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 (35 page)

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page 197
issues. When the old man threatened to oppose a secessionist group in the North Church with what seemed too blunt a severity, Cotton found ways of softening his father's actions without directly resisting them. He did not manipulate the aged Increase; he diverted him, but in a spirit of love and with a desire to ease his father's final years. The last ten years of his father's life must have occasionally taxed Cotton's spirit. It is too simple a view to hold that one man ever dominated the other; each man possessed great moral and intellectual strength and respected the other's powers. Yet there is evidence that on several crucial issues the son deferred to the father. For example, although Cotton respected Increase's scholarship on the coming conversion of Israel and publicly defended it, he confessed after his father's death that he had always had serious doubts about its conclusions. Shortly after Increase died, Cotton wrote of a central argument in Increase's interpretation of the fate of Israel, "I find it will never do. Tis unscriptural." But Cotton had not even as much as hinted of his reservations to the public while his father lived; rather he had "Laboured all I could for my Life to acquiesce in the opinion." He had, however, arguednot quarreledwith Increase about the matter. His respect and admiration for his father surely helped suppress his differencesin the last years of Increase's life, a respect that is clear in Cotton's customary references to his aged parent as "Adoni Avi," the patriarch. Most of the time these two Mathers looked at the world as if they had but one pair of eyes between them.
14
For all Increase's direct influence on Cotton's attitudes and ideas, he affected his son most of all by his exampleby what he was, a member of a great family that had attained distinction in the service of the Lord. It was in this way that Cotton felt his father's force, and the power of his grandfathers, Cotton and Mather. They more than anyone else, he thought, had made New England what it still claimed to bea model of godliness. As he once confessed, "I were a very degenerate person, if I should not be touched with an Ambition, to be a Servant of this now famous Countrey, which my two Grand-fathers COTTON and MATHER had so considerable a stroke in the first planting of; and for the preservation whereof my Father, hath been so far Exposed." Giving less than his best in the service of God would be a
 
Page 198
''Reproach" and a "Blemish" on the Mather name. The knowledge of what was required of him increased his anxiety, and if ever a man was anxious it was Cotton Mather.
15
If Mather's piety was greater than mostin part because his familial heritage was unusualits sources were similar to that of other Puritans. Mather lived in a world of ideas where God reigned, and man, diseased with sin, craved His dispensation. Only the Lord could save man, and the Lord made His decisions about man's fate without consulting anyone. Man, helpless and sinful, did not deserve to be consulted. Evoking a world of uncertainty, these ideas engendered an anxiety in him that could be eased only by a conviction that he was somehow acceptable to God.
Cotton Mather never questioned the view of himself and of the world that these conceptions imposed. His description of himself would have satisfied any Puritan, for any Puritan would have recognized himself in it. All his life Cotton Mather accused himself of sin that rendered him indescribably filthy. He was a "vile" sinner, "feeble and worthless," suffering, he once told the Lord, from spiritual "diseases . . . so complicated, that I am not able so much as distinctly to mention them unto thee; much less can I remedy them." He employed these terms in describing himself when he was an adolescent, apparently in the midst of an agonizing crisis of the soul. He survived this crisis and though years later he sometimes appeared complacent, he never lost his sense of sin. As an old man he confessed in a characteristic way his "Humiliation for my . . . Miscarriages" and called himself "as tempted a Man, as any in the World.''
16
Mather's anxiety arose when he found himself unable always to bring his behavior and his state of mind into harmony with his ideas. A true Christian, he knew, was humblenot swelled with pride. A true Christian did not prize this world: he was to live in it and he was to give his best, but at the same time the attention of his heart should be fastened upon God. Mather was pained by his failure to live up to this ideal. In his pride and in his sensuality, he disappointed both the Lord and himself. Falling short of the divine imperative rendered him ugly in the sight of God; truly Cotton Mather was a filthy creature.
17
This conception of himself must have helped induce the massive anxiety he endured for so long. From an early age Cotton
 
