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Cotton Mather and the Meaning of Suffering in the Magnalia Christi Americana
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
When Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana was finally published in London in 1702, the anxious historian set a day of thanksgiving to God, “ for His watchful and gracious Providence over that Work, and for the Harvest of so many Prayers, and Cares, and Tears, and Resignations.” From 1693 to 1697, Mather had labored over the seven books of his immense ecclesiastical history of New England. Readers of the Magnalia have often dismissed the work as unwieldy, pedantic, incomprehensible. As one anonymous critic complained in 1818, it is “ a chaotick mass of history, biography, obsolete creeds, witchcraft, and Indian wars, interspersed with bad puns, and numerous quotations in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, which rise up like so many decayed, hideous stumps to arrest the eye and deform the surface.”
Despite the difficulties presented by the Magnalia, however, American colonial historians have recognized Mather's history as the “ greatest effort in the century to organize the experience of this people.” Cotton Mather was one of the many second- and third-generation ministers who feared that the New England people were declining in piety and descending into moral corruption.
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References
1 Diary of Cotton Mather 1681–1708 (Boston, 1911), p. 445Google Scholar.
2 “Books Relating to America … Magnalia Christi Americana,” North American Review, 6 (1818), 256Google Scholar; quoted in Manierre, William R. II, “Cotton Mather and the Biographical Parallel,” American Quarterly, 13 (1961), 154Google Scholar.
3 Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 33Google Scholar.
4 Perry Miller's assumption, in Colony to Province, that piety actually declined among late seventeenth-century New Englanders has been challenged by Pope, Robert G., in The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton, 1969)Google Scholar, According to Pope, the Half-Way Covenant was evidence not of a decline in piety but of a greater religious scrupulosity. In fact, the second half of the seventeenth century saw a revival of religion and an increase in church membership. Miller also argued that New England did fail in its “errand into the wilderness,” when Cromwell's Puritan Government rejected the New England model and established religious toleration; see Miller, , “Errand into the Wilderness,” in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), pp. 1–15Google Scholar. This view, too, has been challenged, by Middlekauff, Robert, in The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals 1596–1728 (London and New York, 1971), p. 32Google Scholar. As Middlekauff has pointed out, the “errand into the wilderness” was not the avowed mission of the first generation, but a rhetorical device developed by the second generation. Throughout this essay, “declension” refers to Cotton Mather's perception of the growing apostasy and moral degeneracy of the New England people, and not to any actual historical decline from a former state of piety.
5 Miller, , Colony to Province, p. 33Google Scholar. All Magnalia references are to Magnalia Christi Americana; or, the Ecclesiastical History of New-England, from its First Planting in the Year 1620, unto the Year of Our Lord, 1698 (Hartford 1820)Google Scholar. For other discussions of the Magnalia as a jeremiad, see Murdock, Kenneth B., Literature and Theology in Colonial New England (New York, 1963), p. 129Google Scholar; Gay, Peter, A Loss of Mastery (New York 1966), pp. 65–76Google Scholar; Dunn, Richard S., “Seventeenth-Century English Historians of America,” in Smith, James Morton, ed., Seventeenth-century America: Essays in Colonial History (New York, 1959), pp. 217–19Google Scholar. For an excellent discussion of the jeremiad form, see Minter, David, “The Puritan Jeremiad as a Literary Form,” in Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed., The American Puritan Imagination: Essays in Revaluation (London and New York, 1974), pp. 45–55Google Scholar. I am indebted to Minter's view that the Puritan jeremiads embodied the New England design in literary form, by testifying to the perfection of the first-generation ideal, and lamenting their generation's failure to achieve it.
6 Bercovitch, Sacvan, “New England Epic: Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana,” English Literary History, 33 (1966), p. 337CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Bercovitch, , “Cotton Mather,” in Emerson, Everett, ed., Major Writers of Early American Literature (Madison, Wisc., 1972), pp. 93–149Google Scholar.
7 Lowance, Mason I. Jr, “Cotton Mather's Magnalia and the Metaphors of Biblical History,” in Bercovitch, , ed., Typology and Early American Literature (n.p.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), p. 160Google Scholar. Also see Bercovitch, “New England Epic”; Manierre, “Biographical Parallel,” pp. 153–60.
8 For a good summary of the literary discussions of Puritan providential history, and a brilliant analysis of spiritual biography as an expression of Puritan tribalism, see Tichi, Cecelia, “Spiritual Biography and the ‘Lords Remembrancers,’” in Bercovitch, , ed., The American Puritan Imagination, pp. 56–73Google Scholar.
