It seems the universe is a kind of foam, huge voids with filaments of conventional matter, galaxies, constellations, and so on surrounding them like the skin on bubbles. These voids grow. They put enormous pressure on matter, pressure so great that the force of it is attributed in some part to dark energy, of which we know nothing. It, with these voids, may account for the accelerating expansion of the universe, with consequences so profound that a human observer, however well equipped, living one or two billion years from now (granting that there might be such a creature), would see nothing but void. I offer this as a metaphor for contemporary American intellectual life, which is also a thing of forceful and expanding voids, driven by a nameless energy that pushes reality out of shape and might ultimately push it out of sight altogether. I am not talking about popular culture or about the impact of new technologies. There is really nothing very new about the phenomenon I describe. If there is anything essentially American about it, this is probably true because we educate such a large part of our population. We educate them or, more properly, we condition them in a way that makes them averse to knowing all kinds of things. We teach them that they already know what it is essential to know—that certain things are worthy of unvarying and uninformed contempt. Many people are aware that Edwards wrote a sermon about hell and damnation. Many highly educated people are aware that Edwards is generally considered the finest philosophic mind this continent has produced. They all have the same fixed ideas about him and his America, learned from the same high school or college anthology with the same excerpt from that sermon, which is offered as an epitome of New England thought and culture, though it is certainly not characteristic even of Edwards’s writing, let alone his theological tradition. The void Puritanism has merged with the void Calvinism, swallowing Edwards along the way, to constitute a vast ignorance of early American history, a negative energy that obviates any awareness of contemporary British and European history, with which early New England history is so deeply intertwined. Specialists might think I overstate. But, in my experience, specialists also are afflicted by the problems that come with this strange attrition, this general emptying out of whole fields of effective knowledge.
America always has the great, interesting problem of arriving at some understanding of itself. History is entirely germane to this project. We have lived with norms and institutions we value. How did they develop? What have they meant to earlier generations? How have they been articulated and extended? The word conservative seems to have some authority among us, but how many of us know enough to be sure when our institutions are being defended and when they are actually under assault? We should have learned by now that the whole civilization could drift off its moorings amid much waving of flags, much loud talk of former greatness.
Ideas about the nature of a good society were developed and applied in New England. They did not originate there. There were precursors on the Continent and in England. For my purposes, it is enough to say that the Puritans were intent on a reformist experiment in New England, which was as much political as religious. The Southern colonies, by contrast, were socially dominated by the Church of England, the capstone of Royalist conservatism. When the parliamentary revolution, also called the Puritan Revolution, took place in England, many New Englanders crossed over to fight for Oliver Cromwell. There were perhaps ten years when Puritans actually governed a commonwealth in England, a prosperous nation by its own recent standards and despite the turmoil that typically follows revolution. Cromwell died and his son quickly failed as his successor. The British call this period the Interregnum, a word that marks an absence almost as complete for them as it is for us.
The void that has swallowed early American history has swallowed this crucial passage in Anglo-American history. British historians typically say that Puritanism ended in 1689, at the time of the Bloodless, or Glorious, Revolution, which might as well be called the unresisted invasion of England by William of Orange and a sizable army. This must mean that Puritanism ceased to be a threat to the established order in Britain, therefore that it is understood as primarily a political movement. It continued to flourish in America well into the nineteenth century, depending on definitions, and is still dominant among us, according to foreign observers in those diminishing instances in which they think we are being overly fastidious about something. In any case, the writers Edwards cites and quotes at length in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections are almost all Puritans of that old Cromwellian generation, active about a century before Edwards. All those I will quote are from this period, my point being that in this treatise Edwards is making a defense of a stable, elaborated tradition, not merely engaging in controversy. If there is a question in anyone’s mind whether Edwards, writing in the mid-eighteenth century, is himself a Puritan, his choice of references makes his own identification with them very clear. He does not quote to argue from authority, rather from affinity. He uses them to identify a core Puritanism, over against religious excitements he and they denounced as hypocrisy.
The work of the many Puritan writers who flourished in the Cromwell period was, even at the time, recognized as a striking element in the life of the movement and the culture. The British Puritan William Greenhill, in a preface to The Sincere Convert, by Thomas Shepard, the Anglo-American founder of Harvard, says,
Did ever any speak, since Christ and his Apostles, as men now speak? We may truly and safely say of our divines and writers, The voice of God, and not of man: such abundance of the Spirit hath God poured into some men, that it is not they, but the Spirit of the Father that speaks in them … What infinite cause hath this age to acknowledge the unspeakable mercy of God in affording us such plenty of spiritual tractates, full of divine, necessary, and conscience-searching truths, yea, precious, soul-comforting, and soul-improving truths!… In good books you have men’s labor and God’s truth.
