Abstract

This study examines Perry Miller's application of "the Augustinian strain of piety" to Puritan New England, asking what he meant, and whether he was correct. ;Recent scholarship has pointed to the modern context of Miller's portrayal, noting his existential tones and admiration for Reinhold Niebuhr. A close reading of Miller reveals remarkable consonances between his articulation of the Puritans' sense of divinity and Paul Tillich's later description of "the God behind God", and between their sense of sin and Niebuhr's analysis of anxiety. In the appreciation of modernism, and its Freudian imagery, that Miller shared with these writers, he found a way of reading the Puritans' piety as Augustinian. ;The actual evidence of Augustine's works in Puritan New England is slim, but a closer inspection of their reading shows a burgeoning of Augustinian texts within the works of Reformed, Catholic, and humanist scholarship, as well as contemporary English literature. The many translations of Augustine's reputed writings into forms intended for the popular as well as scholarly markets, reveal the often bitter tug-of-war over his legacy in post-Reformation England. Puritan writing demonstrates a respectful but cautious approach to the Church Fathers. Attracted by their thoughtful biblical scholarship, and the appeal of antiquity, the Puritans were nevertheless wary of the barbed use of patristic writers by Catholic controversialists, and their uncritical embrace by some Protestant polemicists. ;Perry Miller's critical appreciation of the Puritans owes much to Adolph Harnack's observation of Augustine's "pious mood" inhabiting a "shell of doctrine". References to both the letter of Augustine's doctrine and the spirit of his piety are scattered in the Puritans' writings. The Antinomian controversy illustrates their concurrence with Augustine's interpretation of the apostolic injunction that the letter without the spirit is dead, and, equally, that the spirit without the letter could not to be tolerated. ;Miller's portrait was correct in that the Puritans read Augustine's doctrine, as they approached all theology, with devotional intent, but they also shared his conviction that an undisciplined piety is subversive. Miller argued they were more right than they knew