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Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, New Haven:
yug, 1975

The Vision of History

Christology provided Cotton Mather with a superb rhetoric for biography,
and he made effective use of it both formally and conceptually. His Life of
Winthrop blends the disparate biographical methods of his time and conveys
an imposing image of the hero as man, governor, and saint. The parallel
with Nehemiah expands from civic to moral exemplum and thence to exemplum
fidei; the facts of Winthrop's American career combine in the pattern of
the scriptural microchristus. It is a remarkably coherent synthesis, except
in one respect: it fails to account for the biography as part of a
historical venture. Winthrop's christic identity defines his stature as
another Nehemiah; but this has no apparent bearing on what his American-
ness implies, that he is one of a series of magistrates and divines who
contributed to a particular New World enterprise. Christologically,
"Nehemias" absorbs "Americanus" as a definition of Winthrop. Yet we can
hardly avoid recognizing that it Winthrop's role in history which really
places the biography in context. What unites the Life of Winthrop with the
corporate action of the Magnalia Christi Americana is not, to all
appearances, the exemplariness of Nehemiah, but the idea of the exemplary
American.


Figura

The problem would seem to have a ready solution in exegetical tradition.
For the seventeenth-century Puritan, exemplum fidei denoted a type of
Christ; and what he meant by type pertained equally to biography and to
history. In its original form, typology was a hermeneutical mode connecting
the Old Testament to the New in terms of the life of Jesus. It interpreted
the Israelite saints, individually, and the progress of Israel,
collectively, as a foreshadowing of the gospel revelation. Thus Nehemiah
was a "per-
36
sonal type" of Jesus, and the Israelites' exodus from Babylon a "national
type" of His triumphant agon. With the development of hermeneutics, the
Church Fathers extended typology to postscriptural persons and events.
Sacred history did not end, after all, with the Bible; it became the task
of typology to define the course of the church ("spiritual Israel") and of
the exemplary Christian life. In this view Christ, the "antitype," stood at
the center of history, casting His shadow forward to the end of time as
well as backward across the Old Testament. Every believer was a typus of
figura Chnsti, and the church's peregrination, like that of old Israel, was
at once recapitulative and adumbrative. In temporal terms, the perspective
changed from anticipation to hindsight. But in the eye of eternity, the
Incarnation enclosed everything that preceded and followed it in an
everlasting present. Hence Mather's parallel between Win-throp and
Nehemiah: biographically, the New Englander and the Israelites were
correlative types of Christ; historically, the struggles of the New England
saints at that time, in this place-the deeds Christ was now performing
through them in America-were "chronicled before they happened, in the
figures and types of the ancient story." 1
So understood, typology contributes much the same elements as does
christology to the Life of Winthrop. It emphasizes the imitatio, it
translates secular history, whether of individuals or of communities, into
spiritual biography, and it recalls the tradition of the Saints' Lives.
Patristic hagiography, for instance, resonates with the figuralism of
church liturgy (e.g., the flight from Egypt in the Holy Saturday sacrament
of baptism). Later developments tended to reinforce the method. When after
Constantine the call to martyrdom lost its practical value, writers turned
increasingly to the passion as figura: St. Christopher, they explained, was
not literally crucified, but "we call him a martyr" anyway because, on his
miracle-working way to the heaven, he "carried the cross of Christ
continually in his heart." 2 This tendency grew rapidly after the
Reformation. Typology recommended itself to the Reformers as an ideal
method for regulating spiritualization, since it stressed the literal-
historical (as opposed to a purely allegorical) level of exegesis, and then
proceeded to impose the scriptural pattern upon the self, in accordance
with the concept of exemplum fidei. For these and similar reasons,
typology became a staple of Protestant
37
writings, including even the Character genre. In particular it seems to
have been a family speciality with the Cottons and Mathers, to judge by the
procession of great figural studies, from John Cotton's Exposition of
Canticles (1655) through Samuel Mather's monumental Figures от Types of the
Old Testament (1683), a work almost as impressive in its range of figural
applications as Cotton Mather's unpublished "Biblia Americana" and almost
as detailed in its analysis of types as Increase Mather's Mystery of Christ
Opened and Applyed (1686).
Christology equated the saint with the heroes of scripture; typology merged
the saint's life with scripture history. It taught the believer that the
process by which he fastened to Jesus "was typified"-to recall Hooker's
discourse-"in the passage of the Children of Israel towards the promised
land." "Draw the [whole] Scripture to thine own heart, and to thine
actions," went the standard pulpit injunction. "All the promises of the Old
Testament [are] made, and all accomplished in the New Testament, for the
salvation of thy soule hereafter, and for thy consolation in the present
application of them." The argument behind this emphasis on the present was
simple and comprehensive. Since Christ as antitype encompassed all of
history, there was no reality outside of the human-divine paradigm. To deny
Christ was also to be a type-in the manner of Cain, Judas, or Corah. The
man who never read the scriptures had the Bible without the book, as John
Donne put it: Genesis, Exodus, Job, Nehemiah-"he hath all in his memory,
even to the Revelation." Donne's concept of memory derives from Augustine's
figural Confessions; its meaning for seventeenth-century spiritual
biography and autobiography is made vivid in Thomas Browne's Religio
Medici:

That which is the cause of my election, I hold to be the cause
of my salvation, which was the mercy and beneplacit of God, before I
was, or the foundation of the world. Before Abraham was, I am, is the
saying of Christ, yet is it true in some sense if I say it of my
selfe, for I was not onely before my selfe, but Adam, that is, in the
Idea of God, and the decree of that Synod held from all Eternity. And
in this sense, I say, the world was before the Creation, and at an end
before it had a beginning; and thus was I dead before I was alive;
though my grave be England, my
38
dying place was Paradise; and Eve miscarried of mee before she
conceiv'd of Cain.3

In this context, Winthrop as figura is virtually indistinguishable from
Winthrop as microchristus. Nonetheless, it is important to examine Mather's
figuralism in its own right. To begin with, the use of types is central to
his imagery. When in the deathbed scene he calls Winthrop another David
(citing Acts 13), and alludes to the bereaved children as the tribes of
Israel, he unmistakably associates the twelve tribes with the twelve
apostles, and Winthrop with Jesus, as He was foreshadowed by David (Acts 13
: 22-36). In effect, Mather forges the link between past and present
through Christ's omnipresence as antitype. Or again, when he describes the
governor's Job-like benevolence, he enhances that christic image within a
sort of figural kaleidoscope of good works:

It was oftentimes no small trial unto his faith to think "how a table
for the people should be furnished when they first came into the
wilderness!" [Ps. 78]. And for very many of the people his own good
works were needful, and accordingly employed for the answering of his
faith. Indeed, for a while the governor was the Joseph unto whom the
whole body of the people repaired when their corn failed them. And he
continued relieving of them with his open-handed bounties as long as
he had any stock to do it with; and a lively faith to see the return
of the "bread after many days," and not starve in the days that were
to pass till that return should be seen [Gen. 49, 50], carried him
cheerfully through those expenses.

Winthrop appears here in several guises: as an open-handed, devoted, and
beleaguered public official, as the Good Magistrate, and as a Reformed
Christian. But it is the figura that dominates. Mather announces this, as
it were, in his opening statement, which summarizes Winthrop's actions as a
trial of faith (see Heb. 10,11). It finds ample expression in the
references to David and Joseph which thread his account. In Psalm 78, which
Mather quotes, David denounces the Israelites who during the exodus
blasphemed God, although He preserved them with water from the rock and
manna from heaven. We need not enter into the typological intricacies of
the text (rock/Christ/church, water/baptism/redemp-

39

tion, etc.)-as Mather does in his Psalterium Americanum-in order to grasp
the basic connections: the exodus with Jesus' wilderness temptations; the
manna with His triumph over evil as well as with His feeding of the people;
the ungrateful Israelites with the stiff-necked Pharisees and Sadducees.
The same pattern extends to Joseph, who foreshadowed Christ, Mather notes,
both as provider and, earlier, as God's injured and insulted servant. As
the configuration comes to bear upon the New England magistrate - in his
wilderness, providentially overcoming his trials, providing for his often
ungrateful people - the figura that emerges bespeaks the furthest moral,
spiritual, and eschatological reach of Winthrop as exemplum fidei.

And yet as figura Winthrop remains rooted in history. Since typology, to
repeat, is quintessentially concerned with littera-historia, the same
hermeneutic which raises Winthrop beyond time locates him in time and
place, as "Americanus"; the same technique which broadens our sense of
Nehemiah as archetype deepens our sense of him as precedent, as a
distinctive individual engaged in certain historical events that occurred
some two millennia before the settlement of Massachusetts Bay. This is the
second, larger reason for recognizing Mather's use of typology: it turns
our attention to ordinary, temporal, geographical facts. It is precisely to
underscore Nehemiah's figural significance that Mather refers to him always
from a historical angle. In detailing Winthrop's notions of civic
discipline, he comments that "he thus did the part of a ruler in managing
the public affairs of our American Jerusalem, when there were Tobijahs and
Sanballats enough to vex him," alluding to the Persian and Samarian
officials who opposed Nehemiah. Later, he writes that in his personal
behavior Winthrop "made himself still an exacter parallel unto that
governor of Israel by doing the part of a neighbour among the distressed
people of the new plantation." Finally, Mather's epitaph versifies
Josephus's eulogy to Nehemiah as the glory of his countrymen. Throughout
the biography, he insistently reminds us of Nehemiah's specific
institutional and organizational accomplishments, impresses us with the
Hebrew less in his abstract grandeur than in his political reality, as a
national leader, "bonus ac Justus," whose relevance to the colony abides in
certain social acts. The one line from Josephus that Mather alters, the
last line in the epitaph, states that Winthrop's legacy is the wall

40

of defense he built, the "Novanglorum moenia," substituting "New England"
for the original "Jerusalem."

