A look at modern scholarship on Puritan meditation
General introduction
Before examining Puritan manuals and sermon collections upon meditation in a close way, it is important to consider the work that earlier scholars have done, noting their sources, arguments, and conclusions, as well as later scholarly comments on their work. This article provides a brief outline of the modern scholarship, from the 1950s to the present, which is related to the study of Puritan meditative practice.
Puritan meditation lends itself well to scholarly investigation in a variety of fields. Thus far, literary scholarship on the subject has been most plentiful. Of course, such scholarship also involves analysis of non-literary (e.g. theological, historical) aspects of meditation in order to provide context for the attitudes, actions and thoughts of Puritans about this topic.
Even so, much work remains to be done. Many of the literary studies appear in a work whose larger focus is upon one specific author or text, thus limiting the amount of space devoted either to discussing the effect of the meditative tradition on that work, or to analyzing larger trends in Puritan meditation.
Further, few historians have studied Puritan meditation. Simon Chan's 1986 dissertation demonstrates the importance of historical analysis to this field of study, and it provides a good introduction to and sampling of the very large number of sources available. Yet further study on Puritan meditation, including its methodological, theological and practical aspects, is necessary.
Further explanation
Louis Martz's 1954 study of the relationship between poetry and meditation in the seventeenth century began recent scholarship on Puritan meditation. Martz, a literary scholar, proposed that continental meditative influences affected English religious practice and poetry of the seventeenth century. He drew important connections between Protestant and Catholic, Continental and British, and pre- and post-Reformation meditative traditions; however, he did not study at length the tradition which F.L. Huntley later described as a post-gunpowder-plot "non-Jesuitical, Protestant, and English mode of meditation."
In the middle of the next decade, U. Milo Kaufmann further considered Puritan meditation from a literary viewpoint. He argued that two separate traditions developed within Puritan meditation: one which limited imagination and focused on strict adherence to the Scriptures within meditation, and one which held that it could be profitable to use limited imagination in visualizing extra-biblical events. Yet not all scholars agree with Kauffman that such a distinction upon this point is necessary. John R. Knott, Jr. wrote that although these distinctions can be helpful, it is important to realize that the traditions are much more fluid and may even coexist within one writer; he suggested that perhaps speaking of "tendencies" within Puritan meditation would be more accurate than Kaufmann's idea of divergent traditions. Later, theologian Joel R. Beeke mentioned Kaufmann's failure to deal with the Puritan fear of excessive visualization of gospel events beyond the bounds of Scripture on the one hand, and yet on the other hand the "remarkable freedom that...writers gave to scriptural imagination and use of the senses" and argued that more of a balance is necessary in understanding the imagination in regard to Puritan meditation.
In 1968, Norman Grabo authored a response to Perry Miller's The New England Mind. Although Miller's focus on psychology is not of consequence here, Grabo's response to it featured a discussion of Puritan ideas about the affections and meditation. Notably, he argued that much of Puritan meditative methodology did have Catholic roots, and challenged Louis Martz's treatment of Puritan meditation as of little importance until after 1650. Grabo's work provides evidence that it began a few decades earlier.
In the 1970s, Barbara Lewalski twice addressed the Protestant art of meditation in works regarding the poetry of John Donne. Her excellent analyses of Protestant meditation highlight its distinct character. Lewalski disagreed with those who related it too closely with Catholic meditative practices and instead argued that the most useful methodological comparisons appear in other Protestant practices such as hearing or giving sermons, studying the Scriptures, searching for personal application of truth, and more.
In 1980, John R. Knott Jr. addressed some further issues related to Puritan meditation in his book, The Sword of the Spirit: Puritan Responses to the Bible, primarily in a chapter on Richard Baxter's Saints' Everlasting Rest. He pointed out that, "Baxter's approach to meditation was unusually eclectic for someone writing in the mid-seventeenth century for a predominantly Puritan audience. He was able to assimilate influences of widely varying kinds..." and further noted the importance of stirring up the affections to Puritan meditation. His work is a helpful, accessible introduction to Baxter's work on meditation and provides some important questions, comparisons and contrasts which will prove useful in the present study as well.
Two years later, Frank Livingstone Huntley published an edited collection of Bishop Joseph Hall's works on meditation. In the introduction to this work, he drew some conclusions about Puritan meditation in general, categorizing it as philosophically Platonic, psychologically Augustinian, theologically Pauline-Calvinist, public rather than private, more similar to sermons than to penitential prayer, and finding its "subject matter in God's 'three books'". Scholars such as Chan and Beeke have criticized these conclusions as too rigid or too "neatly devised" to reflect the reality and diversity of the Puritan meditative tradition. Even so, Huntley provided a helpful introduction to Hall and his work, as well as a useful discussion of the Ramist techniques used by Hall and others.
Earlier, in 1979, Huntley had also produced Bishop Joseph Hall, 1574-1656: a Biographical and Critical Study. This work develops many ideas upon which Huntley would build in his 1982 publication, yet it itself is useful. It provides a much more thorough historical and literary background for Hall's work on meditation. Additionally, it explains the importance of medieval influences on Hall's understanding of meditation, especially as opposed to counter-Reformation influences such as the work of Ignatius of Loyola. Further, it includes a more extensive discussion of Hall's use of the three books and of his literary style. Thus both works by Huntley provide important background for the development of the Puritan meditative tradition as it would continue to develop.
Chan, the first historian to address the subject of Puritan meditation at length, argued in his 1986 dissertation that the Protestant and Puritan meditative tradition did not differ methodologically from the late medieval Catholic tradition of meditation as much as it did in theology. In part because of the presence of these seemingly Catholic elements, Chan presented Puritan meditation as basically ascetic rather than enthusiastic - or, in other words, as more focused upon duty than upon the work of the Holy Spirit in the practical application of their theology. He also argued in favor of a "progressive development" of Protestant meditation from non-methodical to methodical over time. Chan's work is especially useful in that he assembles the major broad-based overview of this tradition and because he points out the great importance of this subject. Unfortunately, he falls short of achieving a full characterization of the Puritan meditative tradition. Even though many of the practical outworkings of Puritan and Catholic meditative traditions may be the same - which is Chan's argument - the theological bases for the two are so divergent as to keep comparisons between them to a rather superficial level, not taking into account the inner thoughts and motivations of the Catholic or Puritan meditators themselves.
In 2003, Joel R. Beeke compiled a concise, helpful survey of certain aspects of the Puritan understanding of meditation, in which he also briefly addressed prior scholarship in this area. The focus of this article is pastoral exhortation more than historical or theological analysis; nevertheless, it is useful even for the latter two pursuits due to its useful, representative sample of Puritan teachings about meditation.
The scholarly study of Puritan meditative practice, dominated mostly by literary scholars, and most active in recent memory between the mid-1950's and the mid-1980's, has provided a strong and inclusive base upon which further work can profitably depend. Yet the available studies leave many important questions about this discipline yet to be considered. For instance, much of the literary scholarship on meditative practice has grown out of study of a single individual's work and has not sought to provide a full comparison of that individual's work with other contemporary meditative works.
The more recent studies, Chan's and Beeke's, demonstrate a trend toward scholarship that speaks more generally about how wide-ranging and diverse this tradition actually was and which seeks to place Puritan meditation more clearly in its broader historical framework. Yet, again, there is more work that remains to be accomplished, especially in areas of historically- and chronologically-based analysis of texts and in terms of interpreting Puritan meditation via other practices and phenomena from within Puritanism itself.
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