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Errand into the Wilderness

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When I was pursuing my Ph.D. in American history more than twenty years ago Perry Miller's studies of Puritan New England represented required reading on this religious group and its settling in North America. Having just reread this volume, originally published in 1956, Miller's work still offers insight into the Puritan mindset. He argues in this book that the Puritans came to America not so much in search of a better livelihood so much as in search of a better world. The quest for a perfect society motivated them beyond all else. I recommend "Errand into the Wilderness" both as an important statement of the intellectual history of the Puritans and an enthralling reading experience by one of the masters of American colonial history.

"Errand into the Wilderness" is a collection of ten essays, mostly previously published, on various aspects of colonial intellectual history. All but one of them deals with Puritan thought, but the one on the Virginia colony also emphasizes the religious/intellectual nature of the "errand" to create a more perfect society in North America. The Puritans explicitly accepted the mission of an "errand into the wilderness" to establish God's kingdom, serving as a beacon to England of what it should become as well. Essays with titles like, "The Marrow of Puritan Divinity," "The Puritan State and Puritan Society," "The Rhetoric of Sensation," and "The End of the World" trace an overriding concern for the salvation of humanity through increasing "perfection" in this life. The utopian element of Puritan thought comes through clearly in these essays, and they present a compelling element of the American experience. Making the world a better place has long been the "stuff" of the American character.

Miller asks several fascinating questions at the conclusion of this volume. "Can an errand, even an errand into the wilderness, be run indefinitely?...Can a culture, which changes to embody itself in a nation, push itself into such remorseless exertion without ever learning whether it has been sent on its business at some incomprehensible behest, or is obligated to discover a meaning for its dynamism in the very act of running....What will America do--what can American do--with an implacable prophecy that there is a point in time beyond which the very concept of a future becomes meaningless? Protestant America, as well as Catholic, has an implicit commitment to this event. What then happens to the errand?" (p. 217) The Puritan sense of the errand into the wilderness is pervasive in American society to the present. Miller's analysis resonates still.

For those wishing to begin learning about Puritan theology, this book is probably the best starting point there is. The book is a collection of essays covering different aspects of the Puritan experience and their belief system. This is intellectual history, and some chapters are quite difficult. Most chapters, however, are highly readable and easy to comprehend. An excellent follow-up book, which disputes the idea of a decline in Puritan piety over the generations, is Harry S. Stout's "The New England Soul." Recommended for any college level reading person.

Perry Miller's collection of essays ranges from his stomping ground of the Puritans to Virginia and elsewhere in colonial history. Throughout, the most blindingly brilliant American intellectual historian of the twentieth century displays his craft. Unlike his magisterial histories of the New England Mind, these tend to be somewhat easier to follow, as his themes were more compact. If you haven't read Perry Miller, you're missing a first-class thinker; at the least, there's no more important colonial historian, although many are more easily accessible.

Perry Miller's "Errand Into the Wilderness" more than any other book I've read in a long time makes you realize sometimes how little education our educational institutions actually provide. Think of the Puritans. The word conjures up images of earnest, hard-working folk bedecked in golden buckles and ruffles eager to spread their moral superiority to anyone within earshot. We think of their biggest accomplishment as managing to survive disease and pestilence for so long, despite their backward ways. The history we know of the Puritans is a history of events - things they did, their names, their travels. Miller's fascinating book opens up Puritan history for those interested in intellectual history - a history of ideas, theology, and polity. And what a fascinating world he uncovers.

While the main focus here is Puritanism, Miller does occasionally do a bit of wandering; some of the latter essays explore Emerson and the formation of American nationalist ideology. There are ten essays, all of which are full of the enticing, meaty history of ideas, so I won't be able to cover all the ground of the book here, though I would like to give a short précis of some of those essays which I thought to be the most impressive.

The book's title comes from one Samuel Danforth, whose sermon "A Brief Recognition of New England's Errand into the Wilderness" sets the existential, searching tone whose tenor can be found in each one of these essays. In the title essay, Miller notes the dual meaning of the word "errand." It can mean a task done by an inferior for a superior, or it can refer to the task alone, the very action itself. The first generation of Puritans to set foot on North American soil never thought of themselves as Americans. They were just Englishmen and Englishwomen whose task was to see to it that the "errand" of the Reformation could be enacted on Earth. In other words, they saw themselves very much performing an errand in the first sense. After the English Civil War had failed to turn the heads of the world to their glorious City on a Hill, they were left with a vast wilderness. These essays are how the Puritans fashioned a sense of meaning, and eventually, in time, American identity, out of those very raw ingredients whose presence still make themselves felt in American life - Calvinist theology, a sense of community, and profound intolerance.

"The Marrow of Puritan Divinity" is one of the longest, and best, essays in the collection. It covers the shift from strict fundamentalist Calvinism to covenantal theology that took place sometime within the early part of the seventeenth century. In 1550, strict Calvinism was still acceptable. The Scientific Revolution was still far off, and the abject nature of human beings was still de rigueur. The absolute and capricious power of God could still accept or reject human souls according to His whim. By 1650, however, the unscientific worldview that would allow this kind of God had, in some respects, given away. Theology had better learn to justify the ways of God to man or else risk losing some of its influence. Some of the first important Puritan theologians - including Cotton, Hooker, Shepard, and Bulkley - began to constitute a new school that broke from Calvinism in one important way: the incorporation of covenantal theology. No longer, according to these theologians, did you have to believe in God despite his mercurial nature as you used to. Now when you professed a belief in God, you and He entered into a covenant - he turned into a God who was capable of making and keeping a promise. "He has become a God chained - by His own consent, it is true, but nevertheless a God restricted and circumscribed - a God who can be counted upon, a God who can be lived with. Man can always know where God is and what he intends" (63). In a lot of ways this essay forms the ideological core of the book, since Miller will discuss in the later essays many of the ways in which the covenant was absolutely essential in understanding Puritan civil society, church, and state. In fact, Winthrop's constitutional ideas were based upon the idea of men coming together and forming an earthly covenant.

