Journeys to America

Prof. B. Harvey

KEY POINTS ABOUT THE PURITAN MENTALITY: TO BE READ IN CONJUNCTION WITH MARY ROWLANDSON

Some of the initial list below repeats the earlier Puritan summary; and the following prose paragraphs repeat both to some extent.  Read the Edward’s poem to get a famous Puritan poetic expression of the euphoria of self-abasement.  Finally, at the end are a few study questions for Mary Rowlandson per se.

1. Good works are insufficient

--Martin Luther (1483-1546), German monk, publishes his famous "95 Theses", challenging the

 Medieval Catholic idea of indulgences (that you could, in effect, purchase redemption).

‑‑He goes even further: salvation not by good works or individual merit, but by faith in Christ's loving, redemptive sacrifice.

2. Predestination

--John Calvin, French lawyer living in Geneva, publishes Institutes of Religion in 1536, in which he insists upon the logical consequences of perceiving God as omniscient and omnipotent.

--God knows, from the beginning of time who will be elected to salvation and who will suffer eternal damnation.

--God cannot be coerced or cajoled into extending His grace to you and you cannot earn it; indeed to say you deserve His grace, to be saved, would to restrict His power.

--Christ only redeems the elect (not everybody).

3. Innate/Inherited Depravity/Original Sin

--In the Garden, Adam and Even had immediate access to God; but when they disobeyed, they fell and all of nature fell.  Subsequent generations inherit their fallen faculties and corruption. 

--Because god is infinite perfection, a departure from perfection in effect goes in the opposite direction—infinite separation (sin) from His goodness.  We are inclined to sin, like a fat spider over a fire waiting to fall thru its own weight, with only God’s mercy keeping one from plummeting.

4. God writes history; but He’s really hard to interpret

--Devout Christians today may say they believe in a Providential god, but tend to be theologically fuzzy.  To the Puritans, God does not so much intervene in history, rather he writes history entirely, including the events of your life, and including even the trivial (thus Winthrop wonders about the mouse eating one book but not the others—such is a sign of God’s will, although Winthrop is unclear on what to make of it!).

--This means all the events of your life are signs of God’s intent, his wrath or his love, but such is hard to sort out: a good/bad event may be a sign of God’s tender mercy or a temptation, luring you into complacency.  "Do not let me drowned in this deluge of security," one Puritan poet says.  Paradoxically, an affliction may in fact be a mercy, God’s effort to wean you from love of this world and your too carnal attachments.  Thus Anne Bradstreet writes a famous poem “House Burning” in which she says how sweet that disaster is for her.  A loving god is a god that chastises, and it is key to keep this in mind when reading Rowlandson.  Psychologically, too, affliction can be oddly compelling: when we’ve been sorely afflicted, we tend to no longer feel in control of our lives, and thus give up an obsession with control, and thereby paradoxically become quiet and non-anxious.

5. Our understanding of a mysterious God is somewhat compensated by typology

--In the beginning, in the Garden, God walked among Adam/Eve and spoke directly; later God spoke to us through the Revealed Word (the Bible), but in general subsequently, he’s rather silent and those who deemed themselves inspired by God were spurned as deluded enthusiasts (although Puritans scorned Catholicism and ritualism, they believed in social conformity and cast out as antinomians—the word means “against the law”—those radicals such as Anne Hutchinson who claimed to hear the voice of God [i.e. you were supposed to experience God’s grace, but weren’t supposed to get a new set of moral instructions from him!]).

--Typology helped make God less mysterious.  For Puritans, the Old Testament prefigures the New Testament: Israel escaping from Egypt is a “type” of Jesus liberating us thru his grace.  But the entirety of Scripture is also a “type” for actual historical events: Puritans fleeing the corruption of the Old World thought of themselves as being like Israel fleeing bondage of Egypt, etc. When Puritans write autobiography or collective accounts of history, they see their own story as merely exemplifying Scripture—this typological humbling is, of course, empowering also.

6. The visible saints

--Puritans in the late 16th/early 17th century believed the English Anglican church still maintained too much Catholic ritual (still had bishops, priestly vestments, stained glass windows, etc.), and they wanted to get back to what they perceived as a more pure, apostolic form of religious communal expression.

--Bradford’s Pilgrims that land in Plymouth in 1620 did not want to participate in a corrupt church, and found loathly the notion of a national Church of England that embraced sinners.  Winthrop’s group that lands in Salem in 1630 still hoped the English church would still cleanse itself; they, in the New World, would be an example (thus the famous “City on a Hill” passage).

--True: one could never really know whether one was saved, and Puritans spilt much ink over this issue.  Typically, the process of “proving” a sense of grace within would involve elaborate self-reflection and self-testimony and a sequence of stages, full of paradox: if you felt assured of your salvation, you were guilty of presumption, meaning you weren’t saved; but if you felt an overwhelming sense of your own sin, its infinite burden, that was a first sign of perhaps being saved, as only self-abnegation could prelude the influx of Godly light.  Such paradoxes are theologically vexing, but led to Puritan introspection, and in turn to the marvelous poignancy of Mary Rowlandson’s autobiography.

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Puritan theology was based on the ruthless logic of Calvin (predestination), the unavoidable paradoxes when something finite rubs against something infinite (i.e., because God is infinitely good and perfect, the smallest infraction of disobedience is, in effect, infinitely bad; once you are out of the zone of grace, your fallen mortal faculties infinitely remove you from God; infinite righteous wrath is just the obverse of the infinite rapture of being with God's being--see the Edward Taylor poem below), and what was known as the typological reading of the Bible, in which New Testament events are prefigured by Old Testament events (Christ's redemption of humankind is prefigured by Moses leading the Israelites) and in which the history of both Testaments become allegories of the soul's possibilities (God selects just the Israelites to be their God; this allegorically prefigures Christ's redemptive offer to just a FEW of the hoard of sinners). For the Puritans, God is absolutely sovereign; he does not choose to make you one of the elect because, at the beginning of time, he foresees that you will turn to Christ via faith. Your faith is not something you will into being, which then gives you a ticket to the Book of Life (the image comes from Revelations). God chooses from the beginning of time who will be able to have faith and who will not have faith and will remain reprobate.

