Puritanism in an Existentialist Key
THE DECADES THAT FINALLY saw the release of the Puritans from the embarrassments of their past were the crisis decades of the Depression and war. And the figure who, more than any other, accomplished this came from Chicago, not Boston. Though he was a commanding presence in Harvard’s lecture halls for thirty years, Perry Miller never imagined that he fit into New England manners or Boston civic pride. He entered the field of Puritan studies as an outsider, writing books that initially bewildered his fellow historians and literature scholars. He cultivated a sense of heroic intellectualism and existentialist drama that roiled many of his academic peers. But by his death in 1963, he had written the Puritans into the core story of the development of the “American mind” and had begun, for the first time, to single out Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” as one of the central statements in its unfolding.1
Perry Miller was a man of poses as well as a scholar of enormous erudition and writerly force. Some of what he said about his own past worked far better as story than as literal truth. Born into a physician’s family on Chicago’s West Side, he dropped out of the University of Chicago in 1923 to try to soak up some of the real-life experience he felt he had missed by being too young to enlist in World War I. He acted for a while with a theater company in Paterson, New Jersey, wrote a bit for pulp magazines, and then enlisted as a merchant sailor.2 It was in Africa, unloading American oil drums for export to the Congo, he would later claim, that he caught a “vision” of his life’s task: “the mission of expounding what I took to be the innermost propulsion of the United States.” There was “a kind of truth” in that story, his widow would patiently explain, mixed with a great deal of fiction—though for decades historians preferred to take Miller’s fib as literal fact.3 What he did decide in the Congo was to go back to college, then to graduate school, and finally to immerse himself in the literature and history of early America.
There was a kind of truth, and a kind of fiction as well, to his subsequent claim that he went on to read every piece of writing produced in colonial New England. But he did read massively across three centuries of American thought and literature. He brought an insatiable appetite to the history of American ideas and a passion for making ideas the fulcrum point of history itself. Pious, disciplined John Winthrop and the gifted, unruly, atheist historian who began Winthrop’s incorporation into the center of American history were an oddly matched couple. But between Winthrop’s heroic sense of acting on a commission from God and Miller’s sense of the heroic act by which Winthrop’s Puritans had held up the assumptions of that commission by sheer force of will there turned out to be a powerful synergy. Out of that unlikely pairing the modern life of “A Model of Christian Charity” began.
Perry Miller arrived at Harvard as a visiting graduate student in 1930 at the peak of Boston’s tercentenary celebration whose “horrors” of self-congratulatory excesses he thought the city had “barely survived.” He had already decided that to fathom the American mind he needed to start at “the beginning of the beginning,” where the earliest surviving sources were richest and deepest.4 That meant starting not with the Virginia project but with New England. And not with Bostonians’ mythmaking but with the massive sermon literature generated in Puritan New England whose legacy, he was soon sure, had coursed through virtually all American thought and literature thereafter. Among “the elements that have gone into the making of the ‘American mind,’ ” Miller was writing by the end of the 1930s, the New England inputs were “the most conspicuous, the most sustained, and the most fecund.” “Without some understanding of the Puritans, it may safely be said, there is no understanding of America.”5
In the early 1930s when Miller undertook this task, there was nothing fashionable in studying the history of “mind,” much less the obscure byways of Puritan theology. For most historians in the 1920s and 1930s, the serious engines of historical change were the pressures of material experience. Frederick Jackson Turner had insisted on the massive significance of the frontier in American history. Charles Beard had stressed the determinative force of economic interests. Vernon Louis Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought had breasted much of this trend in 1927, but even Parrington had launched his chapter on Puritan thought by warning that “unless one keeps in mind the social forces that found it convenient to array themselves in Puritan garb, the clear meaning of it all will be lost in the fogs of Biblical disputation.”6
In the face of all this the young Miller took to the challenge of explicating the intellectual structure of the New England mind with the exuberant sense of climbing an unconquered mountain peak. The indispensable tool the historian needed was to set aside every temptation to translate Puritan social and theological ideas into modern terms. Those who imagined that democracy had arrived on the first Pilgrim vessels were wrong, Miller was certain; so were those who saw only the hand of an oligarchical theocracy in New England’s history. The Boston tercentenary’s portrait of bland conviviality distorted the past most severely of all. To begin at the beginning was, for Miller, to plunge into a radically foreign frame of thought that ultimately, but only through a series of wrenching dialectical twists and turns, would become the template on which the cultures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America would be forged.
