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 (56 page)

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page 327
course were never surprised at Satan's ingenuity and his persistence. They believed, however, that Satan could not exert power over them so long as they resisted temptation; the corruption of men stripped them of defenses against the Devil's authority. The Devil, in fact, needed their consent in order to gain power over them. Cotton Mather knew this but his obsession with demonic power was so great that he often spokeand actedas if the Devil's authority was uncurbed, that in fact the Devil might obtain authority over good men even without their consent. This suspicion bordered on irrationality even in the seventeenth century. It did not go unnoticed. With Mather in mind, Robert Calef charged in his indictment of Salem witchcraft that the ministers who supported the prosecutions made Satan into an "Independent Being."
20
The ministers reacted with horror to this charge and none professed more distress than Cotton Mather. Strictly speaking, Mather was innocent of the charge which suggested in a way that he was guilty of Manicheanism. Consciously, of course, Mather despised the Manichees; he was unaware that he sometimes espoused a "practical Manicheanism" by his tendency to attribute initiative and energy to the dark powers of the universe while he often pictured the good in the guise of a passive victim. He did not do so as a result of intellection but from feeling and temperament. He felt Satan pushing against himself, and within himself, and within the world around him. His eschatology provided the perfect vehicle for the expression of this feelingand at the same time prevented him from giving way to it in paranoid despair. Mather's eschatological perspective revealed to him the long history of Satan's conspiracy against God and His people. Every major event in history took its place in the design of the Lord who permitted not only the Devil's plots but also the rise of empires, the falls of Kings, the wars against the Church of Christ, the Protestant Reformation, and the long struggle with the Antichrist, whose time was near its end.
21
One way of dealing with conspirators, whether men or devils, is physically to smash them. Christian eschatology, especially in the Bible, fortells this end for Satan and his creature, the Antichrist. Mather studied Revelation with satisfaction and even relish, especially its accounts of the destruction of evil. There is in his Puritanismand perhaps in most varieties of Chris-
 
Page 328
tianity which conceive of historical process in terms of conflict between good and evilsome need of violence. The God of the Puritans was the scourge of transgressor, as well as the loving Father who gave His Son for the chosen. His afflictions were familiar to all: He brought death to His enemies and He took off children and old men. The anger of God filled learned scholars and untutored men with terror, an emotion strong in Cotton Mather. His
Diary
shows him dreading and welcoming the sword of fire as it would descend upon a wicked world. These feelings found nourishment and ultimately release in his eschatology. At no time in his vision of the end did he ever describe Christ's Second Coming as occurring in harmony and peace. The Lord might come as a thief in the night, that is, His appearance would surprise a world sunk in sinful sleep, but the shock sinners would receive when they awakened would leave no room for doubt that the world had reached its end. Mather enjoyed this picture he painted so often: Christ would descend upon the earth in smoke and fire with His angels. And the fire would rain clown on degenerate men everywhere, and the heavens would be set on fire to torment the devils there. "This
Fire
will be that
Sword
, the
Fiery Sword.
" Unregenerate men would burn and with them, the works of man on this earth including whole cities and their best parts, libraries and the great achievements of man. The prospect of the burning of books distressed him, he admitted; and the idea of the loss of whole libraries was enough to make a Protestant scholar weep.
22
Whatever reservations Mather had about the destruction of such vanities arose less from sympathy for the human beings involved than from the difficulties in explaining how the saints would survive the Conflagration. Increase Mather held out for a partial burning of the earth which would allow the saints to retire to unscorched parts to await the end. Cotton never felt easy with this solution but offered it as late as 1712. Near the end of his life, with Increase in the grave, he announced his change of mindthe theory of a partial conflagration was "unscriptural" and would never do. The fire would burn everything in "an all-devouring Rage"; there would be much more than an incomplete and leisurely destruction, there would be "universal Desolation.''
23
It is the obvious gratification Mather takes in the grand smash
 
Page 329
of all things that reveals his impulses towards violence so clearly. These impulses grew stronger late in his life when they affected his treatment of the prophetical books of the Bible. They appear in their starkest form in his new understanding of Psalms. As late as 1718, in
Psalterium Americanum
, Mather asserted that the sufferings of the Jews depicted in Psalms referred to the children of Israel. But within a few years, in "Triparadisus," he had shifted to a typological interpretation and now held that the accounts in Psalms were forecasts of what awaited the Lord's "Holy People" at the end of the world. Similarly, he began to read Isaiah not as history but as typology, discovering in the fiery destruction of Judea by the Assyrians and of Jerusalem by the Babylonians "Emblems and shadows" of the burning of the whole world.
24
Although Mather recognized that most men would find such destruction almost inconceivable, he did not shrink before the task of justifying it. The sins of men made it understandable, he explained, and in the human scale, just. In the 1720's when he had fully absorbed the theory of total desolation, he offered his ultimate explanation of divine wrath. The sins of men had grown to insupportable proportions, he said. When real and vital piety had been banished from the face of the earth and "exploded as nothing but Enthusiasm," men should not expect anything but the Conflagration.
25
The history of Europe reinforced this harsh judgment, Mather believed: the Protestant interest there had shrunk to half its sixteenth-century size; and in Great Britain a succession of ministries controlled by Tory High-Fliers persecuted dissenters. Corruption thrived with placemen and grafters taking large cuts at the expense of the public interest. In America moral practice was not much higher; and men showed themselves to be brutes to one another. In the Caribbean, for example, the slave trade was especially shocking. But evil infected nations professing Christianity everywhere. One of the saddest reports of a benighted world that Mather received, he said, came from the East Indies, where missionaries wrote that even the heathen there expressed shock at the behavior of men professing the religion of Christ.
26
God would punish these men some day; of that Mather had no doubt. They would burn and suffer torment; Cotton Mather welcomed that prospect. But the burning would end sometime,
 