The substitution attests to Mather's overriding emphasis on history. But
his context, we must remember, is sacred rather than secular history.
Jerusalem, Babylon, and Israel are the landmarks of the scheme of
salvation. So, too, are New England and America, insofar as they represent
(as Mather says they do) ecclesiastical matters and the mighty works of
Christ. In short, the central purpose of his figural technique is to refer
the littera-historia in Winthrop's career, and in the Magnolia at large, to
the history of redemption. The point warrants elaboration because scholars
have misread Mather as a providential historian. Certainly, he believed in
providence; but with all Christians of his time he distinguished sharply
between kinds of providence. The distinctions are conveniently summarized
by one of Winthrop's English contemporaries, John Beadle, in a work
acknowledged to be a characteristic expression of seventeenth-century
Puritanism:

Some acts of God, are acts of common providence, and so he feeds us,
and cloaths us, he doth as much for the creatures; so he feeds the
Ravens. . Some acts of God are acts of speciall priviledge; and thus he
gave Abraham a child in his old age, and made David of a Shepherd a
King. Some acts of God, are acts of pattern; and thus he shewed mercy
to Menasse. .
Some acts of God are acts of wonder: it is a wonder that any soul is
saved.4

God's acts of wonder stand apart from the rest in that they govern the
soul's progress. They constitute providential signs of grace which chart
the believer's embattled course to an otherworldly perfection, thus
equalizing him with every regenerate Israelite against the background
of eternity. All the other forms of providence pertain to history. They
tell us about the self (rather than the soul) in progress - its mundane
needs, its political involvements (Menasseh), its social guises, from
paterfamilias (Abraham) to pater patriae (David). Conceptually, however,
these historical providences divide into mutually opposed outlooks.
Feeding and clothing are affairs of the civitas terrena, encompassing saint
and sinner alike, heathens and "creatures" as well as Christians. They

41

form the substance of providential history. God's acts of mercy and
privilege extend to the elect alone, the subjects of ecclesiastical history
from Abraham through David and Nehemiah to Winthrop. Grounded as these
providences are in prophecy and promise, they form the substance of the
work of redemption. They are figural providences, we might say, as distinct
from secular providences.

The distinction implies a twofold approach to history. As Augustine
conceived it, providential history concerns the political, cultural,
economic, and moral life of individuals, societies, civilizations
-everything, in short, that makes up the story of the City of Man. The
Greeks and Romans had read that story as a series of recurrent actions,
cycles of growth and decline as predictable as they were futile; and
Augustine agreed. He rejected only the pagan notions of the underlying
cause (fate, chance, fortune). Whatever happens, he contended, is
controlled by God, Who leaves "nothing unordained," through particular
providences. Despite their divine source, the meaning of these providences
is always immediate, specific, and temporal. God speaks to us through them
of "the good things of this life and its ills," the blessings and
punishments common to all mankind. Historically interpreted, they provide a
framework for human activity, a running commentary on our earthly
endeavors; and for Augustine, the interpretation invariably confirmed the
nature of our fallen world. God granted the Romans a splendid empire in
reward for their good works; but their virtue, and therefore their
splendor, soon faded. "Prosperity never fails to turn to adversity."5

Of course, historiography did not necessarily entail homiletics. The
providential approach could serve simply to illuminate man's achievements.
Thus the humanists used it to justify their rejection of any theological or
supernatural explanations in historical research. Beginning with the
separation of earthly from sacred affairs, Historie from Heilsgeschichte,
they gradually introduced what we now term historical realism. But the
Reformers retained the Augustinian significatio. All secular events, they
insisted, "beeing captived to the trueth of a foolish world," taught the
immemorial lesson of Ecclesiastes. "God has collected a fine, splendid, and
strong deck of cards," Luther snarled, in a review of the past,
"representing mighty, great men, such as emperors, kings, princes, etc.;
and he defeats the one with the other." The acts of heaven, echoed Ralegh

42

in his History of the World, "giue victorie, courage, and discourage,
raise, and throw downe Kinges, Estates, Cities, and Nations." 6 Through
all its manifestations - in drama, epic, handbooks on government, histories
proper - Renaissance Protestant historiography is shaped by the cyclical
vantlas vanitatum that characterizes Augustine's view of providence.

Augustine himself, however, had little interest in providential history;
primarily, he devoted his thought to the story of the City of God. From
this perspective, he recast the pagan notion of recurrence into that of an
expanding spiral. Christianizing the Old Testament eschatology in terms of
the covenant of grace, he emphasized the developmental scheme which Paul
outlines - in the same passage that defines figura as exemplum (Heb. 10,
11)-as leading "by degrees" from Ararat, Sinai, and Golgotha forever upward
toward the Holy Mount of New Jerusalem. The covenant pertained in this
context not to the individual but to the entire spiritual house of Israel.
The one was seen as analogue to the other, each of them a mirror image of
Christ as antitype. "Israel are often called collectively God's son . . .
and his first-born, as if the whole multitude of them were one person." And
collectively, as the true church, the progress of Israel was as firmly
assured as was the saint's stage-by-stage progress towards heaven. Milton
describes this as "the Race of time / Till time stand fixt" 7 - a sort of
relay race toward eternity, whose participants were essentially identical
(all one in Christ), while temporally they represented ascending steps in
the work of redemption. Although the substance was the same, the manner of
dispensation altered. Thus the exodus out of Babylon was greater than that
out of Egypt, a brighter manifestation of things to come. The image in the
christological mirror gradually wiped out the varieties of self and
circumstance. The image in the mirror of providence revealed the cyclical
pattern which linked all selves and circumstances despite their apparent
variety. The image in the mirror of redemption was dynamic, progressive,
and variegated, reflecting the different stages of the evolution of the
church.

Renaissance Protestants contrasted redemptive and providential history
under many headings: revealed and natural knowledge, holy and temporal
affairs, ecclesiastical and political history. William Ames distinguished
between God's primary and subordi-
43
nate "Gubernation," Bacon between the history of prophecy and the history
of providence. For my purpose, the most convenient terms are those now in
use: soteriology and secular history, where secular history designates the
providential view (not the humanists' a-religious, empirical realism) and
soteriology the mode of identifying the individual, the community, or the
event in question within the scheme of salvation. The dualism, by any name,
confirms-as it were beyond providence-God's overarching, inviolable plan,
"the summum and ultimum of all the divine operations and decrees," as
Jonathan Edwards called it, or in the words of an earlier New Englander,
Samuel Torrey, "the Sum of all Gospel Prophesie . in every Age and
Generation . until all the whole Mystery of God be finished, and Time shall
be no longer." None but the elect were concerned in the happy outcome.
Those among them, like Cotton Mather, who felt called to calculate the
progress of the church, did so figurally, by correlating the prophecies
with contemporary affairs. Their speculations pertained to corporate rather
than personal matters, and as such they were neither moral, primarily, nor
christological, but (in the framework of scriptural or sacred time)
historical. However dismal the repetitive course of human, subordinate
affairs, no matter how ominous the signs of secular time, the elect might
rejoice as members of the communio praedestinarum, in an age closer than
any before to the "utmost Prophetical Period." 8

In that framework Mather places Nehemiah and Winthrop. He invites us to
discriminate between the two rulers according to their chronological
positions in the apocalyptic timetable. In that framework, too, he would
have us understand the providences that guide Winthrop's life. But when we
do so, we find ourselves unavoidably conflating God's acts of wonder with
the events of secular history. As Mather describes them, the common
providences by which Winthrop survives the wilderness, and helps others
survive, are indistinguishable from (he figural providences by which he
becomes governor, defeats his enemies, and brings blessings upon his
children. To extol Winthrop as "Americanus," then, would seem to deny the
very basis both of spiritual biography and of church history. Figural
providences are unique, as Augustine was careful to explain. In personal
terms, they separate saints from sinners: "even in the likeness of the
sufferings, there remains an

44

unlikeness in the sufferers," for "the same violence of affliction proves,
purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked."
Historically, they separate the holy from the secular communities:

it was not only for the sake of recompensing the citizens of Rome that
her empire and glory had been so signally extended, but also that the
citizens of that eternal city, during their pilgrimage here, might
diligently and soberly contemplate these examples, and see what a love
they owe to the supernal country on account of life eternal, if the
terrestrial country was so much beloved by its citizens on account of
human glory.9

The problem with "Americanus" is that it connects Winthrop with a
terrestrial and a supernal country. As the representative American, he
stands at once for citizen and saint, state and church, New England and
ecclesiastical history, res Americana and res Christi. In sum, his
exemplary status yokes together two historiographical modes-one
providential, the other figural-apparently as different from each other as
(in another framework) historia is different from allegoria.


