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 (52 page)

 
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worse, absurd. And, of course, as Mather pointed out by the standards of a faculty as limited as reason, it was. Neither reason nor science could properly "exhibit" this mystery, he said in the Biblia. All the descriptive terms the mind devised "persons," "essence,'' "procession," failed before its magnificence and power. Yet the Trinity deserved faithful respect nonetheless as one of the articles of revealed religion.
68
While Mather declared his respect for natural reason, in his praise of the glory of the Trinity he resorted unself-consciously, and perhaps insensibly, to the old Ramist logic. At the end of the chapter "Of Man" in
The Christian Philosopher
, a book celebrating the compatibility of the new science and the New Piety, Mather declared that the very construction of the universe was in some mysterious way analogous to the Trinity. "All
intelligent compound Beings
have their whole Entertainment in these three Principles, the DESIRE, the OBJECT, and the SENSATION arising from the
Congruity
between them . . . ," and this analogy, he inferred, permeated the entire spiritual and material world. So universal a pattern could have its source only in the archetype of the infinite God. Were men able to penetrate to its "Source," they would find the Holy Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Of course, they lacked this ability, but this did not prevent Mather from telling them what they would find if they had it. In the Godhead there existed a powerful "
Desire
, an infinitely active, ardent, powerful
Thought
, proposing of
Satisfaction
"; this representation was God the Father. Since only God could satisfy Himself, and fulfill the desire of happiness, He contemplated Himself, and the glorious ''
Image
of His person"; the OBJECT, then, of this reflection was God the Son. The joy, the love, the "
Acquiescence
of God Himself within himself, yields the SENSATION, the Holy Spirit." The relationships which exist within the Trinity, Mather explained, appear "analogically" in nature; they do not inevitably, or necessarily, assume the "relations" that we observe. But in the Godhead they are "glorious Relatives."
69
Mather did not admit that he was using the language and conceptions of Peter Ramus, the great logician in the founders' eyes. Every intellectual and every divine in New England knew these terms from their days at Harvard. They knew that although most things could be related in several ways, "Relatives"
 
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described the only possible relationship that some things could have. They weren a sense mutual causes of one another; if one ceased to exist so did the others. The Trinity fitted this notion perfectly, Mather believed: "it is impossible that the SON should be without the FATHER, or the FATHER without the SON, or both without the HOLY SPIRIT." This far and no farther could the mind carry man and "Thus from what occurs throughout the whole Creation, Reason forms an imperfect Idea of this incomprehensible Mystery."
70
More than the imperfections of reason had led Mather to write these words. He knew that he had gone too far in hoping that reason and science could be used to make religious claims so compelling that enlightened and skeptical men of the new age would return to the true faith. And though he never repudiated reason, he recognized the heresies it had inspired.
Yet while Mather reduced his advocacy of reason he increased his support of the uses of experience. His disenchantment with reason was far advanced in 1715, the year he sent off the manuscript that was to be published as
The Christian Philosopher
five years later. Mather's praise of the natural theology in this book has often been notedand his reservations about reason such as appear in his discussion of the Trinityignored. He would continue to seek scientific knowledge throughout the remainder of his life confident that it would redound to the glory of God.
Yet he no more expected the experimental philosophy to lead men into an understanding of the mysteries of religion than he did reason. But still his hopes grew that experience might reduce men's pride, stimulate them to reform society, and lead them into the Christian Union that would greet the return of Christ. Experience could do all thisbut not the experience of the creatures, nor the experience grasped by reason, rather the direct and immediate experience of the Holy Spirit.
71
Cotton Mather's private worship was always more "spiritual" than his public utterances revealed. The emphasis on the Holy Spirit in his preaching and writing only gradually caught up with these inner encounters. In one of his early expressions of reliance on the Spirita sermon preached in 1709he told his listeners that conversion brought men "Experimentally to
feel
the
Main Truths
which the Christian Religion is composed of." But the Holy Spirit might do even more for such men if they
 
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exercised their grace. The Holy Spirit indeed would "Irradiate" and "Satisfy" them, "not so much in a way of
Reasoning
''Mather had already recognized the limits of rational satisfactionsbut "in a more
Immediate way
," the ''way of the Intuition."
72
The way of intuition would persuade them of the truths of Christianity.
These promises would have left the natural theologians in England flabbergasted. They might have asked how anyone could recommend intuition as an instrument of truth, when a more reliable source lay at hand in the wonderful works of God. And did not Cotton Mather praise those works and their study? He did and would continue to do so, but his religious sensibilities were both finer and less restrained than theirs. His religion, which in these years he began to refer to as American Pietism, looked to both science and the Spirit.
73
Eventually American Pietism would learn to ignore science, and then to repudiate it. But not in Mather's lifetime. Still, Mather, without intending to, forecast this development as he turned from the experience of nature to the experience of the Holy Spirit.
 
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17
The Experimental Religion
Cotton Mather's first statements about the New Piety owed little to European Pietism. The term "piety" had appeared in Christian writings for centuries with both more general and more specific meanings than he gave it. Mather arrived at his peculiar emphasis after brooding for years on the nature of religious experience. New England's Church polity, by requiring that members be tested for saving faith, forced him to think long on this subject and he had complied willingly at first and then with a growing desperation as men declined to join the churches. By the year 1710, he had learned of the European Pietists and began writing them of his efforts to revive religion. His most important correspondent was Dr. August Hermann Francke, a minister whose philanthropic impulses led him to found an orphanage that became famous in Europe, as well as schools and colleges at the Frederician University at Glaucha, near Halle, in Germany.
1
From Francke and others on the Continent and in England, Mather learned much about the organization of society along Pietistic lines, yet his ideas remained essentially, as he once said, "American Pietism." Shortly after he began talking of "PIETY" and the ''Maxims of the Everlasting Gospel," he said
 
