THE AGE OF FAITH THE PURITANS

1. THE AGE OF FAITHTHE PURITANS Advanced Composition & Novel Mrs. Lutes

2. Who Were These Puritans? • The Puritans were part of a large religious movement that began in England during the 1500s and lasted into the first half of the 1600s, when it spread to America. • Puritan is a broad term, referring to any of a number of Protestant sects that sought to “purify” the established Church of England, which they had perceived to be corrupt. They believed that too much power rested with the church hierarchy and that the people should have more involvement in church matters. They wanted to return to the simple forms of worship and church organization as described in the New Testament. Ceremonies should, the Puritans believed, be simplified to stress Bible reading and individual prayer instead of church doctrine. They should not include priests’ fancy vestments, ornate churches, incense, music, or elaborate rituals. • Because they refused to conform to the state church’s beliefs and practices, the Puritans were also called “Nonconformists” or “Dissenters.”

3. Separatists • Since the time of King Henry VIII (who reigned from 1509 to 1547), the English church had been virtually inseparable from the government; the Puritans thus represented a threat to the political stability of the nation. • “I will make them conform,” King James I had said of the Puritans in 1604, “or I will harry them out of the land.” As it turned out, it was in the end the Puritans who harried the royal family out of the land: forty-five years later, they beheaded James’s son Charles I and forced Charles II into exile in France. • Even so, many Puritans suffered persecution. Some of them left England, at first for Holland. But fearing that they would eventually lose their identity as a religious community living as strangers in a foreign land, a group of about a hundred Puritans set sail in 1620 for the New World and established their colony at Plymouth. There they hoped to realize their dream of building a new secular society patterned after God’s word. This group later became known as Separatists, as opposed to the Puritans who would establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony. • The Separatists originally wanted to live in seclusion and so wanted to settle in a forbidding place so that only like-minded people would join them, people willing to sacrifice everything in order to be able to practice their religion as they chose.

4. Non-Separatists • Like the Separatists of Plymouth, Non-Separatist Puritans left Europe for the freedom to practice their religion. However, the Puritan leaders who guided settlers to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629 also believed that they had a chance to establish an entirely new kind of society, based on religious principles, that would prepare the way for the second coming of Christ and the end of the world. • Unlike the separatists, who originally wanted to live in seclusion, the Puritans viewed their journey as a very public experiment in theocracy (the government of a state by divine guidance). • The Puritan settlers envisioned their migration to America as an “errand into the wilderness.” They viewed the wilderness as dangerous and filled with savage peoples, but they believed it was their duty to clear the land and create a paradise, a Garden of Eden or a New Jerusalem. Like the Jews of the Old Testament, they were God’s chosen people, they believed, whose duty was to prevail. • John Winthrop, governor of the colony, outlined the Puritan vision for America: “the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us, as his own people and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness, and truth than formerly we have been acquainted with, we shall find that the God of Israel is among us . . . [and] that men shall say of succeeding plantations [settlements]: the Lord make it like that of New England: for we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.

5. Basic Puritan Beliefs • Human beings exist for the glory of God. • All of human time is a progression toward the fulfillment of God’s design on earth. • The Bible is the sole expression of God’s will and one of the means by which God reveals His purpose to humanity. • They believed that God revealed His purpose for humanity also by Divine Providence—the idea that God’s plan for the universe was by definition good and that He directly intervenes in human affairs. Thus, no matter what happened to an individual or community, it was the duty of a saint to find the good in it. • Puritans also believed that God’s plan for the universe could be discerned in His creation; that is, through the observation of nature, one could come to understand God and His plan. • God’s hand is present in every human event, no matter how insignificant. • God rewards the good and punishes the wicked. • They thought of themselves as soldiers in a war against Satan— the Arch-Enemy—who planned to ruin the kingdom of God on Earth by sowing discord among those who professed to be Christians. • Puritans also tended to engage in a kind of biblical interpretation called typology. Through typology, Puritan theologians and ministers would analyze a “type”– a person, event, or concept from the Old Testament—as a foreshadowing of the New Testament “anti-type,” or the fulfillment of the promise of the type. For example, one could interpret the story of Jonah’s three days in the belly of a whale as a type of Christ’s three days in the grave. Thus, the story of Jonah prefigures Christ’s resurrection. This kind of interpretive strategy was later expanded to include using Old Testament events to forecast or explain current events, as when Puritan ministers interpreted their journeys to America as parallel to—or a type of—the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.