At the time of the Restoration, Roger L’Estrange, the royal government licenser of the press, laid out his plan for suppressing insurrectionist writings by radically limiting the number of presses, destroying condemned books, and severely punishing anyone who owned them or had any part in distributing them. He recognized that many printers would go out of business because the books he would be suppressing were the books people wanted to buy. It would be most efficient, he said, to eliminate writers, since there were few of them in any generation. But John Milton and Andrew Marvell are noted Cromwellians, better understood in the context of their remarkably prolific generation. Shakespeare was the older contemporary of writers such as Richard Sibbes and William Ames, and he is fascinated by subjects that fascinated them, for example, the potency of conscience. (The American historian Perry Miller has said the Puritans “abhorred freedom of conscience,” on grounds he does not divulge. Glib as he is, thin as his scholarship is, I appreciate him as a nameable misfortune.) In any case, it is remarkable how cleanly the Reformation has been severed from the English Renaissance, and how little attention is paid to the popular audience that writers and playwrights enjoyed in this period. It is simply annoying to have studied the period off and on for decades without ever seeing a reference to these important figures.
The political character of Puritanism as part of an international movement is easily demonstrated. Many dissenters had gone to centers of Reform learning in Geneva, Strasbourg, Wittenberg, and elsewhere. Hugh Peter, born and educated in England, served as a pastor in England, then in Rotterdam among the English there, then from 1635 as a pastor in Salem, Massachusetts. He returned to England seeking financial support for the colony and became involved in the incipient revolution as a chaplain, soldier, and close associate of Cromwell. In 1651, during the Puritan ascent, he published in London a little book titled Good Work for a Good Magistrate; or, A Short Cut to Great Quiet. It is a small compendium of proposed reform, too interesting to be dealt with more than briefly here. It states that “none can bee free of great injustice, who by persecution for Religion take away liberty of conscience…” It is to be
noted that under Cromwell no one was prosecuted for his or her religion. The little book includes provisions liberal by modern standards, that doctors and lawyers should be paid at a fixed rate from the public treasury, for example. On the subject of crime, it says, “Let no Malefactors against the light of Nature, and civil society, escape punishment, but be justly and speedily punished, not in prisons beforehand, by cold, heat, stink, famine or any other way, but out of humanity, let them be comfortably provided for, till sentence bee given, and then let Justice take place; That all Murderers, Thieves, Whoremongers, Adulterers, False witnesses, evil speakers, deceivers, Bankrupts, Drunkards, Traitors, Blasphemers, and all manner of evil doers may be duly punished, rather inclining to mercy than cruelty, and always with a merciful heart.” I am sure we moderns do not meet this standard.
In one respect Peter is definitely harsher than we are. He proposes “that they, who under pretense of able men, under color of Merchandise, get other men’s goods into their hands, and yet, when they need not, bankrupt themselves on purpose to deceive others, and enrich themselves, be sorely punished, as very great thieves.” Further, “that no bankrupt may ever after come into any office, or bear any Rule in Church or State.” He says, “One Bankrupt doth more hurt than twenty thieves that are put to death, or sorely punished for it.” I have quite recently acquired a context that allows me to understand what is referred to here.
In any case, the only early legal system I have seen that is comparable to this one for gentleness and moderation is the code titled the Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts, promulgated three years earlier, in 1648. This code remained the basis of Massachusetts law until our Revolution. In form and content it anticipates the American Bill of Rights. In both cases, Cromwell and Parliament were dominant in England, and the social thought behind the laws was Puritan. Compare Dale’s Laws, a body of laws imposed in Virginia in 1611, with its many death penalties for minor theft, for speaking ill of the English governors of the place, for running off to the Indians, and, on the third offense, for skipping church. (This horrible code was to be read in church on every Sabbath.) Or compare the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, approved by the British governors of the territories of the South from Virginia to Florida. This design was promulgated in 1669, after the Cromwell era and outside the sphere of Puritanism. It was meant to establish a fixed, hierarchical, land-based aristocracy, a virtual feudalism. Whether these laws were practical or sustainable, and the degree to which they ever took effect, are complex questions. It must be said, there is little evidence that the dominant Anglican elements in the South took exception to the notion of land-based aristocracy, a model with which they were entirely familiar. In other words, the Reformist tendencies that lie behind American achievements in the direction of democracy and—John Winthrop’s term, of course—liberalism, have Puritanism in New England as fons et origo.
Someone should write a good book about all this, one that would make distinctions historians seem never to make: between Puritan North and Anglican South, between the period of Cromwell on the one hand and the rest of the colonial period on the other—that is, between times when the colonies were necessarily self-governing, and when they were compelled to renew their royal charters, and, more generally, when the laws in force in any case were British and when they were colonial. Historians describe the harsh legal practices of Virginia as “colonial,” when in fact they were simply British. At the time of the Restoration, Peter, condemned in London as a traitor, was made to watch, and the next day to suffer, an execution so appalling I can’t bring myself to describe it. It was cruel, yes, but it was not as unusual as one might wish, since Elizabeth the Great had introduced it as a punishment for recusant Catholics.
