Review Essay, Biblia Americana, American Literary History

All on an American Table: Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana

Mitchell Breitwieser

American Literary History, Volume 25, Number 2, Summer 2013, pp.381-405 (Article)

Published by Oxford University Press

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All on an American Table:Cotton Mather’s BibliaAmericanaMitchell Breitwieser*

My title takes a figure from Cotton Mather’s “New OFFER to

the Lovers of Religion and Learning,” a pamphlet he wrote and had

printed in 1713 or 1714 to advertise the manuscript of his Biblia

Americana in hopes of securing an English publisher: “Many

Thousands of those Fine Thoughts, whereof sometimes One or

Two, or a very Few, have enabled the Writer to find some

Acceptance in setting up for Authorism, are here together set upon

the Table, in order to a Feast of Fat Things full of Marrow, of Wines

in the Lees well refined” (Mather, BA 32). The table was a congenial

figure that allowed Mather to depict himself as a servant, bringing

the work of others to us, for our sustenance and pleasure. The Biblia

is not his work, done from scratch; he has only gone round select-

ing, gathering, sorting, arranging, and setting it all before us in an

attractive array. But though he wants to present himself as one who

does secondary work, a kind of sous-auteur, the humility he aims to

project is impeded by his ill-concealed intimation that he does what

he does so very well, and so prodigiously, that his work surpasses in

quality, magnitude and importance the primary work of those who

produced one or a couple of the dishes brought to the table. This

tacit grandiosity is manifest within the Biblia at those moments

when Mather explains that the massive selecting, gathering, and

sorting from primary material was exactly the sort of work God did

when assembling the vast feast of Creation. But, Mather might

reply, the grandeur belongs to my time, not me; the “Feast of Fat

Things full of Marrow, of Wines in the Lees well refined” in Isaiah

25:6 will be served up at history’s glorious end, and Mather’s

*Mitchell Breitwieser teaches American literature in the department of English at

the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Cotton Mather and

Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality (1984), American

Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning (1990), and National Melancholy:

Mourning and Opportunity in Classic American Literature (2007).

American Literary History, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 381–405doi:10.1093/alh/ajt011Advance Access publication March 29, 2013# The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

The Biblia Americana:

America’s First Bible

Commentary, A Synoptic

Commentary on the Old

and New Testaments. Vol.

1: Genesis, Cotton

Mather. Edited by Reiner

Smolinski. Baker

Academic Press, 2010.

reference to that particular feast indicates his feeling that the signifi-

cance of the Biblia was conferred by history, to which he was,

again, a diligent servant. More an assemblage than a composition,

the Biblia was designed as a kind of ark, a preserving and renewing

vessel, its production, Mather felt, a vital and necessary contribu-

tion to what his time and locale required, an urgent American

catalyst to history’s last act. In this conviction that the tabular form

of his book was especially suited to an American task, Mather

anticipates a tradition of literary compendia, a national genre.

But the Biblia can’t be said to have inspired such subsequent

works because it was never published. Mather began working on it

in 1693, according to Reiner Smolinski, culling and gathering

Bible-related lore from his copious library, affixing summaries of

relevant information and theory to the appropriate verses and chap-

ters. By 1706, he had tried to find a publisher but failed, a fate that

also befell a second attempt in 1712. Smolinski contends that

Mather was naıve; he didn’t have good connections among English

bookmakers, there wasn’t much of a market for such a major new

commentary, and the Biblia was an already unfeasibly large manu-

script, too costly to produce, too unlikely to attract a requisite

number of subscribers. About “three times as big as the Magnalia”

when Mather wrote to Henry Walrond in 1716, it had “cost [him]

exquisite Elaborations” (Diary 416). By then, Smolinski contends,

Mather “appeared resigned to accept the inevitable” (Biblia 237),

though in his diary he continues to hope that God will someday

present his book to the world. But, amazingly, Mather continued to

work on his opus, adding in large amounts of new text, as if it had

not sunk in that the size of the manuscript had played a large part in

its rejection, defying the logic of the eighteenth-century book

market with a text that blossomed into what a commercial mind

would have considered a preposterous size. Perhaps he did so

because he trusted that the Lord would arrange to put the book

before the public when it was most needed, or perhaps deep within

himself he responded to the rejection by abandoning his hope for an

audience in order to allow his assembling self the freedom of its

own expansive, peculiar, and remarkable telos. His diary for

February 1712: “[D]oubtless the Number [of additions] which I

have this Year added unto the Biblia Americana, has been many

more than a thousand” (Diary 162). A year later: “A considerable

Accession to our Biblia Americana, many more illustrations than

Dayes in the Year” (2: 178). Like Henry David Thoreau, who, in the

wake of disappointing sales for A Week on the Concord and

Merrimack Rivers (1849) allowed Walden (1854) to mutate into a

very different sort of literary being (an eight-year project evolving

through seven drafts1), Mather may have committed himself to the

382 Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana

innate unfolding of his writing rather than to market calculations. In

any case, he continued to gather and assemble. At the time of his

death in 1728, his masterwork was some 6,000 pages long in manu-

script.

Mather extracted some of his material and assembled it into a

text that did find a publisher in 1721: The Christian Philosopher.

But the Biblia itself remained a manuscript, eventually coming to

rest in the Massachusetts Historical Society, thereafter attracting

only fitful or cursory attention. The general expectation among

scholars has been that the Biblia would languish forever, not just

because it is itself so huge, but because a scholarly edition would

require massive explanatory scaffolding in addition to the massive

labor of turning Mather’s handwriting, columns, inserts, and so on

into a reliable text—a labor of intellectual devotion, it always

seemed, that would have to rival Mather’s own omnivorous prolifer-

ative decades-spanning feat, an impossibility, in other words. But,

quite remarkably, unchartable currents of circumstance have

brought Mather the publication he prayed for (or at least the com-

mencement of such an outcome) in Smolinski’s edition of Mather’s

commentary on Genesis. To get a sense of the magnitude of

the task, it helps to ponder Smolinski’s remark that “[a]nyone

who merely glances at the holograph manuscript of the ‘Biblia

Americana’ at the Massachusetts Historical Society will be startled

by the sheer bulk of the six folio volumes and the seemingly endless

reams of double-columned sheets, interleaved with hundreds of

half- or quarter sheets—even snippets of paper—pasted in the

margins, and interpolated with thousands of textual revisions, era-

sures, excisions and emendations. . . . Heavy foxing, stains from

watermarks, bumping of the manuscript leaves at the top and

bottom, loose conjugate (but smaller) leaves interpolated between

the pages, paper cutouts pasted into the margin with red sealing wax

(now extremely brittle and disintegrating upon touch)—these condi-

tions describe the general state of the three-hundred-year-old manu-

script” (50, 195). Nine further volumes will follow, edited by

various scholars, with Smolinski serving as general editor, and Jan

Stievermann from the Heidelberg Center for American Studies as

executive editor. As an event within the American literary canon,

the publication of this first volume of the Biblia rivals in importance

the publication of the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography

by Robert Hirst and the staff of the Mark Twain Papers and Project

in Berkeley, an accomplishment that it parallels in a number of

ways—most importantly, the fabulous difficulty of establishing the

text. But Twain doesn’t require so much annotation, so much appa-

ratus, so much delving into obscure sources. And a certain volume

of sales could have been assumed for Twain, though all concerned

American Literary History 383

were happily surprised by how large the demand proved to be.

