[models of American radicalism and conservatism.]
Cotton Mather: February 12, 1663 – February 13, 1728
William Byrd: March 28, 1674 – August 26, 1744
Two philosophies of life which have done more than
any others to produce in the United States two differing cultures can be
appropriately studied near their sources in two early diarists, Cotton Mather
and William Byrd. Born but eleven years apart in the latter half of the
seventeenth century, they mirror in their thinking worlds so opposed that a
contrast of them goes a long way to towards explaining basic conflicts and
tensions in American culture down to our time. That both men represent in a
sense extremes of their positions enhances rather than detracts from their
value for the student of American culture. And most fortunately for him, both
men left behind copious records, that of Mather covering the majority of his
adult life and that of Byrd covering with fullness three different periods . .
.
Part III Conclusions
In assaying the basic differences between Mather and Byrd, we may begin by recapitulating
the circumstances which they shared. They were contemporaries, of English
extraction, born in America. Both were men of considerable education, with some
interest in science, and both became members of the Royal Society. Each was an
outstanding, perhaps the outstanding member of his community. Mather a theocrat
and ‘teacher’ of Puritan Boston: Byrd a large landowner and a public servant in
royal and Anglican Virginia. And both were interested enough in their lives to
preserve long and intimate records.
But the difference in their thinking and their way of life remain
extraordinary, and from this difference have flowed to great streams of
American radicalism and conservatives.
That difference has its taproots in their respective attitudes toward creation.
For Mather, creation hardly existed as a beneficent fact. The world was there,
but it was an essentially negative
reality; it was prone to be used by evil spirits for their purposes, and the
best to be said for it was that it could be made to yield to man. By the logic
of this kind of thinking, ‘could’ was at some point translated into ‘should.’
No purpose was served by letting the world stand as it was because the world
had no claim to status. Now to use the world is to change it, and here appears
the Puritan ethos of functionalism. The more man does with the world, the more
he is showing his sense of duty in this life. To live virtuously is to
concentrate everything for man’s purposes under the aspect of the drama of salvation
which was so vivid to the Puritan mind Later this conviction of a
transcendental reality fades out.* But what has been established does not. The
impulse to domineer over creation and certain habits of concentrating interest
were due to serve the future institutions of business and science. The heart of
the legacy is a belief that nature has no purpose apart from man’s will, in
consequence of which he is constantly called upon to judge and reform her.
Accompanying this is a dynamism: things must be changed in order to effect purposes,
and finally exchange becomes a principle which is used to vindicate itself. The
culmination is a business civilization and an order based increasingly upon science,
in which not the actualized past but the future becomes the probative idea. Alienation
and narrowness can be sources of power, and they gave to the Puritan both his
will and his strength to conquer.
Byrd’s outlook, on the other hand, derives from an acceptance of stasis and
status. He was conscious of no driving imperative to change the forms in which
things had come from their maker. Acceptance of the pattern for what it was was
a major premise of his thinking. The things that were around him shared in a
substantial reality. Nature, people, the physical endowment of man, and the cultural
creations of society and art were therefore to be contemplated, and contemplation
requires intactness. There was a Providence, and it was discovered through
things; else why were they there? Man was neither the creator of everything nor
the sole agent of his destiny. Byrd did not believe that the human part of man
is reprobate. Man was an incarnation, which represented a meeting of the
natural and the supernal. The natural and the divine were this seen together in
a body, and this vision set bounds to the idea of domination. The ideal is not
a rejection, but a proper distance from things, which prevents both an
unnatural alienation and an undignified involvement with them.
The Puritans recovered one strain of the Hebraic spirit, but they added a special
conviction about what was material, which narrowed and one may say fairly
warped their view of what was before their eyes. The religious tradition and the
social class that Byrd represented, on the other hand, had little of the spirit
of condemnation and was far more receptive to the Graeco-Roman part of the
Judaeo-Christian heritage. This did not begin by rejecting the material order,
and it balanced the metaphysical idea of becoming with that of being. Moreover,
it contained another idea very dear to the classical mind, that of measure. The
maxim for human life must be ‘nothing too much,’ and to imagine that one can
think as a god is, in the wisdom of antiquity, madness. Byrd’s adjustment to
the world is a display of this ideal; it is an acceptance qualified by distance
and measure, in response to a sense of man’s dual nature. Egoism is held in
restraint by an awareness of other things. Hence his poise, his urbanity, his
willingness to let live. He moved in a world which appreciated these virtues
and rewarded them. But when they met Puritanism in a wider struggle, it
developed that the Puritan temper
possessed the power of aggression which classical balance and tolerance could
not withstand.
*As long as this impulse was under the discipline of a religious realism,
certain tendencies that later became overwhelming were in check. But
eventually, in the nineteenth century, when this realism had been abandoned, the
real destiny of the trend emerged. It was against such destiny that Emerson,
Thoreau, and other members of the Concord group spoke out. There have probably
never been more eloquent sermons against materialism, engrossment in business,
and indifference to nature. But Emerson and Thoreau were reacting against a
tide which had been set flowing far back, and which they could not successfully
resist from the positions they took. To be aware of its destructiveness was of course
to their credit, but to devise a protection against it was more than a eclectic philosophy and rhetoric could do.
Puritanism lost its cosmological foundation, but retained its bias and its
method, and these proved very strong through-out nineteenth-century America.
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