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Two Schools of Desire: Nature and Marriage in Seventeenth-Century Puritanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Belden C. Lane
Belden C. Lane
Affiliation:
Belden C. Lane is Hotfelder Professor of the Humanities in the department of theological studies at Saint Louis University.
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Extract

In Milton's description of the marriage of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, the entire Garden of Eden is seen to participate in the celebration of their union. Spousal and nature imagery are woven together, beauty and desire joined in the mystery of Adam's amazement at this gift of his “other self” newly received from God's hand. Says Adam of his wife,

To the nuptial bower

I led her blushing like the morn: all heaven,

And happy constellations on that hour

Shed their selectest influence; the earth

Gave sign of gratulation, and each hill;

Joyous the birds; fresh gales and gentle airs

Whispered it to the woods, and from their wings

Flung rose, flung odours from the spicy shrub,

Disporting, till the amorous bird of night

Sung spousal, and bid haste the evening star

On his hill top, to light the bridal lamp.

Joyous birds, whispering breezes, welcoming stars—they all share in the couple's holy delight in each other and in God.

Type
Biblical Interpretation and the Construction of Christian Sexualities
Information
Church History , Volume 69 , Issue 2 , June 2000 , pp. 372 - 402
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2000

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References

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36. Luis, Juan (Johannes Ludovicus) Vives, The Instruction of a Christian Woman (London, 1557), D4. Juan Vives (1492–1540) was a Spanish Catholic humanist praised by Erasmus for his commentary on Augustine's City of God. He was made a fellow of Corpus Christi College at Oxford, lecturing there in the 1520s.Google Scholar

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42. In James Ussher's analysis of the fourth commandment, he asked, “Why is there mention of allowing rest to the beasts?” His answer: “First, that we may shew mercy, even to the beast. Prov. 12:10. Secondly, to represent after a sort of everlasting Sabbath, wherin all creatures shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption. Rom. 8:20, 21.” A Body of Divinitie, or the Summe and Substance of Christian Religion (London: Thomas Downes and Geo. Badger, 1653), 248.Google Scholar

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45. Benjamin Whichcote (1609–83) was himself a graduate of Emmanuel College, later serving as provost of King's College, Cambridge. Other Cambridge Platonists included prominent figures like Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, and John Smith, all of Puritan background. See Howe, Daniel W., “The Cambridge Platonists of Old England and the Cambridge Platonists of New England,” Church History 57 (1988): 470–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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50. Baxter, , Everlasting Rest, 40. “Knowledge of itself is very desirable,” he added, meaning that its energy and authenticity springs from the affections.Google Scholar

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54. Cotton, John, A Brief Exposition with Practical Observations upon the Whole Book of Canticles (London: T. R. and E. M, 1655), 3. John Cotton (1584–1652) was another Puritan divine from Trinity College, Cambridge, who served as minister in Boston, England, before immigrating to Boston, Massachusetts in 1633.Google Scholar

55. Bailey, John, Man's Chief End to Glorifie God; or Some Brief Sermon-notes on 1 Cor. 10:21 (Boston: Samuel Green, 1689), 148.Google ScholarJohn Bailey (1643–97) was from Blackburn, Lancashire, where he had been ordained a Congregationalist minister in 1670. Subsequently imprisoned for his nonconformity, he moved to Ireland and then on to New England in 1683, serving churches in Boston and Watertown.Google Scholar

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57. Sibbes, Richard, A Breathing After God, or A Christians Desire of Gods Presence (London: John Dawson, 1639), reprinted in Works of Richard Sibbes, 2: 233.Google Scholar

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59. James Turner Johnson discusses “The Covenant Idea and the Puritan Doctrine of Marriage” in the first chapter of his A Society Ordained by God: English Puritan Marriage Doctrine in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century (Nashville: Abingdon, 1970), 19–49.Google Scholar

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63. Kolodny, Annette, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).Google ScholarSee also her book, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).Google Scholar

64. Morton, Thomas, New English Canaan (London: Charles Green, 1632), published in Tracts and Other Papers, ed. Force, Peter (Washington: P. Force, 1836–1846), 2: 10. Morton was not a Puritan. Indeed, his work heaped ridicule on the New England colonists.Google Scholar

65. Cecelia Tichi shows, for example, how early New England Puritans justified their “right” to the land around Massachusetts Bay because of their ability to “use” it well, making a visible impress on the natural landscape. The Puritan “legitimates his claim to America by manifestly improving it.” Hence, John Winthrop could say: “we deny that the Indians heere can have any title to more lands then they can improve.… God gave the earth to be subdued, ergo a man can have no more land than he can subdue.” See Tichi, , New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 9–10.Google Scholar

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69. Marital and horticultural images were regularly combined in Puritan spiritual writing, especially in connection with the rhetoric of the garden in the Song of Songs. Edward Taylor spoke of

Christ's Curious Garden fenced in

With Solid Walls of Discipline

Well wed, and watered, and made full trim.

