470 - The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change

The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change
By David E. Stannard
New York, Oxford University Press, 1977. 236 pp. $11.95.

This is a beautifully written and intriguing essay on the development of western attitudes toward death, particularly in the Puritan culture of New England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. David E. Stannard, who teaches in the American Studies program at Yale, employs a wide variety of literature, evidence, and methodologies to probe the Puritan understanding of death, and in doing so, he suggests yet another perspective on the powerful Puritan influence on American culture. He makes creative use of funerary art, particularly New England gravestones, as well as diaries, sermons, and letters, in describing and illustrating the Puritan confrontation with death and the changing understandings of it. Central to Stannard's entire approach is his conviction that attitudes toward death reveal a great deal about the nature of a society and its values, organization, and stability. In short, Stannard argues that an analysis of death is primarily another way of looking at life.

What is perhaps most difficult for anyone in the twentieth century to grasp is the Puritan preoccupation with death. For Puritans, death was omnipresent. Stannard estimates that a couple entering marriage in Andover, Mass., could realistically expect that two or three of their

472 - The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change

children would die before the age of ten, and Andover had a low death rate. For some, the rate was much higher. Samuel Sewall fathered fourteen children, one of whom was stillborn, several died as infants, several as young adults, and only two survived him. Sewall was plagued by dreams of the death of his wife and children, including one in which he took his daughter into a closet to pray with her and she disappeared. As the poet Ann Bradstreet described the lives of children, they were "like as a bubble, or the brittle glass." In sharp contrast to the twentieth century in which children are encouraged to believe that death is only for old people, Puritan children were reminded by the New England Primer: "T-Time cut down all/Both great and small"; "X-Xerxes the great did die,/And so must you & I"; "Y-Youth forward slips/Death soonest nips."

Stannard argues that the Puritan attitude toward death was characterized by a tension rooted in their understanding of grace. "Assurance" of salvation was always conditional. Believers were secure in their faith only by realizing that their security depended on God alone. If individuals felt secure, that was the surest sign of their insecurity before God. And so, when confronting death, the Puritans feared the prospect of dying without a redeemed heart and yet longed for the blessing and peace of life with God. Death was both "the King of Terrors" and the promise of comfort and rest. This extraordinary ambivalence and tension could not be maintained, and the Puritan attitude gave way to a more romantic longing for death in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

One of Stannard's most intriguing observations is his effort to demonstrate that a heightened awareness of death and increased devotion to funeral rites and rituals are closely related to social strain and instability. Toward the latter part of the seventeenth century, funerals became more elaborate, headstones more intricately carved, and eulogies more fulsome. This development, he argues, is related to the gradual disintegration of the Puritan synthesis, both theologically and socially. Death and its attendant rituals became a means of celebrating social organicism in a culture that was splintering from within. The intense interest in the subject of death during the last fifteen years, of which Stannard's book is itself an example, may tell us more about ourselves and our society than we realize.

Stannard concludes his analysis with an eloquent reminder that while we cannot and should not return to the awful (aweful?) agonies of the Puritans, they nevertheless faced death with realism and the resources of a community, two elements of life conspicuously absent from twentieth century America. Death is commercialized, mechanized, and depersonalized, and the process of dying becomes increasingly a solitary experience, endured in sanitary isolation. To change our attitudes toward death and dying, he insists, means changing our society and its institutions.

One may quarrel with Stannard's sometimes superficial understanding of Puritan theology or the hybrid quality of his methodologies, but

473 - The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change

this is a sensitive, thoughtful, and humane book, one that should be especially helpful to those who minister daily to people who are dying or grieving, but even more, to people who are living.

John M. Mulder
Princeton Theological Seminary Princeton, N.J.