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 (55 page)

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page 321
the departed saints enjoyed a limited communication with Christ. Mather's restlessness, his urgent need for effort and action, are nowhere clearer than in his ideas about the soul. In his scheme of things the souls of the dead did not rest: they could "see" and "hear" in a sensible way that resembled the powers of the body. Of course the souls of the dead escaped their bodies and the burdens of the flesh. Still they might reappear as apparitions in this world acting through the medium of the Nishmath-Chajim, that divine set of fine particles which linked the spiritual and the physical in man. Separated from their bodies at death, the souls of the departed entered the Second Paradise, as Mather styled the next to the highest apartment in Heaven, and immediately engaged in the worship of God. This action was divine indeed, the sweetest fruit possible before the Day of Judgment and the resurrection of the bodies of the dead.
2
Although Cotton Mather was comforted by this vision of souls in motion, he sometimes admitted his uneasiness that they might not enjoy union with Christ until the end of the world. On this matter, the peculiar conjunction of his literalness in reading Scripture and his fantastic imagination shaped his thought. Heaven, he always believed, surely was a place having a physical location somewhere above the stars, and surely it was made up of separate stations; but just as surely, Christ passed from apartment to apartment visiting the saints until they joined him in judging the world.
3
And so Cotton Mather dreamed of death, not just his own, but the death of the world when all this would come to pass. In his excited moments he called on the Lord to "Overturn! Overturn! Overturn!"
4
He envisioned the world in flames; he relished the torments of sinners as they finally received their payment for their crimes against God. The satisfaction of these scenes was equalled only by his pleasure in the rewards the saints could claim. They at last would come into their own and shake off their secret sorrows. The Lord would publicly bless them and praise them before the entire universe for their services in His faith. And they would sit with Him and separate the just from the damned.
5
Mather never tired of the speculation about the final convulsions of the earth. Until the last ten years of his life he puzzled over the meaning of the "signs" of the end. For years
 
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every earthquake appeared to him as a portent of the destruction of the earth, every large fire as an anticipation of the last great burning. Sometime around the year 1720, he decided that the signs had all been given and God would give no more, although great events might occur that would provide some notion of how things would be in the millennium.
6
The end itself would take by surprise a world morally asleep. Christ would come as a thief in the night, but the circumstances of His coming would leave no one in doubt as to the meaning of His appearance. For He would come in clouds of smoke and fire, accompanied by legions of angels singing His praises. He would destroy the Antichrist and his cohorts with this fire and then chain the Devil for a thousand years. All this He would accomplish in a gigantic conflagrationso hot and huge that Mather hardly dared guess its extent and its duration. Those saints still living on earth would be caught up to Christ, raised above the fire, and along with the saints long dead would be given bodies completely transformed. Once the burning ended, the City of God in the New Heavens would rule over the saved nations of the New Earth. These nations would then live a thousand years on an earth marvelously refined by the conflagration. They would build their houses, plant vineyards, and reproduce themselves during this glorious period. The raised saints in the New Heavens would reign with Christ over them, would indeed serve them as angels now served men. The saved nations in the New Earth, however, would enjoy a sweet communication with the raised saints not often granted to men in their present state no matter how pure they were. And Christ Himself would occasionally walk among men on the New Earth, openly and visibly so they might enjoy His beauty.
7
At the end of a millennium of this peace, Gog and Magog would rise from Hell, led by the Devil playing his final wicked part. Mather always felt uneasy about the details of this final act in the cosmic scenario, but he could not doubt its denouement. As dreadful as Gog and Magog were, they and the Devil would be speedily consumed by fire from the New Heavens. The last judgment would then ensue with a second resurrection of sinners. Their fates were clear: they would be dispatched to burn eternally while the saints would enjoy communion with Christ in the Third Heaven.
8
 
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Every form of Christianity has conceived of an end to this world. Yet Christianity has always been a religion of obscurities which have baffled the theologians and the unlettered alike. An end to all things and a judgment of men there will be, but how and under what conditions, has always been disputed. The Scriptures themselves have provided the common basis for Christian historyand prophecyand have proven to be embarrassingly tractable to varieties of interpretations.
The Puritanism of the founders of New England reflected the deep concern of the seventeenth century that the end might be near in time. The English Civil War reinforced this preoccupationas did indeed the migration to America. Both were deeply unsettling experiences and turned men to thinking of the final resolution of human affairs. In the New World, however, as settlement took root and Puritans discovered the opportunities as well as the agonies of life in the American wilderness, eschatological interests went into decline, except for a few pure spirits such as John Cotton. Richard Mather, who for twenty years after his arrival continued to believe that history was approaching its close, lost this certainty by the last decade of his life.
9
Because most Puritan divines of the first generation felt little need to work out in detail man's progress on the line of time, eschatology rarely served as the chief ordering device of their thought. The theology of Calvin and the covenant supplied the structure of thought and feeling for this generation, while the theology of the end of things remained interestingly speculative and for most, obscure. Perhaps the same propositions can be offered about the generations of Increase and Cotton Mather; they too clung to the classic certainties of predestination, election, and the efficacy of Christ's sacrifice. At the same time, it is clear that Cotton Mather and his peers inaugurated an era of apocalyptical expectation in America that did not lose its force until after the American Revolution.
All the elements of Cotton Mather's thought were joined in his eschatology and were expressed by it. On one level Mather's eschatology provided no more than a homiletic device. He couldand didthreaten unregenerate men with the final conflagration, telling them that though they might savor the creatures in this life, eventually the book of the election would be opened
 
