Godly Letters

The Literature of the American Puritans

Michael J. Colacurcio

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780268159238
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Letteratura e arti nel cristianesimo

In Godly Letters, Michael J. Colacurcio analyzes a treasury of works written by the first generation of seventeenth-century American Puritans. Arguing that insufficient scrutiny has been given this important oeuvre, he calls for a reevaluation of the imaginative and creative qualities of America's early literature of inspired ecclesiological experiment, one that focuses on the quality of the works as well as the demanding theology they express.

Colacurcio gives a detailed, richly contextualized account of the meaning of these "godly letters" in rhetorical, theological, and political terms. From his close readings of the major texts by the first generation of Puritans-including William Bradford, Thomas Hooker, Edward Johnson, John Winthrop, Thomas Shepard, and John Cotton-he expertly illuminates qualities other studies have often overlooked. In his words, close study of the literature yields work "comprehensive, circumspect, determined subtle, energetic, relentlessly intellectual, playful in spite of their cultural prohibitions, in spite of themselves, even, they are in every way remarkable products of a culture that... assigned an extraordinarily high place to the life of words." Magisterial in sweep, Godly Letters is likely to stand as the definitive work on the Puritan literary achievement.

PART ONE

VISION

CHAPTER TWO

ADVANCING THE GOSPEL, DIVIDING THE CHURCH

Design and Vision in Bradford’s Plymouth

I. THE TRIUMPH OF DESIGN

Nothing could seem more telling, at first glance, than the structural division by which William Bradford organizes the materials in the remarkable account of his community of doubly exiled Separatists. “The First Book” sets out, in ten brisk, topical chapters, the events leading up to this momentous New World plantation: a religious awakening that spurs the formation of extralegal churches, the persecution provoked thereby, the impeded flight to toleration in Holland, the critical decision to leave that pluralist domain, the various steps leading up to the perilous ocean voyage, the climactic arrival scene, and (less rhetorically) the first efforts at securing the basis of the group’s transplanted life. Then, in “The Second Book,” beginning in 1620 with the famous “Mayflower Compact,” Bradford offers a set of yearly entries, or “annals,” which record “the heads of principal things . . . as they fell out in order of time, and may seem to be profitable to know” (73).¹ Eventually, of course, every reader must puzzle to infer the law by which Bradford discovers things to be “principal” and “important to know,” and this in both parts of his self-divided history. But his own design suggests that everything leading up to the actual planting of the Plymouth colony, including that “weighty voyage” itself, is merely preparatory. Had the little band of Saints failed to establish a viable outpost of Reformed Christianity, Bradford could scarcely have imagined the vicissitudes of his group were worth the telling; for he hardly strikes us as a man who, like Columbus or John Smith, was tempted to regard adventure itself as the end of travel and indeed of life.²

But Bradford’s masterful history, Of Plymouth Plantation, admits of another sort of structural self-division, not so immediately visible as a feature of explicit authorial design, but even more important to the experience of reading and absolutely crucial to the writer’s silent sense of his own task. I refer, of course, to the fact that Bradford began formally to write his history not in 1608, when his odyssey first began, and not in 1620, at the moment of arrival in New England, but only in 1630, when quite a lot of New World experience had already been logged. What this delay suggests, I think, is that Bradford was even more self-restrained than even his modest habits of style have always suggested; that he waited and waited and watched and watched until events should have proven the larger significance of his unusually ragged life experience so far; until only a settled skeptic like Thomas Morton could doubt that a sequence of Puritan successes in New England had to “mean” something.³ Something important, in which God almost certainly had a hand.

