Whereas this blog took a
turn toward Yale College two posting ago, it left the reader with little
information as to the developments at Harvard during the 1600s. This posting hopefully will modestly fill in
the gaps in that story. The main reason
for looking elsewhere relates to the quality of leadership experienced on the Cambridge
campus.
This period saw subpar administrations beginning with Harvard’s
first president, Henry Dunstar, who became embroiled in the religious turmoil
between the scholastics and the Separatists – the strong Puritanical believers
who took on the moniker, Baptists. He
was eventually forced to resign and was followed by a succession of men that were
not able to bring under control the rowdy student body. They were Charles Chauncey, Leonard Hoar, Urian
Oakes, and John Rogers – these men were either physicians or clergymen.
Finally, in 1684, almost fifty years after its founding,
Harvard hired its first effective president with the curious name, Increase
Mather.[1] At the time of his acceptance of the position
he was already well known as the pastor of the Old North Church of Boston where
he secured the highest reputation among the second-generation New Englanders. From the get-go, Mather’s appointment had
some political intrigue since his ascendency staved off direct control of the
college by the English government.
One thing Mather accomplished was to upgrade the
faculty. Two additions to that group
would prove of particular consequence; that would be the hires of William
Brattle and John Leverett. Brattle strongly
insisted on Cartesian logic to attack skepticism – the belief that nothing is
knowable. Leverett proved to be more
independent of religious ideas and ideals and eventually assumed the presidency
of Harvard in 1707. His more distinguishing
posture led to his support of a new church.
As Allen Guelzo describes it,
Leverett would … talk more about virtue than about redemption,
more about reasonableness rather than mystery, and he put his entire support
behind the organization of a new church in Boston, the Brattle Street Church,
whose Manifesto of 1699 proclaimed the church Congregational, not by reason of
Scripture, but by the Light of Nature.[2]
Eventually, a rift
developed between Increase Mather and Leverett, as Mather attempted to block
the ascendancy of Leverett to the presidency, but it proved too late. This antagonism stemmed from the belief
Leverett was drifting too far away from Calvinistic beliefs. And this discordance would be picked up by
Mather’s son, Cotton Mather.
This drift, ironically, led
like-minded advocates, headed by Cotton, to look to Connecticut to start a new
college. That would be New Haven, and
this younger Mather convinced Elihu Yale to provide the bulk of the funds. The irony continues, since it would be Yale
College, through the work of its post-graduate tutor, Samuel Johnson, that would
in time take the lead in promoting Enlightenment ideals and furthering the use
of reason and the objectification of study that would lead the scholarship of
that day.[3]
While surely other writers
have commented on this next concern, what follows are the ideas of this
blogger. And that has to do with a
source of contention between Enlightenment thinking and Puritanism. Earlier, this blog introduced the acronym,
TULIP. The letters stand for the various
beliefs Puritans claim. The “U” stands for
unconditional election which means one does not get to heaven through good
works, but through being selected by God to be so rewarded. This smacked as antithetical to Enlightenment
ideas.
The
Enlightenment not only rejected the notion that a person knows such a thing,
but that belief undermined human capacities to reason. Why a person is “saved” or not, must depend
on more than the whimsical biases of some almighty power. If that contention were true, it would need
to be discovered as a tangible reality to be believed and since such a belief
can have such far-reaching effects, it is of no small matter. This writer believes that such disconnect
underscored the ongoing discord between Enlightenment thinkers and the Puritans.
And
another point, this writer wishes to highlight, that with objectified thinking having
a Cartesian starting point of total ignorance, epistemological thinkers, since
the days of the 1700s, have delved into what are the implications of
Enlightenment thinking. One such scholar
was Eugene Meehan in the mid-twentieth century.
He provides the following list of criteria by which one can evaluate or
ask questions of any theory, but given its thrust, they seem most applicable to
scientifically derived theories. The list is:
•
Comprehension: Does a construct explain as many
phenomena related to the area of concern as possible?
•
Power: Does a construct control the explanatory
effort by being valid and complete in its component parts and in the relationships
among those parts?
•
Precision: Does a construct specifically and
precisely treat its concepts, making them clear in their use?
•
Consistency or Reliability: Does a construct
explain its components and their relationships the same way time after time?
•
Isomorphism: Does a construct contain a one-to-one
correspondence with that portion of reality it is trying to explain?
•
Compatibility: Does a construct align with other
responsible explanations of the same phenomena?
•
Predictability: Does a construct predict
conditions associated with the phenomena in question?
•
Control: Does a construct imply ways to control
the phenomena in question?[4]
This is offered so that the
reader can get a sense of what Enlightenment thinking has led to.
That is a highly disciplined way to look at, to
measure, and to model what some aspect of reality is. Of course, such knowledge, as it is
accumulated, leads to application of it and the advent of engineering. But a question to ask in terms of this blog’s
story: was this influence limited to the
New England colonies? The next posting
will look at Virginia and Pennsylvania.
[1] Apparently, the name Increase was popular among
Puritans during the time in question.
[2]
Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I
– a transcript book – (Chantilly, VA: The
Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005), 40.
[3] See posting, “A Yale Turn,” of this blog. It was published April 27, 2021.
[4] While this blogger cannot find from which of Meehan’s
works this originates, the reader is directed to work of this now deceased
academic. That is Eugene J. Meehan, Contemporary
Political Thought: A Critical Study
(Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1967).
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