We should instead be finding language that is capable, capacious, and responsive. The expectations induced by any fixed approach should be relaxed, in pondering history as surely as in considering human nature or the depths of physical reality. Ideology has been a terrible mistake, theory another one. Both mimic positivism in their stringencies and exclusions. There is no writer, and so on. Why should any given thing have happened? No theory, no convention or prejudice, should take precedence over the fact that if it did happen, it arose out of the endless complexity of human life, human lives. The Puritan Thomas Shepard, generally credited with founding Harvard, remarked that a man with a wooden leg could trim his foot to fit his shoe, but in the case of a living limb this would not be advisable. By all means those who think about history should avoid such trimming, since they deal with living flesh, specifically those human swarms whose passage through the world is the sum and substance of history.
We have not yet absorbed the fact that history has fallen into our laps, and we hardly know what it is, let alone what we should do with it. We have been busy destroying the landmarks that might otherwise help us orient ourselves. We have impoverished ourselves of every sense of how over time a society emerged that we and most of the world have considered decent and fortunate. Could we save this good order from a present threat? If it collapsed, could we rebuild it? These are real questions.
The stringencies and inadequacies of positivism in all its forms have sent me to the literature of early modern, pre-positivist thought, where its attritions were not yet felt. I have been reading some old sermons and treatises by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English and Anglo-Americans. I have been reading the Puritans. I confess to being drawn to orphan figures, movements, and periods. My reward is in the discovery of their frequently remarkable value and significance. It was no doubt inevitable that I would come finally to the Puritans, among the most effectively dismissed of all historically consequential movements. They are seldom mentioned except as a pernicious influence on our civilization, both early and abiding. Few grounds are offered to support this view of them, and those that are offered are ill-informed. That name “Puritan,” affixed to them polemically, has singled them out for a particular dislike that we have learned to share. Arthur Golding, in the Epistle Dedicatory to his translation of John Calvin’s commentary on Galatians (1574), remarks wistfully that there are those who “are in the eyes of some persons not only to be despised but also blamed; verily as who should say it were a fault to endeavor to be faultless.” It is curious that the desire to live a scrupulous life should be anyone else’s business. And what were the transgressions of which Puritans were particularly aware? Errors in their own thinking. Hypocrisies and idolatries. They are supposed to have frowned upon the joys of life, to have had a special, dark obsession with sexuality, to have hated all things beautiful. None of this is true.
There is a strong tradition of piety in Europe, reaching back to the twelfth century at least, that is always denounced in just these terms whenever it becomes visible enough to seem to authorities to pose a challenge. Notably these groups were the Albigensians or Cathars and the Waldensians in southern France and northern Italy and Spain, the Lollards in England, and after them the English Puritans. The earlier groups were all seen as heretics. They were violently suppressed. The writings of the Cathars were burned, and what records we have of them are testimonies made under torture, so it is difficult to know much about them. We do know that they were the civilization of the troubadour poets and the courts of love. Oddly, they and the other groups were and are all associated with an aversion to sex. Considering the struggles the dominant traditions themselves have had with this aspect of human nature, it is strange that this notion about dissenter groups should serve as an aspersion against them. Nevertheless, it was and is employed consistently and effectively against supposed heresies, despite every change of moral climate. Where the aversion to sexuality is strong, the status of women is generally low, particularly in matters of religion. Albigensian teachers and clergy were male and female indifferently. Lollards denounced priestly celibacy as a disparagement of women. Puritans idealized marriage and educated their daughters. I have looked further into the matter than most people, and I have found no evidence of special anxiety on this subject, in fact very little mention of it at all. Puritans had a serious interest in sin, and they also had their own definition of it. From what I have seen, the great sin in the Puritan understanding is religious hypocrisy within their own churches and within their own minds—evangelical hypocrisy, in the words of Shepard. Their rigors were felt inwardly, among themselves and within themselves. Self-scrutiny was mastered as a discipline.
The association of Puritanism with sexual repression in Anglo-American cultural history has significant effects. Any writer who is a little salacious now and then, or who translated Ovid, say, could not have been a Puritan, even though that translator, Golding, also put many of the Latin and French works of Calvin into English. In fact, in his preface to Calvin’s commentary on the book of Daniel, Golding says of him, “As I do profess myselfe to be one of his scholers, and do prayse God for the same more than any earthly matter: so do I not of arrogance alter or change any thing in his writings.” Golding was making his translations in the 1570s and ’80s. Since his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a major source for Shakespeare’s plays, there is no reason to assume he would not have picked up others of Golding’s books. The commentary on Daniel deals at length with a question of great interest to Shakespeare and his period: what a ruler’s legitimacy consists in, and why and how it can be lost. The imposing of an inappropriate test on the vast literary output of the English Renaissance, which was also the English Reformation and which encompassed the rise of Puritanism, very effectively minimizes the influence of the movement, and mischaracterizes its focus, its temper, and its worldview.