6. Five Tenets Essential to Puritan Belief • Total Depravity—the idea that humankind, as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve, has been completely corrupted by sin. • Unconditional Election—also called Predestination—the idea that from the beginning of time God has decided which humans will be saved and which condemned to damnation. Those who will be saved were called the Elect or the Saints. Nothing the individual did or can do will influence God’s choice. • Limited Atonement—the idea that Christ’s death on the cross atoned only for the Elect, not for all sinners. • Irresistible Grace—the idea that when God—in the person of the Holy Spirit—calls to a member of the Elect, that person cannot resist the grace that is offered. Though the person may continue to sin, he or she will be continually drawn by grace to a complete conversion. • Perseverance of the Saints—the idea that those who are saved are saved forever and cannot be lost. TULIP

7. Unconditional Election Puritans did not know who was saved and who was damned. They did believe that you must have a conversion experience in order to be accepted by God. In this conversion experience God would pour His grace into your heart, and you could feel this grace arriving in an intensely emotional fashion. Your outward behavior of godliness and righteousness would be continuing proof that you were a member of the Elect. People hoping to be among the saved examined their inner lives closely for signs of grace, and they tried to behave in as exemplary a manner as possible. Puritans were always looking for signs, and since they believed that God’s hand was present in every human event, everything could emblemize something. Puritans read their lives the way a literary critic reads a book, examining the significance of each event. Adrienne Rich observes that seventeenth-century Puritan life was perhaps “the most self-conscious ever lived”; that “faith underwent its hourly testing, the domestic mundanities were episodes in the drama; the piecemeal thoughts of a woman stirring a pot, clues to her ‘justification’ in Christ.”

8. Byproducts of Puritan Beliefs • Puritans believed in living a virtuous, self-examined life. • Puritans came to value virtues of industriousness, temperance, sobriety, and simplicity. • They felt that qualities that led to economic success were virtuous. • Reading the Bible was a necessity, as was the ability to understand closely reasoned theological debates. • They put great emphasis on education in order to combat the influence of “ye ould deluder, Satan.” In fact, Harvard was founded in 1636 to train ministers. • Since a covenant or contract existed between God and humanity, this should be used as a model for social organization as well—people should enter freely into agreements concerning their marriages, creation of churches, formation of towns, and establishment of governments.

9. Family • The family was the cornerstone of the society where the closest scrutiny and continuous religious instruction occurred. • The townsfolk carefully monitored activities within the households to insure that the family maintained the harmony that characterized God’s original creation. • A hierarchy existed within a family so that all would know their places, thus avoiding competition and arguments. • The husband was at the head and represented the family unit in all public and church affairs. The husband also was responsible for raising the children in a strict fashion that would suppress their naturally sinful instincts. • The wife deferred to her husband and supervised the private household affairs. • Children were expected to complete chores, attend church, and prepare themselves for a battle with Satan through Biblical study. Therefore, imaginative play was viewed as a distraction and a means for Satan to tempt youth. Displays of emotion were discouraged and disobedience was severely punished. Whereas girls typically fulfilled household responsibilities, boys were allowed to hunt and explore the outdoors. • If any stepped out of their prescribed roles, it was believed that they would be vulnerable to the temptations of Satan.

10. Church • Churches were at the center of Puritan society. Believers settled close together in towns so that they could attend church at least twice a week and gather for prayers and theological discussions in private homes. Living in close proximity also allowed them to scrutinize each other’s behavior and help everyone to lead the moral lives that would please God. • Puritan churches were simple, plain, square buildings. There were no steeples, stained-glass windows, or ornaments of any kind. Worshippers sat on hard, wooden benches facing the minister, who often stood on a raised platform. Pews were assigned by the family’s rank in society. The main feature of worship services was the sermon, which usually lasted about two hours. • Only those who had been saved and were members could take the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. • There were no formal religious holidays, not even Christmas or Easter. The Puritans viewed these holidays as a whitewashing of heathen partying with a Christian hue.