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and only the names of the saints read aloud. Then the book of the damned would reveal the names of sinners. The wicked might congratulate themselves on their prosperity in this world, only to discover that they had enjoyed a dream. The flames of the final burning warmed these words as well they might: Cotton Mather could do no greater service than saving souls, and if he had to pour oil on the fires of the end, he would do it.
10
On a deeper level Mather's eschatology provided a coherence to all his thinking about man's relationship to God. The formal propositions of Calvinism remained as the fundamental structure of his theology and he never considered repudiating them. Indeed, he reaffirmed his belief in Calvinism throughout his career, often in response to the challenge of Arminians and Arians. The reformed theology was so much a part of his thought, however, that most of the time he announced his views unself-consciously and without indicating that he saw anything unusual in endorsing the five points of Calvin.
11
Over the years, in attempting to deal with the inroads of Arminianism on Calvinism, Mather came to recognize in chiliastic theory another means of supporting the truths of revealed religion. This recognition did not occur as a blinding flash, or even consciously; rather, as his piety and his frustration grew, he gradually came to phrase the old formula in the language of his chiliasm. The final meaning of God's sovereigntyMather saidwould be revealed on the Day of Judgment: the sufferings of the elect would cease and the damned would receive their just deserts. What was new in this was the emphasis which shifted from divine arrangements of human affairs in this world to the final resolution of man's condition in the next.
12
There was no comparable shift in Mather's psychological theory. It had always tacitly, and sometimes explicitly, looked toward the Day of Judgment. Eschatological speculations exalted the triumph of Christ; psychological thought, the abasement of man. Between these two poles Mather sought to devise the means men could use to glorify God. As early as the year 1692, in his
Preparatory Meditations Upon the Day of Judgment
, he juxtaposed the meanness of men in this world with the bliss awaiting the saints at the end. What he insisted upon in prescribing good conduct for men was that they renounce the self; until
 
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that were done they could do nothing towards the glorification of God.
13
Mather's version of the covenant theory made the same point. Unregenerate men deluded themselves by regarding the covenant of grace as a transaction between equals. The Lord, however, took men into His covenant as subordinates whose obligations had been assumed by Christ. The full meaning of the covenant, Mather argued, would be realized only with the Second Coming. Then Christ would claim His chosen, those for whom He had paid the price. In that moment of union with the Savior, man would at last find his soul free from pride and corruption.
14
There is more than a whiff of other-worldliness, or at least alienation from this world in these attitudes. Puritanism always wavered between full-scale immersion in the creaturesin an attempt to make ordinary life conform to the moral lawand a surrender to the ecstasies of the spirit. Mather's development, though by no means steady, was towards the spirit and away from the preoccupations of ordinary life. He never admitted to having a conscious desire to escape completely from the affairs of this world, yet his piety increasingly carried him away. His most concrete denunciations of his society which castigated interest groups and virtually named names are filled with eschatological expectations.
15
These impulses are clear too in his theory of religious experience. In worshipping, he said, men are most effective, most pleasing to God, if in the course of abasing themselves they succeed in getting a taste of the judgment in store for them. Their spirits will close with the Lord if they keep the Day of Judgment before them in all their practice whether in meditation, prayer, or self-examination. "Think, Faithful Soul," Mather pleads, "what thy Account will be When Christ to an Account shall Summon thee."
16
This was the religious experience of the New Piety, a full celebration of the maxims of ''the gospel of the Kingdom." PIETY required the "experience'' of Christ and of the Spirit. Were it attained, men could expect the end of the world almost immediately.
17
The eschatological urgency in this appeal appears in almost all of Mather's invocations of PIETY. The ultimate purpose of PIETY, whether conceived of as religious experience, or doc-
 
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trine, or morality, was best understood within a chiliastic framework. Thus Christian Unionthat contrivance that would have men put aside petty squabbles over polityanticipated the faith that would animate the New Earth and the New Heavens. To be sure, those Christians who put aside minor differences in Church polity in favor of brotherly communion could not expect to enjoy all the bliss of a world refined by the Conflagration. Christian Union could not transform the flesh; united men would still require food and drink; they would suffer from disease and pain; they would continue to use sexual intercourse to reproduce themselves. These requirements of the flesh did not disturb Mather. The important fact of Christian Union after all was the experimental enjoyment of Christ and more immediately, of the Holy Spirit. Such experience forecast the way things would be in the world of the millennium. Menas far as Mather was concernedcould not ask for more on this side of Paradise.
18
Do-good, too, gained moral authority when it was performed with the millennium in mind. When Cotton Mather made the connection between helping one's fellows and bringing on the Kingdom of God, he often hastened to add that nothing men did could hasten the Second Coming. But there were reasons for men to try: among others, the fact that the Lord intended that they should. Mather did not mean to suggest that the Lord recommended fruitless exercises. Attempts at do-good that mattered, that achieved their purpose in other words, could only be done by saints. Do-good extended sanctification, and testified to the existence of grace within the souls of its doers. Most importantly it glorified God.
19
Although Mather's eschatology was supremely useful as a medium for bringing his ideas into a grand order and for giving them intensity as well as form, it was even more expressive of the various hues of his piety. (Putting the matter in these terms can distort our understanding, for Mather's religious feeling found expression in virtually every explication of his ideas). The darker side of Mather's piety is especially striking. His sense of the demonic was probably as strong as that of anyone in the seventeenth century who left a record of his inner life. His Diary records the assaults of the Devil with depressing frequency, and he learned to expect buffetings from evil spirits, particularly after he had performed some good act. Puritans of
BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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