Errand into the Wilderness

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Summary: Miller, and the Puritans, can challenge us still today
Review: As Perry Miller tells it, his baptism as a historian came on the banks of the Congo River. Seeking something exotic, he instead experienced a "sudden epiphany." Like Emerson who learned to find wildness not in faraway lands but on the Boston Common, Miller too turned to New England to find the wild. More particularly, he turned to New England's past. The essays in "Errand Into the Wilderness" show just how foreign of a country the past is.

While we today often distance ourselves from the Puritans out of revulsion, Miller emphasizes their foreignness so that they might challenge us. As much as we like to dismiss the Puritans as overzealous, prudish witch hunters in funny hats, they have much to teach us. And if Miller, an atheist, can take the Puritans seriously, why can't we? Actually, Miller and his school of historians suggest that it is because they can teach us something that we treat them as simple-minded fanatics. As Miller's student Edmund S. Morgan has written, "We have to caricature the Puritans in order to feel comfortable in their presence. They found answers to some human problems that we would rather forget. Their very existence is therefore an affront, a challenge to our moral complacency." The human problems Miller interrogates in "Errand Into the Wilderness" are ones of faith, existence, community, social decay, conscience, human frailty. These are dilemmas that have not disappeared, even as through the centuries we have lost many of the nuances Puritans employed in grappling with the human condition. Reading Miller allows us to exhume the long-buried wisdom of the dead.

Miller's own wisdom is also that of the dead, as it is four decades since his death. And consequent scholarship challenges many of the things his work takes for granted. Particularly noteworthy here is that the very idea of "wilderness" expressed in Miller's title is something we should rethink. Ironically (or perhaps not), it is a student of Miller's student Morgan who has challenged our way of thinking about "wilderness." William Cronon, in "Uncommon Ground," argues that what we see as wilderness-some sort of virgin nature-exists only in our heads. From the Puritans on down, Americans have repeatedly imagined untouched wilderness in places where in fact humans for centuries have created changes in the land. Instead of looking for a frontier of wilderness, Cronon urges us to follow Emerson home. In abandoning the myth of exotic, frontier wilderness, we free ourselves to find what Emerson called "wildness" where we never thought to look: in our backyard. While Miller wasn't around to learn from Cronon's ideas about wilderness--"Errand" would be a very different book if he had--I'd like to think he'd appreciate them. After all, by giving up his search in the Congo and instead finding a foreign world in the history of his own backyard--and by forcing us to rethink our preconceptions about the history of the American mind--he issues the same challenge.


Rating:
Summary: Starting Place for Studying the Puritans
Review: For those wishing to begin learning about Puritan theology, this book is probably the best starting point there is. The book is a collection of essays covering different aspects of the Puritan experience and their belief system. This is intellectual history, and some chapters are quite difficult. Most chapters, however, are highly readable and easy to comprehend. An excellent follow-up book, which disputes the idea of a decline in Puritan piety over the generations, is Harry S. Stout's "The New England Soul." Recommended for any college level reading person.

Rating:
Summary: An invaluable collection of essays
Review: Perry Miller's collection of essays ranges from his stomping ground of the Puritans to Virginia and elsewhere in colonial history. Throughout, the most blindingly brilliant American intellectual historian of the twentieth century displays his craft. Unlike his magisterial histories of the New England Mind, these tend to be somewhat easier to follow, as his themes were more compact. If you haven't read Perry Miller, you're missing a first-class thinker; at the least, there's no more important colonial historian, although many are more easily accessible.

Rating:
Summary: An invaluable collection of essays
Review: Perry Miller's collection of essays ranges from his stomping ground of the Puritans to Virginia and elsewhere in colonial history. Throughout, the most blindingly brilliant American intellectual historian of the twentieth century displays his craft. Unlike his magisterial histories of the New England Mind, these tend to be somewhat easier to follow, as his themes were more compact. If you haven't read Perry Miller, you're missing a first-class thinker; at the least, there's no more important colonial historian, although many are more easily accessible.