Modern collective guilt theory as rooted in the English Revolution.

Guilt is an inextricable but problematic component of political ideologies and radical movements. Its role in mass movements such as national socialism is well known, where it is usually taken as evidence of its destructive capability. But guilt has also figured in more benign mobilizations for political change, where, depending on how it is used, it can serve as a constructive force as well. When Martin Luther King pronounced the "collective guilt" of American society for its history of racial oppression he did so not to assign it exclusively to the dominant race, but precisely the contrary, to emphasize that it transcended racial lines and that every individual of whatever race, both oppressor and oppressed, bore some culpability for injustice and a responsibility to rectify it. Czech President Vaclav Havel has more than once condemned "the pernicious doctrine of collective guilt" as it was used to justify persecution of opponents by both communist and post-communist governments. Yet he himself has come under fire for his repeated insistence that blame for the crimes of the communist system did not rest exclusively with party officials and that everyone in Czechoslovak society was, whether actively or passively, inescapably involved and implicated.(1)

Such dilemmas demonstrate that collective guilt is still an important part of modern politics, but it is not new in the history of western society; nor is western literature lacking means to express it. It is a central feature of classical tragedy, for example, rediscovered in modern times during the Renaissance through the drama of the Elizabethans. On a popular level it is more likely to be expressed in religious language, through the myths and metaphors of the Bible, which were similarly revived and transmitted to the modern world in the Protestant Reformation. Perhaps the earliest and most pervasive system of organizing guilt for mass political purposes in modern history was Calvinism. Often expressed in biblical terms, the conviction that guilt for moral and social evils can spread itself so as to include all members of a society was at the core of Calvinist theology and, by extension, Calvinist sociology and political thought. Though usually credited with a decisive role in the origins of modern "individualism," the Calvinist group that developed these mechanisms of collective identity to their full political and revolutionary potential was English Puritanism. By examining the language used by Puritan preachers in sermons to the Long Parliament and other political assemblies before and during the English Civil War, I will argue that guilt was used as a kind of popular sociology and social psychology which mobilized public action and contributed directly to the English Revolution. This picture of radical religion in action may further offer, if not a unique, certainly an unusually vivid commentary on the symbolism of Calvinist religion, if not of Christianity itself, and its meaning for the political culture of early modern England.(2)

Despite academic attempts to devise more technical definitions, the trait for which the Puritans are renowned remains their keen Hobbesian conviction of human moral depravity. "Man hath an evil root within him," warned the notorious Thomas Brooks, "that root of bitterness, that curses sinful nature that is in him."

The whole frame of man is out of frame. The understanding is dark, the will cross, the memory slippery, the affections crooked, the conscience corrupted, the tongue poisoned, and the heart wholly evil, only evil, and continually evil.

Such a view of one's fellow human beings (or for that matter oneself) might be seen as the product of disturbances in early modern society, a time when rapid social change and economic dislocation had weakened many traditional moral and legal constraints; and while the Puritans' opinion of humanity in the best of times was bleak indeed, they were also convinced that in their own age the natural evil that lurked within the hearts of men and women had been given an unusually free rein. "Our times are times of most prodigious wickedness," the famous Stephen Marshall told the House of Commons on the eve of the Civil War, "horrible abominations in men's manners:"

I am confident never such abominable drunkenness and general looseness in that kind, never more universal liberty of whoring, incestuous marriages, oppressions, cruelty, injustice, malice, revenge, and everything that might fill a land with ungodliness. Since we or our forefathers were born, never was there a greater deluge of wickedness than in these our times.

Why such an inundation of disorder and dissipation should have been released at this time is difficult to say, though the most worrying forms of antisocial behavior seem to have been those unleashed by changes in the economic and social structure, as well as by an inadequate system of law enforcement and legal justice that seldom remedied and often exacerbated them: urban decay, poverty, crime, alcoholism, prostitution, fraudulent and exploitative commercial practices, family breakdown, personal and class antagonisms, official corruption. "Go but to the places of greatest resort, market towns, populous cities, and fairs," Marshall suggested, "and your hearts would tremble to think how our land is overspread with these:"

... oppression, cruelty, defrauding of brethren, the sensual sins of uncleanness, especially that of drunkenness ... nobles, magistrates, knights, and gentlemen and persons of great quality ... taking part with wicked men and wicked causes ... patrons of alehouses and disorders, checking inferior officers who discover any zeal for God against an ill cause. In many of their families there is not so much as a face of civility ... and some few others borne down in their places with the torrent of wickedness.(3)

