The Art of Suffering and the Impact of Seventeenth-century Anti-Providential Thought

Ann Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351760737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This title was first published in 2003. 'The art of suffering' is one of many strands of literature on suffering published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This book explores through the art of suffering the way in which the meaning for suffering, which the seventeenth century inherited from the Middle Ages and which centres on the role of suffering as a manifestation of the hand of God in the process of salvation, is refined and enhanced by successive puritan writers only to crumble under the impact of emerging anti-providential thought. It goes on to explore the challenge which the absence of meaning for suffering presents to the Judaeo-Christian concept of an omnipotent and infinitely good God, and the ways in which themes and doctrines already present in the literature on suffering are reshaped and recombined to defend the omnipotence and infinite goodness of God.

Chapter 1
The Godly Life Art of Suffering

The puritan treatises on the godly life have pre-Reformation precedents in vernacular treatises such as Speculum vitae, A myrour to lewde men and wymmen,¹ The doctrinal of sapience, The kalender of shepherdes, Thomas Betson's A ryght profytable treatyse, Andrew Chertsey's The ordynarye of crystyanyte, and The book intytuled the art of good lywyng & good deyng. These treatises were based on the catechetical texts produced to assist parish priests in their pastoral duties, but they were written specifically, if not always exclusively, for lay readers, and the formal elements of the Catholic faith (the Pater Noster, the ten commandments, the Creed, the Christian virtues, the cardinal virtues, the vices, the works of mercy, and so on) provide the framework for extended passages of spiritual and moral guidance.² These 'godly life' treatises could be supplemented by diurnals, or guides to the performance of spiritual and temporal duties on a daily basis, of which perhaps the earliest known example is an early fifteenth-century Latin manuscript found in the Throckmorton muniments at Coughton Court in Warwickshire. Other examples include Jean Quentin's The maner to lyue well, devoutly and salutarily every day for all persons of meane estate, translated from the French in the early sixteenth century and included in This prymer of Salysbury vse in 1531, and A dyurnall: for deuoute soules: to ordre them selfe therafter, printed in 1532.³ Richard Whitford's A werke for housholders (1530) combines the diurnal and the catechetical form. It begins as a diurnal addressed to the head of the household, and then uses the role of the household head as the catechizer of his household to slide into the catechetical form.

In the years following the break with Rome the flow of godly life treatises dwindles for a time, perhaps because of the need to concentrate more heavily on doctrinal issues,⁴ and perhaps too because of the absence of a suitable form. The need to concentrate on doctrinal issues produced the Bishop's Book of 1537 (The institvtion of a Christen man), and the King's Book of 1543 (A necessary doctrine and erudition for any Christen man), both of which employ the catechetical form to clarify the basic tenets of the new religion; but the catechetical form as the vehicle for a treatise on the godly life never seems to have found favour among protestant writers. To fill the void, new editions of The kalender of shepherdes were published at frequent intervals, along with translations of St Martin's sixth-century The rule of an honest lyfe (?1538, 1546 and 1547), St Bernard's twelfth-century A compendius and a moche fruytefull treatyse of well liuynge (c. 1545), and Erasmus's Enchiridion militis Christiani (ten editions between 1533 and 1576). John Colet's A ryght fruitfull monicion (five posthumous editions between 1534 and 1583),⁵ Thomas Becon's The governaunce of vertue (ten editions between 1538 and 1611), and Abraham Fleming's The diamond of deuotion (five editions between 1581 and 1608) must also have helped to fill the void. The absence of solidly protestant godly life treatises was one of the motives which drove Richard Rogers to write his seminal Seven treatises. Rogers is scathing about the two Catholic godly life treatises which he has read: Gaspare Loarte's The exercise of a Christian life, published for the first time in English in 1579, and Robert Parsons' The first booke of the Christian exercise, appertayning to resolution, published in 1582 (and followed within two years by Edmund Bunny's protestant version, A booke of Christian exercise).⁶ Another reason for the relatively late flowering of puritan godly life treatises may well have been the energy-absorbing campaign for the reformation of church government, which was at its height in the 1580s and which collapsed in the 1590s in the face of Archbishop Whitgift's active hostility. Patrick Collinson has suggested that puritanism at this point 'ceased to be a political campaign and underwent a double internalization, in localized communities and especially households, and in individuals'⁷ - hence, perhaps, the timing of Rogers' Seven treatises, which appeared for the first time in 1603.

