Doctrine and Difference

Essays in the Literature of New England

Michael J. Colacurcio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415912389
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317795858
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

The enduring power of many antebellum American texts trace their inspiration to Puritanism. From Melville's preposterous but irresponsible quarrels with God to Hawthorne's instructed yet edgy evocations of earlier New England, to Dickinson's finely turned little blasphemies. Can one imagine that such texts were written anywhere but in the latter days of Puritanism? Doctrine and Difference shows how the spirit and forms of liberalism are a necessary but by no means sufficient explanation for the flowering of literature in this period. The colonialist writers were attempting to have things their own provincial way amidst an air of rejection by the cosmopolitan literary establishment. Capturing the violence of repression, the energy required to meet its moral argument head on, and the disease of embattled survival, this book shows how these works are in many ways the literary remnants of Puritanism.

Chapter 1
Christ’s Reply, Saint’s Assurance

Taylor’s Double Standard

ONCE, LONGER ago than one cares to remember, it seemed quite necessary to insist that Edward Taylor’s most localized allegory—of the Soul’s salvation in latter-day New England—is possessed by a single-minded interest in the question of presumption and despair. Always a problem in a theology which can only ambiguously say “It’s not over till it’s over,” the private uncertainty is advanced to social crisis when the conscientious Congregationalist must go public with the grounds of his assurance, in time, of his election from all eternity. For just how, as a later, “moral” argument would indignantly inquire, could the claim of visible sainthood fail to “end in pride”?¹ Clearly Taylor knows, no less than his own Satan, that the ways of Calvin’s God make no sense till one has mastered this outsetting difficulty. And so, in the dramatic disposition of Gods Determinations Touching His Elect, the teacherly sameness of this crucial argument tends to overshadow whatever empirical differences may have shown up in the region of Taylor’s pastoral care.²

Still, as other scholars have aptly observed, there is some variety in the religious experience, and hence in the implied audience, of this remarkable poem: the would-be saints Taylor identifies as Ranks Two and Three in his homemade ordo salutis are indeed “half-way members,” needing to learn to interpret their sorrows and fears as “blessed motions” (432); Rank One, by contrast, appears to be a Church Member already, having scruples now, about the ease of his conversion and admission, and falling prey to what we might call the Supper Panic. In that preliminary and simpler case, the issue is some sort of reassurance, of the Soul’s right to continue taking the “Children’s Bread” (407) when offered: one’s conversion experience has not been illusory.³ In the eventual and more highly elaborated one, however, the problem is present and future—the confidence to claim the rights of full church membership in the first place. And no one familiar with Taylor’s relation to the formal history of New England religion can regard this as a merely trivial difference.⁴

Yet the general term of anxiety is the same in both cases: have I been, or am I about to be, guilty of “presuming] on Grace” (409)? So the difference comes to matter less than we might expect, which is one reason why it was so easy to miss. But there is another reason as well: when faced with the fact of radically different sorts of religious experience, the poem goes on at energetic lengths to suggest that the one crucial distinction which can fairly be made between the kinds of assurance of salvation that might be enjoyed by the Puritan “Saint” does not matter that much. Not everyone had thought so. And Taylor’s argument could have been otherwise. For surely it would have made recognizable theological sense to emphasize the important distinction between Rank One, on the one hand, and the conflated Ranks Two and Three on the other. Indeed, the failure to insist on this difference must be counted as no less important than the difference itself.

The problem begins when Taylor reduces his original distinction among three separate sorts, or “Ranks”—of those whom God has determined to save—to a simple dichotomy. Initially we were instructed to believe it made fair theological sense to imagine three separate stories or “morphologies” of conversion: some souls would be saved by “Justice,” well (and humorously) characterized in “A Dialogue between Justice and Mercy” as both a “Rampant Lyon” (391) and the sort of father who believes in retributive justice; some would be saved by “Mercy,” characterized in that same poem as intercessor and protective mother; and some would be saved by Justice and Mercy together.⁵ The tripartite scheme seems plausible enough: not “Trinitarian,” by any means, as Taylor’s theosophic “Dialogue” in heaven, like Milton’s, gives no human voice to the bird or tongue or wind of the Spirit; but workable enough for a sequence of dramatic poems. And consistent with the arithmetic of the Covenants: two things taken one or two at a time: three possibilities; each with a minor variation, perhaps, on the logic of the true sight of sin, without despair, and the fair hope of grace, without an inane sense of moral safety.