The description of societal problems as "evil" and the result of "sin" and "wickedness" was not a simplistic failure to accept that they were also social and systemic. In fact the preachers' refusal to limit sin to those with whom they had personal or partisan differences would seem to indicate precisely the opposite, though they were concerned that an acknowledgement of what would now be called the environmental causes of social deviance not become so impersonal as to obscure the fact that society was after all made up of morally responsible individuals. "We complain of the times, but let us take heed that they be not the worse for us," the great Richard Sibbes remarked years before the war. "The worse the times are, the better be thou; for this is thy glory, to be good in an evil generation." Not only were the times bad because people were sinful, in other words, but people could well be encouraged to further sinfulness by the badness of the times, and the social nature of sin was conveyed in the principle that the moral quality of all was to some extent tainted by the problems of their society. "There is none of us all but we have had a hand in the sins of the times," Sibbes insisted. "The best of all conditions are guilty of them. ... We are all guilty in this respect, we receive some taint and soil from the times we live in." While Calvinist theology did portray the world as polarized between the godly and the ungodly - "God's people" as against those of Satan - their sociology tended to minimize that polarity, initially at least, as well as the more visible division between political parties. "Yea amongst God's own people," said Henry Scudder, "even they will be too much tainted with the common sins of the times and places wherein they live."(4)

The political implications of sin then were more complex than simply assigning it exclusively to one's enemies or political opponents, since even the sins of the most wicked were the concern of the most righteous. "A broken spirit grieves and mourns for the sins of others," Francis Roberts said, "especially for the public abounding sins of the times wherein it lives." A righteous soul in fact was not one with less sin but one that demonstrated a willingness to take on the burden of not only its own sins but those of others as well, and an obligation existed not only to be sorry for public sins but also to do something about them. "Let us mourn for our own sins and the sins of the times wherein we live," urged Sibbes. "And let us not only mourn for the sins of the times but labor also to repress them all we can." So important was this personal and interpersonal repression that people would be held accountable not only for what they did but also for what they did not do. "Observe that there's a great deal of guilt and iniquity even in sins of omission," noted Thomas Horton. "The neglect of what we should do is a business which we are accountable for as well as the venturing upon that which we should forbear." And the first thing people were to do, beyond attending to their own sins, was to restrain the sins of their neighbors. "We sin in others while we suffer them to sin," Joseph Caryl said. "We become guilty of other men's sins not only by commanding, counselling, and approving them, but (if we may) by not stopping and restraining them." The effect of this concern with other people's sins was to create a nation not of meddling busybodies (though naturally that was the accusation, both at the time and today), but potentially of vigilant political activists, since people could be held liable for the sins of even the highest figures in the social and political hierarchy, and all were obligated (to a point) to restrain even their social and political superiors. "They do not seldom become guilty of the sins of others by too much complying with kings and princes that seek to mould them to their own designs, although never so wicked or injurious," Cornelius Burges told the House of Commons in 1642. "Kings should not be permitted to commit such public sins, but counsel, Parliament, people, and everyone according to his place and power should hinder them."(5)

The ministers did believe in working through constituted authority as far as possible, and those who already held political office were charged with especially weighty responsibilities for the behavior of those both beneath and above them. "An ill executor of the laws is worse in a state than a great breaker of them," Robert Bolton told some local officials in an assize sermon. "Not to punish an offense, being under your charge and in your power, is to commit it." A clear political dimension was inherent in the concept of national guilt, since God attached a special importance to the role of public authority. "Take an evil, and though it were never so private before, yet if it pass here it will take a higher degree and commence national wickedness," William Bridge told the House of Commons in 1641. "This is a fearful evil, and very dreadful, that a personal sin should become national." One criterion for national wickedness was said to be the role of the law, making national sin more impersonal than personal sin. "A sin is ... (among diverse other ways) properly said to be the sin of a nation when it is established or at least tolerated by law," Thomas Case informed the Commons, "by the government of a nation, not only some governors in a nation." Yet it was men who made and enforced laws, and they were said to be personally accountable to God for the laws under their jurisdiction. "You must look upon yourselves as trusted with the making of all necessary laws and the strengthening of those already made ... for purging the land from whatever filthiness is in it," Burges told the members of the House, "which till you be careful to effect, the sins of particular persons will become national and the guilt thereof will lie at your door." The principle of national guilt then was not incompatible with that of personal responsibility, since both existed alongside and even reinforced one another. "Personal sins are made national when they are not punished by authority," Case asserted, "and national sins are made personal when they are not laid to heart by the subject." There was often no strong distinction between individual and national sins, between the private and the public, between officials and ordinary persons, and the duties of public officials and those of private individuals were by no means mutually exclusive. "How vainly do many private persons bless themselves in casting off the blame and danger of the sins of the times upon great men in places because they think it not their duties to reform these things but those that have power and authority in their hands to suppress them," Samuel Fairclough remarked in 1641. "And how vainly do many of our magistrates ... wash their hands from the sins of ... towns and families by saying. We have nothing to do in these sins of the times, we join not in the practice of drunkards, swearers, and incest, when yet they accessarily and occasionally are guilty of all those which by their counsel, power, and authority they might have restrained."(6)