Separately from a consideration of the editorial work, then, one

ought to envision and marvel at the mixture of talent and dogged-

ness, the sheer commitment, it must have taken to bring the Biblia

project into being, to stick at the work of persuading institutions and

publishers that this was a worthy commitment even without the

level of public affection that a name such as Twain’s name excites,

maybe even something like the opposite in Mather’s case.

The size of the Biblia and the story of its composition so

readily excite (at least in me) what Max Weber called a characteristi-

cally American “romance of numbers” that I hurry to add that

Reiner Smolinski’s achievement as editor isn’t simply or even pri-

marily just a big thing, the amount of work he’s done, though that is

truly amazing. In footnotes, appendices, and a monograph-length

prefatory essay, he surrounds Mather’s work with intelligently ren-

dered context, with sensitive and alert characterizations of the texts

Mather drew upon that allow him to assess the motivation and

quality of Mather’s readings, and with extended discussions of the

rise of scientific reason and of textual criticism that capture the

mixture of excitement and defensiveness with which Mather reacted

to these nascent modes of apprehending the human and natural

worlds. All this work is done with patience, care, good humor, and

deep respect for Mather and his enterprise. Together with

Stievermann, Smolinski has also edited an accompanying volume,

Cotton Mather and the Biblia Americana—America’s First Bible

Commentary: Essays in Reappraisal (2010), which further enriches

our understanding of the Biblia with 20 essays on diverse topics:

genre, race, ecumenicism, semiotics, gender, and others. If, as it

seems, Mather failed to make the case for his book while he lived,

the case may now be said to have been made for him, thoroughly

and convincingly.

Still there’s no denying that, regardless of Smolinski’s success

in impressing us with the quality of Mather’s labor, it’s the quantita-

tive magnitude of this book, even of only volume 1, that draws the

attention, at least upon first sight. (Living in an earthquake-prone

area, I’ve hesitated to keep it shelved anywhere above my head. I

worry about that with Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa [1748] as

well.) And size mattered for Mather, too, as his frequent recourse to

numerical characterizations of his “amassment” suggests. He seems

somewhat self-astonished at such moments, perhaps because the

size was something that happened rather than something planned, a

consequence of the presentational format he chose for the Biblia,

which allowed for but did not require a huge tome. Rather than

writing consecutive text following the course of scripture, Mather

chose a question-and-answer format, with the question staged as


something an interlocutor-persona wonders about upon reading a

given verse or pondering a given biblical figure or event, and Mather

presenting a reply culled from his reading. For example, chapter 1 of

Genesis occasions an interchange that would have interested

Herman Melville, as Smolinski observes in a footnote to the follow-

ing passage:

Q: What are the Creatures intended in the Original, where our

Translation reads, Great Whales? V. 21.

A: Job Ludolphus has demonstrated, that the Name, Tanim,

signifies, Crocodiles. (Compare Ezek. 29.3 and 32.2 where, tis

certain, there can be meant nothing else.) And we know that

Crocodiles are elsewhere singled out, as a most astonishing

Work of God.

There seems to have been a Special Reason, to prevent some

false Opinions, (& perhaps, to touch a Mystery touched else-

where in our Illustrations.) That so noxious & so terrible an

Animal as the Crocodile, should be particularly recognized, as

created by the Lord. (BA 328)

These interchanges, ranging in length from short entries such as the

one above to several-page excurses, were composed as Mather came

across things in his reading that struck him as worthy appositions to

one or another passage in the Bible: “Mather did not concentrate his

annotations on any one part or book of the Bible before moving on

to others, but jotted them down as he distilled them during his wide

reading” (Smolinski, Biblia 52). The numerous interleavings that

Smolinski mentions in his description of the state of the manuscript

are consequences of this method: were at some point new material

pertinent to the Tanim in verse 21 to come to Mather’s attention, he

could write up a new question-and-answer on a separate sheet or

scrap, affix it to the Genesis 1, verse 21 section of the manuscript,

leaving it to a publisher to interpolate the new interchange into the

body of the text. The commentary on any given verse, therefore,

might come from several different times in Mather’s career as a

reader and hermeneut, supplying a sort of biographical cross-section

in a text that over time bulked up at thousands of more or less small

points: “[d]uring [its] long gestation period, the ‘Biblia’ grew from

approximately 5,100 individual annotations (1693–1706) to more

than three times that number by the end of 1728” (Smolinski, Biblia

64). It is also useful to recall Smolinksi’s contention that thoughts

occurring during Mather’s reading in texts other than the Bible

led him to a connection with a Bible passage, rather than that the

contemplation of a passage suggested an annotation, a procedure

that allowed Mather to access the full array of his extensive and


diverse interests and that brought a large body of potentially connec-

tive material into play: according to Smolinski, the Biblia

Americana participates in an ongoing compilation tradition, dating

back to Eusebius Pamphili, that “allowed him to distill the ‘Finer

Thoughts’ into his commentary and nurture his penchant for philolo-

gical problems of the Bible as text, for scientific discoveries, for

social and cultural matters such as food, clothing, monuments, and

customs of the ancients, and for pagan gods, rituals, heroes, myths,

and peoples (including Native Americans) not found in the conven-

tional Bible commentaries of his time” (64–65). If, as Mather

believed, the Bible was the master text, the key to all mythologies,

then in theory no other text could be ruled out in advance. The

formal expansibility of the Biblia and its enormous receptivity,

therefore, enabled the expanse that it became. It may well be, then,

that there was no point at which Mather committed himself to a vast

work, though there were probably many points at which he appre-

hended that that was what was coming into being. His astonishment

at his burgeoning exegesis suggests, again, that though he was proud

of his output, even vainglorious, the size of his accomplishment

may have been more an outcome than a goal. If so, we have to look

elsewhere for motives sufficiently potent to generate such a commit-

ment over such a length of time in the life of a busy minister. Two

come to mind: the obvious pleasure he takes in discerning/fabricat-

ing hermeneutic connections, and his desire to produce a transump-

tive artifact enabled by and suitable for what he considered to be the

crucial historical period in which he lived.

The size of the Biblia, together with the absence of a strict

overarching design, is probably apt to lead potential readers and

cursory library scanners to think of it as a heap, or a pile, or a mass,

and of Mather as kin to Thomas Wolfe’s Eugene Gant:

Now he would prowl the stacks of the library at night, pulling

books out of a thousand shelves and reading in them like a

madman. The thought of these vast stacks of books would

drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to

know—the greater the number of the books he read, the greater

the immense uncountable number of those which he could

never read would seem to be. Within a period of ten years he

read at least 20,000 volumes—deliberately the number is set

low—and opened the pages and looked through many times

that number. This may seem unbelievable, but it happened.