No corner of human thought went unexamined by the Puritans, Miller wrote. Reason, rhetoric, psychology, nature, piety, knowledge, and cosmology all had intricately connecting rooms in the intellectual edifice the Puritan divines constructed. But at the core of the Puritan mind was the idea of the covenant. “We are entered into covenant” in this work, Winthrop had deployed the idea in the Model’s closing passages. By covenant, Miller insisted, neither Winthrop nor any of the ministerial elite meant simply “agreement.” To argue about how far New England politics fell short of modern democratic standards was to begin from premises that were thoroughly inadequate to understanding the New England Puritans’ intentions. A covenant-framed world was not the social contract society John Locke had imagined. A covenant was a pact in which consent and the demands of obedience fused into virtually a single thought and gesture.
The template of covenant thought was stamped across every aspect of early New Englanders’ assumptions about their faith, their polity, and their place in history, Miller was arguing by the mid-1930s. God’s relationship with the fallible people he had created began with a covenant with Adam. For disobeying God, Adam and all his offspring had been branded with sin. Mercifully, God had recovenanted to bring salvation to those who believed—though without his arbitrary gift of grace at work within their deeply polluted selves they were powerless to enter into any such state. Collectively the New Englanders had made a social covenant with each other to live a moral life of love and obedience, and a political covenant between themselves and the magistrates they elected to rule and lead them. At the pinnacle of this ladder of covenants, God made a covenant with his special peoples, to treat them as his own, rewarding their efforts toward virtue and scourging their failures and backslidings, all the while holding the script of the drama in his own hands.7
Worked out by English Puritan writers long before the notion of a Puritan settlement in North America was seriously entertained in anyone’s mind, the idea of the covenant’s myriad, interlocked faces went on to be elaborated in scores of New England sermons. With its imperatives of liberty of will and obedience to law, human ability and human helplessness, all balanced on the sharpest of knife edges, it commanded the heart of the New England orthodoxy, Miller argued, for over a century.
In Miller’s first description of the “marrow” of covenant theology, Winthrop’s Model barely figured at all. Like other historians of New England, Miller put his emphasis, rather, on John Winthrop’s speech to the General Court on the identity of obedience and liberty, already quoted and anthologized many times over. Miller slipped about a third of the Model’s text into his own anthology of New England Puritan writings in 1938, but he did so without any special emphasis or comment.8
But in the darkening world context of 1939, Miller found a more arresting “genius” in Winthrop’s text. The “greatness of Winthrop’s address aboard the Arbella, the daring flight of his imagination,” Miller now emphasized, lay in the audacious way in which Winthrop there had fused the New England migration with the demands at the very core of covenant theology. The New England venture would not be a mere test of the migrants’ practicality. It would not be an escape into an unsettled frontier: a space to do with as they chose. “A Covenant People are not left at their Liberty, whether they will Love, Fear, Serve, and Obey the Voice of God in his Commands, or not,” a New England sermon writer had expressed Miller’s point. “They are under the highest, and most awful Obligations imaginable to the whole of Covenant duty.” In the Model, Miller wrote, Winthrop had urged the same point even more strongly: the emigration to New England would not be flight into freedom but a flight into obligation.9
In the context of the late 1930s, it is hard to miss the contemporary references in passages like this. The illusion of remaining free from the catastrophes overcoming Europe was a pipe dream for a culture born in a deep sense of obligation, Miller implied. But there was also a profoundly new dimension to “A Model of Christian Charity.” Winthrop’s text was not simply a programmatic statement. It was not merely a call to charitable action or the sympathies of love. Within it was encapsulated the very core of covenant theology. By yoking the terms of the New Englanders’ settlement to the deepest assumptions of the “Puritan mind,” from its understandings of piety and reason, its rules of logic and rhetoric, its anthropology and politics, and its ladders of authority and covenants, as Miller urged his readers to understand it, Winthrop had poured the whole of a culture’s aspirations into his text. With the Model’s words, Winthrop literally “tied heaven and earth to his enterprise.”10
