Simpson's Puritanism in Old and New England

I have no idea what possessed me to buy this book. It could have merely been the fact that I know practically nothing about puritanism but was recently exposed to it a bit more during a study of Milton’s Paradise Lost; or perhaps it was the appealing cover with contrasting orange background and blue-black classic “Puritan” buckle hat.

Or perhaps yet it was the intriguing front jacket endorsement: “Sane, witty, well-balanced… as fresh and readable as a man can make it.” So says Percy Miller of Harvard. That sentence has so much going on:

  • why “sane”? does this imply that there have been (many?) other such studies that were… insane?
  • I love a “witty” book about 17th century religious movements, who doesn’t?
  • “Well-balanced” leads me to believe that there will at least be some aspects that, perhaps ostentatiously, stray away from said balance.
  • “as fresh and readable a man can make it” suggests that, in the end, the subject is inherently dull and overdone, and the present effort is merely good when seen in the light of its being essentially doomed to dullness and confusion.

The book is based on 6 lectures delivered in 1954.

A couple high-level points:

  • The book is not exactly “Puritanism 101”, it assumes the reader has at least a passing familiarity with terms like “congregationalist” and “Presbyterian”, the Protestant reformation, the English civil wars of the 17th century, early history of the English colonization of the Americas, and so on. I found myself fairly frequently having to go to Wikipedia, or to just accept that I was missing out on parts of the argument.
  • Simpson often injects his own opinion of what the practical or common sense course of action would have been at a given point in time, which I appreciate.

I - The Puritan Thrust

(Is this chapter title our first hint of wit?)

  • How to define Puritanism? It began (like Methodism) as a “sneer” (1), and encompasses a fairly broad range, but all species have in common a dissatisfaction with the established Church of England; but better than this, we can say that it emphasizes the religious experience of conversion which separates the elect from the mass of mankind (2): “The root of the matter is always a new birth, which brings with it a conviction of salvation and a dedication to warefare against sin” (2).
  • Fascinating account of the young Thomas Goodwin who struggled with his apparent lack of faith, was briefly tempted by Arminianism and its “consolations” (3), was saved from this “depraved decision by a real experience” (4) arising from a sermon. Without God’s grace, which is not prevenient, man is entirely depraved, “even a seemingly good man is a only a beautiful abomination” (4-5). Goodwin compares natural man and God’s mercy to a traitor who is pardoned by a king (5). Simpson says he chose Goodwin to illustrate these points partly because he demonstrates “one of the characteristic weaknesses of the Puritan character—its want of proportion” (5). He does not expand on this here; I’m guessing that this is one of those judgemnts that Miller would have considered “well-balanced”, but are we supposed to take the meaning here as clear?
  • The church can prepare man for grace but cannot provide it (5) and the gulf between the two states is absolute and unbridgeable without God’s (predestined) mercy. But the life of the Puritan saint, even when blessed, is not easy, it demands constant discipline, prohibitions, self-accusation, self-denial (6). In merry old England, the Puritan encountered depravity everywhere.
  • “Genuine Puritans, as I ahave defined them, were never more than a small minority, but there was plenty of discontent on which they could feed, and the movement grew with the years as the country headed toward a crisis in the relations between king and Parliament” (12).
  • The Puritans were not originall politically rebelious, but Simpson suggests that their tendency towards desiring to found a religious community is practically as essential as their experience of conversion and rebirth (17).

