The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather

No other American Puritan has fueled both the popular and academic imagination as has Cotton Mather (1663-1728). Colonial America's foremost theologian and historian, Mather was also one of its most powerful voices advocating millennialism. His lifelong preoccupation with this subject culminated in his definitive treatise, "Triparadisus" (1726/1727), left unpublished at his death. In it, Mather justified his ideological revisionism; his response to the philological, historical, and scientific challenges of the Bible as text by English and continental deists; and his hermeneutical break from the orthodox exegeses of his father, Increase Mather, and Joseph Mede. In his critical introduction to this edition of "Triparadisus", Reiner Smolinski demonstrates that Mather's hermeneutical defense of revealed religion seeks to negotiate between the orthodox literalist position of his New England forebears and the new philological challenges to the scriptures by Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac de La Peyrere, Benedict de Spinoza, Richard Simon, Henry Hammond, Thomas Burnet, William Whiston, Anthony Collins, and Isaac Newton. In "Triparadisus" Mather's hermeneutics undergoes a radical shift from a futurist interpretation of the prophecies to a preterite position as he joins the quasi-allegorical camp of Grotius, Hammond, John Lightfoot, and Richard Baxter. The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather also challenges a number of longstanding paradigms in the scholarship on American Puritanism, history, literature, and culture. Smolinski specifically calls into question the consensus among intellectual historians who have traced the Puritan origin of the American self to the Errand into the Wildernessand the idea of God's elect. He also challenges the commonplace argument that New England represented the culmination of prophetic history in an American New Jerusalem for the Mathers and their counterparts. As an important link between Mather's premillennialism in the late seventeenth century and Jonathan Edwards's postmillennialism in the Great Awakening, "Triparadisus" provides important biographical insight into Mather's last years, when, liberated from his father's interpretations, he put forward his own. The Authority of the Bible and Cotton Mather's "Triparadisus: A Discourse Concerning the Threefold Paradise" 3 2. The "New" Hermeneutics and the Jewish Nation in Cotton Mather's Eschatology 21 3. The Bang or the Whimper? The Grand Revolution and the New World to Come 38 4. When Shall These Things Be? Cotton Mather's Chronometry of the Prophecies 60 5. Note on theText 79 PART II: THE TEXT The First PARADISE 93 The Second PARADISE 112 The Third PARADISE 153 An Introduction 153 I. The Present Earth, perishing in a CONFLAGRATION 155 II. Plain Praedictions of the CONFLAGRATION, in other Passages of the SACRED SCRIPTURES, besides the Petrine Prophecy 159 III. What may be called, A Digression, [But is none] offering, A Golden Key to open the Sacred Prophecies 162 IV. The Sibylline Oracles, concerning the CONFLAGRATION 194 V. Traditions of the CONFLAGRATION, with All Nations, in All Ages 199 VI. SIGNS of the CONFLAGRATION coming on 202 VII. The CONFLAGRATION described 219 VIII. The CONFLAGRATION, How Reasonably to be look'd for 231 IX. The NEW HEAVENS opened 244 X. The NEW EARTH survey'd 268 XI. A National Conversion of the Iews; Whether to be look'd for 295 XII. WHEN shall these Things be! WHEN the Grand REVOLUTION to be look'd for? 319 Notes 349 Appendix A: Manuscript Cancellations and Interpolations 425 Appendix B: Editorial Emendations 467 Appendix C: Biblical Citations and Allusions 469 Selected Bibliography 479 Index 505 Note: Book is xx + 526 pages; PDF file is 29 Mbytes

Art · Art history · Paradise · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History

• The Most Vile and Barbarous Nation of all the World ”

  Open Access•Richard W Cogley•Renaissance Quarterly•2005

  Add to list

• Statistics in the Hands of an Angry God? John Graunt's Observations in Cotton Mather's New England

  Ted Mccormick•The William and Mary Quarterly•2015

  Add to list