[In this essay, Kaufmann examines Hall as a founding father of a significant school of Puritan philosophical thought which advocated using biblical scripture rather than the imagination to initiate the state of mediation.]

The reader's first glimpse of Christian finds him in anguished meditation, standing in a field, with a book in his hand. The scene happily dramatizes a notable motif of Puritan discussions of meditation. The two Old Testament texts most often cited in justification of meditation were the first Psalm, with its description of the righteous man who reflects on the law both day and night, and the brief statement in Genesis (24:63) about Isaac's going into the field at evening to meditate. The biblical account presents Isaac's meditation as incidental to the action, which is his meeting with Rebekah, but for the defenders of formal meditation it was a sturdy evidence and was often cited as a kind of license. Isaac was a patriarch of the faith in that dawn of the world when God moved more freely among His creatures. If Isaac saw fit to improve the time with this practical support to faith, how much more should the children of a later age in which faith was seldom reinforced by sight?¹

It is wholly appropriate that Bunyan's narrative should open with such a posture for the hero. In Part Two, when Prudence catechizes Christiana's boys, she says, “Especially be much in the Meditation of that Book that was the cause of your Fathers becoming a pilgrim” (p. 226). Christian's conviction of sin is the outgrowth of his meditative confrontation with an indicting Scripture. Bunyan's beginning, moreover, hints at the place of meditation in shaping the substance and method of The Pilgrim's Progress.

The numerous Puritan advocates of meditation made high claims for the practice, claims which reflected the conventional valuation placed upon “closing” with the Word and which encouraged widespread exercise of a particular devotional methodology. Bearing in mind the enormous significance of the Puritan sermon, one must consider seriously Bishop Ussher's statement in his A Method for Meditation that “every Sermon is but a preparation for meditation,”² especially since his judgment is not uncommon. Richard Rogers can insist that “this spirituall exercise of meditation is even that which putteth life and strength into all other duties, and parts of Gods worship.”³ And Edmund Calamy makes the point with a detailed metaphor:

The reason why all the Sermons we hear do us no more good, is for want of Divine meditation; for it is with Sermons as it is with meat, it is not the having of meat upon your table will feed you, but you must eat it; and not only eat it, but concoct it, and digest it, or else your meat will do you no good. … And one Sermon well digested, well meditated upon, is better than twenty Sermons without meditation.⁴

Meditation was by no means limited to the digesting of sermons, but it is worth noticing that Puritan homiletics, enjoying a relationship to exegesis in Puritan hermeneutics that paralleled the relationship of devotion to exegesis in Catholic hermeneutics, was of great influence in winning Puritan devotion away from its prerogative of imaginative freedom to the same rational and didactic ends which determined the hermeneutical approaches to Scripture. A literal hermeneutics, oriented toward logos, plainly would do much to narrow the conception of the Word which the meditative Puritan brought to his practice. Moreover, a hermeneutics which incorporated homiletics might be expected to encourage homiletical meditation. Simply stated, meditation tended to handle Scripture as homily and to conceive of its own method as that of preaching to the self. Such meditation could not sustain the kind of imaginative reading and reconstruction of the Word found in Bunyan, but it was the foil to a special development within Puritan devotion, i.e. the tradition of heavenly meditation, which did in all likelihood influence aesthetic practice. It is, moreover, of considerable relevance to two other traditions in Puritan meditation—occasional meditation and meditation on experience—which, because of their special subjects and methods, were handled as distinct entities by Puritan writers and are therefore most conveniently discussed separately in an examination of certain features of the narrative substance of The Pilgrim's Progress.

THE LINE OF JOSEPH HALL

The central tradition in formal Puritan meditation may be said to begin with Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exeter and Norwich, who was a Puritan in theological orientation though not in church polity. In its categories and emphases, his Art of Divine Meditation, [hereafter referred to as ADM] which first appeared in 1606 and went through two more editions by 1609, proved the source of a stream of influence that extended the length of the seventeenth century. Indeed, it is convenient to speak of “the line of Hall,” since his work was appropriated wholesale by Isaac Ambrose, writing in the 1650s,⁵ and Edmund Calamy, writing a generation later.⁶ Besides his influence upon these major figures, which we shall examine in detail, Hall apparently had a wide influence upon minor writers, as well as upon Richard Baxter who, however, does not belong to the line of Hall as we are using the term.