Page 330
and afterwards good men would feel joy and divine happiness. If Mather believed the end of the world brought sinners their just deserts, he felt the horror of the scenes of the conflagration even as he relished them. His greatest satisfactions, however, were not received from the grisly harvest of the unregenerate, but in the rapture he experienced in his dreams of the union with Christ. His piety assumed beautiful as well as ugly forms in his visions of the end, and it was finally in the experience of this divine beauty that he found rest.
27
Cotton Mather always professed a Christian modesty in describing the glories of the world to come. Seeing far into another order was beyond any man, he admitted, but fortunately God had given us strong hints in Scriptures, and anticipations in the experience of pious men might be used. Surely everyone would agree that describing the New Heavens which would come clown after the Conflagration would tax the powers of the most inventive eschatologist. The New Heavens will have a Holy City in them, a New Jerusalem, made of gold and studded with jewels, Mather said in "Triparadisus," his most ambitious attempt at reconstructing the divine vision. God would place this New Jerusalem over the old carnal Israel, stretching it 1,500 miles in every direction. The resurrected saints, their bodies transformed and spiritualized and reunited with their souls would live with Christ in this glorious city. To describe the "Heavenly Things" there defied the powers of "our low, dark, scanty Language" but "the
First Thing
that offers itself unto our contemplation in the
Holy City
, is that UNION with God, into which it is the eternal purpose of His Love, to bring His chosen people."
28
To say that the elect of God will become the "same" with Him would be blasphemy, and Mather hastened to disavow any such suggestion: "they will continue Distinct Beings; they will not putt off their Individuation." Still Mather expected much from a union with Christ and poured his own spirit into the description of its delights in the New Heavens where the raised saints were to be brought so "near to God that He will become '
All in
All' to them." Mather, in these accounts, attempted to feel the fullness of God and to capture the feeling in phrases having God "permeate" and ''Replenish" and ''swallow them up." The perfectionism denied to men by their sin in this world is
 
Page 331
at last attained through this union. All Mather's psychological theory had directed men to strip themselves of their obsession with the self. Now, in the City of God, the purposes of abasement would attain fulfillment: "
Self
will be entirely dethroned, the
Love
of God will govern Every Motion." With the self and all its sinful dispositions "extirpated," a perfection in thought and action would follow. The raised saints would not take a wrong step, nor speak a vain word, nor think anything but right thoughts.
29
Puritans had always recognized the body as offering an impediment to perfection as great as the self. And most eschatology paid at least some attention to the transformation of the flesh in the Heavenly world. Few men have ever been more preoccupied with bodily functions than Cotton Mather, a preoccupation that led him to ponder the connection of physical and mental states. In the New Heavens, he concluded, all the sources of viciousness that lay buried in men's flesh would be destroyed. To be sure, the raised saints would receive bodies which would possess some conformity to the old human figure. But they would get a "wonderful accession of
New Qualities
" too, bodies of "material" but ''highly
Spiritualized
" and able to fly with the ease of angels. Best of all, they would possess immortality, with neither a shred of corruptibility nor deformity. They would be luminous, shining like the stars in the firmament, with power and beauty.
30
In Mather's theory the happiness the saints would enjoy in the New Heavens and the New Earth lay very much in the perfection of soul and flesh. It is true that many of his accounts of the bliss the saints would reach in the millennium suggest an experience similar to the best in this world. He took delight, for example, in reporting that the saints, though swallowed in Christ, would know one another. He liked to conjure up scenes of Luther and Zwingli embracing, and of white-bearded patriarchs enjoying discussions with the martyrs and the prophets. One of his dreams that did not find its way into his published work involved rapturous exchanges between Moses, Abraham, David, and himself. This was the stuff of happiness. Yet in his deepest feeling he saw happiness in still other termsas the achievement of absolute purity. The "very Essence" of the happiness of raised saints, he said in "Problema Theologicum,"
 
Page 332
"will very much consist in this Righteousness." This feeling grew with the years.
31
Supporting these impulses of piety, these feelings of fear and trembling and love and hope was Mather's formal prophetical theory. Like the piety it sustained, this eschatological doctrine drew on many sourcesan understanding of history, the new natural science, Biblical scholarship, Calvinist theology, and an anxious study of European politics. A profund religious devotion underlay all these elements in Mather's consciousness and made their study urgent. His thought of every sort was always in a state of tension with his piety. He was never the detached scholar.
Late in the seventeenth century when Mather came of age, Protestant studies of the prophecies had taken a direction they were to follow for at least another century. This direction had not appeared immediately with the Reformation, for the sixteenth-century reformers had only slowly emancipated themselves from the gloom that suffused Catholic attitudes towards the millennium. Medieval Catholicism had of course accepted the Augustinian synthesis of the prophecies, which held that the predictions of Daniel, Isaiah, and the great patriarchs did not refer to the future at all. In this ancient view the prophets had testified to events that befell the historical Israel and not events that the Church of Christ could anticipate. As for the book of Revelation, to which Augustine had denied any literal meaning, contending that it must be understood as an allegory of the passage of the soul from death to eternal life, the medieval Church had scanted its value as either history of prophecy. Aquinas received most of Augustine's views on Revelation with approval and stripped out any notion of a future millennium.
32
As the sixteenth-century reformers and their successors in the Protestant Church gained perspective on the split from Rome, as they gradually comprehended that it was a momentous event in history, they came to regard the older interpretations with dissatisfaction. It was not just that these views were Catholic and smacked of the Antichrist. Their acceptance deprived the Reformation of its significance and of the possibilities it opened for the Church of Christ. If the break with Rome were to be seen in its proper context, some different version of the Christian past and future would have to be conceived.
BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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