PROVIDENTIA

One way of approaching Mather's effort at synthesis is by contrast with the
colonial classic in providential history, William Bradford's narrative of
Plymouth Plantation. A Separatist on the saint's course to heaven, Bradford
assumes the traditional dichotomy between secular and sacred, and he sees
the plantation itself, accordingly, in terms of common providence. To be
sure, with all Protestants of his time he rejoices in the progress of the
church: the expanding Reformation, the approaching Parousia, and briefly,
during the early 1640s, the Puritan victories in England. But as a
Separatist he expects no more from his own congregation than that it should
hold fast to the principles of the spiritual Israel; and as historian (not
church historian) of Plymouth, he chronicles the fate of a wholly temporal
venture. The Pilgrims have come to America as they had earlier gone to
Holland, in order to worship God in peace. Inevitably, they find
themselves, in America as elsewhere,
45

enmeshed in what Bradford calls "the mutable things of this unstable
world." Indeed, he deliberately uses the New World background to accent
their plight. As he describes it, the country's "weatherbeaten face" and
"savage hue," reminiscent of the "barbarous shores that the Apostles
reached," become an emblem of our fallen state -

sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to
travel [even] to known places, . . . full of wild beasts and wild men.
. . . Neither could they [the immigrants], as it were, go to the top of
Pisgah to view from this wilderness a more goodly country to feed their
hopes; for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the
heavens) they could find little solace or content in respect of any
outward objects.10

This is the landscape of providential history. Somewhere beyond lies the
balm of Gilead; the story itself concerns the beasts and storms of secular
time, and appropriately it is a story of gradual decline. Bradford's style
reflects his subject. As David Levin and others have shown, his
organization is cyclical, his tone melancholy, his vision tentative, alert
for irony and ambiguity. We read of reversals that lead to unhoped-for
success, of successes that pervert the very purpose of colonization.
Throughout, the settlers struggle to make sense of a perplexing variety of
circumstance and character; and all too often the acts of their enemies are
just as bewildering as those of apparent saints, even so exemplary a saint
as the zealous (but sometimes strangely infirm) Robert Cushman. The
patriarch William Brewster is an exception that proves the rule. Bradford
portrays him as another Jacob: not the Jacob of "Nehemias Americanus,"
father of a new Israel, but the Jacob microchristus of spiritual biography,
wandering "from one nation to another . . . through famine, fears, and many
afflictions," until at last, at the age of eighty and weary of this world,
he "died sweetly and rested in the Lord, as infinite others . . . have
done, and still shall do." The Life shines with a sort of lonely,
transcendent glow amid the shadows of contradictory motives, of intertwined
good and evil, which have darkened Plymouth's past and which bode still
bleaker days to come. For if Bradford knew all along that the emigrants'
course was probable at best, he learns a grimmer truth

46

from his experience: "men set their hearts . . . though they daily see the
vanity thereof." His last image of Plymouth is that of "an ancient mother .
. . foresaken of her children." His last comment concerns a colonial agent
who decided to remain in England, unexpectedly and "much to the weakening
of this government"; then, "Anno 1647. And Anno 1648," and silence.11 The
abrupt silence resonates with the essential lesson of providential history,
that this world is a house built on sand.

The difference between Bradford and Mather as historians lies in their
different concepts of "Americanus." For Bradford, the Plymouth settlement
was part of a secular experience from which he tried to infer the meaning
of providence. For Mather, the New World errand was part of church history;
he deduced its providential meanings from the preordained scheme of
redemption. Thus Winthrop's experiences signified not the common
providences of a governor but the figural providences of an "Ecclesiarum
Clypeus," a "shield" of a theocracy. Every good Christian combined his
evangelical with his social calling, and every Good Magistrate represented
his society at its best. Winthrop, like Nehemiah, stood for an
extraordinary society, a church-state fashioned after the pattern of Moses,
David, and Solomon, and like the early Christian congregations a place of
refuge for God's persecuted people. Our. rulers, explained Jonathan Mitchel
in a sermon on Nehemiah, differ from those of other nations in that they
seek the welfare of the saints, and they claim that extraordinary honor
because of the community they serve: "we in these places are eminently . .
. advantaged to be an holy people." According to Increase Mather, "God of
his free Grace, hath seen meet to dignifie an handful of his People . . .
[and has] promised as an high favour . . . [that] their Governours shall
proceed from the midst of them." l2 Brewster's heroism lay in his ability
to transcend his circumstances, Winthrop's in his capacity to lead the
communal enterprise.
Mather accents Winthrop's representativeness in these terms many points in
the biography, from his introductory remarks about New England's "father"
to his closing description of the dying patriarch. The description is
figural, we have seen, as well as christic, and as figura emphatically
historical. The children surrounding Winthrop are the tribes of God's
American Israel; passage in Acts which Mather cites (13 : 17-36) -
describing as it

47

does the magnalia, or miracula, wrought by Christ ("Israel's Savior") in
Egypt, the wilderness, and Canaan-designates the New World of the new
chosen people. Mather's allusions do not always depend on scripture. Often
he suggests what may be called the governor's soteriological exemplariness
through personal detail. He does so when he discusses Winthrop's legal
views and practice, simply by presenting these as a revival of the Hebrew
and early Christian principles of government. He does so more subtly in
discussing Winthrop's private life. When, for example, he recounts the
"stock of heroes" from whom his hero descended, he barely mentions the
parents. Instead, he concentrates on the family's renown in the days of
Henry VIII and Bloody Queen Mary-the grandfather who served England's first
Protestant king, the grand-uncle who aided the Marian martyrs-intending us
to understand that the Massachusetts leader, like the enterprise he sired,
is child and heir of the English Reformation, and hence of the Reformation
generally, the highest dispensation to date in the progress of the church.
As soteriological exemplum, then, Winthrop's heroism derives wholly
from his involvement in history. To appreciate the extent and depth of that
involvement, we might consider a comparable idea of the magistrate,
comparable at least in its reliance on typology. I refer to the idea of
the divinely appointed ruler, which reaches down from the Middle Ages to
the Restoration. As Ernst Kantorowicz has shown, the basic premise of this
tradition is that the ruler has two selves, corresponding to the "two
bodies" of Christ, personal and "super-individual." Personally, the ruler
is a natural man, and like the man Jesus susceptible to the natural order
of things. Super-individually, as Vicar of Christ, he is divine, a
"christomim?t?s-literally the 'actor' or 'impersonator' of Christ" l3 -
descended from the anointed Hebrews who foreshadowed the true King of
Israel. In this function the ruler stands above the body politic, absolute
and immutable, a God-man impervious to the vicissitudes of secular time.
Thus his very right to govern distinguishes the ruler individually from
himself (in the Puritan sense of "self"), and historically from the
community he governs. His magisterial office makes him part of the history
of salvation; their role as subjects keeps the members of the
community within providential history.

48

This distinction between ruler and people recalls medieval hagiography,
with its implicit separation of the miracle-working saint from the mass of
mankind. More pointedly, it indicates the scope of Winthrop's exemplariness
as governor. Mather's soteriology is directed towards the integration of
the ruler as a type of Christ with his community. As, christologically, the
personal and the divine harmonize in the exemplum fidei, so, historically,
governor and colony are one in the work of redemption. Moreover, the source
of integration lies not with the christomim?t?s but with those he serves.
For Mather, the community vindicates the ruler. The figural providences
that demonstrate Winthrop's election are one aspect of New England's
development. The parallels that exalt the man - Jacob, Moses, Macarius,
David, Solomon, even Job, and above all Nehemiah-define the church-state.
His similarity to the Old Testament heroes makes Winthrop unique as an
individual, but representative as "Americanus."

This representative quality simultaneously identifies Winthrop in history
and sets him beyond the scope of common providence. For other Christians
nationality was a secular designation. Brewster was a saint, but his
English traits, or his Dutch habits of dress, or his New English diet,
identify him within secular history. In Winthrop's case, as in Nehemiah's,
communal identity situates the individual in sacred history. Because be is
"Americanus," his day-by-day experiences constitute "the gleamings forth of
Truth / Laid in Prophetic Lines." 14 They form a wheel within a wheel, to
use a favorite Puritan image (borrowed from Ezekiel's apocalyptic vision);
or better perhaps, remembering the different movements of providential and
prophetic time, a circle within a spiral. What would elsewhere be a common
providence becomes an act of wonder. What for other saints might be a sign
of grace-the birth of a son, the rise to greatness-become for Winthrop (as
for Nehemiah) historical facts which join the hero's spiritual growth with
the temporal movement of a holy commonwealth.
Virtually every step in Winthrop's journey enforces the congruence of
private and public salvation. At the start, his genealogy establishes New
England's ties to the Reformation; at the end, his death predicates the
glories in store for New Israel; the experiences which bring him from one
point to the other, from sacred past to promised future, illuminate the
progress of the colony. Providence
49

calls Winthrop to America because a "Moses . . . must be the leader of so
great an undertaking." Providence directs him to the bar so that he may
better serve "a famous plantation founded and formed for the seat of
the most reformed Christianity." The evildoers who vex him reveal
themselves as providential obstacles to the purposes of the divine plan. If
the settlers themselves sometimes rise up against him, "the victories of
this great man over himself . also at last proved victories over other
men"; providentially, his afflictions ensure "an even exacter parallel"
between Nehemiah's church-state and New England's. Summarily, it is his
fate and fortune, as the pagans would have phrased it, to have been a
zealous patriot. His "eternal memorial" is an action in time that issues
in a communal legacy. The walls of the New World Jerusalem bespeak
the merging of history and spiritual biography in the flow of the work of
redemption.
In this figural context, Mather integrates the exemplary Life and the
Church History. Like the biography, the Magnalia is "an history," Mather
tells us, "to anticipate the state of New-Jerusalem." Like the biography,
the Magnalia begins by exploring New England's ties to the Reformation and
ends by projecting the theocracy into the future. And as in the biography,
the littera-historia Mather records in his narrative sections, from the
discovery of America (book 1) to the colonists' final conflict with the
Tempter (the Indian wars, in book 7) express the movement of sacred time.
John Higginson's preface to the Magnalia describes at once Mather's
historiography and the controlling theme of "Nehemias Ameri-canus":