9 I am indebted, however, to the literary historians' work on Mather's use of typology in his redemption history, and to the work of Perry Miller et al. on the jeremiad as a standard literary form.
10 Murdock, Kenneth B., Increase Mather: The Foremost American Puritan (Cambridge, Mass., 1925), p. 339CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Murdock's discussion of the Mathers' eclipse in the 1690s remains the best; see pp. 317–74. See also Miller, , Colony to Province, pp. 173–90, 226–68Google Scholar; Wendell, Barrett, Cotton Mather: The Puritan Priest (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), pp. 124–53Google Scholar.
11 Mather, Cotton, A Companion for Communicants (Boston, 1690)Google Scholar, “Dedication,” quoted in Middlekauff, , The Mathers, p. 197Google Scholar.
12 Larzer Ziff has argued that the Magnalia is the “greatest monument of clerical withdrawal from the political scene into a position of commentary on its eternal implications.” But Ziff, in insisting on Mather's “peculiar unrelatedness to his society” as an alienated intellectual, has failed to see the Magnalia as Mather's attempt to overcome his “unrelated-ness” and assert his own spiritual supremacy within the New England experience. See Ziff, , Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World (New York, 1973), pp. 216–17Google Scholar.
13 Before entering the ministry, Cotton Mather had briefly studied medicine, and throughout the Magnalia he revealed a particular fascination with medical disorders, and with the connection between the sufferings of the body and the piety of the soul.
14 See Haller, William, The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe's Book of Martyrs (New York, 1963)Google Scholar.
15 For a discussion of the uses of Puritan biography during periods of communal crisis and self-doubt, see Murdock, Kenneth B., “Clio in the Wilderness: History and Biography in Puritan New England,” Church History, 24 (1955), 221–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 The churches assembled in the Synod of 1679 to address the problem of New England's declension. The Result of the Synod was an extended jeremiad; see Miller, , Colony to Province, pp. 33–36Google Scholar. Similarly, the General Court of Massachusetts in 1689 issued a list of New England's sins and an exhortation to reformation. Both reform attempts, Mather recorded, were followed by increased national afflictions.
17 In my discussion of the Swarton captivity narrative and Mather's use of the devil in the wilderness, I am indebted to Slotkin, Richard, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, 1973)Google Scholar. Also see Pearce, Roy H., “The ‘Ruines of Mankind’: The Indian and the Puritan Mind,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 13 (1952), 200–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Heimert, Alan, “Puritanism, the Wilderness, and the Frontier,” New England Quarterly, 5 (1953), 361–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carroll, Peter N., Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629–1700 (New York, 1969)Google Scholar.
18 Typology, a method of Biblical exegesis that interpreted many passages in the Old Testament as anticipations of figures and events in the New Testament, was extensively used by Cotton Mather to understand the history of his own time; see Manierre, “Biographical Parallel,” and Lowance, “Metaphors of Biblical History,” pp. 139–60. In identifying New England with Jesus suffering in the wilderness, Mather was drawing, of course, on a New Testament “type” for his seventeenth-century “antitype.”
19 Mather's treatment of these three historical crises is particularly susceptible to Kai Erikson's analysis of the uses of social deviance in Puritan New England, in Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York, 1966)Google Scholar.
20 Peter H. Smith has examined Mather's treatment of the persecution problem as solely a political concern, in “Politics and Sainthood: Biography by Cotton Mather,” William and Mary Quarterly, 20 (1963), 186–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 David Levin has, however, cast some doubt on this picture of Cotton Mather's college days in “The Hazing of Cotton Mather: The Creation of a Biographical Personality,” In Defense of Historical Literature (New York, 1967)Google Scholar.
22 Here Mather was quoting a Quaker named Fisher in an attack on a Dr. Owen; he is probably referring to Samuel Fisher's attack on Owen, John in Rusticus ad Academicos in exercitationibus expostulatoriis, apologeticis quatuor. The Rustick's alarm to the rabies … (London, 1660)Google Scholar.
23 See Bercovitch, “Cotton Mather,” pp. 94–105; Middlekauff, , The Mathers, pp. 255–56Google Scholar; Silverman, Kenneth, Selected Letters of Cotton Mather (Baton Rouge, 1971), pp. ix–xviiGoogle Scholar.
24 For an excellent psychological discussion of Cotton Mather, see Middlekauff, , “The Virtuous Epicure,” in The Mathers, pp. 191–208Google Scholar.
25 Barrett Wendell, in Cotton Mather: The Puritan Priest, examined the priest-like qualities of Mather's religious persona; see especially pp. 303–6.