But then the threefold plan is scrubbed without explanation. Or rather, it is maintained in formality and in name, but ignored as a dramatic opportunity—to give three separate feelings to the process of conversion; or, more practically, to outline three stories that will satisfy the Church’s “Watchmen,” “Porters,” and “Centinalls” who “of all demand/The Word to shew” (330-31). After Rank One has been appropriately and, for the sake of the fiction at least, finally reassured (in a second poem entitled “Christs Reply”), we suddenly find that Ranks Two and Three are being treated together—accused together and then reassured together. The long morphological “middle” of Taylor’s sequence retains a three-part structure, but its outline is not the one we anticipated: not Rank One, Rank Two, and Rank Three; but Rank One, Accused and Assured; Ranks Two and Three Accused; and Ranks Two and Three Assured. Suddenly, it appears, no nice distinction need be made between those saved by Justice alone and those saved by Justice and Mercy together.

The effect is curious and might be worth some exploration in its own right. First of all, certainly, it allows Ranks Two and Three to compare notes: competing to bemoan their hapless condition in a “Threnodiall Dialogue” (426—28), whose comic decorum is easier to appreciate than that of the earlier “Contest” (398) between Justice and Mercy, they clearly establish a commonality of confusion that justifies the need for an intrusion of moral intelligence, from somewhere; they simply cannot work it out for themselves. Then too, arguably, it relieves Taylor of the tricky task of dramatizing what the exact cooperation of Justice and Mercy would look like; for the skeptical reader suspects that wherever they appear together, Justice will be, in human impression, altogether dominant, and Mercy so recessive as to fail of significant impression. Perhaps Taylor changed his plan when he realized the schema worked better than the scenes. Or perhaps, most drastically, he asked himself what it would mean for a New England man to be saved by Justice alone. The thing might appear to happen psychologically, as the out-and-out preparationism of Thomas Hooker seemed to suggest. But not all Puritans had been edified by that model, and perhaps its theory began to look insufficiently Protestant.⁶

But the point here is simply that Taylor appears to have changed his plan without telling us why. And in doing so, he has reduced the varieties of Puritan assurance from three to two. The first is, let us say, an experience of Mercy; but is also, and more memorably, an experience of divine assurance in the positive. The other is an experience of Justice, or of Justice and Mercy together, however one imagines the outcome of Taylor’s theological collapse; but it is better characterized in terms of the kind or quality of its assurance, which is negative, inferential, and anxious. So reduced, the varieties do indeed appear. Taylor’s norm of saving experience is not triple, but it is double; and the difference needs to be noticed.⁷ But so—and perhaps more so—do the implications of the fact that this remaining difference does not take the form of an emphatic either/or. What are we to make of the fact that, in the lengthy discussions between Saint and Second- and Third-Rank Soul, a distinction that might have been presented as all-important is all but effaced? And how do we suppose Taylor regarded the difference between his two stories of saintly assurance?

Rank One, we notice, has had a relatively easy time of it. Though young, he appears already converted. “Always already,” we are tempted to say; as if, grown up in the bosom of the Church, he cannot remember a time when he did not take the timeless decree of election as the constituting fact of his identity. Until the urgent “now,” that is, of “Satan’s Assault against those that first Came up to Mercy’s terms.”The assault begins, vigorously enough, with Satan’s folksy prediction of “Soon ripe, soon rot; Young Saint, Old Divell” (407); and it settles into a technical and searching charge that this putative Saint never experienced the crucifixion of his own sins; that he is “presuming” a salvation for which there was no significant preparation, trying to grasp the salvation of the Gospel without facing first the doom of Law, the good news without the bad. And now, at any rate, he cannot get away without undergoing Satan’s justice-oriented and quasi-conscientious inventory of his “Inward” (409—10), “Outward” (411), and formally religious (412—13) behaviors.⁸