Sin and guilt then were not matters of personal or private morality; in an age of increasing social disorder they were seen, perhaps not unrealistically, as having social and political consequences, and one succinct method of conveying this was through organic imagery. "What breeds distempers in the body natural," said one, "carries some resemblance to that which causeth distempers in a body politic." In itself a conventional form of discourse at the time, this imagery was infused with new and almost literal meaning by the Puritan preachers, who more than most used the metaphor to emphasize not the health of the social organism but these "distempers" and "diseases" and the need for drastic remedies by those in positions to administer them. "The commonwealth is a body politic," explained Elidad Blackwell. "Offenders and offences in a commonwealth, they are (as it were) the peccant and noxious humors and diseases in that body. Judges and magistrates, they are (as it were) physicians for the healing and curing of those diseases." The idea that the nation as a whole constituted a "body," within which Parliament stood as the "representative body," and which in turn was composed of individual bodies, expressed the link between private and public morality and with it the transmission of guilt among the limbs or "members." "You may keep the disease from proving epidemical, for as for the general body of this people it hath well nigh overspread all," Anthony Tuckney reminded the "state physicians" who sat in Parliament, "and therefore the representative body's integrity must stand for all, one body for another, you representing us all, as well to God as to man, and so being for the present the only means that is left of keeping off national guilt and so the wrath of God from this whole nation." This idea stipulated that great men and public figures, especially as they sat in Parliament, were so important to the spiritual status of the nation that they embodied it, both as individual persons and, indeed, as a "body." "Let me consider you ... as you are united into one body," Calamy told the Commons at the start of the war:

All the sins of the kingdom which are committed by your connivance, or allowance, are the Parliament's sins, and they call for a Parliament repentance. I beseech you, search and try your hearts, and consider how far you are accessary to the sins of the kingdom, that so you may be wrought up not only to a personal but to a Parliament humiliation. And if it doth appear that you have taken more care in settling your own liberties than in settling of religion, if you have taken more care to build your own houses than God's house, this is a crying sin, and this makes you accessary to a thousand sins that are committed in the kingdom. Again, if you do not labor according to your duty, and according to your power, to suppress the errors and heresies that are spread in the kingdom, all these errors are your errors, and these heresies are your heresies, and they are your sins, and God calls for a Parliamentary repentance from you for them this day.(7)

There was thus no sharp distinction between personal and public morality; especially for those designated as "public persons" nothing any longer entirely "private." "Private self-respects prove great hindrances to most necessary duties," according to Herbert Palmer. Those who neglected public affairs to devote themselves to private matters were said to be simply atrophied or diseased members of the body politic, fit only to be cut off from the life of the whole. "Surely it is a great pity that any man's private respect should hinder the common good," John Greene said. "Nor will it be well with the body politic, where it is not with this as in the natural, which will willingly lose a great deal of blood ... will endure the cutting off a limb or two, to preserve the health and life of the whole." Organic imagery thus tied the individual to the collective in such a way as to make everything public and even political, and the near-literal understanding of the metaphor in political affairs was perhaps most powerfully conveyed when it was reversed and the individual in turn was described as a kind of microcosmic political unit: just as the body politic might be forced to discharge noxious humors or amputate useless limbs, so each person was required to institute a reign of terror against the public enemies incorporated within his own carnality. "Every man hath a little commonwealth within him," said Thomas Case. "Call a parliament ... in thine own heart. Thither call every offender before thee. Sit as a ruler, a judge, and arraign and execute every rebellious, traitorous lust. Cast out whatsoever it is that will not consist with the government of Jesus Christ."(8)

This tendency to describe sin (and indeed all aspects of life) in political as well as religious terms indicates how the preachers saw people, for all their antisocial traits, as at least potentially political animals with a capacity to benefit from political instruction and practice. "God hath made every man a governor over himself," asserted Richard Sibbes. "The poor man, that hath none to govern, yet may he be a king in himself. It is the natural ambition of man's heart to desire government. ... When we have learned to rule over our own spirits well, then we may be fit to rule over others." For even the humblest subject then the repression of sin was the first step in becoming a citizen and exercising political authority over others, and the most basic unit of such "government" any man (or in this case even woman) could command was the family. "Every master of a family stands accountable to God for his family as well as for himself." The family served as something of a link between the private and the public, and so could combine the various understandings and practices of authority most effectively. "Family authority ... ought to be more exact and strict than public and that which is more extensive," argued Thomas Coleman. "Successful reformation is by gradual ascension: family, congregation, kingdom - the less constitutes the greater." Personal reform was the beginning of that over others, and family reform was but the first stage in reforming all of society. "Reform your own families," Edmund Calamy urged members of Parliament, "and then you will be the fitter to reform the family of God." The family was the basic unit of "society," as well as the most personal object of affection, and therefore the training ground for political - including "radical" political - activity. "Families are the first root of human consort and communion, for government was first settled in those little nurseries," Francis Cheynell pointed out. "If the root be rotten, what will the branches be? A kingdom consists of so many families united ... for the common good, and if families be poisoned and corrupted, what will become of the towns and cities, and how will the kingdom flourish?" The foundation of all politics was thus "economic" in the seventeenth century understanding of the word, and the family was not a private institution but the lowest building block of civil society. "All civil unions begin in a family, in a house, in those three combinations of husband and wife, parents and children, governors and servants," Humphrey Chambers noted. "By the union of houses, cities and townships are constituted; by the union of cities, kingdoms are composed; and so upwards, out of the union of kingdoms arise large and comprehensive empires or states of the earth." The idea of the family as a political and administrative unit was most easily projected outward in the case of great men and members of Parliament, who had special responsibilities regarding their own, politically influential families as well as the nation, which itself could be described as a kind of extended family. "You that are Parliament men are members of an honorable house," Francis Cheynell said. "The kingdom is your household; the commonwealth is your family."(9)

