On January 6th of 1696—1695, old style—Betty Sewall, daughter of Samuel Sewall, one of the judges in the Salem witch trials, “surprised,” as Samuel puts it in his Diary, the whole family. Samuel explains what led to that surprise:
It seems Betty Sewall had given some signs of dejection and sorrow; but a little after diner she burst out into an amazing cry, which caus'd all the family to cry too; Her Mother ask'd the reason; she gave none ; at last said she was afraid she should goe to Hell, her Sins were not pardon'd.
Betty’s “dejection” derived immediately from a sermon by John Norton that Samuel had read to the family, where the preacher used John 7.34 as his text, “Ye shall seek me, and shall not find me,” followed by John 8.21, where Jesus says, “ye shall seek me, and shall die in your sins.” Those texts “ran in her mind, and terrified her greatly,” says Samuel, especially when she then read one of Cotton Mather’s sermons where Mather asked, “Why hath Satan filled thy heart.” When her mother asked her “whether she pray'd,” Betty answered “Yes; but feared her prayers were not heard because her Sins not pardon'd.”
I say that the “dejection” came immediately from Norton’s sermon because that sermon, indeed a great deal of the theological underpinnings of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, itself derived from the Calvinistic idea of predestination, double predestination. The idea of double predestination is that from the beginning of time itself God had already determined, predestined, not only that some people would be saved, but also that some people—the bulk of humanity, in fact—would be damned.
Betty’s dejection, what nowadays you might call her nervous breakdown, stemmed from her sense that, despite all her desire, all her prayer, all her faith, god did not respond to her. She did not feel within her the justification, her acceptance into the bosom of Jesus, that would signify her predestined to salvation. Whatever she could willingly do to exercise her faith, whatever work that the spirit might perform to move her to assert her faith, a process called sanctification, there was no way that god would change his mind. Without such the inward conviction of justification, the only other option available to her was damnation. Good, faithful, innocent as she might be, god had predestined her to hell.
Betty Sewall’s response to double predestination is one possible outcome of Calvin’s theology. The good person, praying desperately for some sign of god’s having chosen her for salvation, will try and try and try again to perfect the sanctification that will clarify her justification and union with the divine pleroma. With no inkling of divine preference, however, dejection, depression, and despair might well follow.
There is an alternative path for the subjects of predestination, however. Convinced that justification will never come, that the inevitable end of one’s existence is damnation, surely it follows, for some at any rate, that the whole house of cards comes crashing down. Why work towards something that can never be accomplished? Why not simply enjoy the pleasures of the here and now, and to hell with salvation, since in any case hell certainly will engulf the ones rejected by god. And god has determined the fate of every person from before the beginning of time itself.
That alternative approach to double predestination motivates the actions of Dr. Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s play. Certain of damnation, in fact so skeptical of religion itself that he does not hear Mephistopheles’s assertion of his own damned condition, Faustus signs away his soul for the pleasures of the moment. “I count religion but a childish toy, / And hold there is no sin but ignorance.” To be sure, Faustus had higher ambitions than mere pleasure. He assumes that from knowledge he can come to wealth and power. Finally he is satisfied with pleasure, the illusory presence of Helen of Troy, whose spectacular beauty “launched a thousand ships,” as he says. Certain that he is not justified before god, Faustus does away with future sanctification and opts for the instant.
I gave Faustus, a fictional human, as example of the way double predestination can work on those who accept that they are not and will never be among the chosen few. I did so because the fiction covers a multitude of real persons who, sure that they will never lie down beside green pastures, simply assume the right to break all bounds of law and decency. I could point to a certain president of the United States who seems to have accepted that power is the only thing that matters, for instance, and damn the torpedoes of an impossible salvation.
Ancient as her travails are, Betty Sewall could be considered fictional as well—certainly very different from a twenty-first century human. And yet her doubt about the prospect of justification, which produces a constant effort at sanctification, has its contemporary counterpart as well. For her as for the modern worker, if there’s no sign of paradise, or fortune for the worker, then one keeps trying; and if there’s conviction of spiritual or economic wealth, then one rests in the bosom of the Abrahams. Or Benjamins, perhaps. The failed worker’s hopelessness in poverty parallels Betty’s spiritual dejection. For Betty a continued state of dejection might lead to madness; for the worker poverty might lead to suicide.
Betty and Faustus. The two of them limn out modern American reality.
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