Love Is a Bond or Ligament
HAD HE LIVED INTO THE 1660S, John Winthrop would probably have been disappointed by the newly marginal place of his colony on the larger Atlantic scene. But he might not have been surprised. Influence had not been foremost on Winthrop’s mind as he drafted “A Model of Christian Charity.” That he yearned to find his proper place in the course of providential history was patently clear. His writings on the eve of departure are filled with concern to read God’s intentions in history. He longed to decipher God’s plan for England, for Reformed churches all across Europe, and for the remnant that was putting in motion a voyage of escape across the Atlantic. But that he intended by sailing west to change England and the world requires a reading of the Model’s words that they do not sustain. Even the theme of a chosen people freighted with the awful responsibility of their covenant with God sweeps into the Model only at its very end.
For readers who have been taught to anticipate the theme of mission as the great, overarching motif of “A Model of Christian Charity,” this displacement of the expected point until the text’s very end still comes as a shock. Nowhere in the Model’s first thirty pages is the idea of an errand into destiny anywhere anticipated. From Winthrop’s opening sentence until the “application of this discourse to the present design,” nine pages from the end, the Model’s theme is the right ordering of social and economic relationships. Eager to get on to the Puritans’ sense of their world-historical task, modern editors routinely cut out the first three-quarters of the Model in their abridgments, as if the text had arrived at its proper destination only after an extraordinary digression on inequality, charity, and love.
But Winthrop was not an indirect writer. He wrote for occasions: to lay out with care his reasons for joining the New England venture in the summer of 1629, for example, or to refute the contentions of the religious dissenters who so profoundly shook the political and social unity of the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1636–37.1 His celebrated speech to the General Court on the true bounds of liberty and authority went straight to its point: rulers might be chosen by the people but their authority had “the image of God eminently stamped upon it.”2 The rest was an elaboration of that opening premise. If mission and destiny were the key themes of the Model, why the long detour to get to the heart of the matter?
The answer lies not in the Model but in the preconceptions with which we have surrounded it in modern times. Too sure of the providentialist section as the essential motif and rhetorical climax of the text, we have plucked out only one of the core themes it carried. There was a second text within “A Model of Christian Charity,” as close to Winthrop’s heart and intentions as the covenant idea. Its controlling theme was not mission or pride. Its theme was love. Its journey was not across space but across social relations.
There was nothing hidden about Winthrop’s “second” text. “Christian Charitie / A Modell hereof” the seventeenth-century copyist headed the first page in a bold and clear hand. We know from Henry Jessey’s request for a copy of the Massachusetts colony’s “Model of Charity” in 1635 that the title was part of the original text, not a later addition.3 To take the Model seriously, we must refocus our attention from an “America” to come to something more immediately at hand: the idea and practice of charity in a society where some were rich in power, dignity, and wealth and others were poor.
The term “model” in Winthrop’s text held more than one meaning in the seventeenth century. A model might be a smaller-scale embodiment of a thing, in the way that an architect’s model was a miniature of a building, or a child the model of its father. A model might be an especially perfect example to be imitated, in the way that an especially well-made contrivance might forge the standard for later designs. Seventeenth-century English print shops published reams of “models” for the better ordering of church government, poor relief, customs collection, governments, and the like. Oliver Cromwell’s “New Modelled Army,” organized on a new pattern of professional soldiery, was a particularly prominent linkage of the term with the English Puritans’ zeal for social invention.
But “model” could mean something else: a condensation, the marrow and principle of the thing being outlined. This was John Yates’s meaning of the term in his Modell of Divinitie of 1622 and the meaning behind James Harrington’s “models” of his conception of a radically more egalitarian society.4 Winthrop would use the term “model” in exactly that fashion himself in 1645, noting that he had first tendered his thesis about arbitrary government “in a model” to the colony’s deputies and then later “drew it up more at large” in a written copy afterward.5 In this sense, “Christian Charity / A Model hereof” was a digest—not a mission statement for a colony but a summation of all that Winthrop was sure must lie at the kernel of charity.
In Winthrop’s mind, as his opening sentence made clear, charity was rooted not in human likenesses but in the intractable inequality of persons. The world’s contrasts between rich and poor, between those with power and those in subjection, Winthrop explained in the Model’s opening paragraphs, flowed first from God’s delight in diversity. Secondly, inequality gave God all the more occasions to show his hand, by restraining the greed of those with wealth and moderating the resentments of the poor. But most importantly, inequality insured that “every man might have need of others,” that through acts of charity “they might be all knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection.”
