American Puritanism and the Cognitive Style of Grace by Rachel

American Puritanism and the Cognitive Style of Grace By Rachel Trocchio A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Kathleen Donegan, Chair Professor Elisa Tamarkin Professor David Marno Professor Massimo Mazzotti Spring 2017 American Puritanism and the Cognitive Style of Grace © 2017 Rachel Trocchio 1 Abstract American Puritanism and the Cognitive Style of Grace By Rachel Trocchio Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Kathleen Donegan, Chair The present monograph initiates the lapsed possibility that Puritanism in the New World was an endpoint, rather than an origin, by contextualizing Puritan cognitive and literary styles within a history of the “craft of thought” that stretched from antiquity to the Renaissance. New England divines Thomas Hooker, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards, I argue, applied imagistic, linguistic, and mathematical models for thought in an effort to meet the vexed imperative of moving closer to God in a predestinarian theology that held one’s grace had already been determined. Why acts of thinking should serve to navigate this explicitly Puritan ordeal, I also contend, proceeds from the fact – largely unrecognized by either Puritan studies or cognitive literary studies – that many of the fields we today designate as cognitive sciences were first understood as cognitive arts. Plotting a correspondence between acts of creative thinking and a distinctly Puritan concept of grace, I show that the Puritans were radially more creative than we may have realized, precisely because they forged out of a long and diverse intellectual heritage an art – what I term a ‘cognitive style’ – that mediated between intellection, representation, and belief. Memorial, copious, and infinitary ‘styles of thinking,’ I contend, discern American Puritanism at the juncture of British intellectual history, Anglo-American lived experience, and Calvinist doctrine. When first-generation New England divine Thomas Hooker uses both imagistic and dialectic models for the memory to explain the spiritual potency of recollection, he composes what was known as the doctrine of preparation as a memorial art. To read preparation as this cognitive style is to grasp how the program joined intellection and grace. When Cotton Mather collates ecclesiastical and personal confessions with the conclusions of a 1662 Massachusetts synod, he models copia to insist that the synod’s expansion of church membership was not dangerous innovation but a recombination of orthodox policy. Mather’s use of this style reconceives the Halfway Covenant as a literary rather than socio-political event. And Jonathan Edwards, trying to staunch social ills flowing from revivals in the Connecticut Valley that had become ungovernable, appealed to contradictory accounts of the infinitesimal to reconcile the Calvinist tenets of predestination and conversion. Grounding his responses to the revivals in this mathematical epistemology, Edwards evinces a knowledge of God that was both Enlightened and Awakened, because it took the form of a leap between mystery and sense. Tracing these intellectual movements and the corollary literary modes they imparted across Hooker’s sermon literature, Mather’s ecclesiastical history, and Edwards’ philosophical theology, I show that a Puritan theology of grace comes into view when we attend to the style Puritanism engendered, both of rhetoric, and through rhetoric, of thought. i for Peter, who made it other ways with me ii Table of Contents Introduction: The Profanities 1 1. Thomas Hooker on Memory and Grace 15 2. Mather and the Multitude: The Halfway Covenant as Literary Event 39 3. Endless Things: The Infinitary Techniques of Jonathan Edwards 68 Bibliography 97 iii Acknowledgments Though I am not by nature a betting woman, I would wage that the world is very far from seeing an end to writings on grace, both human and divine. This is a study about the second. The long process of thinking and writing it has been an education in the great gifts of the first. The earliest origin of this project lies in the graduate seminar I took with Kathleen Donegan in 2008, an experience that gave me my field. A 2011 seminar with Elisa Tamarkin on American Revolution and Enlightenment both deepened and textured my relationship with it, and the courses I have been fortunate to teach at Berkeley have sustained it in ways my students could not imagine. At Berkeley I met Ella Mershon, whose hand is always in mine; Shannon Chamberlain, whose wit is second only to her steadfastness; and Jonathan Shelley, whose friendship is fine as his tap dancing – finer, truly. My committee is as brilliant a committee as ever was: Elisa, thank you for the precision of your guidance and insight; David, for helping to keeping this project as near the