as if by lot."
1
And how was he, a totally helpless creature, expected to respond to this universe that took its decisions about his eternal state as easily as a man casts dice? With the most strenuous efforts to secure from God the grace that could save his soul. The paradox is obvious: the creed the community lived by, the ministers that preached to it, the books and tracts that came from its presses, all told the Puritan "you are helplessly and hopelessly sunk in sin, your will is corrupt, your understanding impaired, your emotions base, but though only God can save you, you must strive after the grace that will bring eternal peace, you must exert yourself to all your capacity." We have difficulty
 
Page 5
comprehending a creed that tells a man he is without power and then exhorts him to use all his power to save himself. We can refuse to consider such a situation as a description of reality; men in seventeenth-century New England could not. But some of them too found the doctrine paradoxical and responded by saying that they could do nothing for themselves. Their repetition of the doctrine of human depravity had a hopeless and desperate ring to ityes, we admit our guilt, but we are helpless, they said, we cannot rescue ourselves; only God can give us saving grace.
The rejoinder to such plaints reveals remarkablethough limitedpsychological insight: to be sure, Puritan ministers replied, you are helpless. But sinners always ignore the dreadful truths about themselves. "Sinners," Increase Mather once noted in a great sermon, are not only "wicked," they are "unreasonable. Ask them why they don't reform their Lives, why don't you Turn over a new leaf, and amend your ways and your doings, they will answer, God does not give me Grace. I can't Convert my self and God does not Convert me. Thus do they insinuate as if God were in fault, and the blame of their Unconversion to be imputed unto him.'' Increase Mather, as clearly as any Puritan preacher, saw the weakness in these protestations. Of course, he agreed, it is true that "Sinners cannot Convert themselves, [but] their
Cannot
is a wilful
Cannot. They will not come
. It is not said they could not (though they could not of themselves come to Christ) but that they
would
not come." This explanation which emphasizes the willfulness of the refusal is reminiscent of the Freudian theory of neurosis. The Freudian analogue holds that what makes it difficult to cure the neurotic of his sickness is his attachment to it, his willful (to use the seventeenth-century term) clinging to his neurosis and all its unhealthy gratifications. And why do men will not to convert? "If it were in the power of a Sinner to Convert himself, he would not do it: For he hates Conversion. It is an abomination to fools to depart from evil. . . . Their hearts are in Love, and in League with their Lusts, yea they hate to be
turned
from them.''
2
Forcing the sinner to recognize his complicity in his inability to act had the effect of subduing the will, robbing it of its arrogance and power. You cannot act, the minister says, because you will not; your inability, your sin is deliberately chosen. The
 
Page 6
intention of this preaching was achieved when humility was induced; the sinner was in despair; he looked at himself honestly and saw only depravity. In this state of diminished will, he was at last ripe for conversion. He, or his heart, that is, his psyche or will, was now an empty vessel; its corruption had been drained away; and once emptied, the vessel of the heart might be filled with the saving grace of the Lord. He had endured, in modern terms, a crisis of identity. When his ego loss had reached the point where he was reduced to desperation, he experienced the new birth and became a new man as his personality attained a fresh integration, the components of the new birth being implied, of course, by the Calvinist version of Christianity.
This experience, and the explanations of it offered by theology, reinforced a bent towards self-awareness in men eager to determine whether or not they were of the elect. Puritanism achieved the same result in yet another wayby explicitly demanding a self-consciousness that made a man aware of his emotions and sensitive to his attitudes towards his own behavior. It accomplished this by describing in elaborate detail the disposition of a godly mind. Sin, it taught, might be incurred as surely by attitudes as by actions. In the process of performing his religious duties a man might sin if his feelings were not properly engaged. Prayer, for example, was commanded of every Christian; but prayer without inward strain, even agony, is mere "lip-labour," a formality that offends God.
3
Prayer for spiritual blessings without faith that those blessings will be granted implies a doubt of God's power and is equivalent to unbelief. Ordinary life, too, must be lived in a Christian habit of mind. A man getting his living in a lawful calling, though staying within the limits imposed by the State, might nevertheless violate divine imperatives by overvaluing the creatures, as Puritans termed excessive esteem for the things of this world. The "manner of performances," Increase Mather once said, was the crucial thing in fulfilling the duties imposed by God.
4
Puritanism thus bred a deep concern about a state of mind. The norms of good thought and feeling were clear, and every Puritan felt the need for effort to bring his consciousness into harmony with these norms. Doing what he must was another matter and much of his anxiety arose in the attempt to live according to God's stringent requirements. The most familiar
 
Page 7
figure among Puritans is the tormented soul, constantly examining his every thought and action, now convinced that hell awaits him, now lunging after the straw of hope that he is saved, and then once more falling into despair. He wants to believe, he tries, he fails, he succeeds, he failsalways on the cycle of alternating moods.
The sources of Puritan anxiety then were vastly different from those of modern anxiety. Puritan anxiety in a peculiar sense was a conscious uneasiness, deliberately imposed or at least clearly seen and accepted by its sufferers. It rose from the objective world; it was, paradoxically, reasoned anxiety, and there lay its difference from modern anxiety which is neurotic and which has its sources in the irrational and the abnormal.
What surprises one is that this anxiety did not often produce morbidity among the Puritans. Children who had been taught, almost as soon as they left their mothers' breasts, that they reeked of sin, continued in this belief and tormented themselves over their inner condition but still grew into adults who worked productively, married, reared childen and lived useful lives by any standard. As a young man, Michael Wigglesworth, who earned fame through the apocalyptical poem
The Day of Doom
, not only worried constantly over his own but over his neighbors' souls. As a tutor at Harvard, the innocent play of students reminded him of the torments of Hell, and he resolved to suppress their Sabbath evening activities, which he saw as "mad mirth." Wigglesworth did not shed these concerns with his youth, as far as one can tell. Rather he obtained a forum for expressing his opinions of them when he became a minister. But no one minded; his prying into his neighbors' lives was not resented; and his preoccupation with sin seemedand wasperfectly normal in the seventeenth century. His life contained spheres other than the pastoral: he marriednot oncebut three times. The last time at age seventy-four he took his servant-girl to be his wife; she gave him his last child.
5
The records of these lives suggest that morbidity did not occur more often because of what seemed the restrictive side of Puritanism generated tremendous energy and compelled its release. Beyond any question man was depraved. By nature he loved only himself; he should try to love his fellows and to love God. He lusted after the things of this world, but he should love the world
BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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