II - The Covenanted Community

  • The theme of this chapter is essentially: how to preserve the religious fervor and feeling that drove the Puritans to New England? There are fundamental tensions between the individuality of a Puritan’s religious conversion and the needs of maintaining a community of believers.
  • Puritans had an apocalyptic sense of time (19).
  • Making a small criticism of “Professor Miller’s studies of Puritanism” (21) Simpson suggests that Miller has “told us too much about the Puritan mind and not enough about the Puritan’s feelings. If the seventeenth-century Puritan, with his formal training in scholasticism, usually tries to give a rational account of his faith, it is the strtetched passion which makes him waht hs is. They are people who suffered and yearned and strived with an unbelievable intensity; and no superstructure oflogic ought to be allowed to mask that turmoil of feeling” (21).
  • The Puritan is “better prepared for disappointment” on account of his stark view of God’s goodness and man’s depravity. As Miller said, “a disillusioned Puritan is impossible to conceive. Was it not the Puritan who had preached the arbitrariness of God and the depravity of man? Who was he to falter if the age missed what in his foolish pride he had allowed himself to beleive was its destiny” (21) yet this was not the mood of the Pilgrims who left England, nor of Cromwell (21).
  • The problem of building a community out of objective tests for subjective experience (25).
  • Most Puritans wanted to separate church and state only to bind them together again, as partners with different roles, both institutions run and controlled by Puritan saints (26).
  • The whole history of Puritanism is a commentary on its failure to satisyf the cravings which its preaching had aroused. It was forever producing rebelliosn against its own teachers: rebellions within the learned camp and rebellions from without that camp against the assertion that learned reason had anything to teach the illuminated spirit” (28).
  • Reference to Puritans as “potentially explosive” (29)!
  • The history of New England is the history of a losing struggle to presrve the intesnity of the experiecne of the saint and his authority over soceity” (32). We see a “decay of spiritual intensity” (33) a “common experience of all spiritual revivals” (34). “There is plenty of evidence that, in spite of all their precautions, worldliness is still with them and that saints who struggle to rule the world may find themselves ruled by it—especially the Puritan, who develops for religious purposes a type of character which can hardly fail to be a worldly success” (34). Is this an elliptic reference of Weber?
  • Eventually the chosen people could not find enough elect to keep them going. What happens when the supply of saints runs out (35)?

III - Salvation Through Separation

  • The Puritan’s “crusading force of immense energy” executing God’s will and revolutionizing history was yet “incapable of united action” and “everywhere subsided from an ecstasy of zeal into a standradized patterns of behaviour, as successive waves of enthusiasm were broken on the resistant forces of huan nature and as men who had dreamed of a holy community found themselves simply the administrators of a Puritan tradition” (39). The book is littered with nice turns of phrase like this, I enjoy Simpson’s writing.
  • The previous chapter charted the course of various “convenanted communities” founded in the wilderness of of Plymouth, Massachussets, New Haven, and Connecticut, lead and administered by a “spiritual aristocracy” (40). Those defying the orthodoxy would find themselves subject to punishment or banishment by the state, which is “simply the police department of the church” (40), while the majority of unregenerate but law observing mankind, “they will be protected in such civil rights as God intended them to have, exposed to the sermons which will save a few of them, and prevented from dishonouring the communit by scandalous conduct” (40).
  • This interpretation of the relation between church and civil society was common throughout “the Right and Center of the Puritan movement” (41) though is “Repellant to us” (41) Simpson says—what exactly? The de facto subordination of state to church? The “dogmatism” (41)? Seems like Simpson assumes again that our moral judgements and political tastes will be more or less of a piece with his here.
  • Within that tradition of dogmatism, the “first impulse of the Puritan saint was to erect a theocracy. But to attempt to do so was to try to seal off all the explosive possibilities of the conversion experience, and those who did so, either in New England or Old England, found themselves confronted by a series of rebellios from saints who refused to be confined within the new orthodoxies. It is the purpose of this chapter to examine the extreme form which these rebellions assumed: the discover that the mission of the saints is to separate the church from the state” (41).
  • There are many paths to such a conclusion. One arises from the saint’s discover that the church is not adequate to his standards (41). This can lead (1) to separation from society, pursuit of the frontier as with the Anabaptists; (2) to a theory of religious liberty in which the saint will live within society but must be absolutely free from any religious control; or (3) to armed rebellion, “only withdrawing from the world to come back with a sword in his hand” (42).
  • Most of these saints were pronouned rationalists or mystics. The rationalist sees his reason as the revelation of God’s will, and tends to pursue self-determination and free moral choice. Simpson says this is the path Milton took. “It is a doctrine of conscience which embraces the idea of the individual as a church in himself and employsevery resource of prophetic scorn against the the notion that ecclesisastical or civil coercion can contribute anything to the growth of grace” (44).
  • “So much for the experiecne which is liable to turn a saint into a separatist: one, that is to say, who will demand complete freedom for the religious conscience from eccelesiastical or civil authority and who is willing to forego any claim by the godly to govern society” (44). The Puritans (except the Quakers… I don’t entirely understand this point) “abandoned one half of their profession in order to embrace the other. They became theocrats in spite of thesmelves, because the liberty which they demanded for the religious conscience… could be enjoyed only if saints like themselves wielded a dictatorial power over the political community” (45).
  • Discussion Roger Williams, “forced worship” which he thought “stank in God’s nostrils”: “The real sufferers of forced worship had always been the saints. It places them at the mercy of any error which clerical authority may commit… It invites the natural man, through is representatives, the political government, to impose his ideas in a realm which he is aboslutely unfit to have an opinion” (48). How to reconcile this with the 10 commandments, especially the first 4 (no other gods, no idols, don’t take name in vain, keep sabbath)? Williams took an extreme typological approach, seeing the OT as just a symbol for the “Spiritual church of Christ” (49).
  • How far and where might the Puritan saints take their claim of “soul liberty”? Simpson outlines 4 directions: 1) militant millenarianism (as in the English revolutions); 2) anarchism/antinomianism, leading some to reject even the authority of the written Bible: “the saint is capable of invoking his privilges to undermine all th eobligations of social life. He may demand the right ot sin oin order to prove his superiority over sin… He may discover a conscientious objection to bearing office, paying taxes, or submitting to a legal process… that no law ought to be binding which is not approved by individual conscience. This is a spirit which can be invoked to justify anything” (55); 3) he may become a constitutionalist, seeking refuge in its guarantees of personal freedom, while going no further towards any sort of “Declaration of the Rights of Man” (56); 4) he may become a “doctrinaire democrat” (56) wishing to model society on the free association of his church, seeking as close a bearing to direct democracy as possible (56).

