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Religious Autobiography![]()
III
The Origins of Religious Autobiography
VERY FEW religious autobiographies were written in Britain before 1600; yet during the next century the number of such works runs well over a hundred. In this and the three following chapters I attempt to describe and to account for the rapid efflorescence of this literary form in seventeenth-century Britain. The task is simplified by dividing autobiographies according to the denominations or sects to which their authors adhered, for striking differences between each group, in both quantity and type, soon become evident. Works by Catholics, Anglicans, and even Presbyterians are comparatively scarce; works produced by members of the dissident sects1 are correspondingly plentiful, with the Quakers easily the most prolific group. This lopsided distribution of autobiographers across the range of doctrinal belief makes the critic's task of analysis easier than it might otherwise be. Autobiographers from the more conservative denominations usually worked independently of each other, and produced well-differentiated autobiographies; autobiographers from the sects, on the other hand, tended to conform, sometimes slavishly, to the traditions and conventions of their particular group. These conventions might derive either from the specific doctrines of the group, such as the emphasis on childhood wickedness among Calvinists, or from the example of a particularly strong personality, such as that of the founder of Quakerism, George Fox. But before entering in detail into the differences between various schools of religious autobiography, we should first examine some elements of the Judaeo-Christian tradition which provided inspiration for the rise of autobiography; this will be followed by an explanation of the scheme of exposition to be used in the three following chapters.
Scriptural Origins
(a) Old Testament. For our present enquiry the most important book of the Old Testament is Psalms. Its description of a passionately intimate relationship between God and man had an enormous influence, especially among Protestants, on the practice of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 Moreover, Renaissance divines read Psalms autobiographically; the Presbyterian autobiographer Henry Burton, for example, considered the book to be a literal description of David's own life, and cited Psalm lxvi, 16 as proof: 'Come and hearken, all ye that fear God, and I will tell you what he hath done for my soule.'3 John Donne found in Psalms a paradigm for every Christian's life:
The he Psalmes are the Manna of the Church. As Manna tasted to every man like that that he liked best, so doe the Psalmes minister Instruction, and satisfaction, to every man, in every emergency and occasion. David was not onely a cleare Prophet of Christ himselfe, but a Prophet of every particular Christian; He foretels what I, what any shall doe, and suffer, and say.4
The emotionalism and the intimate, dramatic relationship with God which are typical of Psalms were well calculated to appeal to the zealous seekers after the Lord who abounded in Britain after 1600, and it is in the autobiographies of members of the more radical Protestant sects that the psalms are most frequently invoked, and their tone imitated. Bunyan's Grace Abounding is the most famous representative of the numerous spiritual autobiographies in which the relationship of the writer to God is so close as to include even voices from heaven, and providential interventions of Divine power:5 the alternate despair and exaltation of the Psalmist, and the intensity of his conversations with the Lord, create a dramatic confrontation between man and God which spiritual autobiographers from Augustine onward strove to emulate.
After Psalms, the books of Job and the major prophets probably had the most influence on religious autobiography. These books, written in a later and more complex period of Jewish history than the time of the Pentateuch, are much concerned with the plight of the individual who attempts to live justly and holily in a corrupt and confusing society. The springs of justice have been poisoned; yet God does not intervene, or comes tardily, and man must learn to live with evil. Whether he resists by stoicism, like Job, or by denunciation, like Isaiah, he must dissociate himself from the community in order to seek his individual salvation; he thus becomes a potential model for the scripturally-inspired autobiographer. In seventeenth-century Britain many religious autobiographers felt themselves alienated from the workaday society around them, and reacted by adopting the role of men singled out for special attention by the Lord. Some went so far as to proclaim themselves successors to the Old Testament prophets, and to disseminate their private revelations—Arise Evans and Lodowick Muggleton were two of the most famous such pseudoprophets (and autobiographers). Scripture had an inordinately strong influence on half-educated men of this kind, because they read little else; we shall see some of the bizarre results of this single-mindedness in Chapter VI.
(b) New Testament. For the religious autobiographer, St. Paul was the great exemplary figure of the New Testament. To imitate Christ was an undertaking which only the deranged or the mystic could undertake in full literalness; and St. Peter, though nominally Paul's superior, was a shadowy figure who lacked Paul's vividness and force of character. The Reformation brought with it a great revival of interest in Paul. Both Luther and Calvin were strongly attracted to him, and were in many ways similar to him in temperament.6 Paul's influence on Protestant autobiographers may be considered under three heads: his use of autobiographical testimony in the Acts and elsewhere, his conversion (which became the archetype for later narratives of spiritual awakening), and his contribution to Christian doctrine.
Paul, unlike Jesus at his trial, was ready with an articulate and systematic defence of his beliefs. It was a trait which Bunyan remarked on in the preface to Grace Abounding (p. 4): 'It was Paul's accustomed manner (Acts xxii), and that when tried for his life (Acts xxiv), ever to open, before his judges, the manner of his conversion, he would think of that day, and that hour, in the which he first did meet with grace; for he found it support unto him.' Bunyan himself had been imprisoned for several years when he wrote these words, and a remarkable number of seventeenth-century spiritual autobiographers seem to have shared his experience; so that Paul's behaviour in front of his accusers provided a dramatic example to those who had good reason to identify with his predicament. Arise Evans, beginning his autobiography, shows how Paul's example could be invoked: 'But I suppose such an account as St. Paul sometime gave to the people, is expected from me, that is in some measure a Narration of my whole life, & specially of my calling to his work, Acts 22, Acts 27.'7 Acts xxii suggested to later autobiographers both a means of justifying their works and a style of self-presentation.