There is a stigma attached to this influential strain of early modern thought that generally forecloses the possibility of interest in it or respectful attention to it. It is no help at all to say Puritans were Calvinists, since every aspersion cast on them is cast on him as well, on no better grounds. These stigmas have created dead zones in British and American historical thought—around Geneva, around the English Civil Wars, around early New England, and even around the English Renaissance, a period celebrated and pondered endlessly—within limits that seem unaccountably narrow unless the power of stigma is taken into account. The influence of Geneva as a republic governed by elected councils, the importance of the English Civil Wars, which, in crucial respects, were a model for the French Revolution, and the formative first century and more of our own civilization all tend to be badly dealt with or effectively ignored. Even great Shakespeare has been caught in these snares.
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I have been using the word Puritan without defining it. There was no church or institution by that name, no membership in any formal sense. The word in England was applied to nonconformist or dissenting Protestants—Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, and anyone else—who did not accept the legitimacy, or in any case the claims to exclusive legitimacy, of the newly created Church of England. The affinity of these groups is demonstrated in their years of military effectiveness and in their sustaining a parliamentary government for a decade, more or less, until Oliver Cromwell died, leaving no competent successor. Before battle, or when there were important decisions to be made, their soldiers would separate according to their various sects to pray, then come together again to plan or to debate. The unity among them was not untroubled—the Presbyterians and the Congregationalists fought two major battles against each other around the issue of monarchy, which was less acceptable to Congregationalists than to Presbyterians. But over the course of years of warfare the population did divide along the lines of Puritan or Parliamentarian and Anglican or Royalist. This division justifies the use of terms that by themselves do not do justice to the complexity of either side. The best of the P
uritan writers are now claimed for the Anglicans, which can be confusing. But if they were forbidden to preach, jailed, forbidden to come within five miles of a city, or inclined to making long stays in Rotterdam, or if they emigrated to New England or thought about it, it’s safe to say they were Puritans.
The stream of Puritanism that landed in New England and flourished there, and was greatly supplemented by the arrival of refugees fleeing the consequences of the collapse of the revolutionary government and the restoration of the monarchy in England, had a highly characteristic intellectual culture. Its theological stronghold was Cambridge University. It was based on the paramount authority of Scripture, for them understood as an ancient text in three ancient languages, counting Aramaic. Their clergy were trained in these languages as well as in Latin so that they would be competent interpreters of a text that was never definitively rendered in any translation. This by itself marks a great difference between their religious consciousness and that of all our modern supposed literalists. There was a great, treasured difficulty at the center of Puritan culture that enlisted them in the study of history, of antiquity in general, and of the natural sciences, which by their lights gave insight into the nature of God as Creator and as Presence. For all these reasons they needed a Harvard and a Yale, a Princeton and a Dartmouth, a Grinnell and an Oberlin and a Mount Holyoke, and, while their influence lasted, scores of other schools, private and public. We can and do dismiss this intellectualism as elitist, congratulating ourselves for the distinct modesty of our own aspirations. But the American Puritans maintained a historically high level of literacy in their population. In England and Europe their immediate forebears had struggled and died to create a Bible in English, which could be understood by the unlearned. This became the basis of all later Bibles in English, including the Authorized or King James Version.
From the time of John Wycliffe forward, England had a population they called the unlearned, who were literate in English or knew someone who was. Learnedness meant competence in Latin and French, later perhaps in Greek and Hebrew. When the press made books relatively cheap, translators made history and theological and classical literature accessible to readers of English, removing an important cultural barrier. Golding omitted Calvin’s occasional brooding over a word in Greek or Hebrew out of consideration for what he called the unlearned reader, assuming at the same time that the reader would be interested in a work of theology. Writers in this period often quote passages in Latin, and then, unfailingly, they translate them. This was the period of the chronicle histories, a narrative of national life that could be read by the literate unlearned. Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s use of translated classics and of histories written in English might be thought of as a part of all this, offering Aeneas and Antony, Edward II and Richard II to audiences avid for a kind of aesthetic and intellectual experience that had always before been closed to them.
The lessons and sermons of Puritan preachers propagated the kind of learning required of their clergy and were printed and circulated in Britain and America. Again, their learnedness might have been welcomed because it was also a breaking down of these same exclusions. In The New England Mind, the American historian Perry Miller describes a Puritan sermon as a “closely knit, carefully reasoned, and solidly organized disquisition.” The preacher “argues his way step by step, inexorably disposing of point after point, quoting Biblical verses, citing authorities, watching for fallacies in logic, drawing upon the sciences for analogies, utilizing any information that seems pertinent.” Miller says, writing in 1939, “[The Puritan preacher] demands a degree of close attention that would seem staggering to modern audiences and is not to be paralleled in modern churches.” Or, I would say, in modern universities. The rigor the preacher demanded of himself, like the brilliance Shakespeare allowed himself, reflected confidence in his hearers and deep respect for them. The pious would take away a meaningful education from their hours in church. There were no women in the universities, but there were women in the pews. In the Wycliffite manner, the Puritan elite worked to close the gap between themselves and people at large.
