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The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England
The Science of the Soul challenges long-standing notions of Puritan provincialism as antithetical to the Enlightenment. Sarah Rivett demonstrates that, instead, empiricism and natural philosophy combined with Puritanism to transform the scope of religious activity in colonial New England from the 1630s to the Great Awakening of the 1740s.
In an unprecedented move, Puritan ministers from Thomas Shepard and John Eliot to Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards studied the human soul using the same systematic methods that philosophers applied to the study of nature. In particular, they considered the testimonies of tortured adolescent girls at the center of the Salem witch trials, Native American converts, and dying women as a source of material insight into the divine. Conversions and deathbed speeches were thus scrutinized for evidence of grace in a way that bridged the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible, the worldly and the divine.
In this way, the "science of the soul" was as much a part of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy as it was part of post-Reformation theology. Rivett's account restores the unity of religion and science in the early modern world and highlights the role and importance of both to transatlantic circuits of knowledge formation.
In an unprecedented move, Puritan ministers from Thomas Shepard and John Eliot to Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards studied the human soul using the same systematic methods that philosophers applied to the study of nature. In particular, they considered the testimonies of tortured adolescent girls at the center of the Salem witch trials, Native American converts, and dying women as a source of material insight into the divine. Conversions and deathbed speeches were thus scrutinized for evidence of grace in a way that bridged the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible, the worldly and the divine.
In this way, the "science of the soul" was as much a part of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy as it was part of post-Reformation theology. Rivett's account restores the unity of religion and science in the early modern world and highlights the role and importance of both to transatlantic circuits of knowledge formation.
- GenresHistoryPhilosophy
384 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2011
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March 10, 2014
An intriguing book and a reminder of the very different requirements of different disciplines. Accustomed to reading from the perspective of religious history, I find this literary analysis of conversion narratives as objects of scientific inquiry to have several lacunae that left me not quite satisfied. That said, it's carefully researched and offers several important close readings of important texts as well as helping to advance, I think, the discussion about the intersections of "religion" and "science" in early Western "modernity" (scare quotes reflecting the ways that the fields have shifted in recent decades, changes well exemplified in this book). I was grateful for and persuaded by the image of colonial theologians as careful students of the pulsations of grace within individual human souls, spiritual predecessors to Darwin's bird-watcher's catalogue of Galapagos finch phenotypes.
The basic argument as I understand it is the transition in conversion narratives from the orthodox Calvinist narratives that were commonly hedged about by the uncertainty mandated by human depravity and the vast chasm between divine perfections and human cognition to the later evangelical conversion narratives that espoused perfect certainty of one's salvation status. Rivett, as I understand her, attributes this transition not to broader theological shifts but to changes, engendered by the rise of early modern "science," in robust trust in the sense data that stand at the core of scientific empiricism. Just as you trust yourself to measure the pressure exerted by gases, so you trust yourself to correctly perceive the presence of grace within your soul.
In a broad, conceptual sense, the close parity between over-certain science and over-certain religion persists today. You can't have a Richard Dawkins without an Oral Roberts. They are doppelgangers, two peas in a pod. That basic insight seems to resonate in this book, but I'm not entirely persuaded that this specific historical instance actually plays out as described.
Regardless of my vague concerns about an approach to this problem that isn't grounded in historical method, this is an important and interesting book, and I will be engaging it in my own writing on the interplay between Common Sense Realism and mystical currents in antebellum America, the group who are most directly the heirs of the transitions that Rivett chronicles in this important book.
The basic argument as I understand it is the transition in conversion narratives from the orthodox Calvinist narratives that were commonly hedged about by the uncertainty mandated by human depravity and the vast chasm between divine perfections and human cognition to the later evangelical conversion narratives that espoused perfect certainty of one's salvation status. Rivett, as I understand her, attributes this transition not to broader theological shifts but to changes, engendered by the rise of early modern "science," in robust trust in the sense data that stand at the core of scientific empiricism. Just as you trust yourself to measure the pressure exerted by gases, so you trust yourself to correctly perceive the presence of grace within your soul.
In a broad, conceptual sense, the close parity between over-certain science and over-certain religion persists today. You can't have a Richard Dawkins without an Oral Roberts. They are doppelgangers, two peas in a pod. That basic insight seems to resonate in this book, but I'm not entirely persuaded that this specific historical instance actually plays out as described.
Regardless of my vague concerns about an approach to this problem that isn't grounded in historical method, this is an important and interesting book, and I will be engaging it in my own writing on the interplay between Common Sense Realism and mystical currents in antebellum America, the group who are most directly the heirs of the transitions that Rivett chronicles in this important book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review