Memory / Debunk

Perry Miller and the Puritans: An Introduction

Historians often treat Miller as a foil, but the Father of American Intellectual history retains untapped potential to inspire new modes of inquiry.

by Rivka Maizlish via U.S. Intellectual History Blog on May 8, 2013

...to post by fate or circumstance,” Miller explained passionately. 10 He, too, in writing about the Puritan experience, struggled “to extricate man from the relentless primordial mechanism” and, while conceding the influence of that mechanism, carve out a significant role for human freedom.

Within the realm of ideas, Miller identified a tension with which the Puritans also struggled– the tension between reason and emotion. Historians have complained that Miller focused exclusively on organized thought at the expense of feelings and passion. Nothing could be further from the truth. As he did with ideas and the environment, Miller identified the complex relationship between reason and emotion, maintaining that thought could never be completely separated from feeling and favoring an analysis of feeling and emotion. Throughout his various works, Miller was drawn to the “Existentialist” character of Puritan thought. According to Miller, the Puritans felt profoundly alienated, from England as well as from God, and were overwhelmed with a sense of their imperfect nature and imperfect knowledge. They struggled to affirm human freedom and God’s will in the midst of what seemed to them an arbitrary and absurd world. This, for Miller, was the emotional, “real being” of Puritanism, found “not in its doctrines but behind them.”^¹¹

Just as the Puritans struggled to maintain a balance between their intellectual doctrines and their emotions, Miller struggled to deconstruct Puritan thought and reveal the complex relationship between reason and passion within it. From this endeavor he developed a philosophy of intellectual history well ahead of the historiographic trends of his time. Miller best expressed this philosophy in his discussion of Jonathan Edwards in the chapter, “The Rhetoric of Sensation,” in Errand into the Wilderness.

As a young man, Miller explained, Jonathan Edwards had read John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, written in 1690. Accepting Locke’s argument that words are arbitrary constructions and therefore have no correspondence to the true nature of reality, Edwards “worked out . . . the immense distinction between knowledge of the word and knowledge of the actuality for which the word is a substitute.”^¹² “To excite the actual idea of certain realities” such as “the fear of God,” Miller wrote, proved a difficult problem for Edwards as a preacher trying to convey such ideas to his congregation. It is, however, an even more difficult problem for the intellectual historian, trying to understand what “the fear of God” actually meant, in emotional terms, to the Puritans. In dealing with this problem as a preacher, Edwards went far beyond Locke and “reached into a wholly other segment of psychology, the realm of the passions, and likened the word not only with the idea but also . . . with the emotions.”