Errand into the Wilderness

Perry Miller

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 1956
• Print ISBN: 9780674261556, 9780674261518
• eBook ISBN: 9780674256378
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The title of this book by Perry Miller, who is world-famous as an interpreter of the American past, comes close to posing the question it has been Mr. Miller's lifelong purpose to answer: What was the underlying aim of the first colonists in coming to America? In what light did they see themselves? As men and women undertaking a mission that was its own cause and justification? Or did they consider themselves errand boys for a higher power which might, as is frequently the habit of authority, change its mind about the importance of their job before they had completed it?

These questions are by no means frivolous. They go to the roots of seventeenth-century thought and of the ever-widening and quickening flow of events since then. Disguised from twentieth-century readers first by the New Testament language and thought of the Puritans and later by the complacent transcendentalist belief in the oversoul, the related problems of purpose and reason-for-being have been central to the American experience from the very beginning. Mr. Miller makes this abundantly clear and real, and in doing so allows the reader to conclude that, whatever else America might have become, it could never have developed into a society that took itself for granted.

The title, Errand into the Wilderness, is taken from the title of a Massachusetts election sermon of 1670. Like so many jeremiads of its time, this sermon appeared to be addressed to the sinful and unregenerate whom God was about to destroy. But the original speaker's underlying concern was with the fateful ambiguity in the word errand. Whose errand?

This crucial uncertainty of the age is the starting point of Mr. Miller's engrossing account of what happened to the European mind when, in spite of itself, it began to become something other than European. For the second generation in America discovered that their heroic parents had, in fact, been sent on a fool's errand, the bitterest kind of all; that the dream of a model society to be built in purity by the elect in the new continent was now a dream that meant nothing more to Europe. The emigrants were on their own. Thus left alone with America, who were they? And what were they to do?

In this book, as in all his work, the author of The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century; The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, and The Transcendentalists, emphasizes the need for understanding the human sources from which the American mainstream has risen. In this integrated series of brilliant and witty essays which he describes as "pieces," Perry Miller invites and stimulates in the reader a new conception of his own inheritance.

CHAPTER III

THE MARROW OF PURITAN DIVINITY

[It was not I who first broached the argument that the founders of New England were adherents of the “federalist” redaction of Calvinist theology. The tenets of this peculiar school, and its position in the development of Protestant thought during the seventeenth century, were set forth, for instance, by George Park Fisher in The History of Christian Doctrine (1896) and by Arthur Cushman McGiffert in Protestant Thought Before Kant (1919). Also, the inherent connection between the idea of the church covenant and that of the cosmic covenant had been at least adumbrated by Champlain Burrage in Early English Dissenters in the Light of Recent Research (1912).

Unfortunately, these theological gentlemen wrote in a manner so pontifical, out of a concern which I may venture to call so purely taxonomic, that their works never penetrated the awareness of historians of American civilization. All I did was to gather up these disquisitions, along with a few scattered intimations, and devote myself to reading the sources. Out of my explorations came, as a first and preliminary survey, this excited report, printed in The Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts for February 1935.

Preliminary and excited the piece was, and so it remains. I have reworked the thesis into less aggressive formulations in The New England Mind, but students tell me that this initial statement is still the more arresting.

The history of the reception of this paper is, on a minor level, an instructive lesson in the vagaries of American scholarship. At first ignored (since not many persons outside the Colonial Society pant for its Publications), it rather suddenly enlisted an almost universal, not to say embarrassing, acceptance, as though everybody had learned about it from George Park Fisher. Then the annoying consequence inevitably followed: friends of the delicate proposition so freely embraced it that they presented it to a world not generally skilled in theological discrimination as a solid block of historical fact. They published the happy tidings, in my name, that the Puritans were not and never had been Calvinists. Consequently, what was intended to be an investigation into the subtleties of human development has been vulgarized into a platitude obstructive both to living appreciation and to further analysis.

There is a pronounced disposition in modern America to resent the suggestion that the colonial leaders (for that matter, also the architects of the American Constitution) were intellectuals. In the vicinity of Boston one can encounter an aversion that amounts to settled hostility against any account implying that the founders of New England were primarily occupied with religious ideas, and even more against the supposition that they gave their days and nights to abstract speculation. In the most learned society of the Puritan capital I have heard antiquarians quote the words of the fishermen of Marblehead, that they came here not to save their souls but to fish, as an exoneration of the whole migration. Great, therefore, was my chagrin, and shameful it remains, when several commentators, having sketchily apprehended my presentation of the covenant theology, rushed to the joyous conclusion that New England had never preached what the world calls “Calvinism.” Innate depravity and original sin, these popularizers proclaimed, need not be taken by modern New Englanders as serious propositions, since these ideas had never been seriously entertained in the first place.

I strove (as on pp. 93–97) to warn against this misconstruction, but I did not warn hard enough. The difficulty is that the modern mind has so little appreciation for such nuances as the federal theology contains that it can think only in terms of black or white. Let me, therefore, try to put the issue as bluntly as possible, the more as I am convinced that in expounding the federal marrow of Puritan theology I am calling attention to a constellation of ideas basic to any comprehension of the American mind.