The ultimate effect of all this is happy, of course, and even in a “systematic” sense predictable; for the terms of Rank’s One’s “Groan to Christ for Succor” are as subde as those of the knowing attack: I’m a hellish sinner, to be sure, but Satan is no true Protestant, striving “to mount my sins…/Above thy Merits, Pardons, or Good Will”—accusing not so much me as “thy rich Grace” (413). Part of the plea, then, is for renewed endorsement of the Reformation’s rare theodicy of grace. And from its ready sophistication we easily infer that we are not yet exposed to Puritan anxiety in extremis.

Less predictable, however, is the tone and tenor of Christ’s reply. That the heavenly Christ should speak at all, on earth, in the latter days, might itself seem a significant fact, particularly in a world that still recalled the bizarre selfjustification of Ann Hutchinson.⁹ But we come to accept the convention, naturalize the trope: everybody here is speaking human, indeed vernacular language; Satan knows the soft points of Protestant soteriology as well as Cardinal Bellarmine; and Christ made “Reply” to our “Address” several poems ago, so why not now? There, however, he was still talking rather stiffly, like a schoolman: “I am a Captain to your Will./ You found me gracious, so shall still,/ Whilst that my will is your design” (405). But now, as if moved by Soul’s distress to further condecensions of love and language, his “Reply” takes the tone of husband to wife; or father to child; or else, to admit the worst, of husband turning wife into child with tone:

Peace, Peace, my Hony, do not Cry,
My Little Darling, wipe thine eye,
Oh Cheer, Cheer up, come see.
Is anything too deare, my Dove,
Is anything too good, my love
To get or give for thee?

What follows, in this relatively long speech, tells too much, perhaps, about how and why Satan is permitted to trouble the saints, for their own good, much as a sheepdog is used to keep a flock assembled in good order. But the intimacy of its explanations, assurances, and promises are more than sufficient to bring forth “An Extasy of Joy” (418).

Particularly as it ends with a frank declaration of divine satisfaction in the very person of the sinful, fearful, saintly Soul. “Oh! fight my field,” begins the enthusiastic peroration of this long and personal enactment of divine assurance; fear nothing, when you “my Battels fight”; “Anchor thy heart on mee thy Rock”—because, well, because “I do in thee delight” (418). Only a more clouded sequel can make this resolution fully emphatic, perhaps. And it would be hard to say if the Imaginary Puritan Audience is supposed to keep the unalloyed delight of this most happy outcome clearly in mind; or whether some purpose requires that it actually be forgotten. Taking due note, however, of this first resolution, the ordinary critical reader may well be shocked by the extent and implication of its difference from the alternative later proposed.

Ranks Two and Three are, we recall, a cruder sort, first approached by Satan with a crasser set of spiritual considerations; and no doubt this has some connection with the fact that they are, at the outset, only half-way members. On the other hand, they are led, and quickly enough, to exactly the same point of doctrine and doubt—the fear that the faintest imagining that they may somehow be elect is not only empty and vain but sinful itself in the unpardonable extreme. Satan says it for them: “Hence sprouts Presumption making much too bold/To catch such Shaddows which no hand can hold” (425); and in their “Call…for Mercy,” they learn to say it of themselves: the minute we think to claim Grace ours,“she’l surely smite/Us, for presuming on an others right” (429). About the significance of this range of sameness and difference, the individual appetite for doctrine or the private relish for tone may well decide. In the end, however, Ranks Two and Three must themselves call on some name or aspect of God for help against Satan’s racy but unsettling abuses of salvation theory in the name of honest conscience. And the crucial difference comes not before this fateful moment, but after.

