Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow-Feeling in Early New England by Abram C. van Engen (review)

Abram Van Engen has set himself two major tasks in his book Sympathetic Puritans. The first is to argue for a reframing of the way we understand Puritan social and intellectual order around ideas and experiences of sympathy. The second is to generate in the reader a new (but complicated) sympathy for Puritans and their experiment in colonial Massachusetts. These two tasks are connected: grasping the way a theologically informed sympathy motivates Puritan ways of conceiving community, politics, and persuasion potentially opens new vistas on established readings of key moments in Puritan history and culture. Often Van Engen’s readings smartly turn received interpretations on their head. On events usually taken as examples of Calvinist cruelty as its worst (the antinomian controversy resulting in the banishment of Anne Hutchinson), Van Engen wants us to consider that the outcome was motivated significantly by a desire to show charity toward “weak and ordinary Christians” (89). At moments where we are perhaps ready to show more sympathy (the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson), Van Engen demonstrates how a sympathetic construal of civility works in Rowlandson’s narrative to reinforce racial distinctions and maintain distance from her captors. In the end, the book succeeds both in building a case for the centrality of sympathy to the Puritan way of life and in presenting a more human picture of the Puritans. Van Engen’s Puritans are a people rigorously committed to a partisan view of the world but one equally committed to building communities of unity and significance.

Van Engen argues that a version of sympathy, inherited from Greek notions of the vitality of bodies and filtered through John Calvin’s biblical exegesis, becomes for Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic a “sign of membership” and a “mark of identity” (3). That is, demonstrating sympathy was necessary, though not sufficient, for belonging to Puritan “emotional communities” (4). Further, sympathy carries with it the central ambiguity (or “double valence” as Van Engen has it) that characterizes so much Puritan thought—it is intended to operate both as a religious duty and as a sign of grace (5). As such, sympathy is an internal disposition (of the “whole person”) that communicates externally about who is part of the covenant community. But one could also be exhorted to practice sympathy when it was seen to be lacking (16). The focus on affections usefully complicates Puritan ideas of community building and community policing, which have most often been seen as discursively focused on acceptance of right doctrine. Van Engen takes pains to note, at each step, how sympathy most often works in tandem with orthodoxy, but the most engaging parts of the book show tension between the two and sometimes even show sympathy leading orthodoxy into new places.

A good example is the chapter on the antinomian controversy, which Van Engen reads as a crisis of sympathy in colonial Massachusetts. Fast Day sermons and trial documents show that, early on, the controversy focused less on questions of doctrinal correctness and more on the problem of a dissolving unity of affections that was seen to mark the actions of Anne Hutchinson and some of the pastors who supported her. The elders of the colony, Van Engen argues, were most worried about what they saw as a claim for the necessity of extraordinary affections in religious experience, and they acted to protect “weak and ordinary Christians,” whose place within the community could be threatened if the rapturous experiences of those like Hutchinson became normalized or even normative. This interpretation questions the long-established reading of the trial as a contest between the disciplining orthodoxy of the elders and the emotive freedom of Hutchinson. Instead, Van Engen gives us an antinomian controversy where the meaning of sympathy is at the center of contention and both sides are pressing for their own vision of community affections. What we learn from the crisis is that as long...