Presented at the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds (England), July 2000

Dr. Thomas L. Long

Professor of English

Thomas Nelson Community College

Hampton, Virginia USA

Longt@tncc.cc.va.us

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 England-born Harvard-educated Puritan preacher, Michael Wigglesworth 1631-1705). From its initial 1662 publication The Day of Doom went through several printings; copies of the first edition are not extant, suggesting that the book was literally read to pieces. Moreover, its popularity was only eclipsed in the eighteenth century with the publication of Benjamin Franklin's The Way to Wealth. (From The Day of Doom to The Way of Wealth appositely suggests something of the seismic shift in cultural values in Massachusetts as the seventeenth-century Puritan plantation became the eighteenth-century English colony.)

The Day of Doom is an extended description of Judgment Day, a setpiece of both medieval Catholic and Reformation Puritan apocalypticism. It represents the sudden coming of Christ and the judgment of the living and the dead. As much as Milton's, Wigglesworth's purpose is to justify the ways of God to men, but God's ways at the end of time rather than at time's beginning. Thus the poem treats readers to the trial and summary execution of punishment upon the unregenerate. My purpose in this paper will be to indicate the ways in which Wigglesworth continues medieval apocalyptic figures for analogous rhetorical purposes. If earlier Puritan discourses borrowed the figures and rhetorical aims of Joachim of Fiore, namely a radical and millennialist apocalypticism that expected the imminent Second Coming, 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.

[A word about my interests and intellectual commitments, which background this study. In the late 1970s and 1980s my pastoral training in biblical exegesis was directed by a need to interpret apocalyptic texts in parish preaching, applied or pastoral exegesis. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, I began to notice and to study apocalyptic figures deployed in the United States around the AIDS epidemic in particularly alarming or stigmatizing ways, the rhetorical uses of apocalypticism. A decade of study of American apocalypticism resulted. By graduate training I am an American studies scholar and only a medievalist manqué. As a professor at an American community college I am perforce a generalist, so I paint with a broad brush. I am now undertaking a more meandering examination of medieval and early modern apocalypticism, less interested in formal analysis than in a rhetorical assessment or a culture studies approach to several questions about the uses of the Bible and its rhetorical figures. What are the purposes to which apocalypticism is put? Whose interests do apocalyptic discourses serve? What cultural work did millennialism and apocalypticism perform in medieval Catholic and Reformation Puritan English societies? How might these shed light on our present moment?]

Typical Puritan discourses imagined the Reformers' reformers undertaking something radically new, committing a disjunction with the medieval Catholic past. Frequently their academic and scholarly chroniclers have done the same. What the Puritans attempted to abject, however, may have been vestiges of their own psychic landscapes, their own imaginary, and one can profitably pay attention to the repressed in order to detect its return. Aside from the rhetorical habitus that apocalyptic discourse provided, Puritans shared more in common with medieval Catholic theology than they would have cared to admit.

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, legends (Voragine's Legenda Aurea 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, in addition to the visual arts of church frescoes and reliefs. In this regard, St. Augustine's City of God may serve as a touchstone because along with the few biblical accounts of Judgment Day it provides the foundation for medieval eschatology and later Reformation theology. Even today it is difficult to disabuse most believing Christians that what they "know" about heaven, hell, and judgment is not found in the canonical scriptures but is the result of this complex cultural accretion.

The more thoroughly biblically literate Michael Wigglesworth, however, was not so muddled in his composition of The Day of Doom. In later printings of the poem he provided exact scriptural citations (both Old Testament and New) for nearly every stanza.

The poem begins:

The ballad rhyme, eight-line stanzas, and depiction of a nocturnal serenity that is about to be interrupted is, I believe, a deliberate parody of John Milton's "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" (composed in 1629), which in its middle stanzas shares with Wigglesworth's poem a representation of the Second Coming. When Wigglesworth describes "The Suddenness, Majesty, and Terror of Christ's appearing" beginning in stanza 5, he does so with minimal details: midnight turns into day, skies are torn with a terrifying noise, the sinful are aghast while some try to flee, the dead arise. In stanza 15 Wigglesworth expands on Rev. 6: 14:

By stanza 21, all the living and the dead are assembled before the Judge for their ultimate trial. What is remarkable about the poem up to this point is its compression and relative lack of dramatic detail. Some medieval literary and iconographic traditions are largely absent. For example, lacking are the tokens or signs of Judgment Day found in Sibylline texts, Voragine's "De adventu domini," the Chester Cycle's The Prophets of Antichrist play, numerous homilies and poems, and The Pricke of Conscience, among others (Heist 204-14). Need I also say that neither the Virgin nor St. John the Baptist appear in the poem?

Similarly, the damned are dispatched to their punishments with relatively little description beyond "endless Misery / . . . in yonder Lake, / where Fire and Brimstone flameth" (stanza 201), and actually consigning them to hell in stanza 208, Wigglesworth spent only the next few stanzas in a theological reflection upon their suffering before beginning in stanza 219 to describe the Saints ascending to heaven. Absent again are medieval apocryphal and literary traditions that entail meticulous descriptions of the exquisite afterlife punishments, such as those in Dante's Inferno, the Apocalypse of Paul, or purgatory legends, as well as the depictions of the demons who drag the damned to their doom, popularly featured in Inferno and church art.