Hall's treatise on meditation represents a carefully reasoned implementation of the orientation toward logos in the area of private devotion. Louis Martz, in The Poetry of Meditation, shows that Hall, who deviates from the Ignatian tradition by making no provision for use of the imagination in meditation, goes back to the pre-Ignatian Catholic writer Joannes Mauburnus in order to construct a program for exciting the affections toward holy ends. Mauburnus had borrowed in turn from the Scala Meditationis of Johan Wessel Gansfort.⁷ The Scala, as a matter of fact, is an elaborate device for using the understanding as well as the affections in the process of meditation, but Hall discards the eight-point program for the understanding on the grounds that it is flawed by both “Darkenesse and Coincidence.”

While it is of some importance that Hall, in the first place, skipped over the whole Ignatian tradition to rediscover Mauburnus, a precursor of that tradition, it is of even greater importance that in lieu of Mauburnus “dark” program for the understanding, he should have decided to dip into the schoolboy rhetoric books of the time and to exploit nothing more nor less than “all, or the principall of those places which natural reason doth afford us.”⁸ These “places” are the heads of argumentation. The order as Hall gives them is: description, division, causes, fruits and effects, the subject wherein or whereabout it is, appendances and qualities, contraries, comparisons and similitudes, titles and names, testimonies.⁹ The ordinary use of these heads is described well by Sister Miriam Joseph in her Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language:

In the Renaissance, as in earlier times, educated men amplified a subject by drawing it as a matter of course through the topics of invention. The topics provide a systematic and exhaustive analysis. A definition expresses the nature or essence of the subject under discussion by telling to what class or genus it belongs and how it differs from other species within that genus. The contrary or contradictory illuminates by contrast. Comparison of the subject with members of the same species shows it to be greater, equal, or less; with those of a different species, similar or dissimilar. The subject may be considered in its parts, and in relation to its characteristics or adjuncts. One may further consider its causes, its effects, its antecedents, its consequents. Its name may reflect its nature, and related names signify related realities, as for instance, to act justly signifies that one is just or possesses justice.

From these sixteen topics intrinsic to the subject under discussion—definition, division, genus, species, contraries, contradictories, comparison, similarity, dissimilarity, adjuncts, cause, effect, antecedent, consequent, notation, and conjugates—are drawn artificial arguments, so called because they are discoverable through the art of topical investigation. Besides these there are extrinsic arguments, which are called inartificial because they do not depend upon the art of the investigator, but are furnished to him by the testimony of others.¹⁰

A brief comparison of the topics listed by Sister Miriam Joseph with the heads of Bishop Hall will show the remarkable degree of correspondence. The order of use of these categories was securely fixed in the rhetorical tradition of the time. Thomas Wilson in his Rule of Reason declares, “one question is eight waies examined, and the manner taught thereby to frame it in dewe ordre, so that he whiche kepeth wel this trade, cannot faile in any cause that he taketh in hande.” He goes on to list these “eight waies.”

• i. whether it be, or no.
• ii. what it is.
• iii. what the partes are.
• iiii. what the causes are.
• v. what are the effectes, or propre woorkyng.
• vi. what are next adioignyng, what are like, what happen thereby.
• vii. what dooe disagre, or what contrarie.
• viii. what example there is, or aucthoritie to prove it.¹¹

The ordering of these questions corresponds precisely with Hall's arrangement, though Hall does not include the first and Wilson omits two of his, “appendances and qualities” and “titles and names.”