Like their pre-Reformation counterparts, the puritan godly life treatises offer instructions on how to live a godly life: what attitudes to take, what decisions to make, what mode of behaviour to adopt, in both the spiritual and the temporal spheres. In the context of the doctrine of predestination they also provide the godly man with ways of validating his status as one of God's elect. Because the doctrine of predestination declares that sanctification is through grace alone, and because grace is mediated only to the elect, so godly living as well as self-awareness of the grace of faith can be taken as evidence of election.⁸ Any link in the ordo salutis, the sequence of steps in 'the ordering of the theology of grace' which constitute the spiritual life in the protestant tradition, can be grasped to heal the 'anxiety-filled rift' between objective knowledge and subjective assurance.⁹ At the same time grace is presented as enabling rather than irresistible, godliness becomes a goal to strive for, and the privileges and blessings which belong to the godly in this life and the next are treated as motives for achieving this goal. Thus godliness as evidence of election is replaced by the effort of striving for godliness, and thus the oscillation between anxiety and assurance is reduced still more.

This is not to suggest that all the puritan treatises on the godly life contain a chapter or chapters devoted to the art of suffering. Among those which don't are Lewis Bayly's The practise of piety (2nd edn 1612), the most popular of all the godly life treatises published in the seventeenth century, and Robert Bolton's Some generall directions for a comfortable walking with God (1625). Those which do include Richard Rogers' Seven treatises and a series of subsequent 'spin-offs': Paul Baynes' Briefe directions vnto a godly life (1618), John Downame's A gvide to godlynesse (1622), Henry Scudder's The Christians daily walke in holie securitie and peace (1627), and Thomas Gouge's Christian directions, shewing how to walk with God all the day long (1661). Other godly life treatises which include an art of suffering are Nicolas Byfield's The rvles of a holy life (1619), the same author's The light of faith: and, way of holinesse (1630), Thomas Taylor's Circumspect walking (1631), Edward Reyner's Precepts for Christian practice (first published in 1645) and the 1657 edition of Isaac Ambrose's Media: the middle things.

Richard Rogers' Seven treatises is an archetypal puritan text in its combination of objective doctrine, voluntaristic practice, and reassurance about God's unfailing care for the elect and the ways in which he manifests his care. The first treatise explains who the true believers are, how they become true believers, and how they can identify themselves as such. The second treatise explains the godly life in general, in terms of faith, regeneration, mortification and obedience, listing the duties required under each of the ten commandments. (Among the duties required under the first commandment is that of the right bearing of affliction). 'From these two [treatises], all the other points handled in this booke doe arise': the means, public and private, to sustain the godly life, the daily practice, the lets and impediments to godliness, the privileges and blessings which belong to the godly in this life and in the life to come, and the answers to those who believe that living a godly life is impossible.¹⁰

The core of the text is the fourth treatise on the daily practice, what makes the godly life difficult is our own inability to order and concentrate on the duties we have to perform. We are 'neuer long setled, especially with religious minds, how to bestow the day nor the parts of it, in the actions of our liues, neither how to begin, nor how to end it; and therefore [are] much wearied and distracted with forgetfulnesse and rashnesse...' But 'the Lords seruice' should be like a 'well gouerned familie' where each member is fully occupied with his appointed tasks, or like 'a trade, wherein men goe from one worke to another' without interruption or end.¹¹ So Rogers took the form of the diurnal, which had already been absorbed into the protestant repertoire,¹² and made it as comprehensive as possible by including the two pairs of contrary conditions, company and solitude, and prosperity and adversity.¹³ It is this last section on adversity which constitutes Rogers' art of suffering. To this must be added the third branch of the seventh privilege ('Concerning the afflictions of the godly') in the sixth treatise, because this is the point at which Rogers links, for the first time in the history of the art of suffering, the profits of affliction and the voluntaristic response of the afflicted.¹⁴ Rogers himself makes no attempt to connect these two sections of his treatise, but the connection is made by subsequent writers.