In language such as this the “wedding of the land” became intimately joined to the physical and spiritual union of husbands and wives. See Taylor's, poem, “The Soule Seeking Church-Fellowship,” from Gods Determinations, in The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Stanford, Donald S. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 454.Google Scholar

70. Hooker, Thomas, The Application of Redemption (London: P. Cole, 1659), 137.Google ScholarSee Morgan, Edmund S., The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 61–62.Google ScholarThomas Hooker (1586–1647) had been educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He emigrated to Boston in 1633, thereafter moving to the Connecticut valley where Hartford was founded in 1636. His Survey of the Sum of Church Discipline (1648) helped to define the character of American Congregationalism.Google Scholar

71. Porterfield, , Feminine Spirituality, 49. Cf. Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Family, 29–64.Google Scholar

72. Unfortunately, English and American expressions of Puritanism are seldom considered together. This essay is an effort to show how the common theme of desire persists in similar ways on both sides of the Atlantic. For studies of Puritan religious poetry, see Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979);Google Scholarand Martz, Louis L., The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969).Google Scholar

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74. Baxter, , The Christian Directory, 353–54.Google Scholar

75. Baxter's own teaching on marriage went beyond the traditional order given for reasons of marriage, which included procreation, avoidance of lust, and companionship (if listed at all). He instead gave prominence to the last, urging primacy of mutual help over procreation. See Johnson, James T., “English Puritan Thought on the Ends of Marriage,” Church History 38 (1969): 434.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

76. See Taylor's, poem “Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children,” in Early New England Meditative Poetry: Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, ed. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E. (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 133. Edward Taylor (1644?–1729) was an English-born minister and physician who lived in Boston and later Westfield, Massachusetts. His poetry, much of it written as communion meditations, shows the sensual imagery and deep devotion characteristic of the best of Puritan spirituality.Google Scholar

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79. Meditation 120, Second Series, on Song 5:14, “His Cheeks Are as a Bed of Spices,” in Early New England Meditative Poetry, 258.Google Scholar

80. Meditation 23, First Series, on Song 4:8, “My Spouse,” in Early New England Meditative Poetry, 190–91.Google Scholar

81. Elizabeth Singer (1674–1737) was already a published poet by the time she married Thomas Rowe, another poet, in 1710. They were only married a few years before his death by consumption in 1715. For the rest of her life she lived as a recluse at her family's home in the town of Frome in Somerset. The Puritan hymn writer Isaac Watts published her Devout Exercises of the Heart after her death in 1737.Google Scholar

82. Farley, Wendy, Eros for the Other: Retaining Truth in a Pluralistic World (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 69.Google Scholar

83. Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Lingis, Alphonso (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 33.Google ScholarLevinas (1906–95) was born in Lithuania, but lived most of his life in France, teaching philosophy at the University of Poitiers. He wrote his dissertation at Strasbourg on Husserl's phenomenology and was also influenced by Heidegger. His most important book, Totalité et infini, was originally published in 1961.Google Scholar

84. Levinas, , Totality and Infinity, 34.Google Scholar

85. Gregory of Nyssa had said, “This truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see him. But one must always, by looking at what he can see, rekindle his desire to see more.” The Life of Moses 2.239, trans. Malherbe, Abraham J. and Ferguson, Everett (N.Y.: Paulist, 1978), 116.Google ScholarIn a similar way, Levinas suggests that there is a certain satisfaction, even joy, in recognizing that eros for the Other can never be satisfied. “The desire that animates it is reborn in its satisfaction, fed somehow by what is not yet, bringing us back to the virginity, forever inviolate, of the feminine.” Totality and Infinity, 258.Google Scholar

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88. Rowe, , Devout Exercises, 16.Google Scholar