It hath been deservedly esteemed one of the great and wonderful works
of God in this last age, that the Lord stirred up the spirits of so
many thousands of his servants . to transport themselves . into a
desert land in America ... in the way of seeking first the kingdom of
God. . . . Surely of this work, and of this time, it shall be said,
what hath God wrought? And, this is the Lord's doings, it is marvellous
in our eyes.' . . . And therefore he has taken care, that his own
dealings with his people in the course of his providence . . . should
be recorded ... as (Exodus xvii. 14,) "The Lord said unto Moses, write
this for a memorial in a book." [Higginson then cites similar
directions from Exod.

50

17 : 14, Deut. 31 : 19, and Ps. 102 : 18, 44 : 1, 78 : 3-5, and 45 :
17]; . . . and this is one reason why the Lord commanded so great a
part of the Holy Scriptures to be written in an historical way, that
the wonderful works of God towards his church and people . . . might be
known unto all generations: and after the scripture-time ... he hath
stirred up some or other to write the acts and monuments of the church
of God in all ages; especially since the reformation of religion from
anti-christian darkness. . . .
And therefore surely it hath been a duty incumbent upon the people of
God, in this our New-England, that there should be extant, a true
history of the wonderful works of God in ... America: which . . . may
stand as a monument, in relation to future times, of a fuller and
better reformation of the Church of God, than it hath yet appeared in
the world. For by this Essay it may be seen, that a. farther practical
reformation than that which began at the first coming out of the
darkness of Popery, was aimed at ... [We] came out into a wilderness
for that very end .... How far we have attained this design, may be
judged by this Book.15

This is an unusually astute account of Mather's aims both as chronicler and
as biographer-because Higginson understands, as most later readers have
not, that those aims are at bottom soteriological. When Higginson speaks of
providence, it is to make plain the figural nature of providence in this
instance. The people in question are unique-God's chosen; the time they
live in is portentous-"this last age"; the events that characterize it are
"marvellous in our eyes!"; they signal nothing less than the establishment
of God's kingdom on earth; and the "historical way" towards that
consummation leads forward through "all ages'' with an ever-enlarging sense
of fulfillment: Israel, the church of Christ, the Reformation, and now
("what hath the Lord wrought"!) this "desert land of America." Providence
is a function of promise here, and the hero primarily an agent of history,
himself a providential figura in the spiral of preordained correspondences-
in Higginson's thricerepeated phrase, one of "the wonderful works of God"
that have culminated in the ecclesiastical history of New England.

MlRACULA APOCALYPSIS
The phrase is not Higginson's, of course, It comes from Isaiah's millennial
vision (25 : 1 ff.), which exegetical tradition joined to the

51

description of Christ's miracula or magnalia upon His entry into Jerusalem
(Matt. 21). So considered, the phrase vividly evokes the Second Coming, and
as such it recurs throughout colonial literature. The old Salem minister
may have recalled some of Richard Mather's "Seventy Lectures" to the
emigrants, virtually all of them glowing with the expectation of
eschatological wonders, and Edward Johnson's Wonder-Working
Providence of Sion's Savior in New-England, which hails the colony as
"the wonder of the world," created to demonstrate "to all Nations, the
neere approach of the most wonderful workes that ever the Sonnes of men
saw." Probably he had read New England's official response, in 1648, to
European critics, where Thomas Shepard and others sought to "recount the
singular workings of divine providence" in America in order to "stop the
mouths of all that . . . blaspheme the goodness of God in His glorious
works." Almost certainly he had heard of John Cotton's sermons on
Canticles and Revelation, which proved that the settling of Massachusetts
Bay was the climactic wonder of the Reformation, and which conveyed the
proof with such authority that one settler, at least, felt inspired to
inscribe his response in poetry:

From the beginning to this Day
Were ever seen such works I say,
..............
Now shall Jehova Reign for Aye.16

In any case, Higginson knew the numerous second- and third-generation
accounts of these wonder-working providences: how they had revealed New
England as "a type and Embleme of New Jerusalem," a manifestation of
"glorious issues" at hand, "a First Fruits of that which shall in due time
be accomplished in the whole world throughout." "Consider," cried Increase
Mather in 1675, "That there are no persons in all the world unto whom God
speaketh by [His] Providence as he doth to us"; "Mention, if you can," he
challenged Christendom in 1686, "a People in the world so priviledged as we
are!" He kept repeating the challenge through the first decades of the
eighteenth century in such works as A Sermon Shewing That the Present
Dispensations of Providence Declare That Wonderful Revolutions Are Near
(1710). Higginson himself had joined in this view long before, in an
impassioned election-day address on

52

The Cause of God and His People in New-England (1663). From the same
platform ten years later, his colleague and Increase's predecessor as
Harvard's president, Urian Oakes, summed up what "in sober sense of many of
our Divines" was the meaning of two generations of the New England Way:

if we ... lay all things together, this our Commonwealth seems to
exhibit to us a specimen, or a little model of the Kingdome of-, Christ
upon Earth, . . . wherein it is generally acknowledged and expected.
This work of God set on foot and advanced to a good ... Degree here,
being spread over the face of the Earth, and perfected as to a greater
Degrees of Light and Grace and Gospel-glory will be (as I conceive) the
Kingdoms of Jesus Christ so much spoken of. 17


From Cotton through Oakes, the emphasis on figural providence has a single
purpose: to impose a sacred telos upon secular events. The miracles of
grace that John Beadle attributed to the justified saint, the orthodoxy
extended to the destiny of their church-state. Here, with respect to us,
insofar as they are our mercies, God's temporal judgments are previews of
last things. It is a wonder that Winthrop should be saved, and that in his
last moments he should receive assurances of glorification. It is no less a
wonder that the colony he represents should persevere through its
wilderness trials to become a specimen of the imminent kingdom. For the
saint, such miracula crown the privileges that mark the journey of his
soul. For the church, they crown the figural providences that ensure its
warfaring progress towards Armageddon. In Winthrop's case, both kinds of
miracula blend in the "acts of pattern" that prove the colony's role in the
salvation of mankind. Urian Oakes argues this conjunction in The Soveraign
Efficacy of Divine Providence. His most famous Harvard student set out its
implications at large, a decade later, in The Wonderful Works of God
(1690). -"An Age of Miracles," announced Cotton Mather, "is now Dawning
upon us," one in which we of "this New-English Israel . . . are more
involved than any men Living." It were well, therefore, if some "good
historian" among us in these ends of the earth would memorialize the men.
and events that shaped our past: "O Lord God, Thou hast begun to shew thy
Servants thy Greatness . . . ; we shall . . . very quickly

53

see those, glorious Things which are spoken of thee, О thou City of God!"
With that wonderful prospect before his eyes, as Higginson understood, he
wrote his church-history of New England. Predictably, he began with a
vision of "the wonders of the Christian religion"-the magnalia Christi of
the drama of redemption-reaching their climax in the "wonderful displays
... [of] His Divine Providence" on the American strand.18
This eschatological application of providence to a colonial venture
required explanation to the world at large, and the clergy readily
responded. In a secular view, they began, the ways of God are mysterious.
Providences "interfere with one another sometimes; one providence seems to
look this way, another providence seems to look that way, quite contrary to
one another." Sometimes, indeed, they "seem to ran counter with His word."
Small wonder that even the best of men-even saints like Bradford, who holds
a place of honor in the Magnalia-have "been put to a non-plus here." But
we, the colonists continued, we New England saints, "the Apple of God's
eye," need not resign ourselves to those "dark and amazing intricacies."
For us, "The Works of Divine Providence are great and wonderful." By and
large, we have been "dandled in the lap of his providence." God has
"prospered his people here beyond ordinary ways of providence," showered a
"singular" and "almost unexampled, unparall[el]ed mercy" upon our efforts;
in fact, "the matchless favors of God unto New England" show that He has
from the start been "so dealing with New England as not with any nation."
And even when His judgments have gone hard against us, and deservedly so,
they confirm our place in the grand design. Elsewhere, His retribution may
be ambiguous or incomprehensible or a sign of utter disaster. Here we may
feel secure that though "the Lord may afflict us ... he will not destroy
us." More accurately, He will afflict us because He would save us. As
Increase Mather argued in his Doctrine of Divine Providence (1684), echoing
John Winthrop's words of over half a century before, the "way of gods
kingdome is accompanied with most difficulties." 19
The notion of gracious affliction is commonplace enough in the saint's
Life, but startling as a framework for interpreting the secular,
terrestrial course of a community. We might well see it, indeed, as the
epitome of the colonial clergy's attempt to elevate the mundane into the
realm of sotoriology-of redemptive history and

54

last things. They prepared the saint for heaven by making visible the
prospect of hell; they prodded the colony forward by stressing God's
untoward providences. In both cases, they were telling their listeners that
His wrath twined with His love in "the Golden Checker work of the Draw net
of [figural] Providence." "There is a great difference," they observed, "in
those temporal judgments, which the wicked and the righteous are subject to
in this world. For when such judgments fall on the wicked, they are Paenal,
they are part of the Curse ... Whereas it is otherwise with the
Righteous; the afflictions that befall them are . . . fatherly ones . . .
; the Lord chasteneth [them] ... as a father doth his son in whom he
delights." The image is christological, but its purpose in these sermons is
unmistakably historical and communal. "Have you not observed that there
have been more . . . awfull tremendous: dispensations of divine
Providence in New-England then in any: place [else] . . . ?" Rejoice,
therefore, in the venture you have espoused. "God is terrible out of his
holy Places," 20 and blessed are the New Englanders whom He chastens: their
hardships are an earnest of the dawning Age of Miracles-like Winthrop's
afflictions, the cornerstone of the holy city to come.