IV Saints in Arms

  • In England, as opposed to new England, the Puritan’s mission is welded to political changes already afoot. “The confused strivings became fused with a providential purpose: a way is being opened for the establishment of Zion” though this ultimately result in the destruction of “ever shred of established authority… But long before then the saints have discovered that many of them are enemies or strangers to each other, that htey have been uited in nothing but the will to destroy, that the hero who embodies so much of their aspiration ish imself a puzzled pilgrim, and that the eneimes without are only waiting for the collapse within to sweep the whole endeavour aside. A crusade shattered by its own contradictions, a classic tragedy i nthe politics of enthusaism—this is what the Puritan thrust produces in its English setting” (61).
  • Simpsons seems to accept a roughly class-oriented “rise of the gentry” (63) as the main explanation for growing tension between parliament and the King which, “whether it knew it or not, was really demanding a transfer of sovereign power” (64). Kick off to civil war being the King’s desire to quell Scottish rebellion, which could not be done without summoning parliament.
  • “Each of these factions [within parliament and the budding revolution] will ahve to decide what sort of church they want because the starting point of the process is a commuinity in which church and state are identical… in each faction there is a large group… whose only motive is political. That is to say, they are looking for the religious settlemetn which will best buttress the kind of liberty they want. Their choice of Anglicanism, Presbyterianism [66] or Congregationalism, and theier attitude towards difference degrees of toleration, are determined by a political claculation. Appropriately enough, a vigorous straing of anticlericalism runs through all of them, reflecting the determination of an increasingly lay society to put clerical leadership in its place” (66).
  • Parliament eventually pledges itself to Puritan orthodoxy to secure the alliance of the Scots against the king (67).
  • What did the Puritan saints actually want? On the right were the Prebysterians, who “have an ancestry which goes back to the efforts of Elziabethan Puritans like Cartwright and Travers to bring the Church of England in line with the best reformed churches” (67). The new church they seek will “embrace the whole community” (68) like the old one, but “full privileges will be reserved… for an aristocracy of grace. Ideally speaking, the elect should dominate the whole government of society… The English Presbyterian has to make the best of his circustances, uphold the authority which seems most likely to do its Christian duty, and use whatever un-Christian allies the Lord throws in his path” (68). Eventually the horrors of heresy and schism throughout the revolution lead Presbyterians to accept a compromise with Charles II (69). The Presbyterians tended to be wealther, partly because “many people calling themselves Presbyterians at this time were not Puritans at all in any real sense. They were simply peers who had discovered they were on the wrong side and were trying to make the best of a bad business, or well-to-do gentry who found Presbyterianism a useful counterpart to parliament’s claims” (69).
  • The indepenents were initially basically the same as the Presbyterians except preferred congregationalism (70) but eventually, pressed in on all sides, developed a strong support of “toleration” (70) (freedom of worship), e.g. Milton and Vane. “The revolution has not been fought to replace an Anglican tyrrany with a Presbyterian tyrrany” (71). “The Presbyterian stronhold was parliamnt, the independent stronghold was the army” (72).
  • “To the left of the Independents is the lower clas radicalism of the Puritan movement, inflamed by the breakdown of authority, by the incessant talk of liberty, by the opportunities which thrust the butcher, the carter, and the cobbler into positions of power, and by the wild debaucheries of the illiterate mind in the depths of Scripture. In this atmosphere all things are possible… almost every heresy known to Christianity and almost every deram of perfection which has ever unbalanced the secular mind” (72) leading to, among others, either a “demand for a democratic republic based on a docctrine of equality and a demand for a dictatorship of saints based on the prophetic books of the BIble” (72).
  • From the first prong we get the Levellers, whose “program, when examined by any disenchanted eye, must have seemed fatuous to the last degree. The idea that a profoundly hierarchical society could be turned into some equalitatrian utopia was almost as grotesque an abberation as the idea that the second coming was at hand” (74).
  • At the end of the first civil war we have four factions of Puritan saints “each nursing its own idea of a holy community, surrounded by other factions who have been fighting only for constitutional liberty and confronted by a king who is determined to exploit these divisions. The common sense of the situation demands a negotiated settelement. BUt we shall see how the saints seize power, sweep aside the establishe dintsitutions, and embark on a hopeless attempt to erect a holy community by force” (79).