Page 199
Mather had learned of his sin; and by the time he reached maturity he did not have to be reminded of it, though he reminded himself often. After a few years of life he seems not to have required the specific accusation of sin to experience the unease; it probably was always therea part of his consciousness or not far from it. The most trivial incident could set his fears in motion. When he had a toothache he asked: "Have I not sinned with my
Teeth?
How? By sinful, graceless excessive
Eating
. And by evil Speeches, for there are
Literae dentales
used in them."
18
This anxiety, perhaps more than anything else, made his psyche what it was. His anxiety was a psychological component of virtuous epicurism: to satisfy it, which meant simply to keep it under sufficient control to prevent a breakdown, he could take no rest. Whatever he did in his outward life, from preaching to rearing his children and performing essential bodily functions, had to be done with his entire being fixed on God. He did not create this frame of mind, of course; it had been described in Puritan divinity for a century. But as much as any Puritan divine of his generation, he felt compelled to honor it in the conduct of his life. The result was that his inner life was marked by tension that few men find tolerable for long.
19
One side of this tension gave Cotton Mather an extraordinary sensitivity to the moods and opinions of others. Indeed he, better than anyone of his generation, sensed the cultural shifts of his time, though he never approached a full comprehension of their roots. A minister of his eminence did not often hear criticism of himself and his religion with his own ears. To gain information about popular attitudes, he had to rely on a few close friends and on his own ability to detect the hidden meanings in the casual comments of his parishioners. His task appeared much less difficult after the
Boston News Letter
began publishing in 1704; but much of importance to a minister interested in the life of religion escaped the public press. Mather's sensibilities quivered constantly, receiving the impulses of religious vitality and decay as they were expressed by people of all ages and ranks. He was especially attuned to adolescents; he recognized their concern over fine clothes; he sensed that making public declarations of their faith was especially painful for them. Youth was a time of "bashfulness," and the jibes by the Ishmaels
 
Page 200
of Boston stung the pious.
20
He discovered too that the very bearing of the godlytheir sober faces, their grave carriagedepressed young people, who tended to equate piety with unhappiness. Mather's characterization of saintly deportment as "Comely gravity," and his assertion that "The
Heart
may be
Pleasant
when, the
Face
is not
Airy,
" may have been clumsy and unsatisfying, but it at least contained a recognition denied to most ministers of the distress felt by many of the young.
21
The young, we know today, register, and sometimes create, many of the impulses for change in society. In Puritan New England if youth did not enjoy so full a creative part, they expressed and felt change. Their desire for fashionable clothes, their scoffing at religion and their sensitivity to scorn, their perception of the variety of attitudes towards Christianity in New England, were expressions of a larger cultural change. Cotton Mather's social senses served him well, and he recognized in these apparently unrelated phenomena the growth of a culture increasingly prone to take its values and direction from sources other than the churches.
The other side of Mather's inner tension gave his introspection its relentless analytical character. The question for the student of his psyche is how much self-knowledge did he attain? The answer seems shrouded in the incessant examinations, usually followed by accusations of himself, in his
Diary
. Much of the
Diary
seems spontaneous, a faithful reflection of the moods and ideas it relays. Yet we know that Mather rewrote large portions of it with the avowed intention of providing instruction for his son Samuel, and for any other of his children who might survive to study it. In his revisions he sometimes may have heightened his private experiences, and yet on the whole these revised passages bear a striking resemblance to the unrevised.
22
There is much of the conventional Puritan in the
Diary
and in his autobiographical comments scattered throughout his other works. The classic Puritan failures, idleness and waste, appear occasionally; but they did not contribute greatly to his unease. He knew that he was rarely idle, that the little money he earned was not squandered; and he indulged in no false contrition on those scores. But he did recognize in himself many of the habits of mind that Christians had always considered evil.
Although Mather's recitation of his sins sometimes takes on a
 