Such comparisons might work both ways; but here the effect was arguably less a patriarchal view of the state, since the intent was to devolve authority from a single head to all householders, rather than the politicization of the family, and indeed of all social relationships. In fact it was usually through ties of family and kinship, whether literal or figurative, that people could be held guilty for sins committed not only by others but by others before they themselves were born. "This humiliation for the sins of our nation must extend to the sins of our forefathers," declared Herbert Palmer, who argued that guilt for past sins was based on social and political relationships, whereby people derived benefits from the acts of their compatriots and forefathers. "Especially if in anything we find, that any worldly commodity we enjoy is the fruit of their sin."

Human politics excuse or justify or commend those sins that redound in appearance to worldly security or advantage, as the letting evil men or practices alone which might have been redressed and suppressed.(10)

The line between the "temporal" and the "eternal" was thin therefore, since punishments were not necessarily limited in time. "The wrath of God reacbeth to the soul as well as to the body," declared Alexander Henderson, "to kingdoms as well as to particular persons or families, to the posterity as well as to the present generation." By the same measures it was sometimes said that the punishment incurred through such guilt would be merely "temporal," though precisely how temporal was left unclear. "The destruction that the family and friends of the offenders are enrapped in is only temporal," Palmer said, "unless they be guilty of the same sin or the vengeance of God reckon with them also for their ungodliness in other respects." In any case, the guilt that carried across time was usually for sins from which the entire nation derived some lasting worldly benefit - sins that had had political and even historical importance in that they had left an impact on subsequent events and especially on the current state of affairs. They were sins in which the injustice in some way still remained in the world, and they were almost invariably sins of "blood." "Blood-guiltiness is another provoking sin," Edmund Calamy told Parliament. "How much hath been shed heretofore and the murderers either not brought unto judgment or not prosecuted in judgment? This polluteth a kingdom with blood, and this blood crieth loud for vengeance upon those into whose hands God did put the sword of justice to revenge for him and to execute wrath upon such as are murderers and do it not." While various forms of private violence - from the common crimes of the lower orders to dynastic warfare at the top - were still feared as serious sources of instability, blood guilt usually involved acts of specifically political repression. "The land is guilty of blood," Cornelius Burges proclaimed to the House of Commons in 1642, "and blood, you know, defiles the land." Burges interwove different strands in the theme of blood guilt as it related to political authority in the sense of both family and violence and specifically exempted private crime when he called on Parliament to repent its complicity in the atrocities of earlier regimes. "I speak not now of ordinary murders committed by private persons for which the law hath provided," he insisted, "but of blood, shed by the whole kingdom, even in Parliament itself."

Witness the blood of many hundred saints and martyrs, shed in England in times of popish persecution, to which the bloody paramours of the scarlet whore hath been enabled by diverse laws made in Parliament in the reigns of Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VIII, and Queen Mary and for which the land was never sufficiently humbled into this day... I leave it to your wise and pious consideration whether England and the Parliament of England be not deeply concerned in the butcheries and burnings of so many holy and precious men and women as (perhaps by the hands or procurement of some of their ancestors who now sit in Parliament) have been destroyed by those bloody laws of this kingdom at the instigation of the man of sin.