In order to grasp the full significance of Hall's choice of procedure, it should be understood that he elected not to use the imagination and senses. Instead, he began the process of meditation with the understanding and chose to exploit the familiar and time-worn categories for artificial argumentation in order to insure a thorough examination of the topic at hand, before the affections were worked upon. Transparently behind this choice is the Calvinist orientation toward logos. The emphasis which looms largest in Hall's procedures is this demand that the subject be examined in an eminently orderly and logical fashion. The process is carefully reined in and controlled by the reason, and the suspect imagination is granted no opportunity to introduce a contraband intuition that might transcend the logical categories.

That Puritan practice on this issue owed more to a positive emphasis which displaced the use of the imagination, than to the simple working out of a prejudice against that faculty is argued by the fact that Catholicism and Puritanism did not differ in their basic evaluation of the imagination, though Catholic devotion employed the faculty in meditation. Luis de Granada in his Sinner's Guide observes:

Imagination … is called a power of our soule, greatly weakened through sinne, & which is very haggard to be subjected unto reason. For oftentimes as a fugitive servant that departeth without licence, it rusheth out of dores, and wandereth throughout the whole world before we understand where it is. It is a faculty also very greedy, in excogitating or searching out any matter, which it hath a desire to: and it imitateth hungry doggs, who tosse and turn all things upside downe, and thrust their snowt into every dish, now lapping of this, now of that: and although they are beate from it, yet alwayes they returne to their repast fore-tasted. This faculty also is very glib and fleeting, as a wild and an untamed beast, flying very swiftly from one mountaine to another, least it should be taken and restrayned: for it cannot abide a bridle or a bit: neither is it willing to be governed or managed of man.¹²

A Puritan could not have stated the case more strongly, but Luis de Granada could still encourage in his treatise, Of Prayer, and Meditation, “After reading, it followeth that we doe Meditate upon the place that we have read. Concerninge which pointe it is to be knowen, that this Meditation is sometimes upon thinges that maie be figured with the imagination, as are al the pointes of the lyfe & Passion of our Saviour Christ.”¹³ The imagination, though the “fool of the household” as St. Teresa put it, might prove a useful servant in the process of meditation. The Catholic position is implicit in these words attributed to Augustine: “When any sinful Imagination sollicites me, I strait take Sanctuary in my Saviour's Wounds. When the Flesh weighs down my Soul, the remembrance of his Sufferings breaks all my Fetters, and sets me free by heavenly Thoughts again. … In his Wounds I can lay me down and sleep securely.”¹⁴ In this simple procedure, when the fleshly imagination distracts, one deals with the problem by putting that very faculty to work upon spiritual matters. The faculty may be marred by sin, but it can do no ill so long as it is working with the proper materials.

The obvious question is, Why did not the Puritan put the imagination into harness and tame it by using it? The answer is implicit in the Puritan orientation toward logos. The Reformers' need for unambiguous authority in the written Word, an authority investing specific instruction or rules, meant that when the Puritan set about meditating on the Word, he would seek for inspiration in a certain kind of subject and through a particular process; to this task the imagination constituted not so much feeble instrument to be sanctified and used despite its weakness as an utter irrelevancy. The Puritan was not likely to meditate upon events in the life of Christ but rather upon doctrines or specific propositions of Scripture. The antithesis which Thomas Hooker sets up in his Application of Redemption grants no scope to imagination: “To preserve our minds from windy and vain imaginations, is to have our understandings fully taken up with the blessed Truths of God as our dayly and appointed food.”¹⁵ The unseemly possibility that Hooker rules out is that the understanding might with profit be taken up with holy imaginations, as one variety or representation of “the blessed Truths of God.” Shortly before, Hooker had made explicit what these Truths would be: “let thy mind be furnished and fraught with the rich and precious Promises, Commands, and Comforts of the Word; let them be ballasted with these, and they will make thy thoughts steady and setled in thy constant dayly imployments.”¹⁶

Since imagination had no proper place in the process in which man confronted the revealed Word, the Puritan was especially chary of that kind of meditation which came to full bloom in the continental Catholic tradition. Into the tradition of Catholic meditation upon the life of Christ, imagination had entered as an integral part, the Word being regarded as an outline to be expanded upon by the imagination so that the person in meditation might enter fully into the scriptural scene. This passage from St. Anselm is illustrative:

