The Puritan Ordeal by Andrew DelBanco (review)

Shorter Book Reviews 401 persistent faith, the crucial events of his time, and the content and style of his writings, exploring recurring themes, dominant images and changing stylistic techniques. We see Daniel Berrigan as a religious man of letters, as well as a religious man of social and political protest, and are able to follow the development of his artistic powers. We are able to see the negative as well as positive effects of the physical and emotional stress caused by his increased activist involvement, a fugitive existence and then a harsh term in prison. The first five chapters contain comparative references to several literary figures. In the sixth and final chapter, the author places his subject primarily in the contemporary scene. There are many perceptive reflections about the distinctive character of Berrigan's artistic work and thought in this chapter and throughout the book; their quality prompt the reader to wish that the author had treated the place of his subject in the history of American literature in greater detail. But that was not Labrie's purpose, and the approach he has chosen enables us better to understand and appreciate Daniel Berrigan the writer. Robert Afaddcn Department of English University of Toronto Andrew DelBanco, The Puritan Ordeal. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.xiv + 306 pp. The historical profession continues to witness a fruitful and seemingly endless proliferation of American Puritan studies. Indeed, the past decade has seen a resurgence of Puritan intellectual history that has reaffirmed the wealth of interpretive possibilities. DelBanco's book builds on these studies to take a bold and largely successful step towards a new synthesis of the meaning of New England Puritanism for American culture. His ostensible focus is on the effective life of seventeenth-century American Puritans. But the central themes of this impressive work are more directly concerned with the "fear of the emergent selr' (12) which DelBanco contends motivated Puritans to flee England, a fear of the growing pursuit of individual gain and of the emergent expressions of capitalism in English society. In a wider sense, this fear reflected the Puritans' inability to accept a more modern sense of evil; they continued to view sin as privation, as "a temporary estrangement from 402 Shorter Book Reviews God ... " (80), and shrank from the modern guilt-ridden conception of sin as internal. In this context, the Puritan migration becomes profoundly traditional, an act of escape. John Winthrop's famed "Arbella" sermon becomes, rightfully, a rejection of the legalistic modes of capitalist contracts and a plea instead for the force of charity in economic and social exchanges. It was, DelBanco convincingly argues, America's first great communitarian statement, as New England became a place of restorative sanctification. But once in America, Puritans had to define more precisely who they were and what they believed in, and confront more directly issues of doctrine and polity, such as the nature of grace and preparation. As ministers drifted toward the ordered safety of preparationist doctrine, for instance, Anne Hutchinson appeared to remind diem of the idea of a spirit which worked independently of scriptural or sermonic form. She stressed the older view of sin and evil (more feminine in nature), and embraced the restorative grace of the divine presence. Ministers like Thomas Shephard recognized in her theories their own earlier approaches to conversion, since moderated, and reacted fearfully and defensively. Similarly, the many immigrants who returned to England out of disillusionment raised doubts in the minds of those who remained concerning the rightness of their course, thus strengthening the sense of collective loneliness that had already become the principal characteristic of the Puritan ethos and fostering a new language of martyrdom marked more by bewilderment than by millenarian purpose. If the first generation was confused, its children were truly adrift in search of intellectual and affective footings. DelBanco stresses the second generation's fervid embrace of ritual and its glorification of the Puritan ancestors, and he offers an overdue corrective to the revisionist work of Sacvan Bercovitch on the nature of the jeremiad. In DelBanco's terms, reminiscent of the interpretations of Perry Miller and Edmund Morgan, the jeremiad served to contrast the confusion and irreligion of...