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 (50 page)

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page 290
ory was founded. It was this experimental basis that finally persuaded Mather to concede more probability to Sinclair's views than to any other.
35
Obviously, a natural theologue could not accept both Whiston and Sinclair; and Mather, probably around 1715, rejected Whiston's cometary explanation, admitting that it was "engenious," but giving it up because it was "Arbitrary."
36
Discarding a theory because it is arbitrary, and choosing another because it is verified experimentally, seems to place Mather securely in the camp of the natural theology and, in fact, he belongs there, though only in one of its outposts. He did not mean to imply that nature must always work without caprice or that physical events must always fall out reasonably. What was arbitrary in Whiston's theory was its disregard of Scripture, which did not hint that a comet passed near the earth before the onset of the deluge. If one wished to follow Whiston's method of reasoning, he asked, why not argue that the flood was "altogether Miraculous"?
37
Some did, of coursebut only by embroidering Scripture. These writers suggested that God created waters especially for flooding the earth which, once accomplished, were destroyed. This explanation, Mather observed, "cutt the Knott.'' And surely there was ''no Absurdity" in attributing such a power to God; but His account, inscribed by Moses, did not cut the knot: "Wherefore wee will rather consider the causes of the flood, which are there more expressly mentioned."
38
By itself Mather's respect for Scripture did not limit his enlistment in the army of natural theology; many better members professed a similar attachment to God's literal Word. But his assumptions about the trinity that natural theologians admired so highlyGod, nature, and reasondid set him apart. Like the first covenant theorists, the natural theologians urged the reasonableness of the Christian religion. They professed to believe that the ancient conundrum of whether a thing commanded by God is good because He enjoins it or is commanded by God because is inherently good, if not exactly solved, was no longer puzzling. There was in the constitution of the universe, as Samuel Clarke, a writer Mather studied closely, said, an "eternal Reason of Things" in which the law of nature was founded.
39
In some ultimate sense, this reason might represent the positive will of God, but in another, some implied, it might even be ante-
 
Page 291
cedent to God Himself. Perhaps metaphysicians alone were qualified to deal with this question, but the natural theologians, openly impatient with the obscurities of traditional philosophy, scorned such riddles. The important
fact
was that God invariably acted according to the eternal and immutable reason of things, the guiding principle of the created universe. Reason thus provided moral obligationClarke said the "
original
Obligation of all"to which "even God ties himself in governing the World."
40
Though not all agreed about the power of this bond on God, many implied with Clarke that God "always" acted in accordance with this principle. If God conducted Himself this way, men should also. They should listen to their consciences which would inform them of rational behavior. Of course, men did not always act reasonably and morally; and when they did not they violated natural as well as ethical principle.
41
While the natural theologues espoused the case for reason, they craved the certainty that any ethical absolutism gives. But science, and the enthusiasm of the sects, had robbed them of most of their capacity to enjoy orthodox Christian assurance. First Descartes and then Newton shook their faith in miracles. As they studied the new science, they could not avoid the suggestion that the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost seemed to defy the laws of physics. Hence they gingerly handled the Scriptures, but despite their care they sometimes fell into heresiesmost notably Whiston, whose fascination with Arianism cost him his post at Cambridge. They did not wish to reject revelation but only to remove it to a safe distance where it might not disturb the ordinary course of nature, which, since the great days of the patriarchs and of Christ, followed reason. Yet they did not want to give way to ethical relativismto say with Swift that moral obligation depended solely on a compact among men. Behind Swift, they knew, lurked Hobbes and the case for obligation to God based only on fear of His unchained power. And therefore they tamed the Calvinist God, several going so far as to throw out the doctrine of election, but conceding to Him absolute sovereignty and foreknowledge. They accomplished their purposes by relocating the Divine in a universe of reason, which filled nature with eternal and unchangeable principles. Newtonianism, especially the law of universal gravitation, undoubtedly gave them courage and helped persuade them that
 
Page 292
they really had solved the old problems of reconciling the existence of an irresistible force with a human kind that possessed freedom.
42
Cotton Mather sometimes made similar claims for reason and the light of nature. And he, of course, always insisted that sinners were responsible for their conduct and for their damnation. There are passages in his works that suggest that he saw miracles much the way pious Newtonians of his generation did, as rare interruptions of a nature that ordinarily conformed to reason. As a matter of fact he continued to make distinctions between special providencesdivine interference that remained within natural lawand miraclesdivine interference that occurred above natural law, distinctions which most men of his day no longer respected. He did not conceive of God, however, as bound by any eternal, rational principles embodied in the created universe. The God who extended His covenant to men through Christ and accepted their compliance only when it was given as total capitulation could hardly appear in the shackles of natural law. Indeed, in a subtle way Mather gently repudiated much Puritan doctrine on both miracles and nature in order to reinvigorate ancient conceptions of God.
43
What men had forgotten in their self-righteous tendency to measure everything by human standards, Mather wrote in the Biblia, was the simple proposition that all things are easy to God. The categories of the "miraculous" and the "natural" were human inventions. Once men realized that, they might begin to understand that working through nature is no easier to God than performing what humans regarded as miracles. To restore a dead man, Mather pointed out in the Biblia, is as easy to God as to produce a living man in his first conception. Men interested in God and nature should recognize that "strictly speaking, if we regard only the
power
of God, there is
nothing miraculous,
" but if we regard our own power "almost everything" is. The distinction between the miraculous and the natural, then, was a human one resting on the judgment of what was usual and unusual to men's senses. Everyone would agree that there was nothing miraculous in the action of a man who, in a sense, overpowered gravitation to catch a ball falling to the surface of the earth. But in men's eyes when God stopped it, the action took on the aura of the miraculous. Some powers of God, Mather explained, may
 