Dryden said this about Ben Jonson: “Other men read books but

he read libraries” and so now was it with this boy. Yet this ter-

rific orgy of the books brought him no comfort, peace, or

wisdom of the mind and heart. Instead, his fury and despair


increased from what they fed upon, his hunger mounted with

the food it ate. (91)

But recall Mather’s assertion that all is set on one table, not dumped

there, and recall as well Smolinski’s suggestion that each annotation

was occasioned by a flash of connection that went off during

Mather’s reading of one or another text: writing the Biblia

Americana was a matter of culling luminous thoughts or passages

and setting them next to the Biblical passages with which they res-

onated, an art of textual juxtaposition, the pleasure of juxtaposition

all the greater when the two parts originate far off from one another.

Traditional biblical hermeneutics found tendrils of connection

between the testaments justified by the idea of foreshadowing

through a glass, darkly (BA 1019): “Adam was Asleep when Eve was

formed out of him; and our Lord was cast into a Deep, a Dead

Sleep, for Three Dayes, by which means he procured a Church unto

himself. (Tit. 2.14.) The Side of Adam was opened, that Eve might

bee fetched out; and the Blood of our Lord, which purchased His

Church for Him, came out of His opened Side. (Joh. 19.24)” (BA

502). But for Mather, as for the American Puritans generally, con-

temporary history can be brought to bear, too; John Winthrop can be

understood to be Nehemias Americanus. But it doesn’t stop there.

Mythologies are also scripture seen through a dark glass: Osiris ¼

Joseph, Saturn ¼ Adam, Minerva and Ceres ¼ Eve, Neptune ¼

Noah, Apollo ¼ Jubal, Mercury ¼Moses (1064–65). Or: “Another

thing that appears very remarkable is; That the Chinese Chronology

when rightly understood, is exactly agreeable, to what we draw from

the Hebrew Text of the Old Testament. Fohi, the founder of the

Chinese Monarchy, was the same with Noah. The Chinois tell us, he

had no Father; no doubt the Memory of his Father was lost in the

Deluge. They tell us his Mother j conceived him, as she was encom-

passed with a Rain-Bow; which seems a cloudy Remembrance of

the Rain-bow first appearing after the Flood” (279). Or philosophies:

“[T]he most ancient Wise Men, beleeved all things to be made at

first, 1’j 1’no6 kai pollvn, of one, and, many; By one, they meant

God; By many, they meant our Atoms, or, immensam particularum

multitudinem. This was the very Name, that Pythagoras too putt

upon that which Moses calls, The Waters” (364). As I read through

volume 1, I constantly felt the excitement Mather experienced when

he witnessed such spans proliferating across the gulfs between

discourses, his sensation of discourses opening to one another, pre-

viously irreconcilable interiors relinquishing their reserve and coa-

lescing into one vast resonant series, all set on one table, a bliss that

supplied, perhaps, the largest part of the motivation that kept him at

the work of elaborating the Biblia Americana. When Hermes stands


revealed as a variation of Nimrod, or Newtonian gravitation turns

out to be the motive impulse in the division of the firmaments in

Genesis, walls fall and vast pathway networks form, opening a virtu-

ally limitless field of play. In this work, Mather does not limit

himself to narrative echoings, like stories of vast floods, for

example; over the course of the Biblia, he adduces a number of

other modes of isomorphism within and between texts—type, pro-

lepsis, prelibation, etymology, hendiadys, metalepsis, metaphor,

allegory, imitation, metathesis, and tautopatheia (“the Paying of

Sinners, in their own Coin” [1095])—all of them chasm-spanners

and domain-extenders. Such an assemblage is a play of mind, unlike

Eugene Gant’s furious bibliophagy, connections sprouting all over,

runners hurrying from here to there, constant possibilities rather

than inert singularities, a fabric everywhere weaving itself. Mather’s

own preferred role models might be “Austin [Augustine], and

Ambrose, and Jerom and Cyprian,” all of whom were “very Fruitful

and Witty in their Allegories” (656). Or we might think of lore-

gatherers such as Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, or Michel de

Montaigne, pale consumptive ushers and sub-sublibrarians:

Q: What think you, about the Hairiness of Esau; was it

Ordinary or Extraordinary? [ch. 25,] v. 25?

A: T’was Extraordinary. T’was more than a common &

Humane Pilosity; t’was little short of the Villosity that the

Satyres have sometimes ascribed to unto them. Rebeckah his

Mother, must use Goat Skins for the Imitation of it; and the

Name of Seir was for this Cause putt upon him. Instances of

such a Hairiness occur in many Approved Histories. Scaliger

sais, he saw a Spanish Boy, all overgrown with White Hairs;

insomuch that the French call’d him, A Barbet, which is the

Name of a Spaniel, or Shaggy Dog, among them. Columbus

affirms, That hee saw a Man all Thick sett with Hairs, all over

except in Part of his Face & Hands. Boscius reports, That the

French King bestow’d education at Paris, upon a Man that was

as hairy as a Hound. Peucerus relates, that he had seen

Children, Toto Dorso, Ursinis obsitos Villis [Consult

Schenkius’s Observations.] And hence tis, that Sperlingius

attributes a sort of Monstrosity, to the Hairness of Esau.

Esau signifies a Thing made, or compleat. (BA 1009)

Shaggy dog stories and wild goose chases, what matters is the inter-

est and the echo. The Bible is for Mather what the whale was for

Melville, a locus of seemingly infinite opportunity, a platform from

which to launch numberless forays: “Out of the trunk, the branches

grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the

The Bible is for Mather

what the whale was for

Melville: a locus of

seemingly infinite

opportunity, a platform

from which to launch

numberless forays.


chapters” (Melville 288). It often feels as if this could go on

forever, as bliss ought to, and in a sense it did: all the new composi-

tion after Mather’s failure to find a publisher suggests that there

were motives other than (or at least in addition to) the desire for

publication at work, sustained and sustaining enjoyments that only

death could halt.

But such a self-prolonging zest, were Mather to acknowledge it

as such, would not sit well with the announced purpose of the Biblia

Americana. The connections that Mather made were there to be made

because non-Biblical texts bore the traces of Biblical inspiration,

mixed in with and obscured by nonscriptural dross; making the con-

nection required a purging of the dross—for example, by highlighting

those elements in the story of Fohi that resonated with the story of

Noah, and allowing the non-Biblical elements to fall away. At the

end of the day the textual ligaments he uncovered were to add up to a

single vast demonstration of the Bible’s prototypical centrality

among books by revealing other textualities—science, mythology,

history, philosophy, Judaica—as more or less corrupt variants on the

prototype. The hermeneutic reduction of obscurity would reveal a

stable territory, this one universal and without impassible interior

segmentations—only areas, no domains, and all obscure or obfuscat-

ing material disposed of. In this enterprise, Mather was not unique.