89. Rowe, , Devout Exercises, 72, 96–97.Google Scholar

90. Rowe, , Devout Exercises, 76.Google Scholar

91. Bradstreet, Anne, “Another (Letter to her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment),” in The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Hensley, Jeannine (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 229.Google ScholarAnne Dudley Bradstreet (1612?–72) came to Massachusetts Bay with her new husband Simon on board the Arbella with John Winthrop in 1630. They settled eventually in Andover, where, as a writer of public and private poetic works, she was best known for her “Contemplations” and other poems.Google Scholar

92. Bradstreet, Anne, “A Letter to her Husband, Absent upon Publick Employment,” in Early New England Meditative Poetry, 68.Google ScholarBradstreet's marriage poems to her husband were emblematic of her relationship to Christ her bridegroom, as Kimberly Cole Winebrenner argues in “Bradstreet's Emblematic Marriage,” Studies in Puritan American Spirituality 4 (1993): 45–70.Google Scholar

93. On Puritan psychology and the dynamics of spiritual growth, see Cohen, Charles Lloyd, God's Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986);Google ScholarLeverenz, David, The Language of Puritan Feeling: An Exploration in Literature, Psychology, and Social History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980);Google Scholarand Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

94. Winship, Michael, “Behold the Bridegroom Cometh!” 172. David Leverenz offers a psychoanalytical study of male Puritan experience in his book The Language of Puritan Feeling, 105–6. Puritan men, he says, “dreamed of being changed into women and babies and of finding in the Great Father a mothering protector.”Google Scholar

95. Shepard, Thomas, diary entry for 5 May 1641, in God's Plot: Puritan Spirituality in Thomas Shepard's Cambridge, ed. McGiffert, Michael (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 92.Google Scholar

96. See Greven, Philip, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1977), 126;Google Scholarand Schweitzer, Ivy, The Work of Self-Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 26. In Joseph Bean's case, the struggle to deal with his own homosexual tendencies seemed to underlay the language and imagery to which he was drawn.Google Scholar

97. Porterfield, , Feminine Spirituality, 27.Google Scholar

98. Porterfield, , Female Piety, 14.Google Scholar

99. This shift in gendered identity even played itself out in the social experience of certain Puritan men. John Milton, as a student at Christ's College, Cambridge, was known as “the Lady of Christ's” because of his elegant appearance and his sensitivities in tastes and morals. The curious phenomenon of “men becoming women” in Puritan piety poses an interesting counterpoint to the pattern more common in Christian history of “women becoming men.” The Gospel of Thomas, for instance, was an early Gnostic Christian text that spoke of women making themselves male in order to enter the kingdom of heaven (Saying 114).Google Scholar

100. Rous, , Mystical Marriage, 688, 690.Google Scholar

101. Quoted in Mather, Cotton, Magnalia Christi Americana (Hartford: Silas Andrus, 1820), 1.3: 237.Google Scholar

102. Shepard, , God's Plot, 70–71.Google Scholar

103. Commenting on the breasts of the bride in Song 4:5, Cotton said: “Brests are the parts and vessels that give milk to the babes of the Church, which resemble the Ministers of this Church of the Jews.” A Brief Exposition … upon the whole Book of Canticles, 198.Google Scholar

104. Cotton, , Brief Exposition, 3–4, 83.Google Scholar

105. Meditation 23, First Series, on Song 4:8, “My Spouse,” in Early New England Meditative Poetry, 191.Google Scholar

106. Schweitzer, , The Work of Self-Representation, 87.Google Scholar

107. This image is from Thomas Hooker's The Soules Exaltation (London, 1638), 30–31.Google Scholar

108. Knight, Janice, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 72–87.Google Scholar

109. Caryl, An Exposition upon … the Book of Job, 206, 211. Like Augustine and Calvin before him, he emphasized the smallest animals as often the most effective teachers. See Huff's, Peter articles, “From Dragons to Worms: Animals and the Subversion of Hierarchy in Augustine's Theology,” Melita Theologica 43 (1992): 39–40;Google Scholarand “Calvin and the Beasts: Animals in John Calvin's Theological Discourse,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 42 (1999): 67–75.Google Scholar

110. Flavell, , Husbandry Spiritualized, “Epistle Dedicatory,” 2–3.Google Scholar

111. Flavell, , Husbandry Spiritualized, “Epistle Dedicatory,” 2–3.Google Scholar

112. Austen, Spirituall Use, 4. Flavell urged that “irrational and inanimate, as well as rational creatures have a Language; and though not by Articulate speech, yet in a Metaphorical sense, they preach unto man the Wisdom, Power, and Goodness of God.” Husbandry Spiritualized, “Epistle Dedicatory,”Google Scholar

