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Certain peculiarities in the long moment of American Puritanism must be considered. It was, so to speak, a branch that fell from the trunk of Anglo-European civilization during the storms of religious contention and societal disruption. That is to say, it was a culture already formed around certain ideals and practices, and already preoccupied by matters meaningful in the context of the old civilization. The conflicts that severed them were long-standing, a fact that accounts for the maturity and stability of Puritan institutions. New Englanders did not grope for a new social ethos or order. They knew who they were. American Puritanism did not simply come into being ex nihilo, or as if spontaneously generated by the contact of certain somber English persons with a remarkably frigid shore, though history tends to treat it this way. It was in its general outlines an old presence in English life, long suppressed, briefly dominant, then suppressed again. Under Queen Mary particularly dissenters had fled to Europe, where there were cities, in Germany, France, the Low Countries, Switzerland, Bohemia, and elsewhere, which had already organized themselves in accordance with Reformed social thought and which Reformed English saw as models. Puritanism is an English name for the local expression of a movement that was in fact actively international. The term has been effective in creating the impression that people to whom it was applied were narrow, eccentric, and naïve, though they printed and translated each other’s books, studied and taught in each other’s universities, afforded each other shelter in times of persecution, and fought in each other’s wars, as many English did on behalf of the Dutch Republic. Colonial Puritans traveled to Britain and involved themselves deeply in British affairs, including the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth government.
The English Puritans were so prone to writing and printing that there is no special difficulty in reconstructing their forgotten history, once one is aware of their forgotten literature. One vast work, highly popular in England and America, is sufficient by itself to demonstrate their understanding of themselves and their origins. This is The Actes and Monuments of the Martyrs, by John Foxe, which covers, in truly incredible detail, the history of the church, in his view the true church, from its earliest origins in the beginning of the Christian era to the time in which he wrote. The true and primitive church, for him, is the dissenting tradition.
This might seem a naïve undertaking. But Foxe’s book is in fact heavily documented with early treatises in Greek and Latin and their translations, letters to and from popes, disputations on theological subjects which are long dialogues in Latin and then English. Golding, in translating Calvin, uses the word historiography, which otherwise I might have considered an anachronism in this context. Foxe’s work, which grew to three huge volumes, is by far the most sophisticated historiography I have encountered—ever, I suppose. Obviously it is not without bias. Nothing of the kind could be. I am in no position to authenticate the hundreds of documents the volumes contain, though I have seen nothing—in the letters of Mary Tudor to her half brother Edward VI, for example—that is at odds with what I have seen elsewhere. The theological disputations stand on their own, without tendentious interpretations. There is careful attention to the reigns of kings, including those who figure in Shakespeare’s plays. The chronicle histories draw on Foxe. Where in the world all this material could have come from I have no idea. The books were printed, meticulously, by John Day, an important publisher of dissenting works. They are illustrated with engravings famous for their depictions of martyrdoms, and more appropriately famous for their quality. I have read that Foxe’s adherence to the truth has been questioned in some particulars. Clearly I am the last person in the world to believe in the infallibility of any history. But, granting that there surely are errors in such an enormous work, not to mention questionable assumptions and interpretations, and that it was produced to champion one side in a passionate debate, it can nevertheless tell us a great deal about who the Puritans believed they were, and about the legacy they embraced.
Puritans felt they were in a line of descent of defenders of an original Christianity, by which they meant those who lived before, or rejected what they took to be, historical accretions: the papacy, the sacrifice of the Mass, transubstantiation and communion in one kind, priestly celibacy and celibacy of women religious, auricular confession, purgatory and prayers for the dead, pilgrimages and crusades, and the use of icons among them. From what we can know about earlier suppressed movements in England, in all these things they did anticipate the Reformation. Over years and generations there was a furtive traffic in forbidden texts that is demonstrated by the punishments of those found in possession of them.
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I will argue that Puritanism in Anglo-American tradition took a distinctive character from a particular constellation of events of the fourteenth century—the brief flourishing of a high literature in English, the Black Death, Wycliffe’s career as a professor at Oxford, the translation by him or under his influence of the whole Bible from Latin into English, and the rise of Lollardy. I know I am entering contested territory here. It is usual to say that English Protestants retrojected Protestantism onto this moment opportunistically. Protestantism is an inexact word here. Puritanism would be much better. In any case, ideas have origins, and influences are real and constitute a lineage of true legitimacy and importance. Historical figures are historical because they set in motion change they themselves could not anticipate and might not endorse in every particular. These writers whom it is supposedly wrong to regard as proto-Puritan articulated ideas that could only have shaped Puritanism in the very fact of their appropriation, even if it was granted that there is no more direct relationship among them. I will note here that stigma is again a factor in all this. Lollard is usually said to refer to slurred speech, associating this movement with the lower classes. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its first meaning is “A name of contempt given in the 14th c. to certain heretics, who were either followers of Wyclif or held opinions similar to his.” A great part of the work of bad history is done by these terms of contempt. In light of this scorn, it might seem odd that the Puritans’ claim to this “heretical” movement should be rejected. But, as it happened, the first great period in English literature was somehow associated with it. Geoffrey Chaucer was, like Wycliffe, a friend of John of Gaunt, uncle to King Richard II. William Langland may have been a Lollard himself. John Gower, a friend of Chaucer, was active at the time, writing his odd, didactic poetry. Wycliffe is ranked among these great early writers in English for his prose. So there is enormous prestige attached to it all, however uneasily.