Miller was thirty-four years old when he completed this much. But what was more audacious still was Miller’s claim that the New England Puritans had built this cathedral of assumptions not out of confidence or dogmatic certainty, but, rather, the reverse: that they had constructed this remarkable synthesis of thought in the face of deepest anxiety about themselves and the capacities of human reason. Miller opened his magnum opus, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, not with New England’s preachers speaking confidently from their pulpits but with the terrors of human beings in the face of the “absolute, incomprehensible, and transcendent sovereignty of God.”11 As old as Augustine, this strain of doubt and sinfulness, this urgent sense of the human predicament and hunger for escape, had marked Christianity for ages. In the Calvinist phase of the Reformation, however, it had erupted again, and in starker terms. The Puritans’ God was not unreasonable in his own being. But to human understandings he was beyond grasp. He was “hidden, unknowable, and unpredictable,” “the ultimate secret, the awful mystery,” “entirely incomprehensible to man.”12 He was not fully revealed in his scriptures, not even in the inner experience of conversion and regeneration for which the Puritan faithful yearned—for that was always imperfect, dispensed or withheld by God for his own inscrutable reasons. This sense of an ineradicable gulf between God and his faithful, this sense of homelessness and of disharmony with the world in which they lived, was the starting point of Puritan religiosity.
And yet, as Miller portrayed it, New England’s elite could not resist the obligation to try to apprehend what they knew could not be apprehended. They tried to pin the mystery of God down to attributes humans might try to understand. They strained to discern the outlines of orderliness in a nature that only God’s will ultimately held in place. They tried to anatomize the stages of the overwhelmingly mysterious experience of conversion. They tried to read the divine course of justice in the willfulness and outward chaos of human history. They built their elegantly nested structure of covenants within a universe they knew to be more arbitrarily ruled than they hoped it might be. They wrote God’s part as well as their own into the “commission” that framed their flight to North America, even though they could only guess, in anxious hope, that they understood what God’s part might be. They imagined that across the awful gulf between divine and human reason they and God might have actually made a covenant, binding on both sides.
As Miller told the story of New England’s first three generations, its most gripping drama lay in their efforts to bring as much reason to bear on the “implacable mystery” of God as they could devise. None of the writers of the eighteenth-century Age of Reason would work harder at this than they. Pride in their achievement, though they knew it to be a sin, was built into their circumstances. Still they “could never banish from their minds the consciousness of something mysterious and terrible in life, of something that leaped when least expected, that upset all the regularities of [science] and circumvented the laws of logic, that cut across the rules of justice, of something behind appearances that could not be tamed and brought to heel.” They could not forget that behind the covenants, including the one whose terms Winthrop had presumed to state, there “loomed the inconceivable being about whom no man could confidently predict anything, who was not to be relied upon or perfectly trusted, who might day in and day out deal with men in stated forms, and then suddenly strike without warning, scatter the world into fragments with a casual sweep of His hand.”13
This was Puritanism in a starkly existentialist mood. Its heroism was the heroism of persons who dared to try to bridge the gap between the certainties they longed for and the hubris and potential failure they knew their task invited. Miller did not put the point explicitly in the existentialist philosophers’ terms. But like many other mid-twentieth-century intellectuals in Europe and the United States, he participated in the mood of disenchantment that we call, in retrospect, existentialism. A generation before, young rebellious writers had taken their revenge on their culture’s dominant conventions by breaking its rules, scoffing at its philistines and moralists, and decamping for the freedoms of artistic bohemia. The attack on the puritanical strain in American culture had been a product of that rebellion. But for many of those who followed in the next generation, for whom the senseless waste and destruction of World War I and then the catastrophic economic and political implosions of the 1930s were formative experiences, personal liberation no longer seemed sufficient. What an honest person needed to realize was that the myth of history as a march toward greater and greater progress and freedom, with God as its optimist in chief, was an illusion. And a dangerous one at that.
