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salvation and wisdom is the fear of the Lord. Yet note how he immediately goes on:
From the fear of the Lord arises salutary compunction. From compunction
of heart springs renunciation, i.e. nakedness and contempt of all
possessions. From nakedness is begotten humility; from humility the
mortification of desires. Through, mortification of desires all faults are
extirpated and decay. By driving out faults virtues shoot up and increase.
By the budding of virtues purity of heart is gained. By purity of heart the
perfection of apostolic love is acquired. [ Inst.4, 43]
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In this logical and rational system even the Jobian "fear of the Lord" becomes something
simply factored into the progressive structuring of a goal. But in the more desperate,
uncertain world of a Shepard this would be incredible: Fear of God is not just an element
of spiritual regimen but exactly what undermines all systems of selfhood. The Puritan's
"regimen" was the daily assault upon self by scriptural Word.
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"Sin" functions differently in the two worlds. For Cassian it is something to be eliminated
because it is incompatible with humility and perfection. For the Puritan the foundation of
religiousness lies in the act of acknowledging sin, exposing one's unholiness, holding the
mirror to one's "filthiness and vileness."
Cassian's writings warn that the contemplation of transgressions could be a hindrance to
meditation since the very recollection of sins can contaminate the mind with their "foul
stink" and "shut out the spiritual fragrance of goodness" ( Conf. of Abbot Pinufius9). He
notes that "a man is sure to be suffocated by the pestilential smells of the sewer as long as
he chooses to stand over it or to stir its filth" ( Conf. of Abbot Pinufius10). But the Puritan
physician found good medicine in the preaching and imageries of self-abasement, self-
abhorrence, self-execration. Where Cassian labored to make himself worthy to receive
Christ within, the Puritan labored to make sure he was unworthy.
For Cassian, unlike for Shepard, sin is conceived as a possessive force that inflicts itself
on the self from the outside. Thus, the Eight Vices are agencies that "assault" the monk.
They "attack" him, "injure" him, "insinuate" themselves on him. "As the moth injures the
garment," writes Cassian, quoting Scripture, "and the worm the wood, so dejection the
heart of man" ( Inst. 9.2.). Of the sin of vanity he stresses that "the more thoroughly a
man has shunned the whole world, so much the more keenly does it pursue him" ( Inst.
11.6). In turn, the monk's task is to "repel," "guard against," or "overcome" these
pursuing and cunning forces, forces that may ultimately be the agency of the devil. But
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Thomas Shepard rarely spoke of sin as an objective pursuant that was seeking "entrance"
into the chambers of his heart. He himself was the agency of all fault.
For Cassian, the monk has seized a certain self-determining power by the act of rejecting
the world of society and its regime. Whereas salvation is theoretically and admittedly
conditional upon divine grace, the individual is de facto the creator of his own progress.
"It is to a great extent in our power," he writes, "to improve the character of our thoughts
and to let either holy and spiritual thoughts or earthly ones grow up in our hearts" ( First
Conf. of Abbot Moses17). But in puritanism, Christian otherworldliness and the temporal
world reconvened, and the point where they connected, the human self, became
threatening, suspect, profane. Subjectivity, with all its assertiveness and absence of self-
consciousness, had to be scourged and had to be subjected to consciousness of itself. It
had achieved no great acts of renouncing the world to give confidence in its selflessness,
and the Puritan felt all the more ineluctably dependent on God's power and honor.
The Puritan journal shows what happens to confession of sin in the absence of a Catholic
confessor. The Protestant self here must in some way become both accused and accuser.
With no earthly superior in the picture, the external, two-part dialectic of confessing and
examining becomes an entirely internalized dialogue. Since for Protestants grace was
based not in church sacramentalism but in direct faith in the Word of God, it followed
that exposure of one's status as a sinner would. be exhibited not in the public ritual arenas
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of exomolgesis 12 but in the alchemical retort of the individual's own self-
contradictoriness.
Cassian and the Puritan did have something in common. Within the typologies of Max [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]