In late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English North America the runaway, best selling blockbuster book consisted of a long poem of 224 stanzas comprising 1,792 lines written by an Yorkshire-born Harvard-educated Puritan preacher, Michael Wigglesworth 1631-1705). The Day of Doom is an extended description of Judgment Day, a setpiece of both medieval Catholic and Reformation Puritan apocalypticism. As much as Milton's, Wigglesworth's purpose was to justify the ways of God to men, but God's ways at the end of time rather than at time's beginning. My purpose in this paper will be to indicate the ways in which Wigglesworth continues medieval apocalyptic figures for analogous rhetorical purposes. If earlier English Reformation discourses borrowed the figures and rhetorical aims of the twelfth-century Calabrian monk Joachim of Fiore, namely an historical and millennialist apocalypticism that expected the imminent victory of Christ over Antichrist, later Puritans like Wigglesworth employed earlier Augustinian figures and rhetorical aims, namely a moralizing apocalypticism that understood the Second Coming and the millennium as deferred, the Church as an imperfect community in need of continuous reformation.
Early Christians expected the imminent return of Christ in judgment, an eschatological hope that informs the gospels, epistles, and the Book of Revelation. This imminent and historicizing eschatology prevailed through the last Roman persecution in the early fourth century, when Lactantius in the Divine Institutes described an historical millennium under the reign of Christ. However, after Constantine legitimated Christianity and the Church had begun to assimilate the structures of the crumbling empire, the theological consensus had begun to shift away from millennialism in favor of St. Augustine's view in City of God that personal judgment upon death was a more serious concern to the contemporary Christian than general judgment of the deferred Doomsday.
In addition to scriptural and patristic sources, medieval Christians had a variety of alternative representations of the Last Judgment, particularly the trial and punishment of the damned, including apocryphal scriptures (like the Apocalypse of Paul that might have influenced Dante), anthologies of legends (Jacobus Voragine's Golden Legend comes to mind), sermons, hymns like the Dies Irae, and numerous literary texts, of which Dante's is the pinnacle, but that also included religious plays and poetry, as well as the visual arts of church frescoes and reliefs. Catholics in late medieval England would have had frequent access to visual and verbal performance representations of Doomsday in church art (particularly wall paintings and external tympanum reliefs),sermons, and mystery play cycles, which typically included Judgment Day episodes. As Marjorie Reeves observes, "It could be argued that Protestantism represented too much of a break with the past to make a use of this heritage likely. Yet one finds developing in Protestant thought first a belief that this is a new age in a unique sense, and then a conviction that the whole of history has been leading up to it and that in history one can read the prophetic signs pointing forward" ("History and Eschatology" 102-03). The problem for Puritans with medieval Catholic Doomsday tropes was that their works theology was at odds with Protestant faith theology and Puritan election theology.
In stanzas 22 to 200 Wigglesworth represented the trial of the unregenerate, including both the defense and the prosecution. It is here that Wigglesworth strays from or embellishes the biblical exemplars, exercises his own imagination, and provides the poem’s didactic core. In so doing, I would suggest, he employs a distinctly medieval Catholic literary or devotional sensibility for early-modern Calvinist purposes. The synoptic Gospel of Matthew describes the Last Judgment as a separation of sheep and goats, the eternal reward of the former and the eternal punishment of the latter according to the principle, "Whatever you have done or failed to do to the least of mine, you have done or failed to do to me" (Mt. 25: 40, 45). In the Book of Revelation, the dead are judged "according to their conduct as recorded" in the book of the living or according to the absence of their names from the book (Rev. 20: 12, 15). This apparent contradiction—Are the dead judged according to their deeds or according to their election?—provided Puritan commentators with a dilemma and Wigglesworth with an opportunity. He acknowledged the synoptic gospel's version of Last Judgment in his collection of devotional poems, Meat Out of the Eater, in which "Heavenly Crowns for Thorny Wreaths" consoles the reader: "Our Lord will call to minde / The meanest services / That any man with upright heart / Hath done for one of his: / So that a Cup of Water / Tend’red unto a Saint / For love of Christ, shall not reward / Nor acceptation want" (stanza 5). The purposes of those meditations, however, were assurance of the Visible Saints undergoing tribulation, who had first to face the abyss thereby recognizing the extremity of sin, the anxiety that preceded assurance. In "A Postscript Unto the Reader" at the end of the 1687 London edition, Wigglesworth made explicit his admonitory purposes in The Day of Doom:
Awake, awake, O sinner, and repent,
And quarrel not because I thus alarm
Thy Soul, to save it from eternal harm. (83)
Wigglesworth and other New England Puritans understood the persuasiveness of hellfire preaching. In the notebook in which he kept a diary of several years, Wigglesworth recorded the "relations" or confessions of those seeking church membership, where we find John Green’s account of coming to faith by Thomas Shepard’s instruction: "The Lord began first to awaken me by Mister Shepard’s catechize concerning the dread and terror of Christ Jesus coming to judgment" (114). Like its medieval penitential ancestors, The Day of Doom acknowledges the rhetorical power of tropes of impending final judgment. Interestingly, earlier Reformers like Martin Luther were suspicious of employing judgment anxiety in order to exhort audiences. As Craig Harbison observes in his study The Last Judgment in Sixteenth Century Northern Europe, while Luther expected the imminent apocalypse, he believed that Catholicism had been "too exclusively and peculiarly preoccupied with the Last Judgment" (92) at the expense of viewing this final event as a dispensation of God's love.
