On Thu, 15 Feb 2001, Carl Remick wrote:
> >Except that the Puritans weren't overthrown here in 1660.
>
> In a sense, the New England Puritans overthrew themselves, with their
> creed becoming more abstracted and rarefied as it evolved into
> Transcendentalism. Emerson, after all, was a very irreligious
> spiritual leader.
Yes, Carl, except that wasn't until 200 years later. In fact, they overthrew themselves several times before that. The Puritanism of the first thirty years was already growing etiolated during the second 30. (Cotton Mather said it was because of commerce and affluence.) The Salem Witch trials were in many ways already a reaction. But they were also a short sharp reaction -- Cotton Mather railed for the rest of his life that he'd been left behind by secularization, and he was right. And then the Great Awakening came after that. And then came the period of revolutionary deism. And then the Second Great Awakening came in reaction to that so fast that in the early 1800s, Tom Paine felt like Cotton Mather had felt a hundred years earlier, but in reverse.
One could argue that Transcendentalism was part of the reaction to the Second Great Awakening. But if one thing's clear, it's that religiosity goes up and down in this country, and both sides are very intertwined. As you put it quite well, Emerson was an irreligious spiritual thinker -- meaning quite religious by LBO standards. And Cotton Mather was on the cutting edge of contemporary scientific thought. He was a member of the Royal Society. He thought the existence of witches proved the existence of the afterlife and that hunting them down and interrogating them was part of the empirical study of nature. Thank god for his old fashioned daddy, Increase, who believed in the Devil all the way down to the ground. He thought witchhunting was one of the ways the Devil made us mad in order to destroy us. And his return from England in 1692 played a big role in ending the trials.
Michael __________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com