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ERIC WERTHEIMER "To Spell Out Each Other": Roger Williams, Perry Miller, and the Indian In matters of Earth men will helpe to spell out each other, but in matters of Heaven (to which the soule is naturally so averse) how far are the Eares of man hedged up from listening to all improper Language? Williams, "Christenings make not Christians" The issue of the visibility of the Native American within Puritan texts, and especially in more recent histories of the Puritans' settlement ofNew England, has been central to the work ofAmericanist revisions for the last twenty years.1 I want to contribute to both the primary and secondary aspect of that ongoing discussion by taking the case ofRoger Williams' A Key into the Language ofAmerica (1645). One of the first English translations to inaugurate not only a concern for Indian visibility but to hold out the possibility of dialogue between cultures,2 this text was misconceived and underestimated in Perry Miller 's seminal interpretations of Williams' notion of theocracy. I would suggest that an examination of how A Key figures Indians, and how Miller historicizedWilliams without really accounting for either Indians or A Key, can lead us back to the cultural poetics that Miller missed. That poetics is manifested in the Indian himself—a textual embodiment of the nexus between metaphor and civil discourse; 1 would argue that Williams conceived the link as essential to political and religious survival in the culturally contested New England of the early sevenArizona Quarterly Volume 50 Number 2, Summer 1994 Copyright © 1994 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 Eric Wertheimer teenth century. Placing the bodies and the language ofthe Narragansetts within an extended metaphorical framework that polemicizes against unregenerate Puritanism, A Key extends a process of revising received notions oftranslation and savagery thatWilliams had begun in his prose works.3 For Williams, civil success in the wilderness resided in the bicultural possibilities of the place, possibilities he struggled to reconcile with the theology he found so efficacious. If America—the civil arrangement which indisputably encompassed more than one culture— and Calvinism were to be harmonized, it had to be done through a dialogue of languages. It is the visible and vocal Indian of Williams' poetry who facilitated that dialogue. The metaphoric dialogism of A Key can be seen as an outgrowth of Williams' theories of the civil state in the Massachusetts wilderness, or what Miller in his essay, "Roger Williams: An Interpretive Essay," has called "the nature of theocracy." In his trial ofOctober, 1635, Williams was charged with four counts that eventually led to his banishment from the colony (where he founded the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations) and his subsequent encounter with the Narragansett tribe. His four major transgressions reveal much about his view of the colonial state and its relationship with theology and the proper uses of speech: 1) Williams believed King Charles had no right to charter and thereby appropriate Indian land. 2) No sworn oaths could be made in the service of civil law. 3) Separatist (millennialist) ministers were the only "lawful" ones, thereby positing a quasi-independent American colony. 4) The magistrate had no right to police the consciences of the subjects; this objection drew on the primacy of the first four of the ten commandments ("Interpretive Essay" 8). The last offense is the most famous and has been held by many historians to be a proto-Jeffersonian policy, a forerunner of the first amendment to the Constitution which provides the crucial link between the theocratic, and authoritarian, Calvinist fathers and their more enlightened, democratic descendants. Miller rightly sees this as an ahistorical interpretation (21), arguing that historians have been too sanguine about seeing Williams as a visionary whose struggle was merely political. This secular interpretation of Roger Williams is a misreading of his real thought. It is altogether too easy to render him the Roger Williams, Peny Miller, and the Indian greatest honor without truly coming to grips with the deeper springs ofhis dissent. To understand him rightly we must recognize that his slant was theological not political. What did he actually say? We have not bothered to read The Bíoiíd;y Tenent...

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