In an essay on Mather’s investigation of mythologies in Smolinski’s

and Stievermann’s companion volume, Harry Clark Maddux explains

the historical rationale for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century euhe-

merism:

After the confusion of the tongues, the various descendants of

Shem, Ham, and Japheth corrupted the true religion they had

inherited from Noah by adding their own interpretations over

long periods of time. Thus, each nation had a residue of an

ancient theology, which (in the case of Moses) could even

have been derived from the Egyptians but restored to its origi-

nal purity through the Mosaic laws. Daniel Walker astutely

identifies this concept of ancient theology or prisca theological

as the belief in an aboriginal and pure doctrinal creed that

could be traced back through the ages ultimately to Adam. At

every turn early modern reformers tried to show how the many

pagan parallels in the Bible in fact proved that the pagans

owed their religion to the patriarchs of Genesis and how pagan

religious belief preserved a dim memorial of a pristine mono-

theism. (340)

Though he did not accept the idea of an Egyptian origin for Judaism,

Mather’s self-understanding of his own massive practice in the Biblia


Americana largely accords with the history of amnesia that Maddux

characterizes here. Connection is remembrance, a tracing back to the

primal one that dissolves the charisma of the spurious accretions that

history has imposed on truth. This is Puritanism’s historical urnarra-

tive and the locus of its self-conception: Mather’s distinction lies in

the number and variety of discourses that he hermeneutically affixes

to scripture, and in the sheer volume of connection he discerns. If

science, mythology, and so on are not themselves falsehoods but,

rather, instances of truth that are riddled with falsehoods, then the

task of remembrance is much vaster than what had been required by

the notion of sola scriptura. According to Smolinski, “Mather col-

lects the most significant discoveries of the ages in all disciplines

from literally hundreds of different tomes. Strongly invested in the

traditional belief in a divinely organized universe of correspondences,

he sought to bring together the combined learning of the different

branches of human and divine knowledge” (Biblia 6). If Mather

“explodes the framework of conventional commentaries” (5), he does

so in order to bring the genre to its fruition. The quantitative magni-

tude of the Biblia Americana identifies it as the transumptive and

unsurpassable instance of its genre:

I considered, That all sort of Learning might be made glori-

ously Subservient unto the Illustration of the sacred Scripture;

and that no professed Commentaries had hitherto given a thou-

sandth part of so much Illustration unto it, as might be given. I

considered, that Multitudes of particular Texts, had especially

of later Years, been more notably Illustrated in the Scattered

Books of Learned Men, than in any of the Ordinary

Commentators. And I consider’d, That the Treasures of

Illustration for the Bible, dispersed in many hundred Volumes,

might be fetch’d all together by a Labour that would resolve to

Conquer all things; and that all the Improvements which the

Later-ages have made in the Sciences, might be also, with an

inexpressible Pleasure, call’d in, to assist the Illustration of the

Holy Oracles, at a Rate that hath not been attempted in the

vulgar Annotations. (qtd. in Smolinski, Biblia 6)

The might of the Bible is such that no other textuality has signifi-

cance except insofar as it indicates the Bible. But if all textualities

embody that incipient servitude, then the glorification of the Word

requires that no stone be left unturned, lest neglect allow the

unturned stone to seem to possess some autonomous, rather than

derived, luster or interest. Thus though the “inexpressible Pleasure”

of Mather’s expansiveness thrives on the discovery of great numbers

of cases of connection to be come upon, the treatment of each case


requires a reduction of complex instance to regular type, rendering it

“gloriously Subservient” to its ulterior truth, the two authorial moti-

vations together comprising a tensed bifold impulsion Mather

shared with the planets: “The concentric Revolutions of the Planets

about the Sun, proceed from a Compound Motion; a Gravitation

towards the Sun, which is a constant Energy infused into Matter, by

the Author of all Things; and a Projected, Transverse Impulse, in

Tangents to their several Orbs, that was also Imprinted at first by the

Divine Arm upon them, & will carry them around, unto the End of

all Things” (BA 385).

Mather’s assertion that his labor consists almost entirely of

gathering contrasts thematically with what draws his attention in

Genesis, which is for him a tale of (to gather some of his words)

constant scatterings, desolations, ruinations, confoundments, ani-

mosities, separations, dissensions, a tale of dispersions followed by

confusions. The thematic echo between the writing of the Biblia and

the key events of Mather’s Genesis becomes clearer when we recall

as well Mather’s emphasis on the fact that what he gathers he has

previously sorted out from his massive reading: “Gold is here

fetched out from the dunghill of the Talmuds,” as he wrote of the

Biblia in a letter to Dr. John Woodward in 1712; in 1715 he

informed Sir William Ashurst that it was “a close and thick amass-

ment of . . . treasures, refined from the superfluities among which

they had lain diffused” (Selected Letters 189). The creation of the

world was also such an ongoing act of patient and incessant discrim-

ination, “Gods orderly Dividing, Separating, and Digesting of this

Dark Mass,” his labor of “separating the Homogeneous Parts of the

Universe from the whole confused Mixture” (BA 415). Mather is

loyal to the notion of creation ex nihilo defended in Augustine’s

Confessions, but he also believed that matter was created from

nothing, and then shaped into worlds. Before the start of a world,

Mather believed, as did Milton and many another in the early

modern period, there was a potent and fructive chaos-stuff:

First, we have Samajim and Aretz, that is, Heaven and Earth.

Moses uses these Two Words together, in one, the more signifi-

cantly to express Universal Matter; and not Heaven and Earth

as distinctly formed, but as Jumbled together in one Unformed

Mass. Hesiod, instructed with Hebrew Traditions, uses the like

Expression. Moses in the next Place, calls the same Universal

Matter only Aretz, that is Earth. This was that so the

Corporeity of it, may be j more plainly intimated. He proceeds

then to call it, Tohu and Bohu, that is, Formless, and Empty.

This is to Declare unto us, the Void Spaces every where inter-

spersed in it. The old Greek Philosophers called this Universal


Matter, oyd1n kai k1nov, Nihil et Vacuum: which Theodotian

and Aquila will tell you, is the Translation of Tohu and Bohu;

And others, for the Turbid State of it, called it, xuuoniay

Meaning the Chaotic Earth, & not the Habitable. He passes to

call it then Tehom, or, The Deep; to note the Immense

Profundity of it. There is a Notable Hint unto this Purpose, in

Aretas on the Tenth of the Revelations; Abyvn kalousti, to

polybauo6 tou protoy stoix1ioy , Abyssum vocant immen-

sam profunditatem primi principij. But the Particles of this

Universal Matter, so wonderfully Diffused and Confused,

could avail nothing, until put in regular Motion. Wherefore

Moses, to point out the Multitude and Motion thereof, comes

in the fifth Place, to call them, The Waters. He does not mean,

the Body which we now call Waters, for they were not yet pro-

duced; but such Atomical and Chaotical ones, as the

Brachmans in Strabo, make to be Arxa6 tn6 kosmopoiia6

The Principles of the World. This is that Universal Matter,

which the Greeks called, Chaos; a Name, not of such a

Notation as Philo Judæus assigns for it, but coming from the

Hebrew Chauth, which signifies, Darkness; in which sense,

Orpheus called it, nykta Sow1raan, a Dark Night; and the

Phoenicians, as Philo Biblius made a1ra Sowvdh, A Dark

Air, to be the Origin of all things. (366–67)