In practice, Winthrop went on to elaborate, charity followed rules. There was a law of justice and a law of mercy; there was a law of nature and a law of the gospel. None of these were easy to fulfill. To follow Winthrop through the Model’s densely packed scriptural quotations is to be led into the most demanding injunctions of the Puritans’ Bible. The laws of debt-forgiveness laid down by Moses, the scolding of the angry Hebrew prophets, and some of the most uncompromisingly antimaterialist lines of Jesus’s parables—“A Model of Christian Charity” drew them all together in a pattern that allowed for little relaxation. What rule shall a man observe in giving to another who stood in need? As much as his prudence and abundance afforded but in extraordinary times far more; as much as he can, even to his own discomfort. What rule must we observe in lending? By way of commerce, as much as one might prudently expect to be repaid, but by the law of mercy, as much as one’s brethren may need, even at the risk that the loans would never return. And in cases of a “community of peril,” all of this “but with [still] more enlargement towards others and less respect towards ourselves and our own right.”
These were familiar sentiments to the biblically literate. For righteousness to return to the people of Israel, they must break every yoke and let the oppressed go free, Isaiah had warned with a prophet’s moral thunder. They must deal out their bread to the hungry. Only when they had done all that, when they had brought the wandering poor into their houses and clothed their nakedness, would finally “thy light break forth as the morning.” Mosaic law had expressed the point more concisely: “If one of thy brethren with thee be poor … thou shalt open thine hand unto him, and shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need.”6 The New Testament writers put the same words in Jesus’s mouth: “From him that would borrow of thee turn not away.” From the letter of Saint John: “He who hath this world’s goods, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?”7
Centuries of biblical gloss and compromise, however, had softened most of the passages toward which Winthrop’s mind ran. Excessive charity might be imprudent. It might risk the well-being of one’s own family; it might not take sufficient heed of the misfortunes one might face in the future. Better than through an extravagant gift, charity’s obligations might be satisfied with a tithe or with a coin in the alms box. Lending might be divided into prudent commerce and the outright grinding of the poor, for staying clear of the sin of usury was no necessary call to lend soft-headedly, to throw money where repayment was at risk. Interrupting his discourse with objections and answers in the dialectic Puritans knew so well, Winthrop acknowledged all of this only to sweep moderation and prudence aside. When practiced according to the law of justice, charity might be corralled in relatively modest bounds. But when practiced according to the law of mercy, the most striking mark of charity, as Winthrop modeled it, lay in its ultimately uncompromising demands.
If the rules of charity were demanding, as the Model outlined them, the “affections” that powered its practice were more demanding still. For charity, the Model went on to make clear, did not run by mere law or the force of its own habits. Just as a clock had a main wheel, a prime mover that set all its hands and gears in common motion, so charity had a power that sustained it. And that was love. In Winthrop’s vocabulary, love was not a private, individual feeling. Love was the “ligament” of the social body. It was the “sensibleness and sympathy of each others conditions [that] will necessarily infuse into each part a native desire and endeavor to strengthen, defend, preserve and comfort the other.” In the central section of the Model, the language of sentiment pours out of Winthrop’s description of the good society, knitted together not only by mutual benefit but by love itself.
Love, Winthrop wrote, was the bond between Jonathan and David within which an injury to one could not be told from an injury to the other. Love was like the mutual nourishment and pleasure of the mouth and the body in which there was no advantage or gain but “a most equal and sweet kind of commerce.” Love was the bond that made a mother recognize herself in her child, or Eve find her being in Adam, so that should they be separated “she is still looking towards the place where she left her beloved. If she hear it groan, she is with it presently. If she find it sad and disconsolate, she sighs and mourns with it.” The bonds of love overcame the awful estrangement that Adam’s disobedience had brought into the world: the propensity to “love and seek himself only.” Love meant the rebirth of the “sociable nature” of the soul.
Here at the inner heart of the Model, before any hint of mission across space was broached, was a description of the first voyage it heralded: not an ocean passage but a passage from self to others. In its course, love would create a new “habit in a soul,” from which would “naturally” flow the power to fulfill even the most demanding rules of charity.