Able criticism has already suggested that the events in the Plymouth history get harder and harder for Bradford to “read” as the New England decades wear on, and this may indeed have as much to do with the lack of adequate retrospect as with the increasing complexity of the events themselves.⁴ But it is just as important to be explicit about the precise emphasis the retrospect of 1630 positively enables, in the annals of the 1620s as well as the more narrative chapters before that. For to understand exactly what sort of a book Bradford actually writes, it is necessary to consider well the moment when he decided he had one to write. What his well-tempered idealism required, it appears, was not just safe arrival, however fortunate, or survival of the starving time, however revealing of the pilgrim character; not just a couple of crucial adjustments in the arrangement of the Plymouth economy, or the timely exposure of spies and their plots; but nothing less than full and explicit assurance that his Separatist sympathies had been premature only in the positive sense of being well ahead of their time and that his singular community was in fact coming to serve as a signal example. Otherwise, one risked corporate egotism on the one side and curious irrelevance on the other: divine redirections of history were precious rare, after all, and of the making of books of natural men’s natural experiences there appeared to be no end.

A prime question involving the “chronology” of Bradford’s account has been mentioned in chapter 1—the problem of what we might call the “pessimism” of the famous arrival scene. Surely the gloom is strategic: the arriving Pilgrims may or may not have fallen “upon their knees” to bless “the God of heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean,” but probably their mood was, at some such moment, indeed “joyful” (61).⁵ It is only some authorial “I” who, looking over their heads, as it were, can see past this moment of joy and face the daunting circumstances that loom like shadows cast by the pale sun of present deliverance. And even this sadder and wiser observer would hardly dare interrupt the joy of his fellows with a solemn preachment on the terrible text of his own discouragement; indeed it seems unlikely that he himself would have had either the perspicacity or the nerve, just then, to face them himself. Speaking in the historical rather than the literal present, he looks back from the safety of 1630 to the danger of 1620: the knowledge of eventual success liberates a realism which the weakness of the flesh was then strong enough only to repress; and the frank evocation of the odds against that little band of true believers serves to lift the fact of their success out of the realm of chance and into the world of faith.

It is a rare moment in the history of religious literature. And Bradford, who everywhere tells us what he must, for the sake of brevity, and must not, for the sake of truth, omit, is never on a surer ground of professed necessity: his brief and stylized account of the “weighty voyage” decides “to omit other things (that I may be brief)” (59); but here he cannot omit. Knowing what he knows about what might be required to achieve the success that has been achieved, he pauses to suffer and to savor the moment this double vision can alone create; and to invite his reader to do the same:

Here I cannot but stay and make a pause, and stand half amazed at this poor people’s present condition; and so I think will the reader, too, when he well considers the same. (61)

The invitation is really a dare, of course—to the reader of Smith’s natural economy, it may be, or of Morton’s natural pleasure—to enter the spirit of this complex, constructed moment; and to read anything but divine purpose into the one-try success of anything so chancy; to name the writer’s representation of the people’s mixture of repressed foresight and sad memory as anything but faith. No wonder if the children were indeed impressed by the “wonderful works” of their fathers’ God; or if some of his valeur rubbed off on them.⁶

But we, who are agreed to read literature and not confess faith, may find the loaded and explosive word in Bradford’s most immemorial passage not any magical invocation of favoring providence or fond posterity but only the simple-appearing temporal marker “now”: “What could now sustain them but the Spirit of God and His Grace?” (62–63; my emphasis). Not the now of his writing, in 1630, obviously, though we may be certain that Bradford hoped he was bearing witness to the enduring reality of that self-same favor; but not an innocent chronotrope for the then of 1620 either, though surely Bradford could recall some sense of trouble in the midst of their arriving joy; and not merely the polite, literary fiction of historical recovery, as writers boldly leave the now of now and live again the now of then. But also the rare figure of the mind truly grasping now what was fairly hidden then: the faltering but not failing faith that could not see its present victory; the triumphant now, refusing to believe that only time had gone between. A remarkable moment. So read, the long list of insuperable difficulties—of being all but abandoned and alone in a strange, unsettled, and even savage land, full of hostile inhabitants, at a season never represented in the propaganda of American Nature—actually gives the moment of arrival an air not of pessimism but of exhilaration. Each impediment becomes in fact a further glory. What but faith could sustain them? And, as they were indeed sustained, their faith had to be real: itself a gift of God, that faith was hardly different from the gracious protection that enabled them to come as far by 1630 as Bradford knows he will shortly be writing to show. Daring to contrast his plight with that of “the Apostle” Paul in his evangelical mission and then with that of Moses in his exodus (61–63), Bradford subtly manages to imply a place for his own enterprise within the sublime context of holy history: if it succeeds, it means a share in God’s eternal plan; if not, it means nothing at all; and, at the moment of writing, it seems to be succeeding beyond belief.