Mather, having separated all this resonant matter from the jumbled

and unformed mass of his reading, has performed an antichaotic or

antientropic feat in this paragraph, modeling various theories of

primal substance into a demonstration of the veracity and primacy of

Scripture, a God-echoing achievement. Mather’s mentor here is

William Whiston, from whose “Discourse Concerning the Nature,

Style, and Extent of the Mosaik History of the Creation” (1696) he

quotes extensively and enthusiastically. For Whiston, as Mather para-

phrases him, the creation of the world is an act of disposition: the

“words here used, of, Creating, or Making, or, Framing of things, in

the Style of the Scripture, do frequently signify no more, than the

Ordering, Disposing, Changing or new-modelling those Creatures

which existed already, into a different & sometimes perhaps a Better

& more useful State, than they were in before” (BA 339). As

Smolinski makes clear in his prefatory essay and in a number of

footnotes, Whiston’s opinions on this question were hardly rare,

eccentric, or questionable, even suggesting that Whiston echoes “the

orthodox Anglican position on the Mosaic creation account” (339).

Mather also draws on Thomas Burnet’s Telluris Theoria Sacra

(1681–89), for example, though he sides with Whiston in rejecting

Burnet’s assertion that there were no mountains before the Flood.2


And such views are not particular to seventeenth-century English

religious culture. According to Richard L. Bushman,

[Joseph] Smith did not conceive of Creation as ex nihilo, with

the universe suddenly appearing by divine fiat out of nothing in

a single big bang. Smith taught that “the elements are eternal”

and coexist eternally with God. (Doctrine and Covenants

93:33). God did not create matter; it was always there. The

Book of Abraham said the Gods “organized and formed the

heavens and the earth” (Abraham 4:1). Creation was more like

bringing order out of chaos than making something out of

nothing. In the King Follett discourse Smith explained that

Creation was the “same as you would organize a Ship” from

available materials. Creation could be thought of as God

moving through an unorganized and chaotic universe and estab-

lishing order. (71–72)

The issue here is not Mather’s originality, or lack of it, but rather his

deep interest in what Whiston was proposing, his choice to dwell on

it at length and to return to it several times in his Genesis commen-

tary. Bushman’s discussion of Joseph Smith’s cosmogony suggests

a reason why Mather’s imagination might have been captivated by

Whiston and his cohort: the idea of Creation as a shaping of primary

stuff echoes more intensely and plangently than does the idea of cre-

ation ex nihilo with human travail, with the struggle to bring or to

form something out of the recalcitrant mass of the given, with all its

inertial resistance. This analogy to human work seems to inform

Mather’s remark that “Ordering, Disposing, Changing or new-

modelling those Creatures” culminates in “sometimes perhaps a

Better & more useful State, than they were in before,” an observa-

tion whose implications he would shun were he talking only about

God’s “new-modellings.”

Modeling, though, suggests shaping, as with clay, and Mather

follows Whiston and Burnet in emphasizing instead that creation is

a matter of sifting and sorting, dividing like from unlike, assembling

things together with things of their own kind and value. In this

passage, Mather excerpts from two places in Whiston and joins the

two pieces:

III. At the Time immediately preceding the Six Dayes Creation,

the Face of the Abyss, or superior Regions of the Chaos, were

involved in a Thick Darkness. All things Beginning then to take

their Places, according to the Law of Gravity, the Mass of Dense

Fluids, being heavier than the Masses of Earth, Water and Air,

would sink downwards, with the greatest Force & Velocity; &


elevate the Masses enclosed among them upwards. Those Opake

and Earthy Copuscles, which before did Rove about the vast

regions of the Atmosphere, were now crowded nearer together;

and by Consequence excluded the Rayes of the Sun, from the

Central Solid, in another guise Manner than before. (352)

Later, as “the Mass of the upper Chaos was separated from the

heavier Abyss beneath, so it again divided itself into diverse Orbs,

which gave the Light some access o to our Earth” (352). In this and

other such passages, matter seems almost self-sorting, requiring no

overseeing sorter, as in Lucretius, to whom Mather refers at several

points:

At that time the sun’s bright disk was not to be seen here,

soaring aloft and lavishing its light, nor the stars that crowd

the far-flung firmament, nor sea nor sky nor earth nor air nor

anything in the likeness of things we know—nothing but a

hurricane raging in a newly congregated mass of atoms of

every sort. From their disharmony sprung conflict, which

maintained a turmoil in their interspaces, courses, unions,

thrusts, impacts, collisions and motions, because owing to

their diversity of shape and pattern they could not all remain

in the combinations in which they found themselves of mutu-

ally reconcile their motions. From this medley they started to

sort themselves out, like combining with like, and to rough

out the main features of a world composed of distinct parts:

they began, in fact, to separate the heights of heaven from

the earth, to single out the sea as a receptacle for water

detached from the mass and to set apart the fires of pure and

isolated ether. (184)

But Lucretius’s emphasis on “a Fortuitous Concourse of Atoms”

bespeaks for Mather a “silly” atheism (393). He prefers Anaxagoras,

who “sett up a pure Spirit or Mind, separating the Homogeneous Parts

of the Universe from the whose confused Mixture,” thereby more

closely approximating the truth of “the Mosaic History, of God’s

orderly Dividing, Separating and Digesting, of this Dark Mass” (415).

Chaos does not commit suicide; an intending intelligence patiently

compartmentalizes materials drawn from the jumble, in this something

like Thomas Pynchon’s Maxwell’s Demon:

“Who’s that with the beard?” asked Oedipa. James Clerk

Maxwell, explained Koteks, a famous Scotch scientist who

had once postulated a tiny intelligence, known as Maxwell’s

Demon. The Demon could sit in a box among air molecules


that were moving at all different random speeds, and sort out

the fast molecules from the slow ones. Fast molecules have

more energy than slow ones. Concentrate enough of them in

one place and you have a region of high temperature. You can

then use the difference in temperature between this hot region

of the box and any cooler region, to drive a heat engine. Since

the Demon only sat and sorted, you wouldn’t have put any real

work into the system. So you would be violating the Second

Law of Thermodynamics, getting something for nothing,

causing perpetual motion.

“Sorting isn’t work?” Oedipa said. “Tell them down at the

post office, you’ll find yourself in a mailbag headed for

Fairbanks, Alaska, without even a FRAGILE sticker going for

you.” (68)

For Oedipa, the demon is nothing but a thought-experiment, a

fantasy of a world in which constant exertion isn’t required to fore-

stall attrition. The Second Law is without exception, and collapse is

an incessant vector in things, for Mather, too, for whom God, like

people, is obliged to deal not only with matter’s initial resistance to

form, but also with its propensity to return to its original state: “And

thus with Creation of Man was this our World compleately finish’d

at the End of the Sixth Day; and all its Parts appeared in the most

Perfect Manner to answer the excellent Purposes of the all

Powerfull, and Wise GOD, by whose Good Providence it is continu-

ally Supported, governed and preserved” (306); “Nature is nothing

but that Motion which the Spirit of God has imprinted upon Matter,

and which He perpetually governs with his infinite Wisdom” (368).

