22 pages • 44-minute read
The Flesh and the Spirit
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Background
Authorial Context: Anne Bradstreet
Bradstreet’s poetry and prose reveal her intensely religious nature. She looked to God for her salvation, and her faith acted as a balm for the trials and tribulations of her earthly life. The life of the Puritans in New England was a hard one, often marked by death and disease, especially of children. Between 1665 and 1669, Bradstreet wrote three poems mourning the loss of three grandchildren, ages 18 months, three and a half years, and one month. In each poem, she affirms that the child is now in a blissful state in heaven. Bradstreet also praised God for delivering her from a serious illness (“For Deliverance from a Fever”). When the family house burned down in 1666, she wrote “Verses upon the Burning of our House,” in which she took the same position as Spirit in “The Flesh and the Spirit,” employing the familiar iambic tetrameter and rhyming couplets:
Didst fix thy hope on mould’ring dust?
The arm of flesh didst make thy trust?
Raise up thy thoughts above the sky
That dunghill mists away may fly.
Thou hast a house on high erect
Framed by that mighty Architect,
With glory richly furnished,
Stands permanent though this be fled (Lines 39-46).
Bradstreet also wrote a collection of short prose pieces that she addressed and dedicated to her son Simon. One of these, “Meditations Divine and Moral,” reads almost like a gloss on “The Flesh and the Spirit.” In it, she takes aim at the vanity and pride of Flesh: “Few men are as humble as not to be proud of their abilities; and nothing will abase them more than this: What hast thou, but what thou hast received? Come give an account of thy stewardship” (Meditation 17). In other words, a person’s talents, whatever they may be, were given to them by God, so humility rather than pride is the appropriate attitude to take.
Meditation 13 comments on the strong pull of the earthly world that Flesh describes in “The Flesh and the Spirit”: “The reason why Christians are so loath to exchange this world for a better, is because they have more sense than faith: they see what they enjoy, they do but hope for that which is to come.” This means that Christians are too attached to the world of the senses, which weakens their faith.
Finally, in Meditation 32 Bradstreet also undermines Flesh’s argument that it is fine to be acquisitive and ambitious for worldly fame, since such ambition lacks a solid foundation and will eventually lead to disappointment: “Ambitious men are like hops that never rest climbing so long as they have anything to stay upon, but take away their props, and they are of all the most dejected.”
Historical Context: The Puritans
The Winthrop Fleet, on which Anne Bradstreet sailed to America, was a group of 11 ships led by John Winthrop (1588-1639), a Puritan lawyer who became governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The flagship was the Arbella, which had about 300 passengers, including Simon and Anne Bradstreet. The voyage took 77 days, with the Arbella arriving in New England on June 12, 1630. In total, the Winthrop Fleet transported between 700 and 1,000 passengers, as well as 240 cows and 60 horses. They traveled during the Great Migration: A period between 1620 and 1640 when about 20,000 Puritans made the transatlantic crossing from England, seeking the freedom to practice their religion, which was in conflict with the Church of England under King Charles I. The Puritans opposed religious ritual and thought the Church of England was too close to the Roman Catholic Church.
The Puritans were an intensely religious group of people who believed in human sinfulness. They rejected worldliness and were intent on living in a way that was pleasing to God. The Puritans were Calvinists—that is, they followed the teachings of the French Protestant reformer John Calvin (1509-1564). They believed in predestination, or the idea that some people were pre-selected before birth by God to gain salvation, while others were foreordained to go to Hell. Those who were to be saved, known as the elect, did not deserve their blessing; they were saved only by the grace of God manifesting through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. No one could know in advance who was one of the elect and who was not.
As Bradstreet’s “The Flesh and the Spirit” reveals, the Puritans adopted a dualistic mode of thought regarding the flesh (the physical body and its desires) and the spirit (the part of the person that aspired to the spiritual or heavenly realm and longed for God’s grace). They saw a perpetual and irreconcilable war between these two elements. This belief was developed based on a number of books in the New Testament, such as Paul’s letters to the Galatians and the Romans and passages such as this: “Dearly beloved, I beseech you […] to abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul” (I Peter 2:11, King James Version). As in Bradstreet’s poem, the spirit was ultimately destined to defeat the lower self, the body/flesh, “for whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world” (I John 5:4, KJV). In order to do everything they could to live according to the spirit and inhibit the flesh, the Puritans engaged in much Bible study and prayer and lived according to a strict moral framework. In 17th-century New England, they were also required by law to attend church on Sundays and were subject to the church’s discipline.
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