early modern world as it needed and wanted to be; and Massimo, for your generous perspective. Above all, thank you Kathleen for your inexhaustible mentorship and dear friendship. At critical stages this project benefitted enormously from a New England Regional Consortium Fellowship, which enabled my travel to archives in Boston, and from a Barra Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies, which provided an environment utterly unique in the rigor it demanded, the scholarly relationships it nurtured, and the affections it continues to inspire. My thanks go especially to Kate Viens and Conrad Wright at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the staff at the Congregational Library, Mary Warnement at the Boston Athenæum, and Dan Richter at the McNeil Center. Over the years this project took to complete I was married, my beloved grandmother passed away, I moved from the West coast back to the East, I bought a house, and I became a mother. The constants are dearer than the changes. To my mother I give my most profound thanks for showing and shoring me up with a tenderness mixed with ferocity such as I have never seen. To her mother, my grandmother: even in death you show me what it means to be strong while alive. To my father, I give you back all the little moments of awe I experienced when in the course of writing or reading something I saw just how many of my analytic dispositions are yours. To my stepfather, Larry Kaplan, I thank you for your gentleness and your care, for your glasses of wine, your roast chicken, your always-open house (which is, you remind me, my house, too). Nathan, Bethany, Hannah, and Micah: It is always better with you in it. Mama, thank you for your elegance and your faith, for moving through the world with so much light. Sean, for your constancy; Poco, for your joy; Harley, for your bright white pouf. Sarah, you have been by this work, as you have been by my life, for its every joy and flinching. Thank you for always calling me back to what matters; thank you for being what matters. Lucien, little bird, you are my love-light. Finally, this work is for Peter, my husband, who dives into the wreck with me every day, and makes it beautiful. 1 Introduction The Profanities “Verbal artistry can be a force for mercy.” —Susan Howe, 2009 The Puritans had an exceedingly active concept of profanity. What one did, what one spoke, what one thought were all occasions where perversion might enter. The third category, what one thought, was the most fearsome, because beyond the uglinesses of one’s whole hidden intellectual-affective life – private lusts and petty jealousies, for example – it included harder doubts about the existence of God or his goodness. “Whatsoever men thinke of thoughts,” warns one of the giants of the first generation, “yet they are the very life and sinews of sinne” (Hooker, Preparation 28). This study explores three varieties of struggle with this profanity of mind as it appears in the literature of Thomas Hooker, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards, by attending to the techniques of mental representation – what I call ‘cognitive style’ – that their writing makes manifest. Fuller definition of my term, ‘cognitive style,’ begins by stating that my inquiry has two general points of departure. The first can perhaps best be described as an impatience with recent appraisals of the religious turn in early American studies, in at least one regard, and which we can look to Edwards to introduce.1 “The beginning of the late work of God in this place,” the minister writes in his preface to a sermon series seeking to explain the 1734-35 Connecticut Valley revival, “was so circumstanced that I could not but look upon it as a remarkable testimony of God's approbation of the doctrine of justification by faith alone” (Preface 795). The sermon was published in 1738, adapted from a version Edwards gave at Northampton; the occasion it spoke to – the mass evangelical conversions commonly known as The Great Awakening – had been extinguished several years earlier, after having pitched themselves, by all accounts, further and further into a wildness like delusion; and still here Edwards grounds this “late work” of revival in doctrine. The particular point Edwards has in mind he calls ‘justification,’ as did his predecessors and contemporaries. Today we are apt to sum it under the concept of predestination, though the Westminster Catechism (1647) – one of the three or four “most generally received and authoritative standards of the Reformed Churches” (Systematic Theology 115), one of Edwards’ successor’s, Princeton’s Charles Hodge, expounds – states that justification is more fully: “An act of God’s free grace, wherein He pardoneth all our sins, and accepteth us as righteous in His sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone” (qtd.

Load more