Puritanism and the Power of Sympathy

When John Winthrop envisioned his ideal community in A Model of Christian Charity, he proclaimed that a “sensibleness and sympathy of each other’s conditions will necessarily infuse into each parte a native desire and endeavour, to strengthen, defend, preserve and comfort the other” (Winthrop Papers [WP] 2: 289). This hope of sympathy forms the heart of Winthrop’s “model”—a vision of society in which reciprocal affections become fundamental to communal well-being. Such a view drew on a long tradition of Puritan sentiment.¹ Since the late sixteenth century, Puritans defined and employed sympathy in a variety of writings, explicating it from biblical passages and enjoining it on followers as necessary to the godly life. The concept of fellow feeling, I argue in this essay, pervaded New England Puritanism and affected the shape of its literature. In particular, the texts examined here demonstrate that a language of sympathy helped Puritans negotiate the vexed political and theological relationship between New England and Old.

When Puritans spoke of sympathy, they relied on a term with wide usage in the seventeenth century.² Transliterated from the Greek συμπαθεία, the English word “sympathy” emerged around the same time as did Puritanism in the late 1500s. Initially applied to nature and the anatomy, the term primarily signified organic connections, the attraction of like things unto like things (such as iron and a loadstone). Yet as Puritans adopted the word, it became increasingly linked to the affections—and particularly to communal affections, those passions that bound together political and religious bodies. In the first English dictionary, written in 1604 to help readers understand the “hard usuall” words of sermons, the Puritan Robert Cawdrey defined sympathy as “fellowelike feeling” (145). Such fellow feeling operated by imagining oneself in the place of another. Parsing the Golden Rule (“Doe as thou wouldest be done by”), the English Puritan minister Robert Bolton advised saints, “In a fellow-feeling reall conceit, put thy selfe into the place, and impartially put on the person of the party with whom thou art to deale” before “returning to thy selfe,” only then dealing out what “thou wouldest be willing . . . to receive . . . if thou wert in his case” (207–08).³

Puritans, moreover, considered sympathy both a doctrine and a duty. Commenting on 1 Peter 3.8, the theologian Nicholas Byfield proclaimed, “The doctrine then is cleer, That we ought to have a sympathie one towards another” (187). Through sympathy, through this “fellowelike-feeling,” saints would be prompted to godly action. Thus, the minister Thomas Draxe, having asked what duties one must perform “to persons afflicted and persecuted,” answered, “First, wee must have a fellowlike feeling of their misery, and sympathize with them” (2: 125). After sympathizing (and as a result of it), Christians should pray, offer counsel and “minister unto their necessities” (2: 126). In other words, deeds followed from feeling. Before people acted well, they had to be moved.⁴

Such a view meshed well with an Augustinian humanism embraced more broadly in early modern England. As explained by William Bouwsma, Augustinian humanism considered the will to “take its direction not from reason but from the affections, which are in turn not merely the disorderly impulses of the treacherous body but expressions of the energy and quality of the heart” (47). Bouwsma thus contrasts Augustinian humanism with Stoicism, claiming that the latter never squelched the former during the early modern period. Indeed, a wealth of recent scholarship has focused new attention on what Richard Strier calls the early modern “praise of passion”—a praise he attributes to the Reformation tradition and traces out in English literature. As Strier explains, for many, such as Salutati, Luther and Calvin, Christ’s emotional example (weeping for misfortunes) serves as an example for true Christians (31–32).⁵ But the importance of passion extended beyond Reformed thinkers: for Thomas Wright, a Roman Catholic priest who published The Passions of the Mind in 1600, passion enabled virtuous action. As John Staines summarizes, “A passion is to be moved in order to move a person to act virtuously: the passive emotion becomes active, spurring on...