Understanding Puritan Meditation |
Affective (or affectionate) aspects of Puritan meditation
While Puritan meditation did involve an active, engaged mind, it was not merely an intellectual pursuit. Rather, the disciplining and changing of thought patterns was for the purpose of influencing one's emotions - of setting one's "affection on things above." Further explanation
Puritans believed divine meditation to be not merely an activity of the head or a duty to perform, but rather, a way to actively move one's affections from self and worldly cares to God and the things of God. As scholar Simon Chan puts it, "... supremely, meditation was the means to stir up the affections... devotion consists chiefly in affections or, more commonly in puritan parlance, in a 'lively faith.'"
There is a tough brawn over thy heart, that it feels not its sins. Now Meditation must look through, and come to the heart at the quick, and cause the truth to dive into the deep places of the soul. When the timber is hard, the workman cannot thrust in the nail with the weight of his hand: no, he must hammer it in. Meditation is the hammering of the heart. It's a pertinent phrase, Jer. 23,24. Is not my word like a fire (saith the Lord) and like a hammer that breaketh the rocks in pieces? There be two similitudes, first, of a hammer: the Word of God is the hammer, meditation is the hand that taketh this hammer, and knocks the nail into the rocky heart, and makes it enter: Wilt thou not feel? I'le make thee feel (saith Meditation) wilt thou not take notice of thy wretched estate? Meditation comes with blow after blow and makes us notice.Puritan Edmund Calamy would agree: "A true meditation is when a man doth so meditate of Christ as to get his heart inflamed with the love of Christ." Nathanael Ranew, too, falls squarely within orthodox Puritan understandings of meditation when he addresses its affective nature. For example, he writes: "If meditation be only head-work, and not heart-work, it is like a picture without life; like a student that studies in a mere acting of wisdom only. The right and genuine meditation is an affectionate thing: as the head acts, the heart glows." In fact, Chan suggests that the focus in Ranew's work, Solitude Improved by Divine Meditation, actually leans toward the affective, noting that Ranew believes "...the predominant emphasis is on the affections of love, joy and delight in heavenly meditation" and that Ranew names "Admiration" as the "Crown on the head" of meditation. One of the most poignant expressions of the affective nature of Ranew's concept of divine meditation is his oft-used metaphor of the individual who meditates often as 'beating a path' to Heaven. The idea here is that one finds such delight in going and, indeed, so often goes before God in divine meditation that the glories of Heaven, the literal and figurative place where God is and where one can meet with Him, are familiar and yet are ever the more desired. Among the feelings that one might expect to accompany this type of intellectual-affective meditation are, of course, love, devotion, and the like; however, Ranew also describes the idea of having rest and peace in the presence of God: "Meditation is to be the motion of the heavenly spirit heavenward; to carry it up to heaven and keep it a time there: a looking of the eye of the mind, and a lifting up of the heart, a making a stay, and taking a spiritual solace in heaven with God." This solace would, no doubt, be of benefit to both a minister and his flock who were continually busy with the cares of everyday life and the work of the ministry. Indeed, much refreshment could be gained through the discipline of meditation. |
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Copyright © 2007 Amy Gant, University of Nebraska-Lincoln