The following post is part of a series of drafts on the rise and fall of the self-made man in American culture.
As I’ve indicated, the phrase “self-made
man” has its problems in the twenty-first century United States. But even its
critics know what it means (or is supposed
to mean). In the seventeenth century, by contrast – the century in which the
foundations for a distinctively American identity were laid – the concept would
be superficially comprehensible, but nonsensical, to almost anyone who heard it,
akin to suggesting that dogs are responsible for the economic welfare. (God makes men. Who else could?) If one
were explain the idea behind the self-made man to a colonial American,
particularly in seventeenth century New England, its implications would be so
blasphemous as to merit possible criminal action by church and even government
authorities. And yet, insofar as the phrase did
eventually make sense in the centuries that followed, its intellectual contours
took shape in the seventeenth century. And, notwithstanding its plurality of
meanings – I’ll be looking a somewhat different version of the idea in colonial
America in the next chapter – those origins are, in a fundamental sense,
theological.
To understand why, we need to go back to
that pivotal event in Western civilization, the Protestant Reformation. As we
were all taught at one time or another, a precipitating grievance involved the use of papal
indulgences, in which the severity of penance for confessed sin was mitigated
by some form of payment charged by church officials. One reason why we were all
taught this is that it rankles in a way even a child can understand: it’s
unfair for the rich to buy their way out of punishment simply by virtue of
their wealth. But the more specifically religious objection, one articulated by
Protestant lights such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, focused on the idea
that only God, not man, was in a position to decide upon and dispense
salvation.
This was sixteenth century common sense,
even if like, later forms of common sense (such as the proposition that bankers
cannot really be trusted to regulate themselves), it had been overlooked or
explained away. But now, for reasons that even after centuries of reasoned
analysis remain a little mysterious, a relatively large number of people, with
motives that varied from spiritual commitment to economic calculation, decided
the offense would be ignored no longer. Of course, there were also a lot of
people who, while not necessarily inclined to defend indulgences, did not feel
such questionable practices justified a break with the Church of Rome.
Sometimes that disinclination was passive. Other times it was so powerful as to
trigger a counteroffensive (in the form of Jesuits, inquisitions, armies) that
resulted in century of bloody conflict.
One person who decided to make a break
with the Church, for reasons that were largely opportunistic, was King Henry
VIII of England. As the story goes, he was angry over being denied his request
for an annulment that would allow him to remarry and produce a legitimate male
heir. (As his advisers pointed out, there were also the rents from church lands
that would become his once he confiscated them.) In England, as elsewhere, this
decision provoked widespread conflict, and there, as elsewhere, it aroused
passions sufficient to lead people to kill each other in the name of Christ.
When, after a protracted struggle, Henry’s (second) daughter Elizabeth came to
the throne in 1558, she shrewdly decided to steer a middle course. Yes, she
affirmed, England would remain Protestant. But her interests in saying so were
less religious than political: it was stability she cared about. As such, she
was as tough, even tougher, on die-hard reformers as she was on closet Catholics,
among them, it was widely believed, James I, the distant relative of Scotland’s
Stuart family she chose to succeed her, which he did in 1603.
From a twenty-first century standpoint,
the religious intensity of the Anglo-American world between 1600 and 1700 is
truly astounding. (After coming across so many references to the Pope as “the
whore of Babylon,” I’ve concluded this was not an act of hyperbole or sarcasm
but a deeply ingrained reflex on the part of people who have done a very good
job of refining their hatred.) Of course, there have been religious fanatics in
all times and places, along with times and places where religion, while almost
always important, has not really been at the center of social conflict or
intellectual innovation. But in terms of sheer intensity, and a willingness to
accept real-world consequences of allowing abstract theological ideas to shape
everyday life, this epoch strikes me as pretty high up on an imagined scale.
One reason I say so is the sheer variety
of religiosity at the time. Henry VIII created the Church of England, also
known as the Anglican Church, which we today know as the Episcopal Church, a
name that refers to the way bishops are organized. But the Church of England
was regarded by some as a cheap knock-off of the Catholic Church, a perception
that can be traced back to the reasons for its creation. (To this day Anglicans
and Catholics are doctrinally close, notwithstanding the liberal wing of the
former’s acceptance of female clergy and homosexuality.) As a result, a series
of now-obscure splinter groups proliferated: Brownists, Gortonists, Diggers,
Barrowists, et. al. These factions
had strong social, intellectual and personal connections with religious
dissidents on the continent. Their doctrinal ideas have a tendency to make the
casual reader’s eyes glaze over, much in the way that adolescent distinctions
between specific sub-varieties of obscure music amount to the narcissism of
small differences. But there’s no doubt that these dissidents took those
differences seriously, to the point of willingness to risk arrest, imprisonment
and execution for being real and perceived challenges to social order.
A second striking aspect of this
religious culture is its ridiculously messianic quality: so many of these
people believed that England – England! – was to be the site of a coming new
world order. Why would a small, relatively insignificant island-state on the
edge of Europe be God’s chosen vessel of redemption? Yes, England had been the home of the fourteenth century
anticlerical writer John Wycliffe, a.k.a. “the morning star of the
Reformation.” Wycliffe translated the Bible into English, a heretical act in an
era when reading, much less interpreting, scripture was considered the
exclusive Latin-educated experts. His followers were known as Lollards (a
derogatory term suggesting idiocy or laziness). But to an outsider, then or
since, such hardly seems the stuff of a sturdy foundation for England as the
site of the next Zion.