When, therefore, your mind has been purged from tumultuous thoughts by that practical exercise of virtues, then turn your cleansed eyes back to the past, and first of all enter with blessed Mary into her chamber, and unroll the sacred books in which are foretold a virgin's maternity and the birth of Christ. Then wait, expecting the arrival of the angel, that you may see him enter, and hear him salute her; that then, transported with ecstasy and wonder, you may with the greeting angel greet Mary, thy dearest Queen.¹⁷

But the Puritan's earnest Calvinism obliged him to regard the event as secondary to the voice, or voices, speaking in the event. Treating the Annunciation, he would not, like Anselm, reconstruct the scene but ponder the words of Gabriel and the Magnificat. The Scripture as revealed Word offered no purchase for imagination.

Richard Greenham makes the point vigorously, in words we have quoted earlier. In meditating, “Let the word be the object, and beware of mingling it with mens devises: Psalm. 1.2.26: 119.99.”¹⁸ Moreover, “Before and in all wee must pray that the spirit may bee given us, that we neither adde nor detract, that wee goe not too farre, nor come not too short.”¹⁹ John Owen in his preface to Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ of 1864 makes the point as effectively as it could be:

His glory is incomprehensible, and his praises are inutterable. Some things an illuminated mind may conceive of it; but what we can express in comparison of what it is in itself, is even less than nothing. But as for those who have forsaken the only true guide herein, endeavouring to be wise above what is written, and to raise their contemplations by fancy and imagination above Scripture revelation (as many have done), they have darkened counsel without knowledge, uttering things which they understand not, which have no substance or spiritual food of faith in them.²⁰

The invoking of imagination in contemplation was darkening counsel without knowledge. The “spiritual food of faith” did not consist of anything the imagination could provide.

Thus the Puritan's failure to use imagination in meditation may be understood to have grown out of his conviction that the way of the imagination represented an inferior way to truth, since God had revealed all the supremely important things in words. The imagination could not relay truth to the understanding as word and was therefore left unexploited. Not only did the orientation toward logos lead the Puritan to doctrines, promises, commands—truth of any kind so long as it could be put into words—but it involved the explicit abjuration of meditation upon revelatory events, such as the Passion. Such events were not considered open to exploration by the imagination of the meditator but were regarded as carriers of doctrines, to be appreciated by reason and faith.

If the imagination had strikingly divergent roles in Catholic and Puritan meditation, no less is to be said for the implementation of the understanding in the two traditions. The energy which the Catholic channeled into the exercise of the imagination, the Puritan diverted to the exercise of the understanding. True, the Jesuit Puente, who fits into the Ignatian tradition, anticipates Hall's use of the logical categories when he suggests the rule:

with the understanding to make severall discourses, and considerations about that mysterie, inquyring, and searching out the Verities comprehended therein, with all the causes, proprieties, effectes, and circumstances that it hath, pondering them very particularly. In such sort that the Understanding may forme a true, proper, and entire concept of the thing that it meditateth, and may remaine convinced, and persuaded to receive, and to embrace, those truthes that it hath meditated, to propound them to the Will, and to move it therby to exercize its Actions.²¹

Puente makes no attempt, however, to outline a restraining and comprehensive program of meditation using the logical heads. More importantly, he employs the understanding in a role dependent upon the prior use of the imagination, which in his sequence calls up profound mysteries from the memory for contemplation. The term “mystery,” except insofar as it stood for doctrine, was alien to Puritan meditation.