Miller’s own father had been deeply invested in the prewar social gospel hope of more and more perfect realization of God’s designs. But God stood not within history but outside it, Reinhold Niebuhr was writing in the late 1920s; societies needed to make their way toward justice without the crutch of cosmic reassurance or the conceit of believing they knew God’s inner mind. The first English-language translations of Søren Kierkegaard’s works began to circulate in the United States in the 1930s, carrying with them their message that “angst,” anguish, and anxiety lay far deeper in the structures of the human condition than the steady improvement in faith and circumstances that nineteenth-century writers had heralded.14 The Puritan sense of divine predestination was different from our modern “sense of things being ordered by blind forces,” Miller himself wrote in 1938. “Yet even with this momentous difference in our imagination of the controlling power, the human problem today has more in common with the Puritan understanding of it than at any time for two centuries: how can man live by the lights of humanity in a universe that appears indifferent or even hostile to them?”15
Perry Miller resisted the full force of Niebuhr’s political and philosophical conclusions.16 But his students could not miss the existentialist strain in Miller’s own teaching. It was through his Harvard mentor, Miller, that historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. discovered Niebuhr and, through him, what Schlesinger thought to be the foundations for a chastened, less utopian project than the American political left had yet constructed. For Robert Coles, the social psychologist, biographer of America’s children of crises, and, in time, a charismatic Harvard lecturer in his own right, the most memorable part of Miller’s late 1940s course in the Classics of the Christian Tradition were its readings: Niebuhr, Blaise Pascal, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, and the newly translated Kierkegaard texts Miller assigned. Decades later, Coles was still telling interviewers about the power they cast on him.17
Above all, Perry Miller etched the existentialist mood not only into his syllabi but into the Puritans themselves. His portrait of God’s “supreme and awful” essence, beyond any human comprehension, was, as his later critics would point out, as much his own invention as the creation of John Calvin, to whom he attributed it. The work of the existentialist writers was to convince their naive fellow voyagers through the mid-twentieth century that history and optimism could not be counted on; that the world was much less reasonable that they imagined and courage far harder to find. As Miller described them, the Puritans had begun at the opposite philosophical pole; in the midst of what they knew to be life’s ultimate incomprehensibility, they had struggled to build in enough handholds for reason and logic for their society to survive. The heroism of the Puritans was not to be found in their efforts at system building, monumental as they were. It lay in their determination to construct as rational a picture of life as they dared without ever forgetting the universe’s ultimate impenetrability.
Perry Miller came back from World War II service to stow his military boots and a captured Nazi flag in his Harvard office, to resume his teaching, and to push his histories of the American mind deeper and deeper into the nineteenth century. He plunged into the worlds of Jonathan Edwards, Henry Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson; Herman Melville and Margaret Fuller; nineteenth-century literary institutions; and the history of the law. But though he spurned any temptation to glue these all to a common theme, he never wholly dropped the existentialist strain.
More and more he saw it written into the very text of Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity.” In what was to become the single most-cited piece he would write, “Errand into the Wilderness,” Miller reminded his readers that historical “errands” like those Winthrop and his generation had undertaken came in two sorts. Some were errands that one undertakes for one’s self. Others were missions on which one is sent as someone else’s errand boy.18 Winthrop and his peers knew how much self-determination and will they had poured into their own efforts. But they yearned to be on an errand that God, not they, had dictated. They worked as hard as they could to remind each other of the terms of the commission on which they had been dispatched, to read God’s mind and purposes in sending them so far from home and England. But being the sorts of Puritans Miller imagined, they could never be fully sure that they had read their commission right. They could never be entirely confident that their city on a hill was not a product of their own mistake or illusion. Even when they felt the hand of God in their good fortune, Miller argued—or, equally, when they felt the hand of God in a disaster that they hoped was proof God still cared enough to chastise them—they could find no certainty.
“In fear and trembling” they had decided to emigrate, temporarily at least, to America.19 They had publicly declared the terms of their project; they had made their settlement in a conscious act of decision. But who among them could dare to be certain that the grounds on which they had acted were not merely a castle of vanities?
