6/13/2023 0 Comments Errand into the wilderness meaning![]() In short, nature in America went from demonized to divinized and the American population of European descent went from God's errand runners into the hideous and howling wilderness to sinful and depraved despoilers of God's beautiful creation. Sin was to be found in the towns, not in the woods, and the Devil in the souls The remnants of uncultivated, unurbanized nature became instead a benign Edenic domain. By Edwards's day, the numbers of dangerous animals had been reduced and the Indian populations had precipitously declined. It was the vastĭomain of Satan, his minions the "Salvages," and diabolical flesh-eating wild animals. The "howling" wilderness encountered by the first generation of Puritans in America was demonized. ![]() Transformed the American wilderness into fruitful farms and shining cities on hills. Perry Miller: Evolution of "wilderness" conceptīy the second century of their existence in the New World, the sober, frugal, hard-working Puritans had The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me I am partĬombine this spiritualizing of nature, begun in the second century of American Puritan theology and fully formed in the third in crypto-Puritan Transcendentalism, with the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity and original sin, and you have the Puritan origins of the American wilderness movement. Standing on the bare ground,my head bathed in the blithe air, and uplifting into empty space,all mean egotism vanishes. World reflect higher, transcendent truths (hence the philosophy's name).Īs Emerson famously enthused almost eighty years later: Here Edwards states the core Transcendentalist doctrinethat the things of this Natural things, it surpassing the art of man. Spiritual beauties are infinitely the greatest, and bodies being but the shadows of being, they must be so much the more charming as Shadows of divine things" in "the beauty of the world," explaining that The transitional figure is Jonathan Edwards, who lived a century after the Puritan colonization of the New World. "The Beauty of the World," 1758 full textĪrgues that Transcendentalism was not an exotic alternative to Calvinism but evolved from it. In contrast, Perry Miller, the great historian of Puritan America and author of Errand into the Wilderness (1956/1984), Henry Nash: Evolution of "wilderness" concept He was celibate, vegetarian, a teetotaller, otherwise abstemious, Thoreau, however, was certainly a Puritan in It seems pretty clear that it was a far cry from Puritanism. Transcendentalism waselements of Platonism, Hinduism, Romanticism, Deism blended togetherbut Waldo Emerson is, like Emerson, labelled a Transcendentalist. Thoreau here opposes Nature toĬivilization, wildness to culture, and himself to his pious audience. The rest of Thoreau's audience consisted mostly of descendants of the Puritan pilgrims whoįirst settled Concord, Massachusetts, in the seventeenth century. Neither do we know whoĬomposed the school committee, but we can be sure that they were among the Electand heavenīound. Presbyterian or Congregationalist preacher of a Calvinist persuasion. ![]() We don't know the identity of the "minister" present on this occasion, but doubtless he was a I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee, and every one of you will take care of that. I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil. Lecture, "Walking, or the Wild" with this preamble: Public lecture, he would declare that "in Wildness is the preservation of the World." He opened that Who better than Thoreau, the man who marched to the beat of a differentĭrummer, represents the intellectual counter current to Puritanism in American thought? Loathing, and conquest, but of veneration and preservation only when the grip of Puritan thought on theĪmerican mind was relaxed. If the history Nash constructs were the whole story, wilderness could become the object not of fear, Baird Callicott, University of North Texas The Puritan Origins of the American Wilderness Movement NHC Home TeacherServe Nature Transformed Wilderness Essay: The Puritan Origins of the American Wilderness Movement, Wilderness and American Identity, Nature Transformed, TeacherServe, National Humanities Center ![]()
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