Page 293
be "communicable" to men; some, denied to men may be held by angels; and some angels may do more than others. No Puritan would have disagreed with this nor with his belief that the power to create something out of nothing is entirely incommunicable to "any meer Creatures," including, of course, angels and devils, who are created spirits. But that does not mean that only God does things which are considered miraculous. Most Puritans had long believed that angels operated under divine restraints that prevented them from interfering in human affairs; Cotton Mather tended to dwell on the exceptions to these restraints, arguing that angels often performed acts considered miraculous by men. The important point that he made, however, was that whatever angels didand he contended that in the affairs of men they ordinarily could do more than menthey did invisibly what men do visibly and therefore their acts appear miraculous: "Let the swimming of Iron on the Surface of the Water, or, the mounting of heavy Stones up into the Air, be Instances."
44
Mather's intention in making this argument was not to divest nature of miracle but to suggest that the weakness of men's understandings, and their pride, had unwittingly led them to ascribe human limitations to God. Hence men, in the invention of these categories by which to understand His power, implied that He was in some way chained by the law accessible to their minds. They compounded their error when theyor the deists among themremoved God from the normal course of things in nature, as if anything could sustain itself for a moment without the assistance of God. And finally in their arrogance they persisted in attributing something extraordinary to God in miracles, though the only thing unusual in the miraculous derived from the character of men's perceptions.
45
All this was said in an extended attack on mechanism, which Mather attributed to Epicureans and their modern descendants, the deists. But in this elaborate argument he separated himself, perhaps unwittingly, from those natural theologians who accepted orthodox views of revelation. They remained convinced that God acted in conformity to a reason expressed in nature that was in some sense removed from Him. They denied that anything contrary toor abovereason survived in revelation. The universe and the ways of God were tractable to reason, and though not all of God's purposes were accessible to men's un-
 
Page 294
derstandings, when they were finally exposed they would be discovered in conformity to reason.
46
Cotton Mather did not agree and his disagreement would have appeared clear to all had he ever succeeded in publishing his Biblia. To be sure, the Newtonians, and Newton himself, would not have quarrelled with his embellishment of Newton's First Law in the Biblia: "
Matter
is no more capable of
Law
or power, than of Intelligence, except of a Negative power," that every part of it "will of itself always continue in that state whether of Rest or Motion, wherein it is at present." Newton had betrayed a reluctance to define the external power that moved things, but his popularizers showed no such hesitation: they would have recognized their own case in Mather's argument that all the power ascribed to matter and motion belongs "strictly and properly" to God who acts upon the stuff of nature "continually and Every moment," either ''immediately'' in Himself or mediately through created beings. But most, committed to eternal principles of reason, could not have agreed that the order and rationality of the universe were more apparent than real, that they were in fact strictly in the senses of human observers. In this contention Mather took his stand, his piety curbing whatever impulses he may have had to shape God according to men's rational specifications, and insisted that in ascribing reality to human perceptions, men exposed the extent of their pride. For, he argued what men called the "course of Nature" is really nothing else but the "Will of God" producing effects in a uniform and regular manner. To Godand Mather obviously believed that men must believe this or they would never be convertedthis way of acting is "perfectly Arbitrary" and as easy for God to alter as to preserve. As far as men's perceptions were concerned miracles existed, though in actuality they simply expressed God's will.
47
No primitive and untroubled faith underlay Mather's view, but rather an uneasy and profound conviction that the new science threatened to mask the very basis of reason. As all his reading and writing demonstrates, Mather craved knowledge whatever its source. He was too much of a Puritan, and too much of an intellectual, to deny the truth even if it came from an unbeliever. A remark he made on William Whiston revealed the force of his curiosity, and his admiration of inquirythough Whiston, he
 
Page 295
said, had deserted to the "tents of Arius" the most detestable heresy, we must not allow his desertion to deprive us of his valuable studies. But still the abyss opened its jaws in mechanism. The worst of it was that the lusting after order and law in nature seemed to go hand in hand with men who wished to approach God as His equals. Were not all bound by the eternal principles expressed in a rational universe?
48
By focusing on perception, Mather fought his way clear of the snares that lay in the forest of natural theology. He needed, and felt that all men needed, not just to discover nature invested with divinitythe natural theology did this muchbut also to grasp the fact of its root intractability despite its comforting appearance of order and rationality. Reason and the law of nature implied conceptions that served ordinary needs. Men had to operate in daily life as if these notions described reality. But disaster awaited men whose hearts could not carry them beyond their intellection. Mather once observed of Descartes' famous principle, "I think, therefore I am," that "it is no
New Divinity
to teach, that
As
men
Thinly, so they are.
"
49
But men must think beyond the evidence of their senses. They would achieve more if they went beyond the assumption that nature was only an expression of the creator's "art'' and that nature in some sense was removed from Him. To be sure, the founders and their fathers before them had in the language of technologia commonly referred to nature as divine art, and art conceivably took a form separate from its creator. Yet all should remember that nature is not so much divine art as it is divine "will." And that ''will" consults itself, not any human conception of order, justice, law, or regularity. It followed for Mather that if nature were "will," God existed unconfined by any eternal principle of nature or reason. lie might speak with reason's voice, but He did so only out of His sympathy for men's limitations. His will was His own and unfettered by law or order.
50
All this bore on Mather's conception of the God who inhabited the Newtonian universe. God's generosity in contriving the world in a way that could be comprehended by men seemed obvious. But men, Mather believed, frequently confused the created with the creator. Understandably they sometimes believed that in the apparent rationality of the cosmos, they detected a Deity observing the same laws that bound them. And hence they puked
BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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