Emotions and the Development of Virtue in Puritan Thought: An Investigation of Puritan Friendship

Abstract

Recent theological and philosophical meta-narratives paint the Puritans as the impetus behind a massive shift in history highlighting the individualistic nature of the spiritual life they promoted. This shift in emphasis from a communal to a more personal piety ultimately led to individualism in ethics, which, in the opinion of these thinkers, inevitably lead to the individualism that plagues our current culture. Most famous among these broad stroke meta-narratives of the Puritans is that of sociologist Max Weber. In Weber there is a sense that ‘inner worldly asceticism’ led to the individualism found later in Western society mentioned above.¹ A more contemporary philosopher, Charles Taylor, in his book A Secular Age consistently comes back to a Protestant, and at times explicitly Puritan, explanation of individualism in spirituality.² In one sense, it is hard to deny the claims of these historical narratives given by Weber, Taylor and others. There seems to be at least a strong precedent for tracing the changes in broader historical and theological modernity to these sixteenth and seventeenth-century thinkers. However, as I will show in this chapter, this is not the full story. The moral and spiritual life promulgated by the Puritans utilised the same ancient, patristic and medieval traditions that contemporary sociologists, philosophers and theologians are attempting to revive;³ that is, a tradition of classical ethics that emphasises the right ordering of the emotions of an individual person in the development of virtue that extends to, and is drawn from, those within a political and ecclesial community.