A striking third-generation example of this dialectic is Cotton... Mather's
Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), which restructures the Salem
witchcraft episode into a preview of Armageddon, and New England in general
into an emblem of the church triumphant. The second-generation view is
represented by Increase Mather's The Day of Trouble Is Near (1674), one of
the fiercest of colonial jeremiads, delivered at the onset of King Philip's
War, the most ominous event the settlers had yet encountered. Why, Increase
thundered, has God so scourged His people? Why has He set the Indians upon
us to pillage and destroy? Why, because we are His people: the pattern, the
privilege, is prescribed in scripture. Our "most dismall Providence . . .
was decreed before the world began"-and decreed to this end, that whereas
other communities His providence destroys, ours it corrects, sanctifies,
and so girds for further accomplishments. When God exposed Christ to
sufferings, He laid bare the figural ways of providence with respect to the
church in all ages. David was sorely troubled, as was Jacob. Job, Moses,
Solomon, and Nehemiah; and the reason is not far to seek:

God hath Covenanted with his people that sanctified afflictions shall
be their portion. . . . When glorious Promises are near unto

55

their birth we may conclude also that a day of trouble is near. . . .
This is the usual method of divine Providence, . . . by the greatest
Miseries to prepare for the greatest Mercies. . . . Without doubt, the
Lord Jesus hath a peculiar respect unto this place, and for this
people. This is Immanuels Land. Christ by a wonderful Providence hath .
. . caused as it were New Jerusalem to come down from Heaven; He dwells
in this place: therefore we may conclude that he will scourge us. . . .
[In the words of] a Jewish Writer . . . who lived in the dayes of the
Second Temple [i.e., after Nehemiah's return from Babylon]; "the
dealings of God with our Nation . . . and with the Nations of the World
is very different: for other Nations . . . God doth not punish . . .
until they have filled up the Measure of their sins, and then he
utterly destroyeth them; but if our Nation forsake the God of their
Fathers never so little, God presently cometh up on us with one
Judgement or other, that so he may prevent our destruction." So ...
he'll reckon with them [other communities] for all at last; but if New-
England shall forsake the Lord, Judgement shall quickly overtake us,
because God . . . will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.21

The difference, Increase Mather is saying, between the providences visited
upon New England and those visited upon "the Nations of the World" is like
the difference in meaning between scriptural precedents applied to the
damned and to the elect. Nehemiah can serve at most as a model of morality
for the unregenerate; but he illuminates the saint's way to heaven.
Similarly, God's judgments elevate or destroy "other Nations"; whereas in
"our Nation" they signify His concern with the community's salvation.
The transformation of local providences into miracula apocalypsis speaks
directly to the meaning of "Americanus" in the Life of Winthrop.
Significantly, Cotton Mather applies the same figures to the governor that
his father does to the colony at large-Jacob, Job, Solomon, Moses, Joseph,
Nehemiah-and with much the same intention. Like Immanuel's Land in
Increase's sermon, "Nehemias Americanus" proclaims the forward movement of
redemptive history. As the representative of theocracy, the Hebrew stands
not with but behind the Puritan. The restored Jerusalem under Nehemiah
forms the background, as it were, for the greater New

56

World Jerusalem. That background includes all the other Old Testament and
early Christian parallels which Mather summons to convey Winthrop's figural
meaning. And that figural meaning, we have seen, renders Winthrop unus
inter pares, one among many other heroes of redemptive history,
reincarnate as Americans. Urian Oakes, writes Mather, our "Drusius Nov-
Anglicanus," was "a Moses among his people, . . . the Jerom of our
Bethlehem! . . . Had Austin [i.e., Augustine] been here, he might now have
seen 'Paul in the pulpit'." As we read from one Life in the Magnalia to the
next it comes to seem as though all the great men of, history-
including Augustine, redivivus in Richard Mather-had converged on the
American Bethlehem, as witness to the birth of the kingdom. Hooker and
Cotton were our Luther and Melancthon, Thomas Parker our Homer, Edward
Hopkins our Solomon, John Fiske our Calvin, Francis Higginson (father of
Salem's pastor), our Noah, Thomas Cobbet our Eusebius, Thomas Prince our
Mecaenas, John Davenport our Jethro, Thomas Shepard our Seneca and
Aristotle in one, Charles Chauncy our "Cadmus Americanus." The colony
has its equivalent of the heroines of the past in Anne Bradstreet; Sir
William Phips conjures up a constellation of civic and military notables;
the Mathers provide abundantly in most other fields of endeavor.22

To delineate the colony's ancestry thus is to predicate its future.
Mather's biographical parallels function as a substitute for local secular
history, a sort of Heilsgeschichte antiquarianism informing us of New
England's true descent. By definition they also open out into a
Heilsgeschichte teleology. Attesting as they do to sequence and gradation,
Mather's parallels demonstrate New England's superiority to the communities
that foreshadow it. If they link the American with some Greek or Roman
epigone, the American usually has "greater things to be affirmed of him
than could ever be reported concerning any of the famous men which have
been celebrated by . . . Plutarch." Mather searches the archives of Europe
for an equal to Phips only to abandon "that hemisphere of the world" for
"the regions of America." His famous men are "better qualified," better
educated and "better skilled" than their forebears (and more modest).
Winthrop is not simply like Aeneas but, by virtue of his beliefs (i.e.,
those of the theocracy) a more heroic Aeneas. He resembles but supersedes
Caesar in the communal laws he espouses,

57

Alexander and Hannibal in the Puritan precepts he follows. "Let Greece
boast of her patient Lycurgus"-so Mather begins the biography-"let Rome
tell of her devout Numa ... Our New England shall tell and boast of her
Winthrop, a lawgiver as patient as Lycurgus, but not admitting any of his
criminal disorders; as devout as Numa but not liable to any of his
heathenish madnesses." Most of the biographies open with a similar
comparativist survey. All the glories of Greece cannot equal Thomas Hooker,
in whom the reader may "behold at once the wonders of New-England. " Tales
of the early church usher in the "golden men" of the "primitive times of
New-England." If a perpetual flame lit the tabernacle of old, "the
tabernacle ... in this wilderness had many such 'burning and shining
lights.' " Curious pagan customs adumbrate our "more worthy" practices. The
American saints rather than the "pretended successors to Saint Peter," body
forth the apostolic succession. "Fires of martyrdom" 23 from Nero to Queen
Mary illuminate the voyage of the Arbella.
In sum, like the figural providences he records, Mather's biographical
parallels demonstrate that all roads to New Jerusalem lead through the
Great Migration. On this premise, each Life in the Magnalia establishes the
colony's place in the grand design, while the preface to each group of
Lives affirms the individual's place in the colonial mission. Mather
introduces the divines by proclaiming New England the holiest country in
the world, the magistrates by announcing that the church-state surpasses
all other regions this side of heaven in civic virtue. "I know very well,"
he adds, that historians like "to throw an air of grandeur around the
origin of States," and to inflate their records with "mythic traditions."
But not he. His are "the real facts," agreeable to an enlightened age. If,
as he tells us, he embeds them in "multiplied references to other and
former concerns, closely couched, for the observation of the attentive, in
almost every paragraph," he does so in order to make the facts bloom like
"choice flowers" in the garden of God. To this end, in his narrative
sections, he marshals a host of providential magnalia, every one an emblem
of the entire community. And to this end he parades before us the heroes
who made "the beginnings of this country . . . illustrious," and its
subsequent growth "a specimen of many good things" to come.24

Hence the commingling of teleology and spiritual biography in

58

the Life of Winthrop: Lycurgus, Numa, and Moses look forward to the New
World governor; the cultures of Greece, Rome, and Israel point towards the
Puritan church-state-"this little nation," Mather calls it, "yet a nation
of heroes!"25 As the two kinds of exemplariness, individual and cultural,
coalesce-as New England makes good her boast by telling of her Winthrop-the
multiplied references surrounding New England's father become a corporate
genealogy, a stock of heroes culled from the entire family of man to
illustrate the colonial cause. They create a historical context which, like
Winthrop himself, does honor to a national cause without becoming part of
secular history, and to the cause of Christ without becoming a generalized
allegory. It incorporates exempla from every corner of Christian and pagan
antiquity, and it extends from the ancient to the modern world. Mather is
careful to make these "embellishments" conform to the theme of government;
and if at times they seem to run to an indiscriminate catalogue of
memorabilia, that is precisely his intent: the random, sweeping effect
conveys the density required by his soteriological concept of Winthrop, the
model both of sainthood and of theocracy, Nehemiah's counterpart as
microchristus and, simultaneously, the greater Nehemiah because he is the
governor of the American Israel.