Generations of historians have sought to cushion the force of these passages by suggesting how ordinary and expected they were in their day. “None of this would have sounded exceptional to Winthrop’s audience,” Winthrop’s most closely informed biographer writes. The significance of the Model “lies in its typicality, its commonplace culling together of basic Puritan and early modern beliefs,” a particularly acute, recent study of Puritan sympathy contends.8
But that is not the case. It is true that virtually none of the ideas and phrases, the yearnings and injunctions that Winthrop injected into the Model, were distinctive to him, nor did he mean them to be. That God had ordered the universe so that some would be rich and others in need, “some are in high degree, some in low, some kings and princes, some inferiors and subjects, priests and laymen, masters and servants, fathers and children, husbands and wives, rich and poor,” so that “there be some order among us” (as John Calvin put it) and so that they might have more need of each other, was a commonplace of early modern social thought. So was the need to “tear from our inward parts this most deadly pestilence … of love of self,” as Calvin remonstrated his beleaguered community in Geneva, so that we all “should be embraced in one feeling of love.”9
Practical ventures of peril sparked similar sentiments. Thirty years ago Edmund Morgan pointed out the parallel between Winthrop’s language and a different set of stock injunctions that early modern European expedition commanders often gave their crew and company as they launched into the unknown. Thus Sebastian Cabot instructed his officers in 1553 to “be so knit and accorded in unitie, love, conformity, and obedience in every degree on all sides, that no dissention, variance, or contention may rise or spring betwixt them and the mariners of this companie.”10 Thus Sir Thomas Smith, on the eve of his diplomatic mission to Russia in 1603, urged those who accompanied him to “love and delight in each other,” especially in time of distress.11
Like so many other texts of its time, the Model was a work of recombinations, a sampler of phrases already many times reused. But that did not make it a commonplace document or make its phrases and argument banal. Winthrop was not setting the tone for a short-term venture like Cabot or Smith. Most important, the Model did not rush past the day-to-day practices of charity to focus its audience’s attention on the still more perfect love that was the love of God. That was the expected structure of a religious meditation on love in Winthrop’s time and culture. The ultimate destination of virtually every early modern sermon on charity was faith itself. The great Puritan theologian William Ames, elaborating on the Sermon on the Mount, described the innermost core of charity as “a virtue whereby we love God as the chief good.”12 In Jonathan Edwards’s fourteen sermons in Charity and Its Fruits in 1738, the spiritual linkages of love between God and his human creatures subsumed every worldly act. “If a man possessed the richest kingdom, and should give all, if a wealthy prince should make himself a poor beggar” and, giving all his goods away, clothe himself in rags, but did so without sufficient faith and sincerity, Edwards preached, it would not be charity.13 Without faith, none of this would bring pleasure to God.
In contrast, the Model’s last section does not swirl up to the love of God. It swings back, earthward, to the “work” at hand. The task on which the New England emigrants were setting out—to seek a place of cohabitation and consortship under a due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical—was “extraordinary,” Winthrop warned. It could not succeed by the “usual, ordinary means.” Self-regard would not suffice. “In cases such as this, the care of the public must oversway all private respects.” For even the strongest claims to private property—to our “particular estates”—“cannot subsist in the ruin of the public.” The covenant into which the New Englanders had entered, the covenant that they could only break at the risk of God’s fury, was not separate from the practices and affections of charity. For their extraordinary work to succeed, confidence, even faith, would not be enough. It demanded a social ethic as well.
We must be knit together in this work as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality [i.e., generosity]. We must delight in each other, make others conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.
“A Model of Christian Charity” envisioned not one voyage but two: the first a journey beyond egotism, the second a journey across space. In the last pages of the Model, its two texts merge. The voyage to America and the voyage into mutual sympathy turn out to be one and the same.
Winthrop’s Model was only one of the many statements of intention that English Puritans wrote or circulated in the late 1620s and 1630s. The covenant that the leaders of the New England–bound emigrants forged on the eve of their Atlantic voyage was a covenant to purge the rituals of the English Protestant church of all that they found so noxious and corrupt. Theirs was a mission of escape from the ills and destruction about to overtake England. It was an extravagant act of imagining themselves stepping into the place of God’s first chosen people. It was a commercial venture: the work of an investment company and its shareholders.
There was a codicil, too, to Winthrop’s account of charity, which partially mitigated the Model’s running critique of economic individualism, a concession that cannot be discounted. That the strongest injunctions to charity and love applied “especially” to those within “the household of faith” his biblical quotations left no doubt. Lawyer though he was, Winthrop did not clearly parse out his rules of giving and lending between those concerning the “brethren” of the church and all others. It would not take long, however, for distinctions between insiders and outsiders to intensify as the settlement grew.
But if we read “A Model of Christian Charity” without putting the demands of charity at its inner heart, we miss the assumptions within which all the rest of it was held in place. Much later, a Cold War generation of readers would see the Model as a call to destiny and greatness. Others would read it as mapping a flight to freedom. Those later lives of Winthrop’s Model cannot be dismissed. But the Model of 1630 began with themes of obligation. It ended with obligations.
For in New England, too, some would be rich and some poor, some (like Winthrop himself) high in power and eminence, others lowly, mean, and in subjection. The Puritans never imagined escaping that core condition of humankind. But if we take seriously the task Winthrop outlined in 1630, a central test of the success of the colony was not going to be measured in its global influence. It was going to be worked out not only in the realms of faith and governance but on the grounds of economic practice. It was going to be seen in the ways the New England–bound emigrants would deal with the culture of markets and self-interest that they could not escape bringing with them to their city on a hill.