Nature is the structure that God has injected into matter, and which

He constantly maintains. Mather asserts that gravity is God’s spe-

cific device for maintaining order: “All Matter, near the Surface of

the earth, for Example, doth not only gravitate downwards, but

upwards also, and side-wayes, & toward all Imaginable Points; tho’

the Tendency Downwards bee praedominant and alone Discernible,

because of the Greatness, and Nearness, of the Attracting Body, the

Earth.” The counterposing of various gravities, therefore, maintains

Creation as a structure of organized discrimination: “the power of

Gravity perpetually acting in the present Consitution of the System

of the Universe, is an Invincible Argument for the Being of a GOD”

(398). Mather’s insistence on nature and gravity as ongoing acts

may be a rejoinder to a deistic notion of God, but it opens the possi-

bility that God might be at times inclined to withhold sustenance, to

let the chaos waters resume their primacy: “Thus it was as long

after, as the Flood, that the Curse upon the Primitive Earth was


executed. The First Earth, was then taken all to Peeces, & framed

anew; Our earth, was by the Flood, in just such a Posture, as the First

earth was, when it first Rose out of Nothing; and God used such a

Method of Nature, in Settling it again, when he had broken it all to

Shivers (by bursting the Strata of it, & bringing out the central

Abyss upon it,) as he did in first Forming of it” (491). Thirty years

after Mather died, Jonathan Edwards would concur that ongoing

maintenance is required if the catastrophe always lurking in a recidi-

vist universe is to be avoided: “God’s preserving of created things in

being, is perfectly equivalent to a continued creation, or to his creat-

ing those things out of nothing at each moment of their existence. If

the continued existence of created things be wholly dependent on

God’s preservation, then those things would drop into nothing upon

the ceasing of the present moment, without a new exertion of the

divine power to cause them to exist in the following moment” (241).

A more distressing variant on this notion of a universal dark procliv-

ity is advanced in Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual

Universe (1848), where Edgar Allen Poe posits “a desire on the part

of Matter” (247): “My general proposition, then, is this: —In the

Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of All

Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation . . . ” (211);

“[the] Oneness[ of the originally created Matter] is a principle abun-

dantly sufficient to account for the constitution, the existing phaeno-

mena and the plainly inevitable annihilation of at least the material

Universe” (227–28); “[t]he Divine Act . . . being considered as

determinate, and discontinued on fulfilment of the diffusion, we

understand, at once, a reaction—in other words, a satisfiable ten-

dency of the disunited atoms to return into One” (230). Poe supposes

a sinister outcome for Mather’s gravity: though the omnidirectional

pull of all on all prevents the amalgamation of terrestrial bodies into

the body of the earth, it nevertheless works toward an infinitely

greater atrocity, a perverse compilation, a universe of no(-longer-

distinct-single-)thingness, a nightmare that afflicts sorry objects, as

Edwards imagined it: “When we go to expel body out of our

thoughts, we must be sure not to leave empty space in the room of it;

and when we go to expel emptiness from our thoughts we must

not think to squeeze it out by anything close, hard and solid, but

we must think of the same thing that the sleeping rocks dream of;

and not till then shall we get a complete idea of nothing” (“Of

Being” 13).

If Mather’s God reliably prevents what Poe sees in the physical

universe’s future, sin nevertheless ensures that entropic malady is a

regular feature of human historical life, which is not an effectively

maintained structure, but rather, a repeating pulse, a series of

fallings-off and temporary remedies. Human creators are more


deeply afflicted by their given material than God is by his self-given

matter; they sort and assemble, arrange on a table, only to see their

work broken, jumbled together in times of declension. Diaspora as it

is chronicled in the Bible is just this sort of confoundment: a people

once gathered is dispersed among other peoples, enslaved by them,

afflicted with adjacent customs and myths, their names, words and

stories, and blurred by being blended or mingled with other names,

words and stories, until the mix is a snarl and the truth almost lost,

requiring elucidators such as Moses, “who, giving us the Records of

the Worlds Creation, keeps up Heaven and Earth too, from sinking

into a Chaos” (BA 313). Holy textual work is not only analogous to

divine labor, it also participates in it, enacting textual elucidations that,

by returning the truth to sharp focus, refresh the human portion of the

order of things and put history back on course, like the “Renovation

of the World, upon the Coming of Noah out of the Ark” (686).

If Mather understood the Biblia to be a player in a historical

phusis that commenced with the events narrated in Genesis, his

book’s emerging magnitude may, for him, have been a sign that it

was to be a, or even the, key text in the advancement of history’s

ultimate pulse, in a transuming and all-disposing repair of the world

that Mather prayed for or hoped might be both imminent and distinc-

tively American. In his Biblia introduction and his introduction to

Mather’s Triparadisus, Smolinki argues carefully and cogently that

Mather nourished millenial hopes throughout the second half of his

life, and that he at least entertained the idea that the New Jerusalem

would be located in New England. If this were so, then what would

be the right kind of thing to be writing while poised on the threshold

of redemption? What sort of book would that historical moment

allow, support, and demand? In Smolinski and Stievermann’s com-

panion volume, Rick Kennedy contends that the Biblia belongs to a

literary genre that was well-established and readily recognizable in

Mather’s time: the commonplace anthology. Such anthologies,

Kennedy argues, presumed a certain historicity, the time required for

the chosen passages to have become clear as items worthy of salvage:

[T]he inward and supernatural principle at work in the

common-place book tradition was usually . . . associated with

the long storage and repeated affirmation of wise and informa-

tive passages. Hugo Grotius, in the conclusion to his conclu-

sion to his “Prolegomena” to Stobaeus’ Antholgium/

Florilegium (lv) affirmed the authority of gathered quotations

that grows stronger over time. Long endurance proved vitality

and strength. In the long tradition of Aristotelian historiogra-

phy, this is the power of time-testing, the power of consensus

through time. Mather, in the Magnalia, quoted Cicero’s time-


honored definition of history: “History is Time’s witness, the

messenger of Antiquity, the lamp of Truth and embodied soul

of Memory, the guide of human life.” (265)