Instead of a judgment based on commission or omission of the Corporal Works of Mercy (or any works for that matter), which was frequently represented in medieval Catholic art as the psychostasis or weighing of souls in a scale, The Day of Doom presents a succession of sinners who advance in groups to the bar of justice: hypocrites of several kinds, "civil honest men" who lived virtuously but without faith, those who claim lack of opportunity to repent, those who followed the bad example of their betters or of religious men, those who plead the obscurity of scripture or disagreement among its interpreters, those who feared persecution, those who plead the preeminence of God's mercy, those who blame God, heathens who did not hear the Word of God, and finally, unbaptized "reprobate Infants" who died before having the opportunity to commit sin freely. The Judge refutes them each in turn, providing an opportunity for Wigglesworth to defend Puritan notions (inherited from St. Augustine) of predestination and the necessity of grace. The doctrine is characteristically Calvinist. In medieval Judgment Day traditions, writers tend to adhere more closely to the synoptic gospels’ accounts of this trial, in which the dead are judged on the basis of their conformity to the Corporal Works of Mercy. Accordingly, in medieval Catholicism this scriptural foundation would eventually develop into contrasting the Seven Deadly Sins with the Cardinal Virtues. In contrast, sinners in The Day of Doom are judged as much on the basis of their flawed theology (and thus perverse faith) as of their flawed ontology.
The depiction of the trial, with its alternating defense/prosecution, is likewise characteristic of New England Puritans’ own ritualism, their replacement of the sacramental (particularly penitential) practices of medieval Catholicism and a substitute for the medieval psychostasis (weighing of souls' good deeds and wicked deeds). As David D. Hall observes, "Hostile to the magic of the Catholic system, nonetheless these people reinstated ritual practice at the heart of their religion" (167), among which the ceremonies of trial, confession, and public punishment were prominent. This too had medieval antecedents: Rosemary Woolf indicates the prevalence of legal imagery in medieval verse representations of death and Last Judgment (342). Moreover, legal figures are central tropes of Thomas Wimbledon’s late fourteenth-century sermon on Judgment Day, which John Foxe believed to be "no lesse godly than learned" (see Foxe 712-20), and accordingly included it in his Acts and Monuments (also known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs), that apocalyptically-inclined compendium of English ecclesiastical history, featuring Judgment Day as the illustration of its folio title page. The guiding conceit of Foxe’s historiography is the argument that Protestant reformers had Patristic and Medieval antecedents and that the English Reformation entailed the restoration of an ancient English Christianity before the corruptions of the Norman/Roman conquest. Wimbledon’s Sermon fits that nicely since in it the preacher admonishes the three estates—clergy, knights, and laborers—to "yield reckoning of thy bailey" when each will have to answer three questions: How have you entered your state in life? How have you ruled? How have lived? In addition, the Doomsday image that dominates the title page of Foxe's later editions provides a visual analogue to Wigglesworth's defense of a theology of grace in repudiation of a theology of works. Harbison observes that the medieval psychostasis (weighing of souls) was already in decline by the time of the Reformation, at which time, "Many of the century's pressing doctrinal disputes were put up before the heavenly Judge in order symbolically to receive his blessing. Christ was in this sense the final arbiter over doctrinal matters (169)." Thus like the Foxe title-page image, Wigglesworth's poem weighs not works but doctrines, Calvinists to Christ's right hand, Catholics and Anglicans to his left.