The real difficulty in understanding the Puritans is not so much their theology (it is very logical). It is squaring the theology with certain social practices such as preaching and evangelicalism: why preach, why try to convert another, etc., if the minister has no agency in transforming a reprobate's heart towards Christ; or why oblige sinners to obey the Ten Commandments if they were destined to hell anyway. The not entirely satisfactory answer is that the Puritan minister would see himself as a tool of God; as a conduit for God's sovereign efficacy of grace. And as for the sinner: the best you could do was to hollow out the self, to abase yourself in absolute egoless abnegation, and wait for God to fill out that chastened being with ecstatic grace.

Winthrop and Bradford), in essence, address the corporate/ collective response to the key Christian question, "What can I do to be saved?"--i.e. separate off from the perceived corrupt Anglican Church of England.  When we get to Rowlandson and Ashbridge below we'll turn to more individual/private stories of spiritual seeking and angst.  In terms of an individual dynamic, the question is how you silence the interminable voice of selfhood to let in an influx of godly illumination: Catholicism believes ceremony and the process of fleshly mortification helps; Protestantism tends to believe the sovereign God moves your heart towards a gracious transformation, and you just abide your time waiting for such a movement (a famous Puritan saying goes " you can prepare the soil, but God plants the seed").  As I have a psychological bias/orientation, I tend to think guilt and bad actions of the past are hard to recover from... it is hard to get a new self-narrative; one of the great virtues of Christianity is that it (faith issues aside)  provides a mechanism of cathartic purging, in which the self, hollowed out, can be renewed.  The problem with the corporate zeal we see in Bradford is that the self is not so much hollowed out so that the spirit may move within, as the corporate entity subordinates itself/subsumes itself within a perceived Christian megalomaniac manifest destiny (see Winthrop's famous City on the Hill passage).

"THE REFLEXION" BY EDWARD TAYLOR (1680 or so)

Canticles 2:1 "I am the rose of Sharon."


Lord, art thou at the Table Head above
Meat, Med'cine, Sweetness, sparkling Beautys, to
Enamour Souls with Flaming Flakes of Love,
And not my Trencher, nor my Cup o'reflow?
Ben't I a bidden guest? Oh! sweat mine Eye:
O'reflow with Teares: Oh! draw thy fountains dry.

Shall I not smell thy sweet, oh! Sharons Rose?
Shall not mine Eye salute thy Beauty? Why?
Shall thy sweet leaves their Beautious sweets upclose?
As halfe ashamde my sight should on them ly?
Woe's me! For this my sighs shall be in grain,
Offer'd on Sorrows Altar for the same.

Had not my Soule's, thy Conduit, Pipes stopt bin
With mud, what Ravishment would'st thou.Convay?
Let Graces Golden Spade dig till the Spring
Of tears arise, and cleare this filth away.
Lord, let thy Spirit raise my sighings till
These Pipes my soule do with thy sweetness fill.

Earth once was Paradise of Heaven below,
Till inkefac'd sin had it with poyson stockt;
And Chast this Paradise away into
Heav'ns upmost Loft, and it in Glory Lockt.
But thou, sweet Lord, hast with thy golden Key
Unlockt the Doore, and made a golden day.

Once at thy Feast, I saw thee Pearle-like stand
'Tween Heaven and Earth, where Heavens Bright glory all
In streams fell on thee, as a floodgate and
Like Sun Beams through thee on the World to Fall.
Oh! Sugar sweet then! My Deare sweet Lord, I see
Saints Heaven-lost Happiness restor'd by thee.

Shall Heaven and Earth's bright Glory all up lie,
Like Sun Beams bundled in the sun in thee?
Dost thou sit Rose at Table Head, where I
Do sit, and Carv'st no morsell sweet for mee?
So much before, so little now! Sprindge, Lord,
Thy Rosie Leaves, and me their Glee afford.

Shall not thy Rose my Garden fresh, perfume?
Shall not thy Beauty my dull Heart assaile?
Shall not thy golden gleams run through this gloom?
Shall my black Velvet Mask thy fair Face Vaile?
Pass o're my Faults: shine forth, bright sun; arise!
Enthrone thy Rosy-selfe within mine Eyes.

REVIEW QUESTIONS FOR MARY ROWLANDSON 

1) What different ways does she/could she interpret her ordeal?

a) Calamity just happens.  Why would this be an unsatisfactory explanation? 

b) "Hell-hound" heathens responsible.  Why is this explanation not entirely satisfactory?           

c) Punishment for sin:  has she sinned; what evidence does she offer?
d) Affliction as God's mercy: since you need to surrender yourself to God's will, yet cannot determine His will (God is unknowable), what psychological/ theological sense does it make to feel subjugated to the force/control of the Indians?

2) Do you sense that her personal feelings and Puritan rhetoric are competing to control her text?

a) Are there details about the Indians in excess of the religious message?
b) Would would happen if she explicitly acknowledged the inadequacy of Puritan stereotypes about the Indians? how do you account for what I called superfluous ethnographic or novelistic detail?     

c) Is she reintegrated into her community at the end? What do you make of her brooding about the Indians getting across the river?  What do you make of her insomnia and image of God's ever-wakeful eyes?

--can she stop thinking about God?

--has she seen the way God sees, as it were?

--is she prideful?

--does she simply keep awake out of fear of another late night attack?