Prophetica

Mather's teleology has its basis in Reformed thought. One of the central
motifs in early Protestant sermons is the flight from Babylon under
Nehemiah. Spiritually, it signifies Christ's deliverance of His beloved
from the bondage of sin. Historically, it signifies His Second Coming, when
He will complete His combat with Satan, and reveal in full glory what He
accomplished in the flesh. The emphasis, that is, on the actual past
accents the timeless, selfless imitatio. The perspective on the
supernatural future reveals the actual movement of history. Of course, the
Reformers did not invent this prophetic sense of the Christ-event-this
sense of time as a predetermined exfoliation of the meaning of certain men
and events, so that we may know everything at any given moment provided we
recognize our relative position in a developmental scheme. Long before
Luther, the medieval scholastics had codified Augustine's seven-stage
scheme of Heilsgeschichte, giving due stress to the Babylonian

59

captivity (the fifth stage), the present Christian millennium (the sixth
stage, dated from the Incarnation), and the heavenly paradise (the seventh
and last period), generally referred to, in order to intimate the organic
development from Creation to Judgment Day, as the Great Sabbatism. But the
scholastics discouraged prophetic speculation. Wisely fearing the
disruptive enthusiasm such speculation could provoke, they insisted
instead on the private and institutional aspects of typology, in effect
opposing the christological use of the figura to the soteriological,
Augustine, they pointed out, had centered his doctrine of last things on
the individual experience. For that purpose, the sacramental life of the
church sufficed; there, the believer could find both form and means of
deliverance. In all other respects, he should attend to common providence.
It was precisely by recourse to prophecy that the first Reformers sought to
justify their break with Rome. In 1522, the same year he denounced the
Saints' Lives, Luther concluded from a study of Daniel that the sixth stage
represented not the Christian era but just the reverse-the reign of
Antichrist. He did not flinch from following through the stupendous import
of his discovery. The sixth stage of history, he declared, was not
postmillennial, as Augustine had believed, not a constant efflorescence of
Christ's influence until the Second Coming. The millennial period was yet
to come; the church still languished in premillennial darkness,
awaiting its deliverance, as during the fifth period die Hebrews had
languished in Babylon. Upon this premise, he announced the
summary challenge of his new-found Protestantism. As the Hebrews had been
called by Nehemiah from captivity, so now the Reformers were being called
to liberate the new chosen people, the remnant of Joseph heralded by
Revelation, from its thousand-year bondage to the Romish Whore. Luther's
identification of Catholicism with Antichrist led him to encourage a fresh,
literalist study of the past, mainly to prove papal corruption. His
prophetic summons was sounded from Protestant pulpits for the next two
centuries. It unleashed an avalanche of histories-of the Reformation,
the world, particular nations, towns, and counties-all of them guided by
the belief in the approaching Judgment Day:

Although that which is foretold . . . was in part fulfilled when the
people of God returned from Captivitie in Babylon at the

60

end of seventie yeares: yet we must not limit the place to that time
onely. . . . For as some passages in this Scripture were never fully
accomplished ... so many things that literally concerned the Jewes were
types and figures, signifying the like things concerning the people of
God in these latter dayes.26

That lime, these latter dayes, never fully accomplished: in such figural
formulations soteriology displaced christology, or more precisely,
christology became a function of the work of redemption. The imitatio was
the absolute means to a temporal end, giving the individual the right to
declare himself part of an ongoing corporate journey towards a glory that
was present but still inchoate, evolving, its full prophetic sense yet to
be made manifest. And as the eschatological focus thus shifted from memory
to anticipation, the correspondence between the believer and the Bible
narrative took on a radically historical significance. The process now, not
the fact of fulfillment demanded elucidation. The source of personal
identity was not the Jesus of the gospels but the ongoing works of Christ
leading towards the Messiah of the apocalypse. For historically considered,
Jesus too was a typus Christi, a scriptural figure signifying greater
things to come. He had completed the spiritual drama of redemption, but the
literal conquest of Satan, the actual transformation of the wilderness,
remained still to be accomplished. The kingdom He regained in the Arabian
desert adumbrated New Jerusalem. The deeds that together formed the perfect
exemplum fidei were partial signs of the miracles He would perform at Gog
and Magog; and not He alone, but all the "people of God in these latter
dayes."

This process of fulfillment was no less rooted in sacred history than was
the typology that linked the Old and New Testaments, and no less centered
on the concept of Christ as antitype. But in one case, history culminated
in the New Testament narrative: all types met in the Incarnation; the
believer's christic identity was absolute and comprehensive. In the other
case, history continued through the prophecies of the Old and New
Testaments: the meaning of the antitype was developmental; christic
identification devolved upon postscriptural events in the progress of the
church. Soteriologically, then, an intricate hierarchy of types and
antitypes unfolded, denoting relative perfections in different moments of
time-"centu-

61

ries," as for the first time they came to be termed, and "periods." This
sense of progression was sometimes applied to scriptural events (e.g.,
Nehemiah's release from Babylon as a partial fulfillment of Moses' exodus
from Egypt). In the main, however, it concerned promises which had "never
been fully accomplished." Thus Israel's salvation, though spiritually
fulfilled in Christ, also foreshadowed the Conversion of the Jews, an event
"more eminent and wonderful, for the TYPE must needs come short of the
ANTITYPE." So, too, Eden foreshadowed both Canaan and, more wonderfully,
the reign of the saints. As a prophetic type, the conquering armies of
Joshua adumbrated the children of fight at Armageddon, and Joshua himself
(with Nehemiah and other Israelite leaders) heralded not only Jesus but the
conquering Son of Man. In these terms, Luther pronounced himself the New
Moses of the Reformation, Bale and Foxe pronounced England the elect
nation, and the New England settlers, as we have seen, discovered in their
migration God's call to His redeemed, and world-redeeming, remnant. Our
undertaking, wrote Winthrop in 1629, "appeares to be a worke of God. ... He
hath some great worke in hand wch he hath revealed to his prophets among
us." As antitype of the Hebrews under Nehemiah, they were to found a
specimen of New Jerusalem, "a preface to the New Heavens,"27 in the New
World.

It would probably overestimate Mather's artistry to read a deliberate
framing device in the word reversals that begin and end the biography:
Nehemiah for Winthrop, New England for Jerusalem. Unquestionably, though,
Mather meant the title to suggest (and the biography to dramatize) what
these substitutions intimate. Ten years earlier, Samuel Wakeman declared in
an election-day sermon that "Jerusalem was, New England is, they were, you
are God's own, God's covenant People; . . . put but in New-England's name
instead of that of Jerusalem,'' and you shall see the meaning of our
errand. To amplify that comparison Mather reports in the Magnalia's General
Introduction his study of the "Figures variously Embossed" in the Bible's
"Prophetical as well as Historical Calender.'' He has succeeded, he tells
us, in having "all the typical men and things . . . accommodated with their
Antitypes" and "the histories of all ages, coming in with punctual . . .
fulfilments of the divine Prophecies." Such calculations were especially
pertinent to biography: in a proto-Hegelian dialectic, they defined the
individual against the

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entire spectrum of history, sacred and secular. When New England ministers
insisted, as they repeatedly did, that "Prophecie is Historie antedated,
and Historie is Postdated Prophecie" they were typologically accommodating
the spiritual state of each of their listeners to the providential magnalia
of the community, and hence to the direction of redemptive history:

Prophecies in the Old Testament . . . help in the belief of New-
Testament prophecies, many of them being already accomplisht, others
also of them agreeing with Those in Revelation [i.e., they remain yet
to be accomplished]. . . . Prophecie is Historie antedated and Historie
is Postdated Prophecie: the same thing is told in both. . . . Therefore
the Historie of the Old Testament is Example to us. ... Such
accommodations will be easy to New England; seeing there is such
considerable similitude and agreement in the circumstances.28

This local emphasis, they continued, was by no means parochial. The destiny
of Christ's people in America was the destiny of mankind. What they had
"advanced to a good Degree here" had its fuller meaning in Christ's end-
time kingdom. Conversely, the holy men and institutions of times past,
though inscribed in Scripture sub specie aeternitatis, served now to
illuminate the settler's place in what Mather called the "long line of
Inter-Sabbatical Time." In this prophetic light, three generations of
New England orthodoxy hailed the colonists as the heirs of the ages,
warning the world that they were shortly to raise an earthquake
which would shake all Christendom. John Eliot exulted in those
prospects with every Indian conversion he obtained, and Anne Bradstreet,
predicting the imminency of Christ's Fifth Monarchy through the persona of
"New England," called for a holy war against Rome and Turkey. The second-
generation echoes and amplifications include sermons, treatises, and poems
by virtually every ministerial luminary. The major third generation voice
was Cotton Mather's, but he found ample support from such diverse figures
as Samuel Willard, whose Fountain Opened, a variation on Increase Mather's
millennial Mystery of Israel's Salvation (1669), went through three
editions by 1697, and Samuel Sewall, who organized a debating club on the
fine points of Revelation and carried on an enthusiastic correspondence
with Edward Taylor on the precise time and place of the Parousia.29