Between the late sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries, Puritan apocalypticism underwent a shift in emphasis and expectation, from an imminent eschatology to a deferred eschatology. During the early years of the English Reformation and through the establishment of the Commonwealth in England, Puritans tended to employ imminent millennialism, believing that they were living on the cusp between the Old Age and the New, between the City of Man and the City of God. Influenced by the twelfth-century monk Joachim of Fiore, sixteenth-century English Reformers like John Bale and John Foxe as well as apocalyptic commentators like John Dee, John Napier, Thomas Brightman, Hugh Broughton, in addition to seventeenth-century figures like James Maxwell, John Milton, and William Dell imagined the English Reformation as the overthrow of the papist (or later episcopal) Antichrist and the institution of the New Jerusalem. As Marjorie Reeves observes:
It is clear that many Protestants, of varying shades, drew on medieval prophecy, oracle and myth, and that they used these materials both negatively and positively. The strength of the Joachimist element in this inherited tradition lay in its affirmation of a coming new age in history which would be one of illumination and liberty. (Joachim of Fiore 165)
The millennialism of Increase Mather's 1667 The Mystery of Israel's Salvation was a last and late instance of this phenomenon. However, with the great disappointment of the Commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy (two years prior to the publication of Wigglesworth's poem), New England Puritans had to recalibrate their millennialist expectations.
Numerous scholars have characterized Puritan apocalypticism generally and Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom particularly as derived from medieval sources. His modern biographer, Richard Crowder, characterized the poem as being "as stark and vivid as the medieval sculptures around the cathedral doors of Europe, for this was a medieval concept: Dies Irae had been in the hymnology of the Church since the thirteenth century" (107). Moreover, Martin Luther notwithstanding, the Doomsday setpiece was as popular with Reformation Puritan preachers as it had been with the medieval Catholic like Wimbledon. As Crowder observes, "Thomas Hooker['s] . . . sermon on 'A True Sight of Sin' was typical of the pulpit rhetoric that kept this medieval vision alive and immediate for the New England congregations" (64). Thomas Shepard’s preaching has been suggested as motivation for conversion of numerous mid-seventeenth-century Cambridge, Massachusetts Puritans, possibly serving as an immediate influence on Wigglesworth, and Michael McGiffert in his introduction to the autobiography points out that Shepard:
As a young lecturer at Earle’s Colne [England] . . . had forged his sermons in the burning pit of Hell. Having discovered in his own conversion the efficacy of fright, he had exploited the ample repertory of brimstone—the day of doom, the last assize, the devouring flames, the horrid concourse of pandemonium . . . (21)
David Watters argues that Puritan death rituals translated the apocalypticism of Catholic funeral rites to the deathbed of the saint:
By the 1640s Puritans had nearly 100 years of iconoclasm behind them, and 100 years of preaching against Catholic ritual and art. While the rites and churches were purged of objectionable items, images had yet to be developed which expressed Puritan innovations in eschatology. The medieval repertory of tomb ornamentation in the memento mori and danse macabre traditions, such as skeletons, death's heads, and hour glasses, were revived in the late sixteenth century. (20)
An apocalyptic spirituality (I borrow the phrase from Bernard McGinn) was central to Puritan experience with its dialectic of anxiety and assurance. However, it was not unique to Puritans, since Voragine centuries before had glossed the Church's liturgical season of Advent as "partly one of rejoicing, by reason of Christ's coming in the flesh, and partly one of anxiety at the thought of the Judgment" (4). For both medieval Catholics and Reformation Puritans, descriptions of Doomsday could be employed to teach congregations about orthodox doctrines (vice, virtue, and sacramental remedies for Catholics, election and faith for Puritans) as well as to guide them in orthopraxy, living a virtuous life. Meditation on Last Things had not only catechetical value but also admonitory usefulness and inculcated a sense of dread that was a prelude to repentance.
Works Cited
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