An interesting and remarkable thing about Lollardy or Wycliffism is that the movement had impeccable intellectual origins and, in its early phase, attracted the support of people of rank. This is true at the same time that it was essentially a movement meant to liberate and elevate the impoverished and oppressed by giving them a Bible in their own language as well as sending out poor priests to instruct them in understanding it. Wycliffe was a man of good family, a scholar, philosopher, and preacher of very high standing, known and admired by the powerful figures of the period, enjoying the loyalty of his colleagues. According to the article about him in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the essence of his teaching was “the immediate dependence of the individual Christian upon God, a relation which needs no mediation of any priest, and to which the very sacraments of the Church, however desirable, are not essentially necessary … [He] divorces the idea of the Church from any connexion with its official or formal constitution, and conceives it as consisting exclusively of the righteous.” Radical as all this was at the time, Wycliffe is most remarkable for his having sponsored, at least, the creation of his Bible in English, its first version completed in 1382. To that time, of course, Latin and French were the languages of the upper classes, universities, government, and church. Sigmund Freud called Americans Lollards, intending no compliment. Still, he might have had a point. There was in New England a virt
ual aristocracy of learning and at the same time a commitment to making learning general that structured their institutions—churches, schools, and press. This looks more like Lollardy than like other social orders of its time. By comparison, neither public education nor printing were characteristic of the Anglican South, in the colonial period or after it. The high populism of the Wycliffites, who after 1400 were burned for their efforts, their writings burned as well, put knowledge and therefore autonomy of a kind into the hands of ordinary people, the peasant, the plowman.
In 1348 the Black Death had struck England, diminishing the population of laborers so abruptly and severely that those who remained were able to negotiate for better wages or to travel to find better employment. Their standard of living rose, landowners took harsh steps to reverse these gains, and finally in 1381 a powerful insurrection broke out called the Peasants’ Revolt. Wycliffe and his teachings were blamed for this uprising. That he did inspire it in some degree is not unlikely. He provided a vivid instance of that intuition broadly shared by religions, and at times even by the religious, that human beings are sacred by nature. In this case as in many others, human sanctity is taken to imply basic human equality, or at least a basic right to fairness and respect.
Wycliffe wrote his thoughts on social conditions in language that could be understood by those who suffered under them. And he was furious. He said lords “should know God’s law and study and maintain it, and destroy wrong and maintain poor men in their right to live in rest, peace and charity, and suffer no men [under their authority] to do extortions, beat men, and hold poor men out of right by strength of lordships.” Instead, lords, prelates, and rich men “waste in pride and gluttony … the treasure of poor men, the while they be in much pain and wretchedness in body and soul,” that they “despise [poor men] and sometime beat them when they ask their pay. And thus lords devour poor men’s goods in gluttony and waste and pride, and they perish for [hardship], and hunger and thirst and cold, and their children also; and if their rent be not readily paid … they [are] pursued without mercy, though they be never so poor and needy and overcharged with age, feebleness and loss of [possessions] and with many children.” These lords do not help a poor man to his right “but rather withhold poor men their hire, for which they have spent their flesh and their blood. And so in a manner they eat poor men’s flesh and blood and are man killers … Wherefore God says by the Prophet Isaiah, that such lords are the fellows of thieves and their hands are full of blood.” Wycliffe’s writings were seized and burned for more than two centuries, and yet I can read to you from a stout volume of his English works. His tradition never was successfully suppressed. In 1523, when Martin Luther’s writings had begun to appear in England, Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall wrote to Erasmus that “it is no question of pernicious novelty, it is only that new arms are being added to the great band of Wycliffite heretics.” The similarity is more than coincidence, since Wycliffe’s Latin writings circulated widely in Europe. If Lollardy was indeed a part of the identity and memory the Puritans brought with them to America, the evidence is clearest in the nature of their spirituality—Lollards said, “Lord, our belief is that thine house is man’s soul.”