V The Bankrupt Crusade

  • The siezure of power in 48-9, taking parliament, executing the king. “it was the act of men who combined to destroy something without any clear idea of what was going to take its place. It reminds us, if we need any reminder, that a movement like this English REvolution is an immense, inscrutable disorder in which a bewildered array of people lurches from crisis to crisis until all but the infatuated are ready to admit they have lost their way” (80).
  • A compromise based on limited monarchy and increased religious toleration at this time might have been possible but had several obstacles, including a stubborn King, a suspicious Presbyterian movement (in England and Scotland) and an army with burgeoning taste for rebellion (80-3). (My summary of the third point is arguably putting words in Simpson’s mouth.)
  • The decision to purge/execute by Cromwell was “fanatical”, born of the Puritan’s desire to act as executor of “Divine justice” (84). Cromwell says later, that he was so taken by the will of God, why would he “consult flesh and blood?” (85).
  • The period during which the saints ruled England (I guess he means roughly between Charles I’s execution and the restoration?) “Considered as an example of dictatorship had some refreshign features compared with those we have known in our present century… One was the guarantee of liberty of worship for all peacable Christians. Another was the effort to impress the standards of responsibility on all holders of office. A third was the handsome compliemtn which it paid to the English tradition by its recurring sense of guilt. Few dicatators have shown so much reluctance for their role as Oliver, so much anxiety to get something tolerable done by consent instead of falling back on force. Finally it put with an amoutn of criticism which only a Puritan like Olver would have tolerated. If England had to be goverened by saints with swords in their hands, it was a great mercy to know that thee commanding saint thoguth of himself only as a seeker after Divine truth and not as someone who had found it. He commits some violent acts while he is looking for it, but, in the long run, the tyrrany of his theocracy is always tempered by humility, magnanimity, and common sense” (88). This seems to run against the point Simpson often makes that Cromwell repeatedly sees his success as evidence of his Divine justification.
  • But in the end (and not so long after the beginning), the “seizure of power naturally brought them no nearer the Promised Land. It simply left them wandering in the wilderness of their own discontents” (90). Cromwell did impose some order on the “unruly flock” of Puritans, but “just how punishing the experience was may be gathered from what the saints had to say about the man who embodied so much of their aspiration. Each purge added its quota to the storm of indignation which was going to envelop him. First the Presbyterians, then the Levellers, then the Millenarians, then the Republicans, and, finally, every PUritan who revolted form the spectacle of the man who had absolished monarchy trying to restore it in his own person. He is being forced back into the old forms of government by the simple impossibility of governing England on any other terms, but, in the eyes of the greater part of thei movement, he has sacrificied the cause to selfish ambition. The Puritan was always obsessed by his sense of sin. Taught to expect it everywhere, and to magnify it where he found it, he easily fell into the habit of inventing it” (91).