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that he had been preaching this type of religion for over thirty years, that is, from the time he first appeared in the pulpit. Mather was both right and wrong on this score: from his beginnings he was an emotional preacher who delivered an affective message. His version of Romans 12.11 was not Paul's "be fervent in spirit," but rather "be boiling hot in it."
2
Pietism was not something he picked up to repair the sagging authority of the ministry in New England. It expressed the intensity of his own spirit, and the spirits of his followers, among them Cooper, Prince, Foxcroft, and Gee. Yet, it was also a strategy, and a well conceived one, to produce the reformation which virtually every minister in New England had cried out for over the past two generations. To its advocates piety connoted "vital'' religion, the faith in the Holy Spirit and a loving appreciation of the sacrifice of Christ. Experimental religion, or as Cotton Mather sometimes called the New Piety, evangelical religion, put men to examining their own immediate experience. What the believer discovered of his feelings, it implied, was far more important than a detached application of the promises of the covenant to one's own condition. One must be affected, and must experience the energy of Christ, and must concentrate one's entire being towards the advancement of His glory. Mather did not propose that experience lead the soul to riots of mystical raptures; piety carried restraints and experience of it stopped far short of emotional anarchy.
3
Yet Mather's conception of religious experience was different from the founders'it implied that when the ways of apprehending the truth provided by logic, science, and reason did not satisfy men, they must consult their own experience. The application of Scripture to the believer's own conditionhow he felt about it, how he experienced itwould persuade him of its truth. Similarly the believer's worship itself, besides glorfying God, would confirm for him the truth of Christianity. The first generation had, of course, recommended introspection to men, but only as a technique of discovering their inner conditions. The truths of Christianity were to be taken on faith; they could not be doubted by good men. But by Cotton Mather's day, men who were good by most standards were doubting Christianity and asking questions about the authority of Scripture. It was to answer these men and to ease their doubts that the New Piety was
 
Page 307
devised, for it provided a completely subjective test of religious truth.
4
If the New Piety provided a different basis of religious authority, there was a further departure from ancient practice in the way it was recommended. For it was preached in terms comprehensible to the weakest intelligencea circumstance far removed from the rigorous divinity of the first generation. Mather had begun issuing his Pietistic productions in the defense of the United Brethren and soon expanded them in the advocacy of Christian Union. Piety enjoined the "Catholic Spirit,"
5
he said in these sermons; it rendered the old sectarianism irrelevant; it dampened the differences which have divided Protestants since the first Reformation. He delivered these opinions in the years immediately following the Glorious Revolution. In these years he also began simplifying the creed, insisting that the heart of Christianity could be expressed in a few eternal maxims. Most of these Pietistic sermons were intended for men of the meanest capacitya favorite audience was one of the Boston Societies of pious young menand doubtless some of the blurring of theological distinctions was undertaken for their understandings. Most of the simplicity inhered in Pietitism itself, however, and in its name Mather found it possible to offer general reassurance to a culture increasingly anxious and fragmented. In the "
Midnight of Confusion,
" as Mather characterized the early eighteenth century, men should learn that piety can give their souls peace.
6
He did not often discuss the doctrine of assurance in Pietistic terms; piety implied that such theological niceties were too fine-spun for ordinary men. All such men required was the happy news that piety could rid them of their uneasiness about their fates and give them comfort much longer than "the short Blaze of
Thorns Crackling under a Pot,
" as he termed the duration of much conventional assurance.
7
In recommending experimental religion, Mather faced a cruelly familiar dilemma: how to persuade men who loved their own righteousness to seek an intense private experience whichin theorythey were incapable of attaining by their own efforts. Moreover they must be convinced that not only their own salvation depended upon vital religion but the progress of history as well. For the New Piety was one of the engines of the chiliad. Of course men could not bring Christ back by themselves; He
 
Page 308
would come at a time of His own choosing. Yet according to the divine plan men must give a sign in history that they were ready. They had to go down the line of timeas eschatologists called the duration of historydoing their best. To convince a society that had come sadly to the knowledge that much on earth was beyond its control presented discouragements for anyone. So many of the old premises had fallenthe State no longer could persecute; the charter of the government rested on the good will of an English sovereign; and the idea of a national covenant seemed increasingly difficult to defend. In the face of recent history, could anyone maintain that religion was anything more than a private affair? Mather could and didthe shock of events simply fueled his burning chiliasm, With the Second Coming, he knew, the concerns of governments and public policy would fade away, and with them the antiquated distinctions that haunted churches and states. The experimental religion, then, assumed cosmic importance, and only one isolated from history could consign it to private concerns alone.
8
Every minister knew that men expected more from religion than a performance in an historical drama. Cotton Mather, the most sensitive of pastors, recommended piety on grounds ordinary men valued. To those who heeded piety's injunctions, it would bring marvelous benefits, which he described in sermons preached to all manner of audiences. To the young it would bring moral lives; to the old, comfort in their age. The happy could expect greater delights; the grieving, a full peace. To merchants and traders, he suggested that the experience of the vital religion would produce honesty and fair bargains in business. Families, too, would find life transformed, with husbands and wives dealing lovingly with one another, servants performing their tasks without complaint, and children showing obedience to their parents and respect to one another.
9
These claims agreed with all the traditional expectations about the power of grace to change men. In another, technical, language Cotton Mather and his father before him had declared that sanctification followed justification. Richard Mather had preached of men growing in grace, becoming better as they exercised the new power a merciful God had given them. Increase Mather had often repeated these hopes. Out of fear, and surely out of eagerness to do good, Cotton Mather could not leave the

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