Actually, by the early seventeenth
century some of the most committed Protestant dissidents had also come to the
conclusion that England was not likely to be Zion, particularly because they
were subject to political pressure from James I, who famously vowed to “harry
them out of the land.” That’s why a group of them left England altogether and
settled first in Amsterdam and then the Dutch city of Leiden, neither of which
they found satisfactory. They were looking for the freedom to worship God as
they saw fit, which, among other things, meant rejecting the self-evident
corruptions they saw around them, whether in the form of crypto-Catholic
practices of the Anglican Church – which they formally abandoned, and were thus
known as “Separatists” – or what they considered the turpitude of the Dutch,
whose tolerance of religious diversity was less a matter of moral principle
than appalling indifference. These Pilgrims, as they were also known, made
there way across the ocean to the place they named after their hometown of
Plymouth in 1620. They were followed a decade later by another group of
dissidents – albeit dissidents who did not
renounce their ties to the Church of England, which they still hoped to reform
– who founded Massachusetts Bay.
Which brings us to the third, and most
striking, thing about these dissidents: how far, literally and figuratively,
they were willing to go for their beliefs. The word used to describe them, once
fairly broad, but which gradually focused on the founders of Massachusetts Bay,
was “Puritan.” It was not meant to be flattering. “We call you Puritans, not
because you are purer than other men . . . but because you think yourselves to
be purer,” wrote an English clergyman early in the century. Ever since,
Puritanism has been considered a byword for sanctimony.
There are many reasons why this was true
in the context of their world, but the most important for our purposes goes
back to this crucial notion that God, and God alone, shapes the destiny of
humankind. Even the Pope himself – officially designated the Antichrist with
the ratification of the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1646* – would assent to this as a general proposition. But like the
signatories of Westminster Confession (mostly Anglican and Presbyterian, a
Scottish branch of Puritanism), the Pilgrims and Puritans were Calvinists. At
the core of John Calvin’s theology was a special insistence that the salvation
or damnation of an individual soul was known to God, but unknown to that
individual, from birth, and that such people were powerless to affect their
fate beyond acknowledging the force of the irresistible grace that might be
conferred upon them. It’s why, for
example, they did not celebrate Christmas, or rejected papist ornamentation in
their churches. Such affections were symptomatic of a pagan notion that men
could in any way replicate a reality whose prerogative was God’s alone.
These practices were indeed radical when
compared with most of their contemporaries on either side of the ocean. But –
and this is a crucial point, especially when considering the eventual emergence
of the self-made man – these early settlers of the region that became known as
New England had a strong pragmatic streak that governed their behavior. God
alone knows, and God alone decides. The man you think of as a saint may really
be a sinner; the woman you consider a sinner may really be a saint. But someone has to be in charge, if for no
other reason than sheer survival in a forbidding wilderness in which they were
surrounded by any number of natural and supernatural forces of evil. Their
necessarily communitarian enterprise relied on leadership, both religious and
civic, to execute one of the more daring resettlement projects of human
history.
You may wonder: Why did they do it? If
they had no control over their fate, if they could never know if their efforts
would matter, then what was the point of going through all that trouble? The
characteristic reaction of most modern-day people when presented with
Calvinistic logic is: Well, hell, then – let’s party hard. But that’s not the
way Calvinists thought about it. Simply put, it was hard to believe that such
an approach was going to get you into heaven. Sure, it might, but in the
meantime you’ve got to live with yourself. And it’s easier to live with
yourself thinking that your inclinations are those of God, and insofar as you
have to guess what they are, a life of dissipation seems like the least
plausible scenario. It’s possible to view the entire colossal enterprise of founding
a new society in a forbidding wilderness on the other side of the world as a
collective attempt to escape the distracting question of whether or not you’re
among the damned or not. (And, once you’ve done that, to establish a modern
economy, as Max Weber persuasively theorized in his 1918 book The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism.)
In any event, the Pilgrims and Puritans
had made some loopholes for themselves, as human beings tend to do whenever
they impose rules on themselves.
One was the doctrine of preparationism, whereby a spirit of humility, a
desire to confess one’s sins, and a willingness to listen hard to the yearnings
of conscience might – might –
indicate sanctification, allowing one to experience the joy of incipient salvation
(and, if convincing enough in one’s testimony, to be accepted as a member of a
church). There was also the so-called Halfway Covenant, in which the children
and grandchildren of church members could be provisionally accepted into the
church pending later persuasive testimony of an authentic conversion
experience. Through such strategies, the Pilgrims and Puritans found ways to
grapple with the profoundly challenging tenets of their faith over the course
of multiple generations.
Here’s the rub: a number of Puritans
vocally opposed such measures. There were, for example, many critics of the
Halfway Covenant; Yale College was founded in 1701 as an alternative to Harvard
by explicitly rejecting it the training of its ministers. But long before that
ever happened, a series of opponents to any compromise in Pilgrim and Puritan
theology insisted on taking their doctrines to their logical conclusion. In the
process of doing so, they revealed the individualism at the heart of the New
England enterprise and pointed the way toward the emergence of a recognizable
self-made man.
Next: Roger Williams, orthodox rebel
*Other
Anglo-American denominations signed on the Westminister Confession later in the
century. The Pope lost his Antichrist status in the United States – officially,
anyway – with revisions to the document in 1789. He would reacquire it –
unofficially, anyway – with the rising tide of Irish immigration a half-century
later.