In "Nature and the National Ego," Miller again uses the trope of the wilderness and connects it to Emerson and American identity writ large. He says that, in contrast to Europe's "Nature" (which is effeminate, inferior, derivative), America has founded itself the original, masculine quintessence of the wilderness. To support this idea, he points out that many Americans intellectuals in the nineteenth century began to worry about the possible effects of industrialization and the encroachment of "civilization," fearing that its appearance might be proportional to the uniquely American identity that might they might have to cede. He goes so far as to say that "if there be such a thing as an American character, it took shape under the molding influence of the conceptions of Nature and civilization" (210).

Both chronologically and ideologically, these are the two essays that couch the rest of this wonderful collection. I would recommend these essays for anyone in search of an alternate view to the prevailing idea of America as being originally founded on religious tolerance and individualism, or anyone excited by old-fashioned American intellectual history. This is some of the best of its kind.

Perry Miller's "Errand Into the Wilderness" is a collection of ten essays on American Puritanism. In these essays, Miller attempts to examine the origins of American history through the examples of the Puritans. His main thesis is one of Americanization. Miller's ten essays follow the theme of "errand into the wilderness" and he uses theological, social, and literary contributions to explain and exhibit this errand into the wilderness. Miller provides literary criticism for each piece to interpret them according to the uniqueness of the American experience.

The title of the book derives its name from Samuel Danforth's 1670 election sermon. The word "errand" is a "metaphor" that probes "some deeper configuration in the story than mere modification, by obvious and natural necessity, of an imported European culture in an adjustment to a frontier" (p. 1). Miller's first chapter discusses the second and third generation Puritans who began to question if they had fulfilled John Winthrop's prophecy of a "city upon a hill." Did they set up and provide a model society for Protestant Europe or did they create something new? Miller contends that the Puritans had unknowingly "redefined their errand" and had begun the process of Americanization and a new identity. This process of "redefining their errand" led to inner tensions and splintering among the Puritans. In "Thomas Hooker and the Democracy of Connecticut," Miller opposes the Vernon L. Parrington and James Truslow Adams views that Connecticut was more democratic than Massachusetts. Miller believes that the rivalry between Hooker and Cotton Mather was much more a factor in the separation. Miller explains the pattern of settlement among river towns of the Connecticut Valley worked out a social pattern, a wilderness pattern, that was vastly different from that of Boston or Salem. Miller believes the philosophical view in Connecticut was similar to Massachusetts.

In the essay entitled "Religion and Society in the Early Literature of Virginia," Miller tries to show that this colony had many similarities with New England. Even though historians have represented Virginia as a business proposition, the colonizing impulse was Protestant, similar to that of the Puritans. The Virginians justified their errand into the wilderness by appealing to the Protestant theology that it would be most acceptable to God. When the Company dissolved it went from a holy experiment to a commercial plantation. In the following essay, "The Puritan State and Puritan Society," Miller believes that Puritanism was not tolerant or democratic and that the government of New England was a dictatorship that was carried into the wilderness. The following chapter on Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening, presents the awakening as a social revolution or transformation that was brought into the American wilderness in search of a new concept of meaning. By 1740, Edwards was the turning point in the Puritan errand into the wilderness. Edwards, a child of the wilderness, was convinced that people should be brought into the experience, that it was not "private and privileged," but "social and communal" (p. 163). The people played a role in their own welfare. Miller analyzes the influence of John Locke on Edwards, saying that Edwards went beyond Locke, that the word was linked not only with the idea, but also with the emotions. The belief that an idea in the mind is not merely a concept, but an emotion, and Edwards preached terror and fear.

Miller continues on with Edwards by comparing him to Ralph Waldo Emerson in an attempt to show that the two of them are not as far apart as we would believe. Miller asserts that Puritan covenant theology, Edwards' sensationalism, and Emersonian transcendentalism have some similar features. Edwards went to nature to find the images or shadows of divine things, whereas Emerson went to nature and saw the mind in a mutual embrace with nature. Miller goes onto discuss the mid-nineteenth century fascination with nature in America. That nature was the last thing between Americans and civilization. If nature were civilized, it would mean the end of the errand into the wilderness.

In the final essay, Miller asks the questions, "Can an errand, even an errand into the wilderness, be run indefinitely?" "What will America do - what can America do - with an implacable prophecy that there is a point in time beyond which the very concept of the future becomes meaningless? What then happens to the errand?" (p. 217). Here, Miller extends his argument from Edwards to the atomic bomb. Miller calls Jonathan Edwards the greatest artist of the apocalypse and that the need for a Judgment had not been removed by scientific discovery. "It will come as a cry at midnight," Edwards said (p.233). Miller, however, concludes that the errand into the wilderness was not run for this. Even though Massachusetts ministers and magistrates thought that their people had not been faithful to the errand, Miller finds that their "errand into the wilderness" was, indeed, a success.

Perry Miller is one of the great founders of the whole academic enterprise called 'American Studies'. In this work he considers the way the religious conceptions of the Puritans and their successors helped form a new society in a new land.

A classic examination of the intellectual struggles of the American Puritans. All serious students and scholars of American literature and history must read this book.