576 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 18 illus., 1 map, appends., notes, index
$100.00 cloth |
The Correspondence of John Cotton Edited by Sargent Bush, Jr. Copyright
(c) 2001 by the University of North Carolina Press. All
rights reserved.
Excerpt from the Introduction
John Cotton now enjoys a well-established prominence in the history of the Puritan movement as a man who provided leadership through his preaching, his books, and his life as a Nonconformist minister. Because Cotton expressed himself in both formal and informal writings as well as in spoken discourse sometimes recorded in notes, he is readily available today as a spokesman for his Puritan contemporaries. His purpose, it must be said, was not to make himself or his colleagues well known. It was, rather, to use his words to carry God's message to his people—to be the tool of his Lord: "It little skilleth what the pen be, of a Goose or Swans quil, or Ravens, yet when God delighteth to use such an instrument … it challengeth from us the more due respect." Indeed, it was a basic principle for him that "in writing a Minister may and doth make use of spirituall gifts requisite in a Prophet or Preacher, to the exercise of his ministery."[1] He took it as a rule governing all of his writing and preaching always to put his writing "instrument" in command of his "spirituall gifts." He did so consistently. He was known for it among his contemporaries. And, in recent years, Cotton has become increasingly known to modern students of the Puritans. It is a rare study of Puritanism in the first half of the seventeenth century that does not include John Cotton.
This has not always been so. Nearly half a century ago Geoffrey Nuttall noted that Cotton had "hardly received from historians of English Nonconformity the attention which is his due."[2] Even then, however, historians of New England Puritanism had begun to focus more attention on Cotton than did the British historians of the seventeenth century that Nuttall had in mind.[3] With the burgeoning of scholarship about the Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in the decades since then, Cotton has become a figure who is now often represented as "typical" of one or another strain of Puritan thought or behavior. After several works centering on Cotton appeared in the 1960s, Richard Etulain saw the need to evaluate the changing interpretations of this one inportant Puritan.[4] The variety of emphases historians have given to Cotton's thought and career, however, bespeaks the complexity with which the entire Puritan movement is now understood. Just as we now recognize that there was, not one typical "Puritan" or "Puritanism," but various shadings of opinion and practice within the larger community made up of several generations of Puritans, so there are a variety of ways to see this one Puritan leader. Even though his centrality to the Puritan movement is not in doubt, he nevertheless eludes simple categorization. Thus thirty years after Nuttall noted Cotton's relative neglect, David D. Hall still observed that, for all of the many recent studies, "the career of John Cotton remains enigmatic."[5]
Certainly the ideas Cotton dealt with in his writings often involved fine and subtle distinctions, not always transparent to the modern reader. One of his major preoccupations was with church organization. Like most other emigrating Puritans, he came to oppose the English episcopacy on the grounds that it was not authorized by scriptural example. At the same time, he opposed formal separation from the English Church. He understood the Puritan movement as a reform movement aiming to improve and purify the church. Though he could not have foreseen it at the outset of his career, his strong beliefs made him a leader in New England's establishment of a church system valuing congregational autonomy—what became known as the New England Way. He is, in fact, credited with giving congregationalism its name and, in his several writings on the subject, with helping to define the new polity.[6]
Cotton also developed a theory of personal religious experience that stressed the relative passivity of the believer and the activity of the Holy Spirit in the experience of spiritual regeneration, an approach that encouraged a different psychological dynamic from that assumed by many of his peers. This has resulted in Cotton's often being presented in sharp contrast with "preparationist" preachers such as Thomas Hooker, Peter Bulkeley, and Thomas Shepard, who urged the importance of the individual's spiritual activity in the early, "preparatory" stages of belief, whereas, in Cotton's schema, "for our first union [with Christ], there are no steps unto the Altar."[7] One modern remapping of Puritanism's subdivisions connects these tendencies to a larger network of like-minded Puritans, presenting him as the chief New England exemplar of a "Spiritual Brotherhood" stemming from the preaching and teaching of Richard Sibbes and John Preston, whose emphasis on God's benevolence and on the believer's passivity in the process of conversion, among other identifying traits of the group, Cotton carried forward.[8] Another study stresses contrasting qualities in Cotton's makeup, showing that, while he was "recognized as the leading intellectual in the colony," a "charismatic" preacher and church politician, "for all of his theoretical brilliance and personal charm, in the 1630s John Cotton was a decidedly dangerous man" for his ability and inclination to alter established religious practices.[9]
His role as representative Puritan has been imagined in other ways as well. He is typically cited as one of the leading preachers of his day, both in England and New England, even while his style is contrasted to that of such contemporaries as Hooker.[10] He has been put forth as a representative Puritan of the plain style of preaching and writing.[11] His use of the tradition of typology in his biblical exegesis has also given him prominence in the scholarly literature exploring that popular system for understanding the symmetry between the Old and New Testaments.[12] He is also the first minister known to have preached a millennial theme from a New England pulpit, and his millennialism has been much discussed.[13] His central entanglement in the Antinomian controversy in New England (1636-1638) is for some scholars the single defining event for Cotton and his fellow New England Puritans, sometimes revealing him as a supporter of a patriarchal power system, sometimes as a self-interested equivocator, sometimes as a diplomatic compromiser.[14] At least one study singles out the issue of the Puritans' violence, both physical and rhetorical—not only against the Pequot Indians and white women but also against Roman Catholics—as a defining issue for his generation of Puritans. Again, Cotton is Exhibit A, especially in his late apocalyptic writings in which the anti-Catholic message is pronounced.[15]
His theology has been identified as focusing, like that of the apostle Paul, on the centrality of Christ in the individual's covenant relationship with God, distinguishing Cotton—in degree rather than in essence—from many of his contemporaries. In the view of one important reading, he is a more likely candidate for the title "the first consistent and authentic Calvinist" than Perry Miller's choice, Jonathan Edwards.[16] His affection for Calvin's thought is colorfully recorded in the memorable passage in Cotton Mather's biography of him:
Cotton's notorious disagreements with Roger Williams, which began soon after Cotton's arrival in Boston, are central to the picture that some present of Cotton. He argued with Williams on two primary issues: Separatism and religious toleration. One-issue readings of Cotton sometimes stress his conservative thinking on the issue of religious freedom and on the question of how much diversity of thought on religious matters is healthy for a society, usually contrasting him unfavorably to Williams.[18] This is a particularly interesting and complex matter, so that, while it is true that Cotton believed heretics did not belong in a godly society, he was not opposed to tolerating some variety of approaches to religion, as he explained in a letter to Sir Richard Saltonstall (Cotton to Saltonstall, [1652]). Likewise, while he is on record—and often quoted—as opposing democracy as a basis for civil government, his was also the voice that said no to the conditions for settlement in New England put forward by the prominent members of the English gentry Lord Brooke and Lord Saye and Sele, who would have attached a hereditary right to officeholding in the colonies by such gentlemen as themselves.[19] Intolerant of certain opinions while not against toleration, opposed to democracy while also against the establishment of an aristocracy in New England—such seemingly discordant ideas indicate the care and patience with which one needs to approach Cotton and his thought.