If therefore, what Kennedy calls the Biblia’s “all-encompassing and

labyrinthine grandiosity” (262) seemed to Mather to surpass all pre-

vious collections, and perhaps to be itself unsurpassable, the histor-

icity supposed in the commonplace book tradition would afford

justification for the claim he always made, that it was not him speak-

ing or writing, but God, and in the case of the Biblia, God as realized

in a centuries-long collective human regathering and reassembly of

the pisca theologica, of all that was lost in the antemosaic disper-

sions depicted in Genesis, culminating in a summary text, orotund

and final, to borrow from Whitman. He came along at the right time,

or the right time found him, or he became himself the vocal and

scriptive organ of the time. Alexandre Kojeve argues that Hegel

apprehended himself in a similar manner, as someone situated at a

particular configuration of historical forces, on the verge of a conclu-

sive pattern, a position that afforded Hegel the possibility of writing

philosophy’s apotheosis, an option not available to Descartes, Plato,

and others because they were too soon and therefore could not know

(33–34). Sacvan Bercovitch contends that, refusing “to resign

himself merely to a proud isolation, glorying in the ‘sacrificing

Stroke’ that bespoke his solitary midnight watch, Mather established

within the apocalyptic imagination itself his mastery over the forces

of history”; he envisions himself as a “millenial herald,” a role that

“sweeps [him] into the dynamic, futuristic, all-encompassing move-

ment of history” (Rites 102, 98). In his introduction to Triparadisus,

Smolinski argues that Mather worried a great deal that the end of

history was not at hand because the Jews had not converted, but that

he came to conclude that the Christians were Abraham’s spiritual

heirs, and that the conversion of the Jews was therefore already

accomplished (Threefold Paradise 5–6). But, though Mather

waived the requirement that a universal conversion of Jewish people

to the Christian faith would be a prerequisite for New Jerusalem, it

is useful to note how regularly his thinking on this matter involves

not just that conversion, but the physical regathering of the Jews,

their reunification on the ground in Palestine. If, therefore, Mather

came to think that the conversion of the Jews as a prelude to immi-

nent apocalypse was to be taken figuratively, that which was figured

would have to display the essential attributes of that which was

taken figuratively: it would have to be an activity of counter-

diasporic sorting and gathering in one place, on one table.

Or even on one table in a new land, an American book.

Throughout the Biblia Mather mentions North America whenever


he can: the myth of Atlantis suggests that the Flood engulfed

America; the heirs of Shem arrived across a land-bridge; huge

fossils found in New York suggest that the Nephilim were here too:

“But America too will come to shelter the reputation of these

Historians [who assert that the nephilim really existed]. They may

shield themselves with the Teeth, lately dug up at Albany. Had

Johannes Cassanione’s Book, De Gigantibus ever come over to

America. I do not know but I might have had a fuller entertainment

for you. But what matters it, now we find the Giants themselves

come over to America” (591). Though Mather’s basic point is that

the fossils can testify to the Bible’s truth, his assertion that the

giants have come over, rather than that they were always here, inti-

mates more, that Americans are not punier than their European

counterparts. Smolinski cites Mather’s remark, in his diary, that

many Europeans “seem to be of the opinion, that a poor American

must never be allow’d capable of doing any thing worth any one’s

regarding; or to have ever looked on a book” (Introduction 26), and

in his introduction to Triparadisus he discusses the sharpness of

Mather’s response to Joseph Mede’s suggestion that the millennal

kingdom would not include the New World, because “America was

to be the abyss of Satan and his minions during their future confine-

ment” (41). Responding to such disparagements, Mather displays an

anxiety about colonial underdevelopment and parochiality that

anticipates Thomas Jefferson’s argument with Guillaume Thomas

Raynal and the Comte de Buffon in the Notes on the State of

Virginia (1785). Unlike Jefferson, though, Mather does not claim

that America will have its turn in the westward movement of the

translatio studii, but rather that it will bring history to its happy

close, surpassing all those predecessors in whose shadow it for now

unhappily stands, chosen by God, as Sacvan Bercovitch puts it, to

be “the finale to his work of redemption” (Puritan Origins 100).

What, then, does the Biblia offer as a Puritan origin of the

American book? Once again, size is the issue. Stievermann contends

that Mather “imagined the Americanness of his work to lie in the

unprecedented breadth and abundance of accumulated knowledge.

More importantly, the ‘American Change’ of which A New Offer

speaks points to Mather’s hope of achieving a pious synthesis of bib-

lical revelation with the various branches of contemporary knowl-

edge in a manner that would also translate into practical lessons for

holy and evangelical renewal” (28). Stievermann is referring to this

passage from Mather’s 1713 advertisement for the Biblia:

If a Work, which is a Tree, that grew on the Western side of the

Atlantic, may on that score hope to be valued by good Men, in

the other Hemisphere, there will be an accession of this peculiar


Circumstance, that, Gentlemen, the Fruits upon it, or at least,

the Seeds that produced them, were most of them, Originally

Your own: And it cannot but be a Pleasure, if not a Surprize to

you, to find that so many of your Best Things, have passed over

the great and wide Sea unto the American Strand. Nor will it be

New or Strange, if some Things happen to be Meliorated, and

made more Sweet and Fine, by passing over this mighty Ocean.

Or, to address you under another Figure: The Writers whom

you made much of, while you had them at Home with you in a

more separate Condition, certainly, will not lose your Favour,

for having Travelled Abroad, and now Returned Home in

Company; tho’ with their habit and Language having something

of an American Change upon it. (27)

The Americanness of the Biblia, that is, lies not in Mather’s occa-

sional inclusions of American information, but in the act of detach-

ing moments of wisdom from their surrounding contexts and

transposing them into a lucid array of companionable moments, an

Americanizing act that realizes the latent potentialities of the source-

texts, previously visible only through a glass, darkly, but now for all

to see. America is not a new material, but the entelechy of all prior

material, “strangely fitting even here, meanings unknown before, /

Subtler than ever, more harmony, as if born here, related here,” as

Whitman puts it in “Italian Music in Dakota” (l. 5–6).

The tree, the fruits, and the seeds are European: it’s the

table they’re set upon that’s American. In the Magnalia Christi

Americana, the word table appears most frequently as “the Lord’s

table,” and it seems likely that Mather would want such a sacramen-

tal connotation for his American table. But in Protestant usage

during Mather’s time, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,

table can also mean “those assembled at the communion table” (def.

7b), so Mather’s figure may also have been meant to imply a certain

social coalescing that his book might catalyze. Table can also mean

a space of play, a Backgammon table, or a space readied for painting

or writing, a kind of condition of possibility for play or discourse,

like a stage. And, finally, table can mean “a schematic arrangement

of information” (def. II), or “a systematic arrangement of numbers,

words or symbols, etc. in a definite and compact form so as to show

clearly some set of facts or relations; esp. an arrangement in rows

and columns, typically occupying a single page or sheet” (def. 14a),

or “a statement of particulars or details in a concise form; a synop-

sis, a conspectus” (def. 15), as in the periodic table or a table of con-

tents—a meaning underlying Michel Foucault’s repeated assertion

in The Order of Things (1966) that the ambition of Enlightenment

science was to devise “a table in which all individuals and all


groups, known or unknown, will have their appropriate place” (245);

“the great table of all that is representable” (263). Perhaps we come

at the Biblia Americana best by combining all these definitions of

table, but with the addition that it is for Mather the American place

and moment in human history that enable the fusion of these

definitions.