Explicitly denying that anyone “then,” wandering alone in the latter days, when miracles may indeed have ceased, could “go up to the top of Pisgah to view from this wilderness a more goodly country to feed their hopes” (62), Bradford actually succeeds in providing an inverse of such a vision “now.” Possession of that “goodly country” has had the effect of liberating the story it were folly for any good man to tell too soon. And though the first-time reader does not yet know the Pilgrim’s timely success against the frivolous Lyford and Oldham—or the mythic one against the provocative Morton—and though he has only a momentary hint that, by 1630, the Bradford group will indeed have served as “stepping-stones unto others” (25) in the performance, in America, of the last-days business of completing the Reformation, he knows that Bradford at least has escaped the looming death to tell the tale; which fact, given the chances Bradford spares no prose to name, may seem like miracle enough. But something else is true as well: something in the assurance with which Bradford heaps it up assures us that he is “now” quite safe and, in a guarded sense, proud. Had the Pilgrims all disappeared, like the vanished inhabitants of Roanoke, no word at all; and had their mission simply failed, prose like this would never dare.

Glad enough to have set foot on dry land, no arriving Pilgrim could be at all assured that triumph lay ahead, as if the type should know itself as such. And no succeeding saint could dare exult in present good achieved, as if to value pleasure over pain; or else, at the very least, to tempt the God that turned the fates away. But how avoid the godly task to turn and look behind? The vision is not of a promised and predicted land from Pisgah’s desert mount but, Puritan-wise, a backward glance from safety to the wilderness behind. A somber look, no doubt; unsurvivable, perhaps, if truly taken then and there. But full of faith fulfilled and hope restored if taken “now”—when Bradford lets his present work its magic on the past. A post- and anti-Pisgah vision that makes the present glow by shadowing the past; and hides within the past a seed of hope that dare not name itself as such. Achieving something more “amazing” than a Pisgah vision, Bradford turns a lavish list of insuperable difficulties—which have in fact been overcome—into the one sort of luxuriance the Puritan imagination dare indulge: to learn the transport by the pain.

But if the arrival scene does indeed epitomize the strategy of Bradford’s work of retrospect—a first part ending more truly in 1630 than in 1620—it is hardly the only moment when the confidence of achieved success redeems the ragged sense of work in progress. Consider, for example, the instinct prompting Bradford to insert, as part of chapter 8’s account, “Of the Troubles that befell them on the Coast, and at Sea” (52), a despairing letter by Robert Cushman. As we have seen in the case of the letter that Robinson and Brewster sent to Sir Edwin Sandys on behalf of the London adventurers, Bradford is never too proud of his project to allow other persons to speak in their own voices, especially when they truly express the sensus communis. Indeed, when these letters are particularly well written, he may be thought of as half-consciously enhancing the effect of his own verbal production. But such is not the case with Cushman’s (Aug. 17) letter to Edward Southworth (“a member of the Leyden congregation who did not emigrate”):⁷ grumbling rather than professing, this letter lacks both the faith and the passion of the Robinson-Brewster credo; and Bradford is far from suggesting that Cushman’s John Smith–like complaints represent the mood of the group at the moment of migration.

His point is simply that someone—not this time Bradford’s own divided self—has the wit to notice and the courage to say out loud that there is no natural reason to suppose the Pilgrim adventure can possibly succeed. And so, for the moment, Bradford lets Cushman speak for that ordinary human point of view:

Friend, if ever we make a plantation, God works a miracle, especially considering how scant we shall be of victuals, and most of all ununited amongst ourselves and devoid of good tutors and regiment. Violence will break all. Where is the meek and humble spirit of Moses? . . . Is not the sound of Rehoboams’s brags daily here amongst us? Have not the philosophers and all wise men observed that, even in settled commonwealths, violent governors bring either themselves or people or both to ruin? How much more in the raising of commonwealths . . . ? (56–57)

Passing over the question of the identity of the braggarts and conceding that Cushman appears to be denying exactly what the Robinson-Brewster letter so passionately affirmed, and what the farewell letter of Pastor Robinson had so explicitly instructed—“that with your common employments you join common affections truly bent upon the general good” (369)⁸—we “cannot but” pause over Cushman’s jaundiced view of the prospect; and over his unguarded use of the word miracle.