Let us say that their early culture in America assumed the appropriateness of educating the general population ambitiously. Granted, their instruction was always fundamentally religious, as it would have been anywhere in the Western world. I know that early New England is very usually described as “theocratic.” So is Calvin’s Geneva. What this can have meant at the time, when rulers in England and throughout Europe felt justified in imposing religious conformity by means of the most extreme violence, I have never understood. The norms of the West then certainly made New Englanders liable to practices that we might consider oppressive, though at the moment we seem to be tending away from enlightenment ourselves. Still, the word theocratic is applied to them as if tolerance flourished elsewhere and they alone resisted its sweet influence. This is profoundly at odds with history.
Meaningful comparisons are available. The Massachusetts Body of Liberties of 1641 is largely a list of protections of citizens of the colony, notably those who are accused or convicted of crimes. It forbids double jeopardy, provides for representation and appeal, and forbids “bodily punishments” that are “inhumane, barbarous, or cruel.” It includes protections of women, children, servants, foreigners, and strangers, and of animals, forbidding “any tyranny or cruelty towards any brute creature which are usually kept for man’s use.” And it concludes with a list of twelve capital crimes, with the biblical verses cited that permit and/or require this punishment. This code is attributed to the American Puritan minister Nathaniel Ward. It was revised seven years later, in 1648, in the somewhat more pedestrian and punitive Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts.
Dale’s Laws, named for Sir Thomas Dale, the deputy governor of Virginia in 1611 when the code was approved by the colonial council in England and enacted in that colony, is a very different thing. It begins with a list of infractions to be punished by death, beyond those commanded by Moses, which are there also. These capital offenses include speaking impiously or maliciously against the Holy Trinity or any of its Persons, blaspheming the name of God a third time, speaking traitorous words against the king’s person or authority, speaking derisively of God’s holy word, being absent three times from twice-daily divine service, stealing from a church, speaking derisively a third time of the king’s council that governed this “pious and Christian plantation,” taking food from a garden, or, surely the most understandable of crimes, running off to the Indians. Newcomers were to present themselves to a minister to give an account of their faith, to be instructed if necessary, and to be flogged each time they failed to submit to instruction. Notably missing from the Virginia laws is the slightest legal protection for people vulnerable to even extreme punishments. Notably missing from the Massachusetts laws are compulsory church attendance and compulsory religious instruction, or laws against disrespect of clergy or of Scripture. In other words, these ungodly and unbiblical laws imposed on the Virginians from London were theocratic as the word is usually understood. The laws of the Puritans, with their insistence on two or three witnesses in capital cases, their restraints on the severity of punishments, their protections of servants and widows derive very largely from the Old Testament. The verses that authorize them could as well be cited as are those that authorize capital punishment. So I suppose these laws might appropriately be called theocratic, if the word were ever used with a little precision.
Severity is so utterly associated with Puritanism that I feel compelled to emphasize my point here. Dale’s Laws are Anglican. The church whose doctrines are enforced in them by flogging is the Church of England. The Puritans and the Church of England were adversaries, within years of engaging as adversaries in two wars that would destroy a larger percentage of the British population than any other war the British have engaged in. So it is with civil wars. In any case, I have learned from my attempts to do them a little historical justice that when I so much as mention harshness or oppre
ssion people will hear the word Puritan, or, possibly, Calvinist. Those who comment on the Massachusetts codes always remark on how closely they anticipate the American Bill of Rights, how modern they are. I’ve gone looking for that English common law they are often supposed to have been based on. Sir John Fortescue, Sir Thomas More, Sir Edward Coke—no luck at all. Advice would be appreciated. Oddly, there seems never to be any mention of Moses.
Be that as it may. There are problems with the comparison of these two codes. Dale’s Laws is older by a crucial generation or two, pre-Revolutionary, while the Massachusetts laws were formulated during the period of the Commonwealth and rule by Parliament. This fact would have meant both that England was engrossed in its own struggles, giving the colonies new latitude, and that the tendency of society away from the monarchical order would encourage a more local, communitarian ethos. The Laws and Liberties begins “To our Beloved Brethren and Neighbors the Inhabitants of the Massachusetts.” The preface to Dade’s Laws says that they reflect the king’s interest in advancing “true religion” and “the glory of God.” There is a stated intent to bring the light of the Gospel to those barbarous Indians.
The Virginia colony struggled bitterly, though it was considered to be in a much more favorable location than Massachusetts. It approached starvation and anarchy. This would account in some part for the seemingly desperate severity of these laws. At the same time, the severity of the laws might have stood in the way of any sense of a common interest. John Winthrop’s speech on the importance of mutual charity to the survival and success of his settlement appears to have been borne out. Also, there was an unusual degree of consensus among the Massachusetts colonists to support civic order, while Virginia had the advantage and misfortune of a military presence to enforce submission.