Sounding as much like Rank One as they ever do, Ranks Two and Three end their own distressed “Call” on a fairly high note:

We’ve none to trust; but on thy Grace we ly,
If dy we must, in mercy’s arms wee’l dy.
Then pardon, Lord, and put away our guilt.
So we be thine, deale with us as thou wilt. (430)

Given this powerful mixture of evident good faith with hard-won Protestant sophistication—this working through to the domain of Mercy, after a long and losing bout with Satan in the arena of Justice—we can easily imagine them actually receiving some hopeful, if perhaps less personalized assurance from God. Less, we imagine, might seem cruel: “Of course I prayed/ But did God care?” Or, at very least, not very consistent with the poem’s evident goal of filling the third-generation New England Church with visible saints.¹⁰ But nothing happens. Indeed a most meaningful silence must be read into the blank spaces that separate the end of their call for encouragement and next morphological moment: “pardon, Lord”: Lord? Mercy? Grace? God? Somebody? But only a silence.

The point of the earlier episode seems suddenly clear beyond mistake: in a rare and powerful trope, at least, God has actually spoken, to somebody, unmistakable words of love and assurance; but now, at the very same point, structurally and indeed doctrinally, where Christ had coddled and petted his little “Sweetums” of a Rank One, He tells everybody else just nothing at all. Students of poetic convention may still feel called upon to identify the language in which Christ responded to Rank One as “homely”; and feminists too protest that Taylor’s gendering of the Soul is no favor to the image and status of women. But for the old-time Puritan watcher, the overwhelming point is that this time there is just no “Reply.” Only a pregnant pause. And then the poem’s own pressing rhetorical energy, its determination to take the next step anyway.

When the talk takes up again, the sound is pretty gloomy. In a poem implausibly titled “The Soule Bemoaning Sorrow rowling upon a resolution to seek Advice of Gods people,” that balked and baffled second- or third-rank spiritual personage seems driven back to square one—lamenting first, Dickinson fashion, the “smart misery” of having a soul at all, “to illuminate a Lump of Slime” (430); and then, more conventionally, a body with “sensual Appetite to satisfy” (431). But this doubly composite speaker soon comes back to the main point: the evident need, against all hope, to find some hope, to “force Hope’s Faculty, till Hope I finde” (432). Reduced to a place where the “nice” rules of presumption and despair seem no longer significantly to apply, Ranks Two and Three express a thought which, temporarily at least, stands in painful place of Rank One’s “Extasy of Joy”:

Perhaps these thoughts are blessed motions, though
From whence they are, as yet I do not know.
And if from Christ, Oh! then thrice Happy mee.
If not, 1st not be worser than I bee.

Evidently, you’re damned if you don’t discover sainthood, Soul; and in a case like this you seem damned also if you (presumptuously) do; but as you can be, at last, only so damned, why not go with it?

Not quite “just do it”—just profess Sainthood, take the Supper, and let the chips of Judgment fall where they may. But why not allow the best possible interpretation to the present evidence? Perhaps a heightened sense not only of guilt but of alienation from God is itself a hopeful sign; a step perhaps, in a p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CONTENTS
• AMERICANIST CRITICISM: AN APOLOGETICAL INTRODUCTION
• chapter 1 CHRIST’S REPLY, SAINT’S ASSURANCE: TAYLOR’S DOUBLE STANDARD
• chapter 2 THE EXAMPLE OF EDWARDS: PURITAN IMAGINATION AND THE METAPHYSICS OF SOVEREIGNTY
• chapter 3 “THE CORN AND THE WINE”: EMERSON, THEISM, AND THE PIETY OF GEORGE HERBERT
• chapter 4 PLEASING GOD: THE LUCID STRIFE OF EMERSON’S “ADDRESS”
• chapter 5 FOOTSTEPS OF ANN HUTCHINSON: A PURITAN CONTEXT FOR THE SCARLET LETTER
• chapter 6 “THE WOMAN’S OWN CHOICE”: SEX, METAPHOR, AND THE PURITAN “SOURCES” OF THE SCARLET LETTER
• chapter 7 PURITANS IN SPITE
• NOTES
• INDEX