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Vital Nature and Vital Piety: Johann Arndt and the Evangelical Vitalism of Cotton Mather

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2012

Brett Malcolm Grainger
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Abstract

Despite a surfeit of studies recognizing Cotton Mather's support for a range of alchemical and occult practices, historians have yet to integrate these occult activities with Mather's religious and scientific thought as a whole. I argue that we can bring clarity to Mather's engagement with the occult by refracting it through his reverence for Lutheran Pietist Johann Arndt, whose writings, especially Vier bucher vom wahren Christentum (Four Books of True Christianity), offer a key to Mather's employment of hermetic materials in his major works of natural philosophy. Through analysis of The Christian Philosopher and The Angel of Bethesda, as well as Mather's private writings, I suggest that Mather's cosmology was vitalistic in ways not previously acknowledged by historians. This view of creation as dynamic, enchanted, and marked by divine signatures—evidenced most clearly in Mather's concept of the nishmath-chajim—helped Mather reconcile the new science, Puritan covenant theology, and alchemical traditions descending from Paracelsus. By positing a divine, dynamic presence in nature, Mather retained an orthodox view of God as sovereign and transcendent while intimately engaged in a process of cosmic redemption, slowly transmuting the base matter of a fallen creation into a new heaven and new earth.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 81 , Issue 4 , December 2012 , pp. 852 - 872
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2012

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References

1 Lovelace, Richard, The American Pietism of Cotton Mather: Origins of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Christian University Press, 1979), 2Google Scholar.

2 Recent debates over the state of the secular thesis have produced an extensive literature. For an introduction to debates, see Taylor, Charles, The Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; see also Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

3 See Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 213–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For examples from the history of medicine, see Breen, Louise A., “Cotton Mather, the ‘Angelical Ministry,’ and Inoculation,” Journal of the History of Medicine 46 (July 1991), 333–57Google ScholarPubMed; Watson, Patricia Ann, The Angelical Conjunction: The Preacher-Physicians of Colonial New England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Warner, Margaret Humphreys, “Vindicating the Minister's Medical Role: Cotton Mather's Concept of the Nishmath-Chajim and the Spiritualization of Medicine,” Journal of the History of Medicine 36 (July 1981), 278–95Google ScholarPubMed.

5 Woodward, Walter W., Prospero's America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606–1676 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 207Google Scholar.

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7 Ward, W. R., Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, 1670–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Until recently, vitalism has interested mainly historians of Renaissance and early Enlightenment science. See Reill, Peter Hanns, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Rogers, John, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996)Google Scholar. The present essay attempts to bring this category to bear upon the history of American religion.

8 Boyd Hilton makes a related point when he states that evangelical “vital religion” in the early nineteenth century was “the counterpart of vitalism in physiology, to catastrophism in geology, and to mechanistic dualism in natural philosophy generally.” See Hilton, Boyd, The Age of Atonement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 300Google Scholar.

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11 Woodward, 208. See also Winship, Michael P., “Cotton Mather, Astrologer,” New England Quarterly, LII (1990), 308–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levin, David, “Giants in the Earth: Science and the Occult in Cotton Mather's Letters to the Royal Society,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., LV (1988), 751–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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13 “The broad influence of Arndt upon English and American Protestantism,” Benz wrote, “should receive special attention.” See Benz, Ernst, “Ecumenical Relations between Boston Puritanism and German Pietism: Cotton Mather and August Hermann Francke,” Harvard Theological Review 54, no. 3 (July 1961), 161CrossRefGoogle Scholar; See also Benz, Ernst, “Pietist and Puritan Sources of Early Protestant World Missions (Cotton Mather and A. H. Francke),” Church History 20, no. 2 (June 1951), 28–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Cotton Mather, The Diary of Cotton Mather II, ed. Ford, Worthington C., Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Seventh Series VII–VIII (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1912), 23Google Scholar. Of course, Richard Lovelace, in The American Pietism of Cotton Mather, suggested that we do just this; however, his argument is concerned with showing the congruity between the Pietist and Puritan promotion of evangelical piety; mine is with demonstrating the congruity between Arndtian and Matherian cosmology.

