498 - The Life and Times of Cotton Mather

The Life and Times of Cotton Mather
By Kenneth Silverman
New York, Harper & Row, 1984. 479 pp. $29.95.

Cottonus Matherus! Quantum Nomen! Quanta Nomina! Harvard's president reminded Cotton Mather (1663-1726) and the gathered assembly of his illustrious heritage, grandson of Richard Mather and John Cotton, son of Increase Mather, when Cotton graduated from Harvard at the age of fifteen. He died fifty years later, leaving behind 388 published works, other huge writings, unpublished, and a questioable reputation among Americans. Charles Francis Adams, descendant of John Adams and John Quincy Adams, who did not like his Puritan ancestors, considered the Mathers part of the "theologico-glacial" period in American history, and Cotton, along with Jonathan Edwards after him, as a huge literary boulder "deposited by the receding ice." Vernon Louis Parrington, exploring "Main Currents" in American thought, considered Mather "an attractive subject for the psychoanalyst," a man "oversexed and overwrought," given to "ecstatic exaltations and, especially during his celibate years, given to seeing visions." Parrington claimed that Mather led-no, outdistanced-the mob during the witch hangings in New England.

Kenneth Silverman, distinguished professor of English at New York University, joins other scholars, for example, Robert Middlekauff, David Levin, and Richard Lovelace, in taking another look at the Mathers, especially Cotton, and concludes that he was "the first unmistakably American figure in the nation's history." As one commentator has put it, Silverman even makes us like him a little. A careful researcher and skillful writer, the author has already stimulated us with Selected Letters of Cotton Mather (l971), in which he uncovers not only the complexity of his subject's personality, but also social, political, and theological rivalries of Mather's time, and indicates how Mather could well be disliked by some of his contemporaries, and especially by self-serving biographers of later generations. While continuing to point out Mather's faults, Silverman seems to have grown in his appreciation of his subject's achievement.

In addition to being a prodigious writer, Mather was pastor in partnership with his father of the prestigious North Church. While his ministry may be considered a success, his life was filled with personal

500 - The Life and Times of Cotton Mather

and public trials and tribulations. Two of his three wives died, and his third was as hard to live with as she must have considered him to be. Nine of his fifteen children died, and his favorite son, Creasy, was a wastrel, was accused publicly of bastardy and was finally lost at sea. Cotton was often at odds publicly with his father, to whom he was nevertheless strongly attached. One of the most tumultuous episodes of his life came when members of his congregation protested his attempt to improve congregational singing, or the "Odd Noise" of psalm singing. One of Mather's chief problems is that he may have written too much, both for public consumption and in his diaries. He thus left for us a record by which we may see more clearly his temperament, which shows him to be a proud man, often petty and peevish, perhaps even dishonest at times with himself, with others, and even with God, to whom he poured out his innermost thoughts. Silverman also finds him a holy man, charitable, and brilliant. He gives him his due in an age in which we understand a little more about human sexuality and visions. With regard to witchcraft in a time when people believed in witches, Silverman reexamines Mather's part in the sad episode and finds that his subject was probably baffled. Mather was not directly involved and was --ambivalent. Silverman terms his justification of the magistrates a "gigantic stammer" (recalling that Mather had to overcome -a stuttering handicap as a promising Puritan youngster) mixing, as it does, cries of conspiracy with appeals for calm. Of course, Mather is not the last person in America to hold a conspiratorial view of life and history.

When Perry Miller paid his respects to the genius of Mather, he held that the Puritan was using his gifts in some panic to recapture the good old days of the New England Zion of the grandfathers, John and Richard, and father, Increase. Silverman, along with other recent scholars, seems to take a more complicated view of Mather's contribution. For example, Mather's Magnalia Christi Americani (1702) is not merely a giant "jeremiad," as Miller holds, or a sign of the "loss of mastery," as Peter Gay suggests, but, according to the author, an attempt to put America on the map by joining provincial America to the "mainstream of English culture." In this way, Mather is a forerunner of the America-yet-to-be, and Silverman analyzes his works in this light. While in the Magnalia Mather saw history as being carried on by governors, ministers, and the presidents of Harvard, in Bonifacius (1710), or "Essays to Do Good," Mather counts on lesser social authorities to carry on the future of Protestantism in a "worldwide Pietistic evangelistic movement," thus indicating Mather's contacts with a growing movement among Protestants. Although this volume was self-serving at points, Mather did write a remarkable book, making an imprint upon Benjamin Franklin, who lacked Mather's piety but shared his zeal for good works, and foreshadowing the "benevolent empire" of the next century. Mather also showed his remarkable modern interests in both The Christian Philosopher (1721), in which he "moved almost effortlessly in his thinking between theological and scientific modes of

498 - The Life and Times of Cotton Mather

explanation," and in his unpublished The Angel of Bethesda (completed in l724 but not printed until the twentieth century). This latter was his most ambitious achievement in science, and the only comprehensive medical work of the entire colonial period. In this connection, for those who only think of Mather as a gullible witch-hunter, Silverman reminds us in his fine treatment that Mather called upon Boston to inoculate its citizens for smallpox during the epidemic of 1721. Dr. Zabdiel Boylston responded to the plea. With Mather's encouragement, he actually carried on the first successful large-scale inoculation experiment which actually saved people's lives. Both he and Boylston were much abused for their activities. While he was accused ironically at one point of trying to intervene in and undercut divine judgment, he argued in his report to the Royal Society in London that Christians would show ingratitude to the God of healing to treat with neglect and contempt a method of sparing people from death.

When Mather died, a large number of people gathered for the funeral, "Every heart sad," and "almost as if it were the funeral of the Country," according to contemporary reports, Silverman reminds us that the mourned was the first person to write at length in and about the New World having never seen the Old. He helps us to understand and appreciate the much-maligned Mather, probably because he seems to have fewer interests to serve in exploring his subject. It is natural that Silverman, author of A Cultural History of the American Revolution (1976), should think of Mather in terms of America's cultural currents, such as those represented by Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, whom he mentions when he suggests that Mather was our "first unmistakably American figure." Here the reader may be helped by the work of Richard Lovelace. In The American Pietism of Cotton Mather, Origins of American Evangelicalism (l979), he explores the nuances of Mather's theology, his relations with seventeenth and eighteenth century pietists, and his ecumenical attitudes with a perception sometimes missed by Silverman. Lovelace joins Alan Heimert of Harvard in seeing Mather as the John the Baptist to Jonathan Edwards, one of America's foremost theologian-philosophers. Even Lovelace must be read with some caution, since there have been a good many alterations in the "evangelicalism" of the type which Mather may have represented and the contemporary evangelical movement of which Lovelace is an able apologist. Moreover, in the case of Silverman's study, we would have profited from some more extensive observations from him, perhaps in an appendix, about the changing attitudes toward Mather in America's cultural history which he knows so well. This may appear ungrateful, like asking for more after he has already served us a rich and varied feast, but it is a compliment to him for his achievement.

James H. Smylie
Union Theological Seminary
Richmond, Virginia