63

With all the authority of that tradition, John Higginson, by 1697 the
colonial Nestor, wrote his "Attestation" to Mather's Church History. By
that authority he acclaimed the Magnalia's exemplars as prefigurations of a
"better reformation of the Church of God, than it hath yet appeared in the
world." Men like Winthrop, he explained, were worthy of imitation as
saints, and as saints worthy bearers of the title "Americanus." But he had
to admit that as Americans- that is, as men in history, bearing a
specific relation to the future-they fell short of the ideal. "They did
as much as could be expected from learned and godly men in their
circumstances," but the circumstances themselves were limiting. They
pointed to but did not constitute, the "perfect reformation." And
that heuristic quality, he concluded triumphantly, gave those men the
right to serve as our guides-to "refresh our souls" in our proleptic
participation in the "times of greater light and holiness that are to come
... when the Lord shall make Jerusalem . . . a praise in the earth." 30
It was not by chance, then, that Nehemiah became the favorite ministerial
as well as magisterial exemplum of the colonial clergy. He stood for the
succession of exoduses, at once repetitive and developmental,
that would culminate in the exodus from history itself: Noah abandoning a
doomed world, Abraham setting forth from idolatrous Ur, the Hebrews fleeing
their Egyptian persecutors, the primitive Christians leaving heathen Rome,
and, in modern times, the emergence of the true church from the dungeons
of Rome. Within this framework, the flight from Babylon applied with
special force to their own departure, in due time, from the
deprivations of Europe. Mather begins the Magnalia by imaging that
departure as the last and greatest of premilliennial migrations. His image
is a commonplace in the literature. During the preceding half-century the
orthodoxy turned to the Jerusalem of Nehemiah more persistently than to any
other single Old Testament episode. They invoked it through the figura of
the second temple, comparing their leaders almost as a matter of habit to
the temple foundations, stones, and pillars. They evoked it within other,
larger metaphors, as in their recurrent references to "the wall and the
garden." They explicated it by a variety of hermeneutic approaches,
including those of the cabalists. They enacted the correspondences in their
convenant-renewal ceremonies-one of their main devices for rallying
their congregations to the Good Old Way-which they

64

modeled proudly on Nehemiah's practice upon his return to Jerusalem. And
they repeatedly defined the Good Old Way as the inspiriting-reprimanding
voice of Nehemiah upon their walls, a ghostly ancestral presence trying to
''encourage the hearts and strengthen the hands of the [present] Builders
of our Jerusalems wall." 31
In all cases, the message was the same. Nehemiah's undertaking foreshadowed
the final deliverance of the church, whose bright pattern now shone from
these ends of the earth more radiantly than ever before. The Life of
Winthrop sustains the pattern with other parallels, including those drawn
from classical antiquity. I indicated that Aeneas functions as precedent
and moral exemplum, but here again figural exegesis is the key to Mather's
full meaning... Almost from the start typology extended
perforce to pagan literature. Since, doctrinally, all truth emanates from
one center, which is Christ, it follows that heathen myths, insofar as they
contain some truth, refer to Him. To be sure, particular mythical forms
(names, places, incidents) obscure and at times distort the essence. But
once the essence stands revealed in the light of the New Testament, it
necessarily partakes of the basic pattern, thus paving the way, in the
words of Clement of Alexandria (one of Mather's favorite expositors among
the early Fathers), for the march of the elect. Samuel Mather notes that
the gods Iao, Jove, Euios, and Adonis adumbrate Jehovah and Jesus.
Correctly interpreted, the | legends that describe their deeds exemplify
God's plan of redemption. Mather's use of Apollo in his Life of Sir William
Phips is representative:

The story of Og, the king of the woody Bashan, encountered and
conquered by Joshua, the Lord General of Israel, with his armies
passing into Canaan, was the very thing which the Gentiles, in after
ages, did celebrate under the notion of the serpent Python (which is
the same with Typhon) destroyed by Apolio. . 'Tis as clear that Apollo,
who was anciently called Paean, or healer, is the same with Joshua. . .
. They by whom Typhon was combated, came out of Egypt, and so did the
armies of Joshua. ...
Reader, 'twas not unto a Delphos, but unto a Shiloh, that the planters
of New-England have been making their progress), and [the Indian] King
Philip is not the only Python that has

65

been giving them obstruction in their passage and progress thereunto.
But ... all the serpents, yea, or giants, that formerly molested that
religious plantation, found themselves engaged in a fatal enterprize.
We have by a plain and true history secured the story of our successes
from falling under the disguises of mythology. . . . And we will not
conceal the name of the God our Saviour. . . No, 'tis our Lord Jesus
Christ, worshipped according to the rules of his blessed gospel, who is
the great Phoebus, that "SUN of righteousness," who hath so saved his
churches from the designs of the "generations of the dragon." 32

The passage demonstrates how easily figuralism lends itself either to a
biographical or a historiographical approach, and how naturally,
for an American Puritan, it comes to embrace scriptural model and local
providence. For the Plymouth Separatists, Joshua was a typus Christi
leading us through "the remaining part of our pilgrimage," and the story of
Og simply one more lesson in grace: the Israelites' "bloody victory"
shadows forth the spiritual blessings awaiting all who have been washed in
the blood of the lamb.33 Mather subsumes that view within a soteriological
application which brings all of time to bear upon the meaning of King
Philip's War. The Bible story is "the very thing" celebrated by the pagan
poets Homer, Ovid, and Virgil; the legendary Python, that old serpent, "is
the same with" Og and Satan; and Apollo "is the same with" Joshua who "is"
Jesus who in turn "is the great Phoebus." As he strips away the "disguises
of mythology," Mather transforms the timeless present into a sweeping
temporal revelation. In his "plain history," Christ antitypes Joshua-
Apollo, and the victorious New England army antitypes the Israelites
entering Canaan. That is to say, both Jesus the Nazarene and the New
Englanders foreshadow the Son/Sun of Righteousness. (The christic reference
comes from the vision that closes the Old Testament: Malachi's paean [4 : 1-
5] to the great and dreadful Day when God's redeemed people, protected by
His healing Apollonian wings, will destroy the wicked). The entire
configuration is geared toward the colonial errand; but Mather invokes it,
we must remember, for the purposes of biography. From Delphos to Bashan
to New Canaan, the progress of history serves to define Sir William Phips
as the American Joshua.

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At several points, Mather hints at a similar configuration in the parallel
between Aeneas and America's Winthrop. But in general he does not explicate
the parallel as precisely as he does that of Apollo or Python. There was no
need. He had every reason to assume the reader's familiarity with the long
exegetical tradition that christianized Aeneas in his role as leader,
saint, and father of the people. Besides, Mather makes it plain that he
conceived the Magnalia as a greater Aeneid. He alludes to the Roman epic
more frequently, more consistently, than to any other work (except for the
Bible), from his opening invocation, a direct paraphrase of Virgil's, to
the last section, concerning the wars against Og-Philip, which he entitles
"Arma Virosque Cano." His purpose here pertains equally to the colony and
to its first governor. New England's plantation excels the founding of Rome
as its heroes resemble and outshine the Trojan remnant, and as the Shiloh
they approach supersedes the Augustan Pax Romana? 34 In this context, it
would be excessive to apply the heaped-up commentaries on Virgil as prophet
of Christ, on the Aeneid as allegory, on Aeneas as typus Christi, to the
Life of Winthrop. We can see readily enough what Mather intended: to
reinforce the structure of the biography by making Winthrop's magnalia
intrinsic to the pattern of Christ's mighty deeds in America. More clearly
than any other pagan hero, pious Aeneas, the Good Magistrate destined by
Jove/Jehova to harrow hell, to rebuild the walls of Latium and change the
course of civilization, enacts the design of exodus and restoration that
unveils the prophetic sense of New England's Nehemiah.
Mather supports the design by way of many other classical and Christian
figures: Lycurgus and Numa Pompilius, the fabled restorers of Greek and
Roman law (as Winthrop, adumbrating Christ in His kingly office, helped
restore the forms of theocracy); the emperors Valentinian and Theodosius,
who transformed Rome from a heathen to a Christian state (as Winthrop
helped transform the American wilderness); Calvin and Luther, the Nehemiahs
of the Reformation, who prepared the way for the exodus to New England. But
as we might expect, he draws most heavily on scriptural parallels,
particularly those which carried traditional associations with Nehemiah in
American Puritan rhetoric. Several of these I have already mentioned.
Winthrop resembles David insofar as David was "a cleare Prophet ... of
every particular