Though Hall finds in Mauburnus an elaborate scale for employing the understanding, it was obviously inadequate for his purposes on other counts than the darkness and coincidence which he mentions. Mauburnus supplies eight steps, but our listing of only the first two should be sufficient for making the desired point. These are “Commemoration. An actual thinking upon the matter elected,” and “Consideration. A redoubled Commemoration of the same, till it be fully knowen.”²² Curiously, though Mauburnus does suggest later in his scale that the use of similitudes may help in the understanding of the subject, his description of consideration implies that the subject will be fully known before any of the six subsequent steps are even brought into use. This inference is confirmed by the fact that his later steps, vague and overlapping, are scarcely designed as tools of analysis. The general impression given by Mauburnus' scale is that he is using the understanding, at the outset at least, much as the later Ignatian tradition made use of the imagination and memory—namely as a faculty for bringing the far-ranging and restless mind into a narrow focus, where the will can then use the mind's concentrated energies to excite the emotions. But in the Ignatian tradition, and to an even greater extent in that Puritan tradition of meditation which began with Hall, the understanding was regarded as a keen-edged blade for cutting to the heart of the subject under meditation. It did more than bring a subject into focus; it explored it thoroughly.

Hall's methodology proved immensely attractive to the Puritan mind. Its rationality and orderliness, its careful skirting of the pitfalls of intuition and imagination, and, not least important, its familiarity by virtue of its sources in the rhetoric texts of the time assured it a lasting influence. Because Hall's work was so important in dictating the main line of thought in Puritan meditation in the century, it is only proper to sketch in the direct line of his influence.

In 1654 Isaac Ambrose published a treatise on meditation as part of the second volume in his series, Prima, Media, & Ultima: The first, Middle and Last things: in Three Treatises [hereafter referred to as PMU]. Not only did Ambrose borrow whole paragraphs from Baxter's Saint's Everlasting Rest, but he adopted Hall's methodology in toto without giving credit to his benefactor. He used the logical categories—description, distribution, causes, effects, opposites, comparisons, and testimony—as Hall had recommended (PMU, 2, 222), deviating only by omitting three of the heads. However, this omission is inconsequential when one considers the borrowings in his introduction, where he urges:

That we be not too curious in prosecution of these Logical places; the end of this Duty is not to practise Logick, but to exercise Religion, and to kindle Piety and Devotion: Besides every theam will not afford all these places; as when we meditate of God, there is no room for Causes and Comparisons: it will therefore be sufficient; if we take the most pregnant and voluntary places.

(PMU, 2, 222-23)

In his treatise, Hall had urged:

That whosoever applieth himself to this direction, think him not necessarily tyed to the prosecution of all these Logical places … so as his Meditation should be lame and imperfect without the whole number: for ther are some Themes which wil not beare all these; as when we meditate of God, there is no roume for Causes or Comparisons; & others yeeld them with such difficultie, that their search interrupteth the chiefe work intended. It shalbe [sic] sufficient if we take the most pregnant, & voluntary.

(ADM, pp. 91-92)

When Ambrose passes to the second stage in meditation, following use of the understanding, he says, “Concerning that part which is in the affection, it is good to follow that course which the common places of Rhetorick do lead us unto: These are six” (PMU, p. 223) and proceeds to list the six steps which Hall had given under procedures for the affections. Though one can only guess about Ambrose's motives for ascribing his steps to the rhetorical tradition instead of to Hall, the six steps—relish, complaint, wish, confession, petition, confidence—do not occur as commonplaces in the rhetoric books of the time. They are a patent borrowing from Hall, who had borrowed them from Mauburnus, who had borrowed them from Gansfort.

In his Art of Divine Meditation, published in 1680, Edmund Calamy, whose name may be remembered for having provided the “e” and the “c” in “Smectymnuus,” borrows heavily from Hall, too. In giving his rules for proceeding with the understanding, he says:

Now here I must tell you I shall be somewhat difficult and hard to be understood, this is the knottiest and difficultest part of Meditation; and therefore learned men that write of this subject, that labour to teach the art of Divine Meditation, do give in nine common-place-heads, as so many several ways of the enlarging the understanding in the consideration of the Truths that they meditate upon.