113. Homes, Nathanael, The Resurrection-Revealed Raised Above Doubts and Difficulties (London: printed for the author, 1661), 244.Google ScholarQuoted in Thomas, Keith, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 127, 179.Google ScholarReflecting typically Puritan interests, Nathanael Homes (1599–1678) published a work on the singing of metrical psalms, an essay concerning the Sabbath, and a commentary on the whole Song of Songs (London, 1652) in which he wrote of the “ravishing love raptures between Christ and his church.”Google Scholar

114. As Anne Bradstreet wrote in the ninth stanza of her “Contemplations”:

I heard the merry grasshopper then sing.

The black-clad cricket bear a second part;

They kept one tune and played on the same string,

Seeming to glory in their little art.

Shall creatures abject thus their voices raise

And in their kind resound their Maker's praise,

Whilst I, as mute, can warble forth no higher lays? (Works of Anne Bradstreet, 207).

115. Caryl, , Exposition upon … the Book of Job, 207.Google Scholar The seventeenth-century Anglo-Catholic bishop Godfrey Goodman similarly argued that animals and humans are able to provide tongues for each other in giving glory to God: “Our praise becomes theirs; and their praise becomes ours.” “There is not only a communion of saints,” he adds, “but also a communion of Creatures, which joyne together in one narurall service of God.” See Goodman, Godfrey, The Creatures Praysing God: or The Religion of Dumbe Creatures (London: Felik Kingston, 1622), 21.Google Scholar

116. This Puritan identification with creatures remained largely emblematic and anthropocentric. When Thomas Taylor urged his readers to “put thy selfe in mind to become a tree,” he meant a “tree of righteousness, the planting of the Lord.” Hence, he explained, “Thou seest the Tree stand firme upon his rootes against windes and tempests: see thou be firmely rooted on Christ, lest the blast of persecution shake thee.” Meditations from the Creatures, 93–94.Google Scholar

117. Taylor, Edward, Meditation 37, First Series, on 1 Cor. 3:23, “You are Christ's,” in Early New England Meditative Poetry, 211.Google Scholar

118. Flavell, , Husbandry Spiritualized, 12.Google Scholar

119. Thomas, , Man and the Natural World, 189.Google ScholarSpeaking of his own experience with Puritan farmers, Joseph Caryl remarked, “If at any time a beast be sick, what care is taken to recover and heal them: You will be sure they shall want nothing that is necessary for them; yea, many will chuse rather to want themselves, than suffer their Horses so to do.” Husbandry Spiritualized, 200. By contrast, Carolyn Merchant reflects also on the “colonial denigration of animals” in her book Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 62–65.Google Scholar

120. Shepard, Thomas, The Parable of the Ten Virgins Opened and Applied (Charlestown, Mass.: Jonathan Mitchell, 1695), 22–25.Google ScholarEdward Pearse similarly wrote of Christ sweetly wooing sinners to himself in his sermon The Best Match: or the Souls Espousal to Christ (London: Jonathan Robinson, 1673), 134. Edward Pearse (1633–74) was a nonconformist divine and Oxford graduate who was preacher at St. Margaret's, Westminster.Google Scholar

121. Michael Winship notes that “marital imagery largely disappeared from discourse after the tarn of the eighteenth century”; “Behold the Bridegroom Cometh!” 173.Google Scholar

122. Watts, Isaac, preface to Rowe, Devout Exercises, iv.Google Scholar

123. The recent recovery of Edwards's emphasis on desire for God's beauty ranges from important scholarly studies like Delattre's, RolandBeauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968)Google Scholarto popular evangelical applications like John Piper's Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (Sisters, Oreg.: Multnomah Books, 1996).Google ScholarFor a recent reevaluation of Edwards' thought generally, see McClymond, Michael, Encounters with God: An Approach to the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

124. Writing on subsistence farming and ecological concerns from the farm where he lives in Kentucky, Berry speaks continually of desire, covenant, the care of the earth, and the love of his wife Tanya. In his poem, “A Marriage, an Elegy,” he says:

They lived long, and were faithful

to the good in each other.

They suffered as their faith required.

Now their union is consummate

in earth, and the earth

is their communion.

The Country of Marriage (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 18.Google Scholar

125. See Calvin, John, Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, trans. Pringle, William (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1948), 4: 325.Google Scholar