VI The Puritan Tradition

  • Opens with a brief sort of meditation on “how much must X change into Xa before it is actually just Y”? Of a 17th century Puritan who began as a dogmatic zealouts and end as lukewarm deists, are we to say they are still Puritans? Simpsons says no, if the term is retain any meaning. “I should say that the continuing history of Puritanism… must be the continuing history of attempts to solve problems in a Puritan spirit” (100).
  • Simpson considers Carlye: while he e.g. belongs to no Church and considers that parts of Scripture cannot actually be literally true (101) these are merely theological not moral differences (102) and Simpson considers the moral aspect to be definitive of the Puritan. “If the life of man begins in darkness and ends in darkness, the lesson is to cling all the more passionately to the feling that there is some kind of order behind the myster and that this orer reveals itself most clearly in the moral sense. And the moral sense to which Carlyle appeals is indestructibly Puritan” (102).
  • An important reason for the difference between the first and second Puritan revivals is that the lay intellectual atmosphere has changed so dramtically between the two points that the later years, the Puritan cannot easily accommodate the findings of natural science into his beliefs, and so much either bury them or shunt them aside, resulting in at worst a “religion of feeling without any intellectural structure at all” (107). In this environment the “theocratic impulse dies hard” (108).
  • On the characterological defects of the Puritan: he has no sense of humour (110); all defects “spring from the fact that he has stripped himself of nonessentials for the struggle and finds it grim. He makes very little contribution to literature outside the didactic sphere. He is likely to regard the arts as the trimmings of life. And he can degenerate into a kill-joy” (111). As Macaulay writes, the Puritan opposes bear-baiting not out of concern for the bear but because it brings too much pleasure to the spectators.
  • He ends with a criticism of the Puritan’s celebration of Cromwell’s moral crusade against hypocrisy and sin in politics. Of a passage from the 19th century he quotes, Simpson writes: “That passage, with its conviction that rightouesness ought to prevail, with its tendency to make the Puritan’s own moral cahracter a test of political fitness, and with its pressure to turn politics, which ought to be the art of reconciliation, into a moral crusade, reminds us of the darkest blot on his political record” (114).

Some questions

Some questions I have after reading this book:

  • How does Puritanism fit into the broader movement/trend of evangelicalism? I don’t recall Simpson mentioning this word once, though surely I am mistaken. Bebbington apparently notes 4 features of evangelical belief: conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism. I have not read Bebbingnot nor do I claim to understand those four qualities in any depth, but it seems that Puritanism checks all of those boxes. Do we then consider it a species of evangelicalism?
  • How does Puritanism relate to pietism? Simpson at one point in the book I lost track of mention one or more Puritan saints retreating to pietism.
  • The term “episcopalianism” comes up a number of times throughout the book, which I understand to be a primarily a mode of ecclesiastical organization. We have the Roman Catholic church hierarchy with a pope, cardinals, bishops, priests; then the Anglican Church which I think is similarly hierarchical (though obviously without a pope); then Presbyterians in which churches are governed by a group of elders (“regenerate” in Simpsons words); then congregationalists who seem to favour wholly independent church communities. In this sense, the RC and Anglican church are somewhat episcopal in nature, and the Presbyterianism also appears to be. But then there also seem to be offshoots of the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland and also the Church or England that explicitly refer to themselves as “Episcopalian”. What is the difference?