Blood guilt on the royal houses of England was an emotive theme in both popular literature and official propaganda. Here however, the blood feud was no longer a private quarrel between actual families, or even a semi-private affair between the royal family and the deity; now it had been displaced onto the public realm as a decidedly public affair between the entire nation and God. Though Burges does exploit the ambiguity inherent in the idea to suggest that guilt for blood is transmitted through the blood lines of great men such as kings, noblemen, and members of Parliament, he also seems to indicate that the phenomenon itself confuses and calls into question the legitimacy of those family lines as the basis of political authority:

Do but trace the streams of blood that issued from that first law made in 2 Henry IV out of the veins of the two houses of York and Lancaster, for many years continuance. Above fourscore of the blood royal lost their lives, together with many thousands more of the nobility, gentry, and common people, before the quarrel ended in the joining of the two roses into one. And yet perhaps Henry IV might plead a kind of necessity for giving way to that bloody law of burning all whom the popish Antichrist pronounced heretics, because by the help and strength of the popish faction, rather than by a just title, he grasped and wore the crown. And for the same reason Henry V might tread in the steps of his father which after cost his son and the kingdom so dear before God could be appeased.(11)

More recent persecutions seemed to establish that blood guilt still remained on the house of England and on each soul within it. "The guilt of the misery our brethren have suffered," was pointed out by Jeremiah Burroughs, "the guilt of their blood is upon the whole kingdom in as much as the whole kingdom hath not risen even as one man to prevent it." In fact so important was the guilt of the nation, and of such "temporal" significance in any sense of the word were the sins that carried over time, that the nation could be held liable not only for the persecution of the godly but even for the damnation of the wicked; thus the frequent warnings regarding what the preachers called the "blood of souls." "Blood guilt is a sad sin," Oliver Bowles said, "but guilt of soul blood is more dreadful and inexpiable." That no guilt was ever purely personal was illustrated by Herbert Palmer's graphic account of how, by this "most prodigiously frightful guilt of the blood of souls," England was literally going to hell:

Thousands and millions ... gone to hell out of this kingdom, even since the Reformation, for want of good laws and through wicked magistrates, civil and ecclesiastical, and wicked ministers and neighbors instead of good ones - millions, I say, now howling in hell, in those infernal flames, from whence there is no redemption, damned through the undeniable defect of sufficient means of salvation in an ordinary way and through the damnable persecution, made against all show of godliness, a wickedness for which alone it is next a miracle that God hath not sunk the whole kingdom into the bottom of the sea long ere this.(12)

Other institutions were also cause for concern insofar as their behavior threatened the land. "We have yet the consideration of our armies to be affected with," Herbert Palmer reminded the House of Commons after the start of the war. "The sins of our armies do in a special manner call us to humiliation ... for their sins as well as our own." The sins of armies were especially dangerous for the nation as a whole and the Parliamentary cause in particular, especially given the problem that did in fact arise of controlling the armies it created. "Let us lay ... to heart the disorders of all ranks, commanders, officers, and soldiers in our camp," urged William Reyner. "For as the sins of the country may prejudice the success of the army, so the sin of the army may hinder the peace of the country." Armies were not only becoming a means of achieving religious ends, but through godly discipline something of the end was achieved in itself. "Your armies are reforming armies," Thomas Case declared. "Let it be your care to make them reformed armies, and you may humbly expect that God will go out with them to enable you to do exploits." This requirement that the means had to be proportionate to the ends was perhaps most often expressed in terms of the standards demanded of military figures. "Holiness is an ornament as proper and comely for soldiers and armies as for any other of God's servants or societies," said Reyner. "They that fight the Lord's battles ought to be holy. ... They should be not only a holy family or a holy church or commonwealth, but a holy army also." While this emphasis on holiness was applicable to other societies and institutions, somehow it seemed to have come out more readily in the injunctions to armies and soldiers, perhaps because soldiers had a special need for holiness owing to the precariousness of their lives. "Soldiers carry their lives in their hands and look death in the face daily," Reyner noted. "Soldiers stand in most need to be very holy men, because they may be taken away very suddenly, and to have assurance of a better life because their present life hangs in suspense night and day. They cannot be ... in preparation for death until they be in a posture of holiness." And if the experience of soldiering intensified the religious one, that of war did the same to some extent for every anxious soul. "We cannot be all soldiers to fight the Lord's battles in the field," Henry Hall admitted, "but there is a holy war which we all may and must wage."(13)

