The
Puritan Legacy
 |
{Concerning
John Smith’s, A True Relation … of Virginia,1608}
Smith’s book was … full
of American promise, defining a heroic and even divine mission for
those who would undertake plantation’s great task. (7) |
|
For
the Puritans … the essential tale was a religious one of travail
and wandering, with the Lord’s guidance, in quest of a high
purpose and a millennial history…. The Puritan imagination …
was central to the nature of American writing… it brought to the
New World not only a Judaic sense of wonder and millenarian
promise—the “American Dream”… —but a vision of the task
and nature of writing itself…. America became a testing place of
language and narrative, a place of search for providential
meanings and hidden revelations, part of a lasting endeavor to
discover the intended nature and purpose of the New World… That
New Nation then turned westward, to contemplate afresh the wide
continent that continued to provide a sense of wonder and the
promise of providential possibility. (9) |
|
Central
to the Puritan’s life was the question of individual election
and damnation, the pursuit by each man of God’s works, the
relation of private destiny to predestined purpose. Besides the
history and the sermon, there was the journal, the recording of
the individual life…. In journals like Bradford’s and
Winthrop’s, the public account, the history, of America begins
… not only congregational concerns but domestic experience. (17) |
|
…
for the Puritan, word and world alike were a shadowing forth of
divine things, coherent systems of transcendent meaning….
Puritan thought anticipated many aspects of Romanticism,
especially that brand of it we call transcendentalism and find
notably American; much of this was born out of the Puritan
heritage. But where
Romanticism celebrated the imagination as a path to spiritual
understandings, the Puritan mind required piety.. Believing that
they would find either salvation or damnation at life’s end, the
Puritans demanded of all the arts they cultivated—pulpit
oratory, psalmody, tombstone carving, epitaph, prose or poetry in
general—that they help define and live a holy life…. So they
cherished moral and spiritual advice, valued the didactic and the
pious, and set limits on other things. (19) |
|
…
one legacy of the Puritan temper was the slow process of American
surrender to the land that was America…. The settlers were late
to acquire what the Indians possessed naturally…. The new
settlers saw New England as a stage on which their roles in a
divine drama were on trial… The Indian sense of mystic reverence
for the land, of the timeless cycles that separated him from
European linear history, had not yet become central to American
culture…. Because of such exclusions,
much later American writing, and some would say the
American imagination itself, revolted against Puritanism….
Critics blamed the Puritan heritage for much that seemed to limit
American writing: its heavily allegorizing disposition, its
failure to open out to experience or the ambiguity of the symbol,
its lack of inclusiveness, its dull response to the world of
nature, its rigorous moralism and its Anglo-Saxonism…. Yet the
Puritans’ cosmic, transcendental and providential vision, their
faith in an escape from a dead Old World to a redemptive New one
… lingers yet in American culture…. Puritanism may have set
certain limits on the American imagination, it was also one of its
essential roots. (31-2) |
(Source: Richard Ruland & Malcolm
Bradbury, From Puritanism to Postmodernism, 1991)
The
Transition from the Puritan world to the world of the Transcendentalists
|
{Concerning
Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin} Edwards was, in short, a
Puritan whose open-minded study of doctrine led him to the
psychology of subjective experience—and so to anticipation of
the transcendental Romanticism of the next century…. Franklin
remained always Puritan in his self-scrutiny and his desire to
edify. But his was the Puritan conscience wholly secularized;
absorbing the Deism of his day, he became a man for whom the
spiritual questions of his forefathers had turned to questions of
ethics, self-management and public service….. Franklin belonged
to an expanding new age of American culture, an age of travel,
newspapers, bookshops, scientific and philosophical societies,
magazines, theaters and universities…. The resulting mixture of
Puritanism and practicality surely makes (Franklin’s) Autobiography
(1791) the most striking book of colonial America—and the first
life, we may say, of modern American man…. It shows how … the
Protestant ethic came to direct the energies of the American
character, and indeed shape it toward revolution and nationality.
(39-45) |
|
One,
Edward’s Personal Narrative (1743), is a tale of
spiritual awakening, a discovery of divine emotion within the
self. The other, Franklin’s self-record, is a tale of moral
entrepreneurship and consequent social awakening… In their
different ways, the stories of both men reveal an essential
American transition from the world of Calvinism orthodoxy to the
world of the Enlightenment. (46) |
(Source:
Richard Ruland & Malcolm Bradbury, From Puritanism to
Postmodernism, 1991)
|
