Simpson is a Professor of English at Harvard College, specializing in the late Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation. He makes the contention that the Reformation fomented a state of permanent revolution within England between 1517 and 1688, in which each successive generation of puritans sought to purge and purify their predecessors, in what was, more often than not, an illiberal process of righteous certainty. Simpson claims “(i) that dissident, repressive, non-conservative sixteenth-century evangelical religious culture was revolutionary; (ii) that revolutionary evangelical culture was simultaneously a culture of permanent revolution, repeatedly and compulsively repudiating its own prior forms; and (iii) that permanent revolution was, as it always is, punishingly violent, fissiparous, and unsustainable, so much so that it needed to invent self-stabilizing mechanisms.”
The evangelical puritans were crippled by doubt and despair about their own predestination. Thus, they had a complicated relationship with the idea of works on earth. “Magisterial and Reformed Protestants worked hard precisely because they did not value works as currency that can satisfy God and change the future…. Works, that is, did not produce meritoriously deserved election. Early modern Protestants worked hard, instead, because works were understood as the fruit of election; works, that is, were signs of the divine decision already taken.”
Hypocrisy was a charge that Puritans threw around with greater and greater scope and scale as the revolution progressed. “Whereas late medieval hypocrisy discourse had singled out one religious order (especially friars, and the different order of friars) as ecclesiastical hypocrites, by the 1520s the charge was being applied globally to the entire Catholic Church. There was no safe place within that Church, since the entire institution, from its Antichrist papal head down, was thought to be committed to the destruction of Christian souls…. As with individual hypocrites, so too with a hypocritical institution—there was no way of reforming it; revolutionary eradication of the entire corrupt edifice (and not just one corrupt order of the Church) was the only way forward.” Almost from their inception, intra-Protestant charges of hypocrisy overwhelmed the Catholic. Soon, every puritan looked first inward, the most the sincere the most sincerely. The charge and the self-doubt could be crippling. Simpson expands, “The puritan saint’s subjectivity sits on the edge of time, straining for eternity, inevitably vulnerable to the trigger switch of hypocrisy.”
For the Puritans, scripture reigned supreme. “If one believes that Scripture determines the Church, as Luther and the entire evangelical tradition after him did, then Scripture’s authority must eject everything without scripture; authorization—mere human “traditions”—from the Church.” William Tyndale, the first translator of the Bible into English, who was burned at the stake for that crime, claimed, “For the whole scripture and all believing hearts testify that we are begotten through the Word.” Luther, himself, before the Emperor at Worms in April of 1521, is purported to have spoken, “I am defeated, the scriptures having been adduced by me, and, with my conscience captured by the words of God, I am unable to retreat.”
Much of Simpson’s argument rests on a deep textual analysis of the fiction of the period. He delves into Marlowe, Shakespeare, and, particularly, Milton. “The word “liberty” is used twelve times within Paradise Lost…. In a poem whose stated theme is disobedience, there are two great disobeyers, Satan and Eve. Both, by Milton’s account, disobey precisely in the name of Liberty. Both Eve and Satan disobey a royal decree in whose making they had no part, and both dismiss that prior condition of their very being as an unjustified, enslaving restraint on their liberty.”
Simpson concludes by trying to encapsulate what the long Puritan Reformation of 1517-1688 meant for England, “No word short of “revolution” will answer to the experience. Once that word is introduced, a range of cultural practices (e.g. predestination and denial of free will; models of singular personal authenticity; image destruction; persecution of “witches”; suppression of drama; literalist reading practice; and absolutist policies) come into view as characteristic of revolutions, and as starkly contrastive with the preceding cultural dispensation…. Revolutions claim to start history afresh, and narrative of the pre-revolutionary period threatens the freshness of that start…. I have called that logic “permanent revolution.” Telling that story points us less to the Catholic/Protestant conflict and more to the much more dynamic energies within Protestantism, that pushed Protestant movements to reject prior versions of themselves.”
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