Word: puritans
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THEY FLED FROM BABYLON, from an England corrupt and doomed, to the beneficent shores of the Promised Land, where they would found their "city upon a hill." Guilty about deserting the cause, the Puritans aboard the Arbella self-righteously sought their justification in the hopeless depravity of their English brethren. If the short-lived blossoming of Babylon--the successful Puritan Revolution--undercut that justification, the dread finality of the Restoration left the New England Congregationalists even more anxious and alone, involving them in a desperate search for a meaning to their "errand into the wilderness...
According to Sacvan Bercovitch in The Puritan Origins of the American Self, they found that meaning in their stubborn and persistent identification of America as the New Jerusalem--a land of the elect that was itself elect, whose history was sacred history, and whose (inevitably successful) struggle for redemption would usher in the Millenium. For Bercovitch's Puritans, New England history and the individual's striving for grace are closely intertwined. Since public and private salvation are symbolically inseparable, history assumes the character of individual sanctification and the would-be saint in turn relies on the redemptive quality of first...
...general cultural approach to Puritan history, Bercovitch writes squarely in the tradition of Perry Miller, for whom "the mind of man is the basic factor in human history." Like Miller and his disciples, Bercovitch is concerned solely with Puritan intellectuals and their literary outpourings. But his originality resides in taking their approach one step further--by asserting the primacy of language over historical fact as the determinant of culture...
...attachment of the Miller-Heimert school to historical fact--as imaged in the writings of Puritan divines--has obliged it to account the Puritan errand at least a partial failure. For these historians, the corruption of the communal vision led inevitably to the separation of individual and communal salvation. Not so for Bercovitch. By shifting his emphasis from historical fact to the language itself, Bercovitch can support the continued coincidence of the two. In The Puritan Origins of the American Self, facts have ceased to matter at all--what counts instead is the distinctive Puritan rhetoric tying the redeemed individual...
...LITERARY KEY to late Puritan ideology, Bercovitch chooses not the jeremiads but Cotton Mather's epic work, the Magnalia Christi Americana--particularly his "Life of John Winthrop." In his "Life," Mather portrays Winthrop as a "Nehemius Americanus," a peculiarly American saviour whose life foreshadows the Second Coming. Mather's ambition, according to Bercovitch, is to be the Winthrop of his generation; writing during the decline of theocracy, Mather, he says, offered himself--in his capacity as a representative American type--as a link between the triumphal era of Winthrop and the millenial future, thus initiating a special mode of defining...