11. Government • They believed that the sinful state of humanity made governments necessary, and the foundation of all governmental laws was the inflexible law of God. There was not even a written code of laws until 1641 because it was assumed that the Bible contained all the laws that were necessary. • All government was in the hands of the saints because they alone could understand and follow God’s will. • Church membership was required of all adult men who wished to vote and hold political office. • Female saints were excluded because they had men to represent their families. • Decisions were made in town meetings which adopted the consensus of the community, which they hoped was close to God’s will. • The colony government was to pass laws to insure that all would walk in the path of righteousness and to punish those who strayed. If the government failed to maintain proper standards, God would , they believed, punish the whole society.

12. Puritan Literature • Puritan literature was created as a means to record forms of revelation and provide spiritual enlightenment, instruction, and self-examination. • The types of literature handed down to us by our Puritan forbears are sermons, history, personal journals, and devotional poetry. • Fiction, including drama, was regarded as trivial and corrupting.

13. Plain Style Puritan literature was written in plain style which was characterized by its clarity, straightforwardness, simplicity, accessibility, and lack of ornamentation. In early America, the plain style aesthetic had broad cultural relevance, shaping the language of prose and poetry, the design of furniture and architecture, painting, and other visual arts. Rejecting ornamental flourishes and superfluous decoration as sinful vanity, plain stylists worked to glorify God in their expressions rather than to show off their own artistry or claim any renown for themselves.

14. America Traces its Roots to Puritanism • Puritanism, to the extent that it focused on self-reliance, hard work, and financial success, proved to be fertile ground for the growth of capitalism. • When later romantic writers and transcendentalist philosophers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, began to advocate pantheism (the idea that equates God with nature and natural forces), they were not far from their Puritan roots, although they did not recognize the link. Although Puritans certainly were not Pantheists, both Puritans and Pantheists have the same tendency to see the universe and all its creatures as symbolic. • Americans have, it seems, always regarded themselves much as their Puritan forbears did, as a people with a special mission ordained by God. The concept of Manifest Destiny, a phrase coined in 1845 by John L. O’Sullivan, for example, was used to justify and ennoble America’s westward expansion. Like the Puritans—who saw themselves not merely as settlers in a new land but as chosen people destined to prepare the way for Christ’s second coming—Americans saw their westward move not as land-grabbing or as a response to an exploding population but as part of God’s larger plan for the universe.

15. PartingThoughts The Puritans were not machines programmed for worship and nothing else. Although they cannot be separated from their religion, neither can they be fully contained by it. They were complex and complete human beings who took great joy in their lives and relationships, while facing hardships difficult to imagine today. At its best, Puritan literature records not merely the moments when the physical and the spiritual worlds cross but rather the moments when they seem to diverge—when love of things of this world threatens to push out love of eternity. “A Christian is sailing through this world unto his heavenly country. We must, therefore, be here as strangers and Pilgrims, that we may plainly declare that we seek a city above.” Anne Bradstreet

16. Source Information All text in this presentation is directly taken from the following sources: Anderson, Robert, et al. Elements of Literature. Fifth Course. Literature of the United States. Austin: Holt, Rinhart and Winston, Inc., 1989. Baym, Nina, et. al., eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Fourth Ed. Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1994. Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Richard Layman. “Puritans (1600-1754).” American Eras. 1997. Discovering Collection. Thomson Gale. Troy High School Library, Fullerton, CA. 21 Nov. 2008 <http://find.galegroup.com/srcx/infomark.doc>. Carson, Thomas, and Mary Bonk. “Puritans.” Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History. 1999. Discovering Collection. Thomson Gale. Troy High School Library, Fullerton, CA. 21 Nov. 2008 <http://find galegroup.com/srcx/infomark.doc>. Meyers, Karen. “Colonialism and the Revolutionary Period (Beginnings to 1800).” Backgrounds to American Literature. Ed. Jerry Phillips, Ph.D. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2006.