In describing these conceptions of guilt the preachers had numerous models and precedents, drawn largely from the histories of the Bible: the belief that God visits his wrath upon the children for the sins of the fathers (Ex. 20:5), the execution of Saul's descendents as expiation for the blood of the Gibeonites (II Sam. 21:1-14), the sacrifice of a heifer to atone for innocent blood, (Deut. 21:1-8), the punishment of the people for the sin of Manasses (II Kings 24:3-4). The meaning of these episodes, and the ideas of "corporate" identification they express have long intrigued and puzzled biblical scholars, as well as anthropologists and psychologists, but they were alive with immediate practical significance in the social and political theology of the Puritans. Perhaps the favorite during the 1640s was the story of Achan, who alone brought down the wrath of God upon the whole Israelite nation and in turn the retribution of that community upon his own entire family. This episode, cited in numerous sermons during the revolution, especially to Parliament, was most systematically elaborated by the notorious Samuel Fairclough in April 1641 during the trial of the Earl of Strafford. "The large and spreading nature of sin," he said, was such that "many may be guilty of the sin that one commits." His use of the affair as a metaphor for the social and political problems of England transformed it into a social-psychological analysis establishing that "a whole nation may be guilty of the offence of one" with immediate political consequences. "That a whole nation in general may be guilty of the sin and punishment committed by one in particular ... is ... difficult to be received," Fairclough admitted. "Yet ... God imputed the sin of one man in particular not only to a whole nation present, when the sin was committed, but to a future generation living long after the offender was departed." Fairclough acknowledged that such guilty could be the result of various forms of willful and active involvement: "commanding," "counseling," "provoking or enticing," "consenting after the fact," "defending," "conniving;" but he insisted, "none of these ways was Israel guilty of Achan's sin." Likewise, he allowed that guilt might be incurred by inadvertent and passive failures such as "not restraining" or "neglecting of vigilancy," but again added, "neither of these ways were the infants of Achan's family guilty of the sin of Achan." In the end, the guilt was imputed not by an individual's acts or even failure to act but by social and political relationships: "The scripture tells us of ... political guilt," he explained,

merely passive and no ways active, not of the sin at all, not punishment eternal, but temporal and external, which arises from the links and bonds of politic and civil society, whereby as members of the same body they are made partakers of the good and evil belonging to either of them in politic things ... In political guilt it comes to pass as we see in the death of infants for their parents', subjects for kings' sin and transgressions.

Fairclough was aware that biblical standards of justice might seem cruel from a human perspective, though he contended that they in fact vindicated God's justice by explaining why seemingly innocent people suffer: "Political" or collective guilt, "serves to vindicate the justice of God in bringing public calamities and troubles by and through wicked men's actions upon people that may seem to be actually innocent of these crimes." Shared punishment in times of calamity, he argued, was justified by mutual benefits in times of prosperity. "I know that some go about to vindicate God's justice by affirming that God [finds] just matter in the most innocent to justify his rod," Fairclough noted, which though it be true, yet under correction it suits not with the scripture... It is by political guilt, wherein yet the equity of God's justice and dispensation may be cleared from this, that as innocent persons, by virtue of political ties and bonds, partake of many temporal rods by occasion of wicked men's sins, so do they also receive many temporal commodities from their services. The very children of Achan had formally received that life from him, which now they lose by him.

Guilt thus extended to all of society and was based not on what one did or did not do but simply on one's membership in the community. "Let none then hereafter secure themselves in personal innocency or rest in actual purity from the sins of the times," Fairclough proclaimed. "He that is as pure as Joshua in person may be guilty with Achan by relation."(14)

This portrayal of contemporary crises as re-enactments of events from the Old Testament was a familiar device in Puritan preaching, though it was used to politicize social problems with an increasingly explicit force during the revolution. The immediate aim of Fairclough's sermon, for example, was clearly to urge and justify action against Strafford, a leading minister of the Crown who was taken to embody the abuses of royal authority. Yet if Strafford was cast in the role of sacrificial victim whose execution would expunge the guilt from the nation, at another level the purpose of the rhetoric was not merely to provide easy justifications for political expedients that would be taken on partisan grounds regardless of political principles but to organize collective sentiment and collective action; the aim in other words was less to victimize enemies (though this certainly became the effect) than to mobilize supporters, to use guilt to bind together a political movement and create an ethic of conscientious officialdom and political action. The religious symbols by which this was effected in the 1640s were in fact the most fundamental tenets of Christian theology and had always existed implicitly in the biblical myths whose new prominence practically defined Calvinism. The biblical prototype that succinctly conveyed the conception of collective guilt in not only Puritan theology but also Puritan political ideology was after all Adam. It was entirely consistent that God would visit his wrath collectively on the entire nation for the offense of one sinner, Fairclough argued: "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin" - adding pointedly, "especially if he be in place of power and authority in church or commonwealth or both." At a time when official corruption was in fact a major complaint that attracted serious attention from political as well as religious reformers, Adam was often described as just such a figure of misused power and authority, a kind of representative of the wicked magistrate whose transgression was not merely personal but drew others of his kind into the same contagion. "Adam must be considered not as a private man but as ... a public person representing all his posterity, and therefore when he sinned all his posterity sinned with him," said William Perkins many years before the war, "as in a Parliament whatsoever is done by the burgess of the shire is done by every person in the shire." Adam thus became something of a negative "role model" not simply for sinners in general but specifically for the way many public officials and powerful men were now in fact behaving, and the use of the political metaphor indicates how far the implications were present, in a sense, all along. "When magistrates are in Adam's condition, too busy with forbidden fruit in the garden, God, it may be, turns them out," George Cokayn warned members of the House of Commons in 1648. "God may bring you to Adam's condition ... even to be thrust out from your pleasure and power."(15)

Conversely, where Adam described the plight of the corrupt official and the consequences of his maladministration, the model for the virtuous political leader, at once human and divine, standing as a "representation" for others whose sins he bore, was naturally Christ himself. "By our Savior's own exposition ... magistrates were types of Christ," Cokayn noted. "In a subordinate way, they are resemblances of the Lord Jesus Christ." Like Christ, magistrates would receive little gratitude for their pains and very likely be scorned and despised for them, but that was why magistrates (and saviors) were necessary: they were "those who will be saviors to a people if that be the work God would have done" - and often whether or not the people themselves would have it done. "Our Savior Christ is ... in you," William Carter told the Commons, "whom God hath called to be saviors of this kingdom."