Page 201
ritualistic cast, the substance of his comments indicates that he saw deeply into himself and even perceived many of his true motives and his capacity for sell-deception. He often thanked God for his achievements in the world, for the size of his library, for the large number of his publications; and he recognized the pride he took in these gifts. The sin of pride was almost always on his list of failures: his dissatisfaction with himself is clear in his contemptuous references to his "affectations in Grandeur, and Inclinations to be thought Somebody. . . ." To be thought somebody! He was somebody and knew it and wanted to be even more than he was. He knew this too and condemned himself for his desire. His despair for himself was expressed in his recognition of his envy of the success of others. It was his "Disposition," he said, ''to envy the Fayours of God unto other Men." There is honesty in his reproacheshe was jealous of the possessions and achievements of others; he felt that he had so little, they so much. He even envied the triumphs of his friends in the pulpit. These feelings were unworthy and he despised himself for them. Even as he did, he did not quite transcend them in the recognition of his own pride and pettiness, for while he castigated himself he still branded the pulpit performances he resented as "jejune."
23
There was honesty, and considerable sophistication, in Cotton's awareness of the complexity of his regard for his children. He placed great hopes in his eldest son, Increase, named for his own father. But this unhappily named boy gave no sign of following in the great tradition of the family. He shirked his studies, Jailed as an apprentice in a countinghouse and as a seaman, and, worst of all, showed little evidence of piety. The distress Cotton Mather felt at these deficiencies became despair when "an Harlot big with a Bastard" laid "her Belly" to his "poor Son Cresy." Prayer and exhortation left the boy cold, and Cotton finally steeled himself to renounce him after the boy had taken to running with a gang that rioted and fought over the streets of Boston. Cotton could not hold to this resolve long and took his son backunrepentant and apparently confirmed in his evil ways. In moments of clarity and painful introspection, Cotton confessed that a part of his grief and anger at his son arose from his disappointment of a desire for "Reputation and Satisfaction" that "a Child of more honourable Behaviour might bring unto
 
Page 202
me." Honesty compelled him to see that not even love for a son was disinterested; regard for the self polluted one of the best of the emotions. Cotton attained the same knowledge in the midst of his torment over his son, Samuel, sick with smallpox in 1721. Whyhe askeddid he love his son so deeply? Wasn't there selfishness in this love too? The answer was clear: "I see
my Image
on my Children."
24
Mather recognized his sensuality as well as his pride, but his awareness of his sexual impulses did not relieve the guilt he felt at their indulgence. Indeed the knowledge of the sensual self must have been secured only at the cost of considerable pain. To be sure, long before Cotton Mather's birth Puritan theologians had in their accommodation of nature and grace attained a remarkable frankness in dealing with the claims of the flesh. But their candid discussions of sex did not imply detachment or neutrality toward the subject. They acknowledged the necessity of the physical side of life and its legality but they did not extol the joys of the flesh even when legality was not an issue. They simply said that sexual intercourse was essential to man and lawful in marriage. Their openness in treating sexual issues was most apparent when they detailed the danger of the physical side of life and when they condemned fornication and deviance.
25
Despite Puritans' frank discussions they felt uneasiness, even guilt, over lawful sexual intercourse, in part because they distrusted the body and in part because they recognized the capacity of sex to undermine spirituality. Puritan divines did not quite concede that the body was a part of nature in the way that the other creatures were. They did not ordinarily distrust nature as a source of truth and beauty when it was considered as a part of God's design (which included a higher and better source of truth, beauty, and enjoyment in the Scriptures). Though the body was a part of nature, it took its place in a special category, a category apart, because the body was so often a source of sin. More than the other creatures it was prone to degeneration and extraordinarily susceptible to corruption. The adjectives most commonly applied to it in Puritan discourse were "vile," "filthy," and "unclean.'' Jonathan Mitchell summed up the attitude implicit in these terms with his denunciation of "the old Crazy Rotten house of the body."
26
Despite these attacks and despite the belief that the life of the
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