15 Ward, Early Evangelicalism, 9.

16 Wallman, Johannes, “Johann Arndt (1555–1621),” in The Pietist Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Lindberg, Carter (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 21Google Scholar.

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18 Arndt, Johann, Of True Christianity, second ed. (London, 1720), vol. 2, para. I (quoted in Ward, 9)Google Scholar.

19 Recent important studies of Paracelsus include Webster, Charles, Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic, and Mission at the End of Time (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Weeks, Andrew, Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Pagel, Walter, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Karger, 1982)Google Scholar.

20 Ward, 11.

21 Mather's original title for the work was The Christian Virtuoso.

22 Ward, 10.

23 Mather, Diary II, 193.

24 His initial exposure to Arndt's devotional classic came through the 1708 Latin translation, a copy of which remains in the Mather's library. See Woody, Kennerly M., “Bibliographic Notes for Mather's Manuductio Ad Ministerio,” Early American Literature 6.1, Supplement (Spring 1971), 15Google Scholar. A. W. Boehme later sent Mather a copy of his English translation, in two volumes; the first volume was released in 1712, the second in 1714.

25 Mather, Diary II, 335–336. Mather seems to have been reading Arndt's work in Latin, as he was proposing to translate its ideas for his wife.

26 Ibid., 337.

27 Ibid., 341.

28 Indeed, it took until the twenty-first century for Mather's 4,500-page manuscript to find its first publisher. Mohr Siebeck and Baker Academic plan to publish the Biblia in ten volumes, having released the first in 2010. See Mather, Cotton, Biblia Americana, Volume 1: Genesis, ed. Smolinski, Reiner (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2010)Google Scholar.

29 Mather, Diary II, 339–40.

30 Ibid., 348.

31 Ibid.

32 Monaghan, E. Jennifer, “Family Literacy in Early 18th-Century Boston: Cotton Mather and His Children,” Reading Research Quarterly 26, no. 4 (Autumn 1991), 359CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Quoted in Benz, “Ecumenical Relations,” 162.

34 Solberg, “Introduction to Mather,” Christian Philosopher, lxix.

35 Mather, Christian Philosopher, 308.

36 Ibid., l. Solberg has shown that Mather also drew significantly on the works of John Harris (1,263 lines, or eleven-percent of the text), George Cheyne, and Nehemiah Grew (Solberg, lxi–lxii).

37 Ibid, lxiii.

38 Ward, 12.

39 Arndt, Johann, True Christianity, ed. and trans. Erb, Peter (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 217Google Scholar.

40 In recent years, German scholars have energetically debated Arndt's orthodoxy; see Otte, Hans and Schneider, Hans, eds. Frömmigkeit oder Theologie: Johann Arndt und die Vier Bücher vom wahren Christentum (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007)Google Scholar.

41 Arndt, Johann, True Christianity, vol. 2, trans. Boehm, A. W. (London: Joseph Downing, 1714), ivGoogle Scholar.

42 Ibid., iv–v.

43 Mather, Christian Philosopher, 105. Solberg's translation is from the Latin.

44 Ibid., 149.

45 Ward, 10.

46 Mather, Christian Philosopher, 150.

47 See, most notably, Warner, Margaret Humphreys, “Vindicating the Minister's Medical Role: Cotton Mather's Concept of the Nishmath-Chajim and the Spiritualization of Medicine,” Journal of the History of Medicine 36 (July 1981): 278–95Google ScholarPubMed.

48 Mather, Magnalia, 493.

49 See Mintz, Samuel, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Rogers, Matter of Revolution; and Reill, Vitalizing Nature.

50 Warner, 282.

51 Mather, Diary II, 700.

52 Arndt, 213.

53 Ibid., 285.

54 Warner, 278.

55 Ibid.

56 Mather, Christian Philosopher, 313–14.