You must do it for many that will ill requite you, ungrateful and unworthy persons, such as consider not your faithfulness nor travel, nay, even for such as will revile you and reproach your actions, for base-minded men that will do nothing for themselves. Thus doth Christ, and thus must you.

Christ after all was the archetype of the charismatic leader and the godly magistrate: what one minister described as "the prototype of holiness." "Christ is our pattern, whom we must strive to imitate," said Richard Sibbes. "Christ ... is the prototype, the first type and idea of all perfection." As God incarnate he literally embodied precisely the virtues that the ministers were demanding of members of Parliament and other "public persons:" he had taken upon himself responsibility for the sins of others, while himself guilty of none, and made expiation with the sacrifice of his own blood. "He hath brought you into a relation of his own, which is of public and common persons," John Ellis told the Commons. "He is the chief representative person that ever was. ... In like manner each of you stands for multitudes: some for hundreds, some for thousands, some for ten thousands." Christ, in other words, was a metaphor for the integrity and self-sacrifice that was expected of the concientious public official, and his act of atonement was similarly characterized by the ethic of selfless public service and devotion to duty that was expected of all political figures and citizens. "Christ upon the cross stood not as a private person but as a public person in the room, place, and stead of all the elect," Perkins similarly explained. "And therefore when he was crucified all believers were crucified in him, as in the Parliament when the burgess gives his voice the whole corporation is said to consent by him and in him." There was here a tendency (and one that in fact long predated the war) to use the political vocabulary of "representative" or "public" or "common" persons to describe not only Adam but especially Christ in a theological sense much as magistrates were said to stand in a political capacity. "Only Christ was he that died in whom all died; he was crucified in whom all were crucified; and he rose again, in whom all rise, he being a public person," said Sibbes. "Let us look upon God incarnate and see ourselves in him, see God in Christ, see Christ a public person."(16)

Christ and his deputy saviors by their sacrifice and self-sacrifice thus expiated the sins of men and women in the same collective terms as they incurred the guilt through Adam and one another, and the dialectic of guilt and atonement that had long been latent in the theology of salvation was now being developed into a kind of political sociology and applied directly to practical politics: "As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." It is at this point, with Christ as both theological and political symbol, that the "kingdom" of Christ comes to be a vivid description of the Puritan vision of not simply ecclesiastical reform but a collective national redemption and with it the kind of millenial eschatology that has recently received so much attention in the study of both the English Civil War specifically and modern religious politics generally. Through the Puritans the metaphors and histories of the Bible continue not only within the realm of religious and social life; they also form a literally crucial part of modern political culture.(17)

NOTES

1 See Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York, 1983). Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless," in Living in Truth, ed. Jan Vladislav (London, 1989), esp. 52-53. The point has recently achieved more popular notoriety as stated in this first inauguration speech and elsewhere; see Jeri Laber, "Witch Hunt in Prague," New York Review of Books, April 23, 1992.

2 For literary parallels to the themes treated here see Fredson T. Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642 (Princeton, 1940), and H. A. Kelly, Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories (Cambridge, Mass., 1970). The language highlighted here emerges again and again in the social and political as well as religious history of the English-speaking world, especially in times of social change and revolution. See for example Ellis Sandoz, Political Sermons of the American Founding Era (Indianapolis, 1991). For the standard interpretation of Calvinist "political thought" as resistance theory that characteristically ignores its popular theological and sociological content, see Quentin Skinner, The Origins of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978), II, esp. 323.

3 Thomas Brooks, Precious Remedies against Satan's Devices (1654), Works (Edinburgh, 1866), I, 152; Stephen Marshall, The Right Understanding of the Times (1647), 32-33; Stephen Marshall, Reformation and Desolation (1642), 45. (For seventeenth-century books, the place of publication is London unless otherwise indicated.) An extensive literature documents the social strains of early modern England, though social historians have not been concerned to connect these to the rise of religious radicalism. See J. A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History, 1550-1760 (London and Baltimore, 1987). For political and administrative problems, see Anthony Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces: The Government of Stuart England (London, 1986).

4 Richard Sibbes, Works (Edinburgh, 1862-64; repr. 1978-82), VI, 188; Henry Scudder, God's Warning to England (1644), sig. Alv.