It was never my intention to deny that in the large sweep of history there is an essential continuity between the New England theology and that of the Reformed, or as they are called, the Calvinistic churches. The New Englanders were correct in claiming that they were not followers of John Calvin, because they honestly believed that they were reading the Bible with their own eyes. Yet in the historical perspective, their way of interpreting the Bible must be called Calvinist. The federal theology was not a distinct or antipathetic system: it was simply an idiom in which these Protestants sought to make a bit more plausible the mysteries of the Protestant creed. That the idiom many times took such mastery over the creed as in effect to pervert it is one of the ironic dramas of the human intellect; but this happenstance must not blind us to the fact that fundamentally the Puritan conception of the predicament of man was that which all the Reformed groups maintained. Were I to rework this piece today — as I dare not — I should more strongly emphasize the underlying connection; though even so, I should retract nothing from the fascinating peculiarity of the federal phraseology.

One note more: the last sentence of the article is a total miscomprehension. Jonathan Edwards was willing (as the founders were not) to call himself a Calvinist, at least as against those he supposed his “Arminian” opponents. But actually, in his substitution of the revolutionary psychology of John Locke for the medieval scheme of the faculties (which John Calvin automatically assumed), and by his replacing of the medieval physics with the new science of Sir Isaac Newton, Edwards was unable — even had he so desired — to retrieve the original positions of John Calvin. What I meant to say, and miserably spoiled in the saying, is only that Edwards brushed aside the (by his day) rusty mechanism of the covenant to forge a fresh statement of the central Protestant definition of man’s plight in a universe which God created.]

I

WE think of the original settlers of New England as “Calvinists.” So indeed they were, if we mean that in general terms they conceived of man and the universe much as did John Calvin. But when we call them Calvinists, we are apt to imply that they were so close in time and temperament to the author of the Institutes that they carried to America his thought and system inviolate, and to suppose that their intellectual life consisted only in reiterating this volume. Yet students of technical theology have long since realized that Calvinism was in the process of modification by the year 1630. There had come to be numerous departures from or developments within the pristine creed, and “Calvinism” in the seventeenth century covered almost as many shades of opinion as does “socialism” in the twentieth. The New England leaders did not stem directly from Calvin;¹ they learned the Calvinist theology only after it had been improved, embellished, and in many respects transformed by a host of hard-thinking expounders and critics. The system had been thoroughly gone over by Dutchmen and Scotsmen, and nothing ever left the hands of those shrewd peoples precisely as it came to them; furthermore, for seventy years or more English theologians had been mulling it over, tinkering and remodeling, rearranging emphases, and, in the course of adapting it to Anglo-Saxon requirements, generally blurring its Gallic clarity and incisiveness.

Much of this adaptation was necessitated because, to a later and more critical generation, there were many conundrums which Calvin, and all the first reformers for that matter, had not answered in sufficient detail. He had left too many loopholes, too many openings for Papist disputants to thrust in embarrassing questions. His object had been to compose a sublime synthesis of theology; he sketched out the main design, the architectural framework, in broad and free strokes. He did not fill in details, he did not pretend to solve the metaphysical riddles inherent in the doctrine. He wrote in the heyday of Protestant faith and crusading zeal, and it is not too much to say that he was so carried along by the ecstasy of belief that an assertion of the true doctrine was for him sufficient in and for itself. There was no need then for elaborate props and buttresses, for cautious logic and finespun argumentation.

Hence the history of Reformed thought in the late sixteenth and early seventeeth centuries reveals the poignant inability of Calvin’s disciples to bear up under the exaction he had laid upon them. He demanded that they contemplate, with steady, unblinking resolution, the absolute, incomprehensible, and transcendent sovereignty of God; he required men to stare fixedly and without relief into the very center of the blazing sun of glory. God is not to be understood but to be adored. This supreme and awful essence can never be delineated in such a way that He seems even momentarily to take on any shape, contour, or feature recognizable in the terms of human discourse, nor may His activities be subjected to the laws of human reason or natural plausibility. He is simply the sum of all perfections, that being who is at one and the same the embodiment of perfect goodness and justice, perfect power and mercy, absolute righteousness and knowledge. Of course, man will never understand how these qualities in unmitigated fullness exist side by side in one being without conflict or inconsistency; though man were to speculate and argue to the end of time, he can never conceivably reconcile plenary forgiveness with implacable righteousness. Calvin said that it is not man’s function to attempt such speculation. Man has only to discover the specific laws, the positive injunctions which God has laid down in His written word, to take God’s statements as recorded, and to accept them through faith. “To desire any other knowledge of predestination than what is unfolded in the word of God, indicates as great folly, as a wish to walk through unpassable roads, or to see in the dark.”² There does not have to be any necessary or discernible reason for these decrees, they do not have to form any comprehensive and consistent system; Calvin may with titanic effort marshal them in the form of a coherent logical pattern, but each individual item rests, in the final analysis, not upon the logic of its place in the system, but upon the specific and arbitrary enactment of God. The object of our faith, as far as His personal character is concerned, is an utter blank to human comprehension; He is a realm of mystery, in whom we are sure that all dilemmas and contradictions are ultimately resolved, though just how, we shall never in this world even remotely fathom.

It is of the essence of this theology that God, the force, the power, the life of the universe, remains to men hidden, unknowable, unpredictable. He is the ultimate secret, the awful mystery. God’s nature “is capable properly of no definition,” so that all that one can say is that “God is an incomprehensible, first, and abs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• I Errand into the Wilderness
• II Thomas Hooker and the Democracy of Connecticut
• III The Marrow of Puritan Divinity
• IV Religion and Society in the Early Literature of Virginia
• V The Puritan State and Puritan Society
• VI Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening
• VII The Rhetoric of Sensation
• VIII From Edwards to Emerson
• IX Nature and the National Ego
• X The End of the World
• Index