(ADM, p. 176)

By combining two of Hall's categories, he devises nine steps instead of ten, but his indebtedness is apparent here and also in his borrowing of Hall's program for the affections. However, while Calamy certainly belongs to the line of Hall, it is plain that he does not feel perfectly at ease with Hall's categories. He attempts to reveal the practical value of meditation for the man of little education, and in presenting Hall's steps, he repeatedly excuses himself for offering something so difficult by noting that he is borrowing from “learned men.” After supplying Hall's program for both the understanding and the affections, Calamy continues:

Now because these Logical heads are somewhat difficult, I will give you some plainer rules, for helping ordinary Christians, those that are babes in the school of Grace, and are not able to enlarge their thoughts upon any subject; I will give you briefly five easie Rules to help you to enlarge your thoughts upon what subjects you chuse to meditate on.

(ADM, p. 184)

Calamy's move toward a simplification of Hall is significant. He pays his respect to what has become an established tradition by giving it a superficial coverage, but he is not content to leave it unrevised. With the Restoration, of course, there came a profound change in the intellectual temper of Puritanism. The Puritan who refused to be assimilated into a society dedicated to moderation found himself and his children denied access to the institutions of public learning. Nonconformity ceased to attract and enlist the services of the intellectually elite, and the Puritan readership declined in sophistication.

Notes

1. Cf. Richard Rogers, Seaven Treatises (London, 1610) p. 252. For what may be regarded as permutations of the basic image, see Baxter, SER, Pt. 4, p. 153, and Sibbes, The Soules Conflict, p. 257.

2. Ussher, A Method for Meditation (London, 1657), p. 49.

3. Rogers, loc. cit.

4. The Art of Divine Meditation (London, 1680), p. 31.

5. Isaac Ambrose's Prima, Media, & Ultima (London, 1654) is a most useful though little known compendium of Puritan theology and devotion. Ambrose borrowed heavily without specific acknowledgment from a number of his better known predecessors and contemporaries in keeping with the widespread Puritan practice of treating the extant works of edification as a kind of common fund of spiritual nourishment. So, while one may not be sure from what source Ambrose is borrowing at any point, he can appreciate Ambrose's work as a mid-century summary of Puritan spirituality. For convenience, we shall refer to this work hereafter simply as PMU.

6. The Art of Divine Meditation.

7. Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954), pp. 331-33.

8. The Art of Divine Meditation (London, 1607), p. 88. Hereafter this work shall be referred to as ADM. Though a like abbreviation will be used for Edmund Calamy's work of the same title, the context will indicate which is meant.

9. Hall, pp. 95-145.

10. Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York, Columbia University Press, 1947), p. 308.

11. The Rule of Reason (London, 1553), fol. 17, verso.

12. The Sinner's Guide, trans. from the French by Francis Meres (London, 1614), pp. 454-55.

13. Of Prayer, and Meditation (Rouen, 1584), p. 595.

14. Pious Breathings. Being the Meditations of St. Augustine, His Treatises of the Love of God, Soliloquies and Manual, trans. George Stanhope. (6th ed. London, 1728), p. 269.

15. The Application of Redemption. The Ninth and Tenth Books (London, 1657), p. 232.

16. Ibid.

17. St. Anselm, Book of Meditations and Prayers, trans. from the Latin by M. R. London (London, Burn and Oates, 1872), p. 199.

18. The Workes, p. 40.

19. Ibid., p. 41.

20. The Works, 1, 275.

21. Luis de la Puente, Meditations upon the Mysteries of our Holie Faith, with the Practise of Mental Prayer touching the same (2 vols. St. Omer, 1619), 1, 3-4. This is cited by Martz, p. 34.

22. Hall, p. 87. Hall furnishes a translation of the relevant section of Mauburnus' scale in the margin of his treatise.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Ambrose, Isaac, Prima, Media, & Ultima, London, 1654. Wing, A2962. Wing lists as A2961 an earlier issuing in one volume of the three sections of the work, all of which had seen independent publication.

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Augustine, St., Pious Breathings. Being the Meditations of St. Augustine, His Treatises of the Love of God, Soliloquies and Manual, trans. George Stanhope, 6th ed. London, 1728.

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———, The Sinner's Guide, trans. from the French by Francis Meres, London, 1614. This is not listed in STC. The work was first translated into English in 1598.

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