Ah, well. In any case, Winthrop’s sons were active in the English revolution. Cromwell had once considered moving to Connecticut. Books like the ones Edwards quotes from were widely known on both sides of the Atlantic. Ties between England and Puritan North America were many and strong.
One question. Were there no witch trials in the colonial South? They went on in Britain well into the eighteenth century, so in terms of social and religious culture there is no reason I know of to exclude the possibility. The South itself has not appeared immune to outbursts of public violence. I mention this because the trials in New England, a strange departure from custom, have been treated as uniquely Puritan. With the generally lurid exploitations of the phenomenon, they add an aversive energy to the void of unknowing that has engulfed this interesting civilization.
And one comment. Thank God for the publishers, whoever they are, who keep this once famous, enormously influential literature in print, in blurry facsimiles, at best, though sadly enough sometimes abridged and modernized. The Reformation was all about the power of books. In this case, books that were once suppressed by law, even burned, are very nearly suppressed by the curious compounding of ignorance and aversion that is so important to our sense of our own history. It is appropriate and remarkable and melancholy that their continued life is owed to the fidelity of these printers of books, the descendants, perhaps, of the unacknowledged heroes of the Reformation, and of the Renaissance as a whole.
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The writers Edwards cites were exploring the human psyche, individual human nature in its capacities as moral agent, in Edwards’s terms, and as soul. Their vision of humankind was directly related to their thinking about the kind of political society that would be suited to its flourishing. It is a given of their thought that the soul can be, and is meant to be, ravished and transformed by an experience—something more than an insight or a vision—of the divine. While it is a given also that an experience of this kind is purely a gift of divine grace, they were intent on predisposing in one another and themselves a receptivity to this divine and supernatural light, which Edwards with great subtlety finally distinguishes from light, making it utterly different in kind from even this most rarefied earthly thing. He escapes the constraints of particularity his analogy might otherwise imply, and establishes a sense of the singularity of the high order of perception for which the senses barely supply analogies. The soul was made ready for this experience by the conscience, a human faculty the English Puritan John Flavel says is inferior only to God. Conscience lays bare the sinfulness and unworthiness that make clear the absolute dependency of any soul on God’s grace. Those who pass through this experience and are changed by it are presumably true saints. Those who are part of the church and make a good account of themselves while awaiting the experience are also called saints, or godly persons.
We are familiar with a superficially similar version of this set of beliefs, and Edwards was, too. The difference might be said to be one of emphasis, though it is in fact a profound difference. For Edwards, the authenticity of the experience is proved, to the converted themselves, in the right conduct of life. For those he criticizes, the experience itself is assurance of salvation without reference to conduct of life. In Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England, Edwards describes at length what he calls the “degenerating” of these experiences, with which we are familiar as well. In All Things for Good, Thomas Watson says, “Christians must keep a decorum; they must observe what is comely,” and “Take heed of a morose, supercilious behaviour. Religion does not take away civility, but refines it.” In his Works, Edwards says, “At length the experience of some persons, who began well, come to little else but violent motions of carnal affections, with great heats of the imagination, a great degree of enthusiasm and swelling of spiritual pride … The unhappy subject of such a degeneracy, for the most part, is not sensible of his own calamity; but because he finds himself still violently moved, has greater heats of zeal, and more vehement motions of his animal spirits, thinks himself fuller of the Spirit of God than ever.” Edwards considers this embarrassing. “Persons will find themselves under a kind of necessity of making a great ado, with less and less affection of soul, till at length almost any slight emotion will set
them going; and they will be more and more violent and boisterous, and will grow louder and louder, till their actions and behavior become indeed very absurd.” He says zeal “may degenerate more and more into human and proud passion, and may come to bitterness, and even a degree of hatred.”
It is in this declined form that unsympathetic history sees the whole tradition of what Edwards calls experimental—that is, experiential—religion. What history ignores is the extraordinarily fine-grained and humane attentiveness to perception and experience that follows from the high Puritan conception of the soul—we must grant them the word—as suited to the reception of ultimate truth and ultimate beauty. Their emphasis is suggested by the titles of their books—The Tender Heart; The Bruised Reed; The Art of Divine Contentment; A Treatise of the Soul of Man; Conscience, with the Power and Cases Thereof. The great old writers of Edwards’s tradition placed a most sacred and delicate mystery at the center of human inwardness. Perhaps this fact and its consequences elude us now because our approach to the study of the psyche could hardly be more different from theirs. In fact it can no longer be assumed that the words psyche or soul or mind can be taken to correspond to anything real. Whether this matters, putting aside the fact that either of these conceptions, theirs or ours, is of a kind to be judged broadly true or broadly false, depends on the importance a value-laden vision of human nature has in sustaining a democratic society, even a humane society. In any case, this is an important instance of the fact that these voids I have mentioned produce a sort of warping of perception that makes things the opposite of themselves. It would be impossible, in an environment without distortion, to make the case that Puritanism was harsh or cold or rigid.