Two scholars in the twentieth century published studies focused entirely on Cotton's life and ideas.[20] Larzer Ziff's Career of John Cotton: Puritanism and the American Experience (1962) examines Cotton's professional life and remains the fullest scholarly account. He stresses the need to understand Cotton in his historical milieu, since his subject is otherwise more or less ungraspable to the modern sensibility, even rather "medieval." Much valuable work on the Puritans—some of it by Ziff himself—has been done since 1962, so the Puritans' apparent remoteness is not such a problem as it once seemed. But Ziff's point about the importance of seeing Cotton in his own context remains crucial. Ziff's picture of Cotton recounts his successful jousts with bishops and hostile local voices in Lincolnshire, where his Puritanism was contested, as well as his emigration to Massachusetts Bay and survival of a controversy there in which he was the object of immediate and harsh criticism by some of his peers and parishioners. He describes Cotton's later years as a time of continuing to distinguish between his own and his colleagues' views on grace, while asserting his authority in the area of civil law, to some extent controlling the outcome of the nervous struggle between democracy and autocracy in Massachusetts Bay. For Ziff, Cotton's ability not only to survive but to earn the lasting respect of his contemporaries in England and New England in the midst of these difficulties characterized the man. Cotton appears as an artful compromiser and a carefully diplomatic rhetorician. He was "a mild and scholarly man" whose "habit of mind was cautious observation and hesitancy before decision," a man of a "conservative frame of mind."[21] He was also, as Ziff recognizes, beset by troubles, so that his skills as a negotiator willing to take the time to untangle things in the interest of an outcome that might restore the community to the principles of love and communion, as urged by Governor John Winthrop in his famous sermon, "A Modell of Christian Charity," were invaluable to Cotton and to the Puritan movement. Yet he might also have been a bit too diffident, a little too ready to blow with the wind. Ziff's Cotton is a man able to negotiate the rocky shoals of both secular and ecclesiastical opinion—a politician, a survivor.
Everett Emerson's study, John Cotton (1965, revised in 1990), also emphasizes the importance of Cotton's "intellectual milieu, with such concerns as his interest in biblical prophecy, millennialism, and spirituality." While Emerson also affirms Cotton's "conservatism," he finds it linked dynamically with idealism, which in Cotton's best writings sounds a note of intellectual clarity and authority, even manifesting a "daring" quality.[22] This coexistence of conservatism and daring in his makeup again suggests the complexity in Cotton that makes him both fascinating and elusive.
In all of this, perhaps there is further corroboration of David Hall's sense that the disagreements about him in modern scholarship lead to the conclusion that Cotton remains an enigma. As his correspondence makes clear, he was, for all of his individuality, central to the movement that was driving him but that he was also helping to guide. His correspondence allows us to see him at the heart of a complex religious, social, and cultural reform movement in which he was a leader. He helped design, construct, and defend a radically new church as well as a civil order based on both English and divine law. The New England community was established on the Puritan principles of which Cotton was a primary spokesman. In England he was viewed as downright dangerous, whereas in New England he was consulted by magistrates and governors; his opinion, as John Davenport once said, was law.
The many ways in which scholars have seen Cotton are all supportable in at least some of the letters, which in their random survival tend to cut across the spectrum of his professional interests and opinions. He was an outstanding student and scholar, a preacher who could be powerfully eloquent, and a teacher whose rational objectivity could bring clarity to complex matters. But, when pressed on a sticky point, he could also be frustratingly opaque.[23] This is not the characteristic Cotton, but it is a trait that appears as both cause and effect of his troubles in the dispute that raged for two years in New England in 1636-1638. Yet opaqueness is not typical for Cotton. His letters confirm that he was, perhaps above all, a teacher—the title he was given in the colonial Boston church could not have been more appropriate.[24] In some degree these paradoxical qualities are themselves the result of the complicated times in which Cotton lived. Ziff, Emerson, and others are right to contend that he is not a figure who can be understood apart from those times. What we can now see more clearly is the extent to which epistolary communication served him and his correspondents as an important means for negotiating those times and for exercising his prophetic "instrument" in them.
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