Bercovitch called the Magnalia Christi Americana a vast

American jeremiad (American Jeremiad 88), and the same could be

said of the Biblia, with the difference that the Biblia does not define,

describe, or characterize a magnificent and imminent American

future, but instead exemplifies or models one by being open to all of

human textual history, massively inclusive, and held together by

networks of conjunction and resonance. At one point in the Biblia,

Mather refers to “the Design of the Work we are upon,” by which he

does not mean a carefully wrought pattern, but instead a sort of

general intention, “To make a Collection of the Finer Thoughts,

wherewith Men of Erudition, have Illustrated the Sacred Scriptures”

(965). This design required the devising of a general space for

receiving choice textual bits that are clarified by having been

removed from their contexts and transported to the table, where they

are enriched and elucidated by the lines of association that grow

between them, a space that would have to be without absolute

perimeter so that, like a periodic table or a table of contents, it could

expand to include any and all new arrivals. Mather’s question-

and-answer format, then, designed to allow for maximal discursive

inclusiveness, purposely lacking an inevitable terminus and thereby

generating an ongoing and massive work, may be a harbinger of

democracy and an early instance of American pragmatism. By

which I mean, echoing James and Dewey, the contriving of an arti-

fact designed with an eye to the work it needs to be able to do. To

find the Biblia’s American heirs, therefore, it might be best to look

outside American religious literature at other sorts of loose-limbed

structures, backyard cosmoi, bricoleur extravaganzas such as the

Dickeyville Grotto or the Watts Towers, for example, or the tradition

of massively digression-ridden prose works after Moby-Dick:

Thomas Wolfe’s novels, H. L. Mencken’s American Language

(1919), Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965),

William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955), Thomas Pynchon’s

Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), William T. Vollman’s Imperial (2009),

Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men (1987), David Foster Wallace’s

Infinite Jest (1996)—a partial list.

The resemblance is even stronger, though, to those American

long poems that, repeatedly reopening in order to include more,

occupied a significant portion of the poets’ lifespans, ongoing books

such as Leaves of Grass, Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, William Carlos


Williams’s Paterson, Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems, or Ed

Dorn’s Gunslinger. Such works, largely inclusive and loosely

structured (inclusive because they are loosely structured), able to

accommodate more without endangering an elaborately worked

overarching design, echo the Biblia not only in size and in the dura-

tion of the compositional act but in the productive conflict between

the urge toward completeness that launches the work and the prolif-

erativeness that keeps it moving and growing, a time-consuming

enactment of the tension Derrida finds between metaphor considered

as a method of philosophical revelation and as a practice with

respect to which “it is no longer a question of extending and con-

firming a philosopheme, but rather, of unfolding it without limit,

and wresting its borders of propriety from it” (270). Twice referring

to the Magnalia as a possible beginning point for the American

long poem, Roy Harvey Pearce finds these poems “barely dialecti-

cal, not plotted, and always by definition unfinished” (62). Margaret

Dickie depicts compositional quandaries that quite strikingly recall

Mather’s predicament:

The sections of these poems were written as the poets responded

to a variety of creative opportunities and a range of inspirational

moments. Work on the poem could start with the final section or

with some middle point, or several difference sections could be

composed simultaneously. Sometimes the sections were created

to fit into a preliminary outline, and sometimes the composition

of the sections forced the poet to reconsider the whole poem he

imagined he was writing. But the sections as written and as pub-

lished follow two quite different sequences. These haphazard

methods of composition were permitted by the poet’s initial

sense that they were writing long poems. . . .

The long poem, which seemed at the beginning of its com-

position an open and capacious form that remained to be devel-

oped, revealed not only its limits, but the inability of form to

generate content. (8, 14)

“Every long poem,” therefore, “will defeat its creator” (15): “That

[the creators] all foundered almost immediately suggests the inad-

equacy of their beginnings. Still, they did not simply abandon their

long projects then, but rather, stopped, waited, and began again.

This persistence against their initial difficulties and the different

ways they undertook to recommence unsteadied their poems” (9).

Fredric Jameson affords something of a rejoinder in his discussion

of Williams’s attempt in Paterson to “sketch . . . a whole envelop-

ing space, which renders the articulating categories of individual


subject and object unnecessary, if not redundant,” creating “a larger

intelligible canvas than the dramatistic events that are transacted

between individuals” (10). Given the tension between the openness

of the frame and the limited thematic or dramatic closures available

in the individual components, Jameson argues, Paterson’s nature is

such that “it must not succeed, that its conditions of realization

depend on its fundamental success in failing” (5). In the Cantos,

Herbert Schneidau contends, Pound, preferring “heterogeneity over

architecture,” chose to follow “the ‘Mediterranean tradition,’ or

what he elsewhere called the ‘polytheistic anschauung,’ which

derives an almost mystical value from its practice of farraginous

inclusiveness. So-called ‘coherence’ or ‘thematic unity’ or decorous

form (what Pound called in relation to sculpture, to distinguish

Gaudier-Brzeska’s from that of classical Greece, ‘caressable’ form)

had nothing to add” (514, 512). Arguing that Pound found in

Mallarme an incentive to compose a “‘Great Work’ [that] would

absorb the entire anarchic material of human life into its own depth”

(5), Michael Andre Bernstein agrees with Schneidau that Pound

found an “open, inconclusive form” (131) congenial for the task,

and that, therefore, “The Cantos were not ‘completed’ for reasons

that lie at the heart of the whole project” (115). Cohesive rather than

coherent, and open to repeated amendment or mutation, the long

poem is, like the Biblia Americana, a massively inclusive and

ongoing American device, incompetent when it comes to decisive

finishing, finishing only when the writer decides to stop, or has that

decision made for him or for her.

Languishing in manuscript for almost 300 years, though, the

Biblia, if it is a literary premonition, has almost certainly never been

a progenitor. This circumstance of book history supports the notion

that genres arise from historical configurations, rather than from the

examples set by prescient originators. As Mather might put it, Q:

How to explain the odd fact that we can go to Paterson to find a

motto for the Biblia?

. . a mass of detail

to interrelate on a new ground, difficultly;

an assonance, a homologue

triply piled

pulling the disparate together to clarify

and compress (Williams 19)

The list price for this remarkable book is $250, though it can

be obtained for a fair bit less from various booksellers. Even so, it

will prove too expensive for many individual readers, especially in

these hard times. Librarians need to be frugal too, but scholars with


an interest in Cotton Mather, in early American literature, culture,

religion, science, or history, or in American literary epics ought

nonetheless to contact their librarians to advise them that this is a

foundational work, essential to research, and intrinsic to the library’s

mission.

Notes

1. See J. Lyndon Shanley’s The Making of Walden: With the Text of the First

Version (1957).

2. For an instructive reading of Burnet that casts light on Mather as well, see

Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the

Discovery of Geological Time (1987), 21–61.

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Transformations in the Symbolic

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Bernstein, Michael Andre. The Tale of

the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern

Verse Epic. Princeton: Princeton UP,

1980.

Bushman, Richard L. Mormonism: A

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Derrida, Jacques. Margins of

Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago:

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———. “Original Sin.” A Jonathan

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Jameson, Fredric. The Modernist

Papers. New York: Verso, 2007.

Kennedy, Rick. “Historians as Flower

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and the Commonplace-Book Tradition

of History.” Cotton Mather and Biblia

Americana—America’s First Bible

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Mather and Biblia Americana—

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———. Selected Letters of Cotton

Mather. Ed. Kenneth Silverman. Baton

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———. The Biblia Americana:

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Reiner Smolinski. Grand Rapids:

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