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Christian," insofar as the Davidic kingdom foreshadowed the church-
state, and insofar as that church-state (Mather notes
elsewhere) was a "praesage" of New Jerusalem. The parallel with Job
culminates, we recall, in Winthrop's deathbed "conflicts from the tempter,
whose wrath grew as the time to exert it grew short." As such, it evokes a
historical stereotype which had become almost as familiar as the christic
saint to colonial audiences: "Sorrowful Job, the type of this Immanuels
Land." A few years before, Mather himself had enlarged this into a central
theme of an election-day address on Nehemiah (1690). His father had made it
a leitmotif of his sermons throughout King Philip's War, similarly
connecting magistrate with suffering servant in the context of colonial
eschatology. In the first place, the clergy explained, God's concern for
Job, as for Nehemiah, pointed to His wonderful latter-day figural
providences: had He not "set an hedge about [us] as about Job, . . . walled
us about as his peculiar garden of pleasure"? More importantly, Job's
reward, like Nehemiah's, forecast "the End of the Lord with New-England":
"His called and Faithful, and Chosen shall more than overcome at last";
in the colony's anguish lay "a certain Prognostick that happy
times are near, even at the Doors."35
Undoubtedly, Cotton Mather meant to reinforce this prognosis by identifying
Job-Winthrop's tempter as the Antichrist, whose wrath would grow "great as
the time to exert it grew short" (Rev. 12: 12). Undoubtedly, too, he hoped
his readers would recognize his reference to John the Baptist when he wrote
that Winthrop eschewed the " 'soft raiment' which would have been
disagreeable to a wilderness." The passage from Matthew (11 : 7-15) was one
of the most popular subjects of discourse in seventeenth-century New
England-partly as an apostrophe to the "wilderness-condition" (in clothes,
thought, morals, style, and so on), more broadly as a figural text.
Observing that John is referred to here as the Elijah heralded by all the
prophets-and that Christ first explains His miracles here as messianic
signs (cf. Matt. 11:5 and Isa. 35, 61)-the ministers applied the Baptist's
errand to that of the theocracy at large. Thus Danforth defines New-
England's Errand into the Wilderness (1670): "John was greater than any
of the prophets that were before him, not in respect of his personal
graces" (for so understood he was one in Christ with every saint) "but in
respect of the manner of his dispensation"-of his relative place,
that is, in the work of

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redemption. Before him, foreshadowing the Baptist, were "the children of
the captivity" who left Babylon to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. After
him, antityping the Baptist, were those who crossed the Atlantic to enjoy
"the signal and unparallel[ed] experiences of the blessing of God" in "this
wilderness." 36 Through them, the forerunner of the Incarnation stood
revealed as witness to the Second Coming.

Other ministers before and after Danforth announced the good news with the
same visionary enthusiasm. "The Ministry of John Baptist . . . may be
looked upon as a Type of the last and great day." When the Baptist" arose
like a bright and shining light," Jesus appeared to him "at the end of the
Jewish world in the end of the world" (i.e., the wilderness) as a "partial
fulfilment" of His promise to the church, that "all the ends of the World
shall . . . turn unto the Lord." To bring that light to its full brilliancy
was the colony's cause and end; and now, considering their accomplishments-
considering also their afflictions, comparable to those in the Baptist's
days-they could "conclude that the Sun [of Righteousness] will quickly
arise upon the world"; "John come thou forth, behold what Christ hath
wrought / In these thy dayes." According to Edward Johnson, this particular
image of corporate destiny begins with the first migration. "I am now prest
for the service of our Lord Christ," he reports a departing Puritan telling
a friend, "to re-build the most glorious Edifice of Mount Sion in a
Wildernesse, and as John the Baptist I must cry, Prepare yee the way of the
Lord, make his paths straight, for behold, hee is comming againe, hee is
comming to destroy Antichrist, and give the whore double to drink the very,
dregs of his wrath." 37

Johnson may have been thinking of Richard Mather, who had made that image
familiar in the previous decade. But of course his emigrant is more largely
a dramatic device, a persona for the entire enterprise. That representative
emigrant comes to life towards the end of the century in the person of
Richard's grandson. From the pulpit, in his diaries, through his published
work, Cotton Mather reaffirms time and again that God has summoned him, the
rightful heir to the theocratic dynasty, "as a John, to bee an Herald of
the: Lord's Kingdome now approaching." "I went to the Lord," he tells us,
shortly before he began his Life of Winthrop, "and cried unto Him that the
Ministry of His holy ANGELS might be allowed unto

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me, that the holy ANGELS may make their Descent, and the Kingdome of the
Heavens come on." Soon after completing the biography he had another
epiphany: "I feel the Lord Jesus Christ most sensibly carrying on, the
Interests of His Kingdom, in my soul, continually," and so directing me to
"become a Remembrancer unto the Lord, for no less than whole Peoples,
Nations and Kingdomes." The grand type of ail the Lord's remembrancers, he
continues, was Moses, and like the Israelite he has commemorated the
providential wonders of the past, and memorialized his people's exemplary
heroes. That obligation fuses in his mind with his role as prophet and
witness. To celebrate the founding fathers was ipso facto to predict the
millennium, as Ezekiel had, and, like John the Baptist, to be "eminently
serviceable in the mighty Changes." 38

Mather's self-vaunting seems almost hysterical-until we recognize that,
here as in his would-be imitatio, the self he vaunts is suprapersonal, the
embodiment of what Ezekiel promised, Nehemiah undertook, and John
witnessed. Speaking for himself, he speaks also for the remnant that
Winthrop, as a second Moses, led into this wilderness. That parallel had
first been advanced by the governor himself, in his vision of the city on a
hill whose inhabitants have miraculously sprung into new life, "bone come
to bone" (Ezek. 37 : 7). Winthrop modeled the famous exhortation that
closes the Arbella sermon on Moses' farewell discourse at Pisgah, and that
discourse, as every passenger knew, was "the Prophetical Song" of the
church. What Moses had seen then, "in a true Glass" and "by the Spirit of
Prophecy," was the return of God's people once and for all from captivity.
Moses had not really spoken, that is, to the Israelites before him, who
were to conquer Canaan only to fall from greatness. Rather, as a figura of
Nehemiah and John the Baptist, he had addressed himself to the spiritual
remnant that would be the wonder of the world in the ends of the world.
Ezekiel, who was granted the same vision, "said of the Church in Babylon,
Shall these dry bones live?"; for him, as for Moses and Nehemiah,
"This Prophecy . , . [was] yet to be fulfilled." For Winthrop,
the migration marked the beginning of "the accomplishment of that Prophesie
concerning the . . . coming together of those dry tones," when the Holy
City would descend upon the hill of Zion.39

"The eyes of the world are upon us," Winthrop had said. His biographer
announces that "what is prophecied and promised" has


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been "fulfilled in us." The light of the city on a hill has become the
light of the world. "Behold, ye European Churches, there are golden
Candlesticks (more than twice times seven!) in the midst of this 'outer
darkness': unto the upright children of Abraham, here hath arisen light in
darkness." The image, from the Magnalia's General Introduction, brings
together many aspects of Mather's heraldic role: the seven books of his own
Mosaic history, the movement from Ezekiel's valley of dry bones to the
American wilderness, and the final stage of that movement, emblematized by
the more than doubled golden candelabra (cf. Rev. 11), whose light arose in
the darkness of John the Baptist's day. Then the darkness comprehended it
not. Now its meaning was unmistakable. The greatest of the prophetic
visions, Mather commented, "go successively by Sevens." As the summum and
ultimum of those visions, his sevenfold proclamation to the upright
children of Abraham looks forward to the time when the seven trumpets of
the apocalypse" would begin to sound-"Which, that it is near, even at the
door, I may say, through grace I doubt not. . . . For the New Jerusalem
there will be a seat be found in wide America." 40

The proclamation also refers us back to those "Abrahams," lea by Winthrop,
who were "more than Abrahams," for "there never, was a Generation that did
so perfectly shake off the dust of Babylon,,' . . . [nor] a place so like
unto New Jerusalem as New England.": Increase Mather made this comparison
on May 23, 1677, as the watchman of an errand undertaken on behalf of all
nations and peoples. His father, Richard, and his father-in-law, John
Cotton, had similarly spoken for the Great Migration as heralds of the
Lord's kingdom. His son could hardly escape feeling that Christ was
carrying on the same interests through him. How should he not "be, touched
with an Ambition, to be a Servant of ... this now famous Countrey, which my
two Grand-fathers Cotton and Mather had so, considerable a stroke in the
first planting of; and for the preservation whereof my Father, hath been so
far Exposed"? 41 Surely Cotton Mather felt the race of sacred time most
sensibly in his soul as he identified John Winthrop with the succession of
prophets leading towards himself: Jacob (Abraham's grandson and patriarch
of the tribes of Israel), Moses, David, Nehemiah, and John the Baptist, the
namesake of New England's first governor. Surely also

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he heard the flutter of angels' wings as his biography drew to a close, and
he recalled how the prophet for whom he had been named had conducted the
deathbed fast for Winthrop-directly after those momentous "conflicts from
the tempter"-and how "the venerable Cotton" had then proceeded to remind
"the whole church" of the governor's Davidic greatness, parental
beneficence, and Christ-like sorrows, in what was in effect a type of
Mather's Life of Winthrop. Cotton Mather, we might say, brings both his own
family line and his grandfather's funeral sermon to fulfillment by showing
us the comprehensive historical design implicit in "Nehemias Americanus,"
As the public and private meanings of his biographical parallels converge,
they form a soteriological exemplum of astonishing breadth and coherence.
Mather's Winthrop is a man representative of his profession, of his
society, of sainthood, of his biographer, and, as "Americanus," of the
conjunction of all of these with the providential wonders, the miracula
apocalypsis, that demarcate the forward sweep of redemptive history.