Rather, 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 the biblical exemplar, exercises his own imagination, and provides the poem’s didactic core. A succession of sinners in groups advances to the bar: 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 Puritan. The depiction of the trial, with its alternating defense/prosecution, is likewise characteristic of New England Puritanism's own ritualism. 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. (It must be also said the Rosemary Woolf indicates the prevalence of legal imagery in medieval verse representations of death and Last Judgment [342].) Absent are two medieval figures, however, namely the self-recrimination of the damned and the populist ressentiment that depicts the doomed as coming from the higher social estates (aristocrats, religious, and gentry) that we see in the Middle French Jour du Jugement or the Chester Cycle's The Last Judgment. These medieval figures bemoan their blindness in this life and caution their audiences against spiritual torpor, and as Owst observes, sermons on Judgment Day often took the form of a critique of clergy and aristocracy (Owst 287-331). Instead, The Day of Doom seems oblivious to distinctions of social class and relentlessly portrays the damned as unregenerate even at the moment of final judgment.

So far I have seemed to argue against Wigglesworth's poem as appropriating medieval Catholic apocalypticism. What I have wanted to dispel, however, is the notion that Wigglesworth employed precise medieval iconographic conventions of the Last Judgment. Instead, I will argue in my remaining space that The Day of Doom adopts the moralizing purposes and rhetorical strategies of medieval apocalypticism by abandoning an earlier Puritan millennialism, derived from Joachim of Fiore, with its expectation of an imminent Second Coming and by adopting the older Augustinian moralizing apocalypticism. I want to suggest that this shift in Puritan apocalyptic hermeneutics roughly parallels that in Patristic Christianity between Lactantius' Divine Institutes in the early fourth century and Augustine's City of God in the fifth. Moreover, The Day of Doom is closer is style and tone to devotional lyrics of the fifteenth century, as Rosemary Woolf has analyzed them, than to those of Wigglesworth’s Metaphysical contemporaries. In an insistently iconoclastic society, the poem serves as a verbal icon analogous to the Judgment Day scenes of Catholic reredos or tympanum.

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) and interpreted the Puritan movement as retrograde:

Not unlike its medieval predecessors, the poem had been stimulated into being by a dream vision that Wigglesworth recorded in his diary in 1653. Moreover, the doomsday setpiece was as popular with Reformation Puritan preachers as it had been with the medieval Catholic. 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). David Watters observes that Puritan death rituals translated the apocalypticism of Catholic funeral rites to the deathbed of the saint: "Thus the Catholic ritual is effectively transformed into a memento mori framework. . . . What is remarkable about Protestant ars moriendi is the transference of Catholic prayers for the dead from the funeral rite to the death-bed scene" (16, 23). Further, he notes that:

Similarly, the Puritan tendency to read natural prodigies as divinely providential and as anticipatory of the final great sign and wonder had a long pedigree. As David Hall observes:

Hall's study deliberately concerns itself with the translation of this lore: "As in the case of wonder stories, we must infer a process of transmission that conveyed a particular vocabulary from pre-Reformation Christianity to seventeenth-century New England" (120). While I cannot in this limited space detail those inferences in regard to Wigglesworth's poem, I will suggest analogies that might be illuminating.

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 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:

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. By the late seventeenth century they also had to contend with Native American aggression aided by French colonialists from Canada in the so-called King Philip's War (1675-76), which placed their communities under attack from "barbarians" and papist "heretics." Even the radical Fifth Monarchists eventually abandoned their hope in the imminent reign of Christ on earth. As J. F. Maclear observed:

This "conservative determination" is evident in Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom, a poem written and published in the midst of the declension controversy that resulted in the New England conciliar settlement of the "Half-Way Covenant," which allowed baptism as sufficient for church membership. In so doing, New England Puritans were recapitulating the Augustinian formulation more than a millennium prior.

In City of God St. Augustine demonstrated an analogous "conservative determination to perpetuate the symbols and institutions" of the Latin Church. Within a century, the precariousness of isolated, persecuted Christian communities that had prompted Lactantius' imminent apocalypticism and material millennialism in Book VII of Divine Institutes (304-313 C.E.), the type to Joachim's antitype, gave way to an established network of dioceses that had assimilated the decaying Roman Empire and were navigating through its decline. Much as the New England Puritan communities later renegotiated the terms of Church membership, Latin Christian leaders like Augustine refined the expectations of the perfectibility of the Church in this world, a preeminent concern in City of God, which rejected Lactantius' millenarianism and suppressed apocalyptic literalism in the Latin Church until Joachim in the twelfth century (McGinn 378). Thus the peculiar resilience of apocalyptic rhetorics resides in their polysemous or fluid significance: they can be employed to subvert the status quo and to uphold it. It is not surprising, therefore, to find patristic and medieval figures performing both revolutionary and institutional work in Puritan New England. Michael Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom, I would argue, performs the latter work by creating a moralizing Judgment Day designed to persuade church members that regardless of how long delayed the Second Coming might be, their own doom could occur at any moment.

Works Cited