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is a presubjective world, still governed by the transpersonal, cosmic opposition of
divinity versus worldliness.
The Puritans adopted quite a different paradigm of holiness. Owen Watkins writes that
for them "the only thing a man
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contributed to his salvation was the sin from which he was redeemed." 3 The Puritan
tradition of self-examination, from the mid-sixteenth to well into the eighteenth century,
specialized in practices based on this belief. 4
Saint Paul wrote that salvation "depends not upon man's will or exertion but upon God's
mercy" ( Rom. 9:16), and it became the Puritan technique not to emphasize performance
of spiritual or ethical "works," including any form of self-purification, but rather to
expose the sinfulness of self so that divine mercy could be acknowledged and honored.
The presumptuous, unconverted 'self was confronted with the Word of God met through
preaching, prayer, and Scripture reading as well as through the daily self-exposure of
journal keeping. Because divine "election" meant precisely life lived under God's mercy,
the practice of unmasking self-righteousness became identical with the practice of
demonstrating or allowing the presence of that divine providence. Puritan "techniques"
did not generate salvation by human effort but were occasions for witnessing to a
relationship.
For the Puritan, then, the significant antithesis was not between God (or soul) and world
but between God and self. As one divine put it:
Man's fall was his turning from God to himself; and his regeneration
consisteth in the turning of him from himself to God. . . . [Hence,] self-
denial and the love of God are all [one]. . . . Understand this and you will
understand what original and actual sin is, and what grace and duty are. . .
. It is self that the Scripture principally speaks against. . . . The very name
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of Self and Own, should sound in the watchful Christian's ears as very
terrible, wakening words, that are next to the names of sin and satan. 5
In his Puritan Origins of the American Self, Sacvan Bercovitch epitomizes a series of
Puritan allusions to this theme:
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Polonius states a humanist commonplace when he speaks of being true to
oneself. Calvin sets out the Reformed "position when he requires us to "rid
our selves of all selfe-trust," and his words resound throughout Puritan
literature. "Not what Selfe will, but what the Lord, thundered Thomas
Hooker. The self is "the great snare," "the false Christ," a spider's "webbe
[spun] out of our bowels," the very "figure or type of Hell." To "lay downe
God-self," to root out "the Devil's poison and venome or infection or
Self," was at once "to kill the old Adam" in us, to defeat the infernal
"rebels against the commone good, all [of them] private respects of mens
selves," and to strike a blow against "Antichrist, that is, the selfe in all." 6
If the Antichrist is the "self' in all, subjectivity here is no mere innocent bystander simply
caught between the forces of heaven and worldliness but is itself the primary antagonist
to God. "Why," wrote Shepard, "shall I seek the glory and good of myself who am the
greatest enemy, worse than the Devil can be, against myself, which self ruins and blinds
me?" ( Autobiography, 45).
The Puritans replaced Catholic confession to a priest with the confessional diary, an
account book of one's state of sin. In Shepard's Journal, in which it has been noted that
"the suspicion of his own hypocrisy is a thread of fire," 7 entries like the following
abound:
March 18. I saw if my mind acted it spun nothing but deceit and delusion,
if my will and affections acted, nothing but dead works. Oh, how do I
need Christ to live in me! Yet I saw if a man hath eyes and life he will not
lean on another to lead him and carry him as when he wants both; so here.
I saw the Lord made me live by faith by making me feel a want of both, to
distrust myself and trust more unto the Lord. [ Journal, 92)
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Certainly the diary was not an occasion for just reviewing the day's events, exposing
personal experiences, or indulging in a relaxed reverie. Puritan journals, in fact, were the
opposite of personal. There is scarcely a sentence in Shepard's log that does not subsume
individual experience into the matrix of divine activity. The "work" of the journal was
precisely to effect this linkage of self with biblical standards of measurement. The result
of this scrutiny: demonstration of the need for mercy, gratefulness and admiration for
divine providence, intimate acquaintance with one's need for humility, and thus
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