Rescuing the Errand

THEY FLED FROM BABYLON, from an England corrupt and doomed, to the beneficent shores of the Promised Land, where they would found their "city upon a hill." Guilty about deserting the cause, the Puritans aboard the Arbella self-righteously sought their justification in the hopeless depravity of their English brethren. If the short-lived blossoming of Babylon--the successful Puritan Revolution--undercut that justification, the dread finality of the Restoration left the New England Congregationalists even more anxious and alone, involving them in a desperate search for a meaning to their "errand into the wilderness."

According to Sacvan Bercovitch in The Puritan Origins of the American Self, they found that meaning in their stubborn and persistent identification of America as the New Jerusalem--a land of the elect that was itself elect, whose history was sacred history, and whose (inevitably successful) struggle for redemption would usher in the Millenium. For Bercovitch's Puritans, New England history and the individual's striving for grace are closely intertwined. Since public and private salvation are symbolically inseparable, history assumes the character of individual sanctification and the would-be saint in turn relies on the redemptive quality of first the Puritan community and later the American landscape.

In his general cultural approach to Puritan history, Bercovitch writes squarely in the tradition of Perry Miller, for whom "the mind of man is the basic factor in human history." Like Miller and his disciples, Bercovitch is concerned solely with Puritan intellectuals and their literary outpourings. But his originality resides in taking their approach one step further--by asserting the primacy of language over historical fact as the determinant of culture.

In his essay "Errand into the Wilderness," Miller emphasized the discontinuity between the limited optimism of the first generation Puritans, who hoped their New World settlement would serve as a model for a corrupt Europe, and the insecurity of later generations, who saw their role preempted and then rendered irrelevant by events in England.

In a similar vein, Alan E. Heimert '49, Cabot Professor of American Literature and a student of Miller's, has discussed the "declension" of Massachusetts Bay Puritanism in terms of its shift in emphasis from spiritual well-being to material prosperity--a shift reflected by the jeremiads, sermons of the 1660s that preach virtue as a means of averting crop failure.

The attachment of the Miller-Heimert school to historical fact--as imaged in the writings of Puritan divines--has obliged it to account the Puritan errand at least a partial failure. For these historians, the corruption of the communal vision led inevitably to the separation of individual and communal salvation. Not so for Bercovitch. By shifting his emphasis from historical fact to the language itself, Bercovitch can support the continued coincidence of the two. In The Puritan Origins of the American Self, facts have ceased to matter at all--what counts instead is the distinctive Puritan rhetoric tying the redeemed individual to the redemptive American community.

AS HIS LITERARY KEY to late Puritan ideology, Bercovitch chooses not the jeremiads but Cotton Mather's epic work, the Magnalia Christi Americana--particularly his "Life of John Winthrop." In his "Life," Mather portrays Winthrop as a "Nehemius Americanus," a peculiarly American saviour whose life foreshadows the Second Coming. Mather's ambition, according to Bercovitch, is to be the Winthrop of his generation; writing during the decline of theocracy, Mather, he says, offered himself--in his capacity as a representative American type--as a link between the triumphal era of Winthrop and the millenial future, thus initiating a special mode of defining the American self. Describing Mather's achievement, Bercovitch writes:

Even when he confronts his backsliding contemporaries, the theocrat of 1690 overleaps the present into the legendary past and the prophetic future. He offers a test not of perception but of symbiotic identification, and he succeeds not because the facts conform but because the rhetoric compels.

Unfortunately, Bercovitch's own rhetorical strategy is far less compelling. The basic plan of his book--which begins with a close textual analysis of Mather's study of Winthrop and expands into an examination of its cultural context and implications as a testament to American identity--is potentially workable, even exciting. What mars its execution, however, is Bercovitch's overfondness for long, convoluted sentences punctuated with Latin expressions, his heavy use of quotations, and the slowness with which he moves from concept to concept. Together these flaws give his prose a muddy, static quality.

In line with his concern with symbolism, many of Bercovitch's sentences read like a long string of identifications:

The magistrate is the Nehemiah of New England then, as Mather is the Nehemiah of New England now, as the New England Way is the Nehemiah of the Reformation, and as the Reformation is the Nehemiah of the universal church, preparing to greet the Son of Righteousness, antitype of all Nehemiahs, Who is to consecrate the apocalyptic marriage of the new heavens and new earth.

Crowded together, such formulations make this book difficult, while their frequent repetition--as though Bercovitch were afraid his ideas might be lost under the flood of his verbiage--makes it sometimes tedious, despite the originality of its thesis.

Miller and his successors modified earlier views of the Puritans as anti-egalitarian, hypocritical killjoys by examining more closely the role their religion played in their lives. Because he focuses on the language of that religion alone, Bercovitch can go even farther and assess the Puritan achievement in a frankly celebratory vein. "History betrayed them, we know," he writes. "That they persisted nonetheless requires us, I believe, to redefine their achievement in a positive way." In labeling Cotton Mather as the keeper of the American dream, Bercovitch writes that "he rescued the errand by appropriating it to himself." Although his style betrays him at times, Bercovitch's errand--the task of rescuing their errand--makes The Puritan Origins of the American Self an important, positive contribution to Puritan scholarship.