Another piece of evidence is again a difference between colonial Massachusetts and the colonial South. Even after the Restoration, London seems to have had relatively little interest in New England. The South was another matter. King Charles II commissioned John Locke, of all people, to produce a document called the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, at the time a general name for the South. “Out of his grace and bounty” the king granted these laws so that “we may avoid erecting a numerous democracy.” Presumably this is a comment on the recently ended Commonwealth period or New England, or both. This constitution is meant to erect instead a land-based aristocracy, descending ranks of narrowing privilege, a hereditary nobility owning by inheritance land they cannot divide among heirs or otherwise alienate, so that the ranks and orders will remain as they are forever. These ranks have fanciful names: the palatine; beneath him landgraves, from the German; beneath him caziques, from the Haitian. Baronies figure somehow. Seldom mentioned are the leet-men, but conclusions can be drawn. Item twenty-two specifies that leet-men are subject to their particular lord without appeal: “Nor shall any leet-man or leet-woman have liberty to go off from the land of their particular lord and live anywhere else, without license obtained from their said lord, under hand and seal.” Here is item twenty-three: “All the children of leet-men shall be leet-men, and so to all generations.” This model was not realized, but the fact that the royal government would have been supportive of a colonial neo-feudalism through all the years that passed between Charles II and George III, from 1669 to 1775, can be assumed to have had an effect. In light of this the distinctiveness, indeed the radicalism, of the Massachusetts codes and social order can be seen as highly intentional. Item 110 of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina says, “Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever”—in other words, Christian or not. The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts says, “There shall never be any bond slavery, villienage, or Captivitie amongst us unles it be lawful Captives taken in just warres,” or people who are indentured. These are regrettable exceptions, but the code specifies that “these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of god established in Israell concerning such persons doeth morally require.” Again we see the liberalizing influence of Moses.
With all respect to the great Southerners who contributed so much wisdom and eloquence to independent America, New England had already made a long experiment with—by the standards of the world at the time—liberty and equality. The impositions of the royal government being limited in their case, they were relatively free to honor the old Lollard passion for ordinary people—first of all, as any good Wycliffites would do, by providing for their education. When John Eliot made his translation of the Bible into the Algonquin language, published in 1663, he was attempting to do what Wycliffe did when he put it into English.
I have not addressed every accusation made against the Puritans. Many have no basis in fact, or they fail to take into account English and European standards of the time, which very often make their severities seem mild. And the polemic against the Puritans has simply been done to death, a cultural tic that is mindless yet full of consequence because it leaves us without any sense of the origins of elements of our culture that we should be aware of, so that they can be valued and perpetuated, and so that the impetus behind them can be understood. It is true that the laws passed in the Southern colonial assemblies—when they were allowed to meet—were more rational and humane than those imposed on them from London. Still, they are no model for a free society. We need to give the Puritans their due.
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New England was a long moment, an accident of history. The earliest immigrants meant to land in Virginia. If they had succeeded, no doubt many things would have been different, for them and for us. That some of them did make it through the first winter and the disasters that followed seems again almost accidental. But they did, and they became a small but growing society. They were very strongly shaped by events, past and present, on the other side of the ocean—the Thirty Years’ War and then the English Civil Wars and the Commonwealth and its collapse, which brought a flood of refugees of just the kind to reinforce an identity already formed. This is a singular history. If New England in the nineteenth century did not rise to what we considered—just a few months ago—to be civilized standards in its response to immigration, it is fair to consider the standards of those times and our own vulnerability to the appeal of nativism, for which, as an exercise in honesty, we should shoulder the blame ourselves. In any case, the influx of people with very different histories, together with the pull of the opening continent, brought the Puritan moment to an end.
This does not mean that its influence has ended. There is still some point in s
peaking about this country in terms of its Puritan origins. They originated an understanding of law that made it a system of liberties rather than of prohibitions. They educated one another and themselves fervently and wrote and printed with a passion to be expected of people whose ancestors might once have been accused of heresy for knowing the Ten Commandments. We still educate very broadly, though we seem to be forgetting where this impulse came from, that it was at its source a sharing out of the riches of civilization, prompted by that old belief that the mind was meant to be God’s dwelling place. Education was, and I would say it still is, by far the most generous approach that can be made to the mysteries of mind, self, and soul, all of which know themselves as they create themselves. I approach tautology here, but this seems to be in the nature of the subject.
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Recently I wrote an essay on Jonathan Edwards’s Treatise Concerning Religious Affections—that is, on the inward experience of religion. I was struck by how suspicious he was of these affections, how prone the religious were, in his opinion and no doubt in his own experience as well, to self-deception, arrogance, and hypocrisy. By itself this treatise might read as profound alienation from or disillusionment with his tradition and community. But Edwards provides lengthy footnotes, which cite great Puritan writers of the previous century, most of them English. They and he take the same view of the matter. The discipline of the mind to avoid presumption or any other abuse of the capacity to enjoy the knowledge of God is a great subject among them—before, during, and after their Revolution. So far from expressing alienation, Edwards was invoking classic Puritanism and also carrying the tradition forward. No doubt his cautionary severity was called up by the passions of the Great Awakening, but he had major authorities ready to hand to second him in his warnings, which address tendencies in the human mind toward self-deception, hypocrisy, and the rest. It would be a crude reading of all this to assume that Puritans must have been more inclined to these faults than the generality of Christians. Since they were for them a primary sin, and a cause of sins, they may have managed to be a little less guilty of them than others. In any case, this is an important consequence of their exaltation of the mind and its processes, which had to be used well and scrupulously.
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