Then and since, many readers of Miller’s “Errand” essay have seen it simply as an amplification of the Cold War culture into which it was published in 1956. Miller had always imagined a kind of crusading aspect to the New England project, as if the voyage to America were best perceived as international Calvinism’s flank attack on Catholicism itself. By the 1950s the military metaphors had become more insistent. In the New Englanders’ inner mind, he began to speculate, perhaps God intended to finally sweep their home country clear of its desperate corruptions and “bring back these temporary colonials to govern England.”20 In that sense, the America of the 1950s seemed never to have left its Puritan starting point. A conviction of acting on a global errand for God appeared to join Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Winthrop in a common, all but timeless, project. What could one imagine of a nation so conceived in righteousness but that it should still be trying to save the world?
But Miller was never a thoroughgoing Cold Warrior and certainly not a spokesman for the business civilization he saw ascendant in Eisenhower’s America.21 Toward the end of “Errand into the Wilderness,” Miller retold the story of a classic circus act. It featured two clowns, one with an ample skirt and the other, hidden underneath, as the first clown’s bustle. They race around the stage as one, and then, suddenly, as the first clown veers right, the bustle, heading straight, makes off with a mind of its own. The story told its own moral. America enters history, dispatched on a mission, only to discover that it can’t remember anymore what that mission was, or whether it was, like a head-and-bodiless-clown act, just a fool’s errand to begin with. After 1660, with the Puritan Revolution in England overthrown and Puritanism’s offshoot in America orphaned as a result, the international dimensions of the New England project suddenly became irrelevant. It had become historically irrelevant as well, like a soldier dispatched on a task that his superiors had forgotten. Its ideas “had served their purpose and died.”22
What is a society to do in such a pinch but to make its purpose up all over again? That was the pattern of American history, Miller wrote in 1954. At some deep level it was discontinuous, glued to no “pre-existing” design, bound only to the necessity of inventing itself anew in a universe that gave it no prefurnished home. It was a “frantic,” futile gesture on the historian’s part to try “to preserve, just as he at the moment understands it, the distinctive American essence.” Indeterminacy and choice were the ground pattern of history. This “complexity is worrisome, imparts not serenity, only anxiety. It keeps us wondering whether we might now be something other, and probably better, than we are had we in the past decided otherwise, and this in turn makes decision in the present even more nerve-wracking.” But from that anxiety there was no escape.23
How that story worked itself out from Winthrop’s first enunciation of its terms forward, Miller himself was never ultimately able to say. His teaching remained as electrifying and terrifying as before. He wrote prolifically, but the comprehensive History of the American Mind he mapped out for his publisher eluded him. In the end he had aspired to far too much, he had fought too many inner contradictions, and he was drinking too heavily to complete it. He died of a heart attack at age fifty-eight.
But Miller’s part in shaping the lives of “A Model of Christian Charity” was indelible. No other figure before him had done as much to pull that text out of a later culture’s forgetfulness and insert it into the nation’s beginnings. He put the “city upon a hill” phrase at the core of historians’ understanding of Puritanism and put Puritanism, for the first time, at the core of the American story itself. “I am sure,” Miller told an audience in 1954, that Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” “is known to all of you.”24 To the extent that there was as yet any truth to that claim beyond the specialists in religious history to whom Miller was speaking—to the extent that excavation of the Model from its decades on the margins of American history and its elevation into the status of a foundational text, perhaps the foundational text for the nation, had begun—the first steps were largely Perry Miller’s work.
But what was foundational about Miller’s Model was not its solidity. The Model’s achievement, as Miller understood it, was to put on display the extent to which the American covenant was held up by will and aspirations alone. It was a heroic act of mind: an attempt to make reasonable a purpose and a mission about which its own participants could never be entirely confident. In the midst of Eisenhower’s America, when one might have thought that Winthrop’s Model might fit easily into the certainties of Cold War conversation around it, irony, not certainty, was Miller’s passion. Among his most lasting achievements was to begin to put at the foundations of American history a text that, as he urged others to read it, had under its anxieties and aspirations no bedrock foundations at all.