the puritans errand into the wilderness reconsidered

In his essay 'Errand into the Wilderness,' Miller emphasized the discontinuity between the limited optimism of the first generation Puritans, who hoped their New World settlement would serve as a model for a corrupt Europe, and the insecurity of later generations, who saw their role preempted and then rendered irrelevant by events in England. But his originality resides in taking their approach one step further-by asserting the primacy of language over historical fact as the determinant of culture.

In his general cultural approach to Puritan history, Bercovitch writes squarely in the tradition of Perry Miller, for whom 'the mind of man is the basic factor in human history.' Like Miller and his disciples, Bercovitch is concerned solely with Puritan intellectuals and their literary outpourings. Since public and private salvation are symbolically inseparable, history assumes the character of individual sanctification and the would-be saint in turn relies on the redemptive quality of first the Puritan community and later the American landscape. For Bercovitch's Puritans, New England history and the individual's striving for grace are closely intertwined. If the short-lived blossoming of Babylon-the successful Puritan Revolution-undercut that justification, the dread finality of the Restoration left the New England Congregationalists even more anxious and alone, involving them in a desperate search for a meaning to their 'errand into the wilderness.'Īccording to Sacvan Bercovitch in The Puritan Origins of the American Self, they found that meaning in their stubborn and persistent identification of America as the New Jerusalem-a land of the elect that was itself elect, whose history was sacred history, and whose (inevitably successful) struggle for redemption would usher in the Millenium. THEY FLED FROM BABYLON, from an England corrupt and doomed, to the beneficent shores of the Promised Land, where they would found their 'city upon a hill.' Guilty about deserting the cause, the Puritans aboard the Arbella self-righteously sought their justification in the hopeless depravity of their English brethren.

The puritans errand into the wilderness reconsidered