Rogers' Seven treatises is the obvious model for John Downame's A gvide to godlynesse, although Downame divides his text into six books rather than seven. The other treatises in the series are much shorter and simpler, without the doctrinal weight of the earlier texts. Paul Baynes' Briefe directions is a pocket-sized reduction of Rogers' text. Henry Scudder's The Christians daily walke is divided into two parts. The first part ('concerning the outward frame, and forme of your life and conuersation') is loosely based on Rogers' diurnal (it consists of a diurnal followed by additional chapters on company, solitude, prosperity, and adversity), while the second part is a companion text on the spiritual life (the 'inward truth and life of all this'). Thomas Gouge's Christian directions is also based on Rogers' diurnal, with additional chapters on the Sabbath, the Lord's Supper, the duties which belong to family members, and ' resting upon Christ alone for Life and for Salvation'.¹⁵ Nicholas Byfield's The rvles of a holy life, the same author's The light of faith: and, way of holinesse, and Thomas Taylor's Circumspect walking belong to a group of godly life treatises which are based on Titus 2:12 (we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world), and which therefore divide the godly life, in reverse order, into duties towards God, duties towards others, and duties towards ourselves.¹⁶ Byfield incorporates elements of Rogers' diurnal into The rvles of a holy life (company, solitude, and adversity), and a complete diurnal into The light of faith,¹⁷ while it is abundantly clear from the language of Taylor's art of suffering that he had read and absorbed Rogers' text. Only Edward Reyner's Precepts for Christian practice and Isaac Ambrose's Media: the middle things show no obvious evidence of the influence of Rogers' text. With the single exception of Byfield's The rvles of a holy life, however, the baseline for the art of suffering in every treatise is the art of suffering in Richard Rogers' Seven treatises.¹⁸

The form of the art of suffering adopted by Rogers and his successors also exists outside these treatises on the godly life. The two sixteenth-century forerunners are John Frith's Of the preparation to the crosse (attrib., 1534) and Miles Coverdale's translation of Otto Werdmueller's A spyrytuall and moost precyouse pearle (1550). Both Frith and Werdmueller were protestants but neither can be described as puritan. Their treatises are strikingly similar in terms of structure, even though it is almost inconceivable that either writer knew the other's work,¹⁹ and in both texts the basic features of Richard Rogers' art of suffering are already present. As important as these early texts for the history of the art of suffering is the passage on the art of suffering in Joseph Hall's Heaven vpon earth (1606), which is a treatise on the attainment of true peace and tranquillity of mind. It is Hall, the 'Calvinist episcopalian' and moral philosopher,²⁰ who introduced the concept of degrees of patience which informs every subsequent godly life art of suffering text. The list also includes John Downame's Consolations for the afflicted (1613), which is the third of four mammoth treatises on Christian warfare, and the art of suffering in Jeremiah Burroughes' exhortation to godliness, Moses his choice (1641). In the chapters which follow, then, the phrase 'the godly life art of suffering' refers to a particular form of the art of suffering, regardless of whether or not the writer can be described as puritan, and regardless of the 'location' of the text.

The essential characteristic of this form in its early stages, and the foundation for all future developments, is its step-by-step structure. It has two main steps or parts, each of which consists of a series of smaller steps, or individual directions. The directions in the first part teach the reader how to control the negative affections, of anger, anxiety, grief, and fear, which make affliction difficult to bear, in readiness for the second part, which teaches him how to approach his suffering with true Christian patience - or how to enhance the positive affections, of patience...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Godly Life Art of Suffering
• 2 The Content of the Godly Life Art of Suffering
• 3 The Art of Suffering in the Context of the Life of Faith
• 4 The Form of the Art of Suffering in the Second Part of the Seventeenth Century
• 5 The Doctrine of Contentment
• 6 The Art of Contentment: Joseph Hall's The remedy of discontentment (1645), Jeremiah Burroughes' The rare jewel of Christian contentment (1648), Jeremy Taylor's 'Of Contentednesse in all estates and accidents' (1650), Thomas Watson's The art of divine contentment (1653), Simon Patrick's The hearts ease (1659), and Richard Allestree's The art of contentment (1675)
• 7 The Defence of God in Jeremiah Burroughes' The rare jewel of Christian contentment (1648), Thomas Brooks' The silent soul (1659), and William Bates' The great duty of resignation to the divine will in affliction (1684)
• 8 The Response to the Problem of Accusations of Imperfection against God in Richard Allestree's The art of contentment (1675) and James Bardwood's Hearts-ease in heart-trouble (1690)
• 9 The Defence of God's Government of the World in Richard Baxter's Obedient patience (1683) and Nathaniel Spinckes' Of trust in God (1696)
• Epilogue
• Appendix A Richard Baxter's The life of faith: in three parts (1670)
• Appendix Β The Impact of the Art of Writing Sermons on the History of the Art of Suffering
• Appendix C 'Residual' Versions of the Godly Life Art of Suffering
• Bibliography
• Index