5 Francis Roberts, A Broken Spirit (1647), 28; Sibbes, Works, I, 382; Thomas Horton, Sin's Discovery and Revenge (1646), 3; Joseph Caryl, The Works of Ephesus (1642), 39; Cornelius Burges, Washing the Heart, in Two Sermons (1645), 25-26; Alexander Henderson, A Sermon (1644), 11.

6 Robert Bolton, Two Sermons Preached at ... Two Several Assizes (1639), II, 96-97; Elidad Blackwell, A Caveat for Magistrates (1645), 37; William Bridge, Babylon's Downfall (1641), 22; Thomas Case, God's Waiting to be Gracious (1642), 95; C. Burges, Washing the Heart, 38; Thomas Case, Two Sermons (1641), II, 23; Samuel Fairclough, The Troublers Troubled (1641), 21-22.

7 Christopher Love, England's Distemper (1646), 16; Blackwell, Caveat, 8; Anthony Tuckney, The Balm of Gilead (1643), 23-24; Edmund Calamy, England's Antidote (1645), 27. For the emergence of a sense of political office as public service among local government officials at this time, see Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces, esp. 115.

8 Herbert Palmer, Utmost Venturing (1643), 19; Calamy, England's Antidote, 25; John Greene, Nehemiah's Tears and Prayers (1644), 13; Case, Two Sermons, I, 24. The ministers had some success in seeing the enactment of sumptuary legislation, though it was not always enforced; see Joan Kent, "Attitudes of Members of the House of Commons to the Regulation of 'Personal Conduct' in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England," Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, XLVI (1973). Similarly, for their impact on the personal conduct, or at least the consciences, of the members themselves, see J.T. Cliff, The Puritan Gentry (1984), chs. 1 (esp. pp. 8-12) and 3.

9 Sibbes, Works, I, 149. See Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (1965). Edmund Calamy, The Nobleman's Pattern (1643), 51; Thomas Coleman, Hopes Deferred and Dashed (1645), 5; Francis Cheynell, A Plot for the Good of Posterity (1646), 15-17; Calamy, England's Looking Glass, 60; Humphrey Chambers, A Motive to Peace and Love (1648), 9. For the "family," see Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought, (London, 1975), esp. ch. 6, and my "The Family in Puritan Political Theology," Journal of Family History, vol. 18, no. 2 (1993). The Puritan drive to promote household worship effectively made the family the lowest administrative unit of the church as well.

10 Fairclough, Troublers, 16; Palmer, Necessity, 16-17.

11 Alexander Henderson, A Sermon (1644), 7; Palmer, Utmost Venturing, 27-28; Calamy, England's Antidote, 27; C. Burges, Washing the Heart, 39-41. I have developed this at greater length in "Blood Guilt in the English Revolution," The Seventeenth Century, vol. 8, no. 2 (Autumn 1993).

12 Jeremiah Burroughs, The Glorious Name of God (1643), 14; Oliver Bowles, Zeal for God's House (1643), 39; H. Palmer, Utmost Venturing, 39.

13 Herbert Palmer, The Glass of God's Providence (1644), 36; William Reyner, Orders from the Lord of Hosts (1646), 7-8, 9, 13; Thomas Case, The Root of Apostacy (1644), 9-10; Henry Hall, Heaven Ravished (1644), 29.

14 For the biblical antecedents, see H. Wheeler Robinson, "The Hebrew Conception of Corporate Personality," Werden und Wesen des Alten Testaments; Beiheft zur Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, ed. J. Hempel (1936). Fairclough, Troublers, 17-19, 20-21.

15 Fairclough, Troublers, 20; William Perkins, Works (Cambridge, 1626-31), I, 160; George Cokayn, Flesh Expiring (1648), 23. See Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (Boston, 1990).

16 Ibid., 4-5; William Carter, Israel's Peace with God (1642), 15; Humphrey Chambers, Paul's Sad Farewell (1654), 110; Sibbes, Works, III, 417-418; IV, 256, VII, 192; John Ellis, A Sound Peace (1643), 59; Perkins, Works, II, 214-215.

17 Cp. C. Hill, "Covenant Theology and the Concept of 'A Public Person'," Collected Essays, III (Amherst, Mass., 1986). For the eschatology, see Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto, 1978). I have argued this more extensively in my Not Peace But a Sword: The Political Theology of the English Revolution (London and New York, 1993).

Article Details

Printer friendly Cite/link Email Feedback
Author:	Baskerville, Stephen
Publication:	International Journal of Comparative Sociology
Date:	Dec 1, 1996
Words:	8206
Previous Article:	Individualism in individualized society? Results from the European Values Surveys.
Next Article:	Bad samaritan: very cognitively disabled people and the sociological sensibility.
Topics:	Guilt Analysis Guilt (Psychology) Analysis