The substance of Paul's autobiographical statements was even more influential than the circumstances in which they were made. His account of his conversion on the road to Damascus, brought about by a voice from heaven, was an inspiration to all spiritual seekers. The conversion became such a locus classicus among the more extreme and Calvinistically-inclined Protestants that, in their autobiographies, they tried to make their early misdeeds seem as heinous as possible, attempting in this way to approximate Paul's dramatic change from a persecutor to a follower of Christ. The voice which spoke to Paul from Heaven speaks again to St. Augustine, and to the sectarian visionaries of the English Commonwealth. Imitation of Paul becomes slavish in Francis Barnfield's A Name, an After-one; or a Name, a New-One, In the Later-day Glory, which is sub-titled:
Or, An Historical Declaration of the Life of Shem Acher [i.e. Barnfield], Especially as to some more eminent Passages of his Day, relating to his more thorow lawful Call to the Office and Work of the Ministry, for about Twenty Years last past.
Wherein Paul is propounded for an Example, and the Case, so far as it doth run Parallel, is set down before it; tho the Prehiminence is given unto Paul.
A similarly close parallel to Paul's experience is claimed in the Recollections of Sir William Waller, the Parliamentary general.
These attempts to imitate Paul by seventeenth-century autobiographers undoubtedly cramped the development of religious autobiography. Autobiographers commonly distorted the true pattern of their lives by trying to fit every detail into the Pauline archetype, and spiritual autobiography was forced into an unduly rigid convention which was all too easy for men of small literary talent to employ without imagination.
Doctrinally, Paul always claimed to be a strictly orthodox follower of Christ. His message, he proclaimed, was a simple one: 'And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified' (1 Cor. ii, 1-2). Nevertheless, Paul did add an emphasis of his own to Christ's teachings, and it was one which appealed especially to the more militant Protestants, who admired Paul's determined asceticism and his sharp distinction between the carnal and the spiritual man. William Haller notes this elective affinity: 'the pattern to which, under the formula given by Paul in the eighth chapter of Romans, the life of the elect conformed was exemplified by the preachers and set forth in the story of their lives'.8 This passage provided the inspiration for that civil war in the soul which is so endlessly fought and re-fought in the autobiographies of Bunyan and his school: 'for they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace' (Rom. viii, 5-6). In the same chapter, vs. 28-34, we find Paul's famous statement on predestination and justification; we will frequently encounter this doctrine in Chapters V and VI, for it was a perennial cause of self-scrutiny among autobiographers who held Calvinist views.
From Augustine to the Seventeenth Century
(a) Augustine. At a critical point in his conversion, Augustine turned to the apostle with whom he had most in common:
Most eagerly then did I seize that venerable writing of Thy Spirit; and chiefly the Apostle Paul. Whereupon those difficulties vanished away, wherein he once seemed to me to contradict himself, and the text of his discourse not to agree with the testimonies of the Law and the Prophets. And the face of that pure word appeared to me one and the same; and I learned to rejoice with trembling.9
The line of descent from Paul to Augustine is clear enough; but it did not continue uninterrupted down to the British spiritual autobiographers of our period. Instead, they returned to the fountainhead of the Pauline epistles and, with a few exceptions, were remarkably little influenced by the Confessions.10 The reasons for this neglect seem to have been mainly sociological. Conservatives in religion, who would have known Augustine's works, tended to write restrained autobiographies in which Augustinian fervour and self-accusation were carefully avoided. The Baptists and other enthusiastic sects were closer to the spirit of the Confessions; but his works were probably too scholarly and expensive for them, since he is very rarely mentioned in their writings.11 It was on the Continent, rather than in Britain, that his true disciples appeared—notably those oddlyassorted geniuses, St. Teresa and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
(b) Medieval Tradition and Autobiography. The Medieval period must be passed over briefly, in part because it was a time when few important autobiographical works were written, and in part because the majority of our seventeenth-century autobiographers were either hostile to, or ignorant of, medieval culture. Such works as Abelard's Historia Calamitatum or The Book of Margery Kempe might as well not have existed for all the influence they had.12 The main link between medieval religious writings and seventeenth-century autobiography came from sermons and other commentaries on the workings of God's providence in everyday life; in particular, the medieval exemplum survived into the Renaissance in modified form. We may take as an example an anecdote in the autobiography of Samuel Clarke, a nonconformist preacher. He tells how 'a Lusty young Woman' insisted on dancing on Sunday in defiance of his remonstrances; 'but as she was dancing, it pleased the Lord to strike her with a sudden, and grievous Disease, whereof she died within three days'.13 This manifest judgement greatly increased his authority in the village, and he went on to a successful career. When we compare this anecdote to a similar medieval tale, which tells of the punishment meted out to the 'Dancers of Colbek', we find that the moral drawn is a more general one:
þys tale y tolde ʒow to (make) ʒow aferde
Yn cherche to karolle, or yn chercheʒerde,
Namely aʒens þe prestys WYlle:
Leueþ whan he byddeþ ʒow be stylle.14
The former story is presented as proof that God was on Clarke's side at a time of moral crisis for him, whereas the latter is simply a fable that any priest could use in his sermon.
In religious autobiographies published after 1600 we often find the author using his personal sins and struggles as exempla. Richard Coppin, a frequ...