There is some reason to think that, modern enough to include a whole range of relevant documents in his avant-garde history, Bradford may also be honest enough to present evidences that are embarrassing along with those that fairly shine: notice, dear reader, we were not, all of us, always so full of faith and hope. Then, too, there is reason to notice that Cushman’s despair is not ultimate, that his letter comes around to the side of piety after all: “[P]ray you prepare for evil tidings of us every day. But pray for us instantly, it may be the Lord will be entreated one way or another to make for us” (57). Another up and down, perhaps, in a faith not fully proof against the world. But another commentary seems called for as well.

The moment of Cushman’s writing is of course 1620 and, supposing Bradford first saw the letter then, there is no way of knowing how Cushman’s gloomy mood or his practical theology affected him at just that time. No one could foresee that Thomas Morton would soon be preparing to pounce on any possible Puritan pretense of miracle, but surely all the principals had thought long and hard on the reason and the method of God’s ordinary and also his special Providence; and no doubt they would all be in sympathy with John Winthrop’s later, uneasy attempt to deflect the charge that the odds against success are so great that “we must look to be preserved by miracle if we subsist, and so we shall tempt God.”⁹ Evidently Cushman has raised the stakes to the highest level; nor can Bradford include his letter without being drawn into a dangerous logic. Not predictively, of course, as at the moment of Cushman’s original doubt and prayer, but retroactively, reflexively, as the triumphant knowledge of 1630 disciplined the legitimate fear of 1620.

For what might have seemed outrageous in 1620—a daring of God to look with favor on one small and damaged ship in the throes of the angry North Atlantic, and a presumptuous hope that he might not incline his ear to what things were being praised or blamed on that ship of more than fools—appeared in quite another light by 1630. No one dare put himself in the position of requiring or even begging a miracle of God; and if Cushman has placed himself in that most unenviable position, then charity’s self can do no more than forgive, within the swing of human hope and desperation, a moment’s mood of last resort.¹⁰ But judging of potent cause after the fact of remarkable effect presents an altogether different problem; and who can deny the right of piety to confess God when a favorable outcome could in no way have been expected? Indeed, one might consider defining “miracle” in just that way: an event confirming faith that hope itself could not predict. Again, the more credibly pessimistic seem the informed predictions of a seasoned skepticism, the more glorious the happy effect. So that Bradford’s own commentary seems modest indeed. The real-life gloom of the fathers is included so “that their children may see with what difficulties their fathers wrestled . . . and how God brought them along, notwithstanding all their weaknesses and infirmities” (46). Here again, in its simplest form, is the formula that explains the force of Bradford’s retrospect: the weaker then, the stronger set in faithful knowledge now.

So important are the events and attitudes embraced by this formula that they may come to count for more than the glaring but more local instances of unusual divine intervention: the salvation of John Howland, whose apotheosis leaps straight up from the ocean perishing of another, nameless, but equally “lusty” (58, 59) young man; the unlooked-for discovery of a buried cache of corn and seed (65–66);¹¹ the deliverance from a “first encounter” with a band of armed natives (69–70), itself closely followed by the friendly appearance of first Samoset and then Squanto (79–81). Credulous rather than critical, in the manner of a saint, Bradford regards these accidents as more significant than they would be in the life (or in the book) of a less godly settler in the unfamiliar world of New England—of John Smith, for example, who may have made up the story of his own salvation at the hand of King Powhatan’s “dearest daughter” but who did not in any event presume to offer it as a special manifestation of divine favor.¹² And the discovery of this difference, of faith as of mission, marks a recognizable feature of godly letters in the (American) seventeenth century. Yet not, perhaps, the most essential one.

For the confidenc...