A Single Eye As An Attack on Puritanism.

If “the powers that be are ordained of God,” then Clarkson logically begs the question, was it “the will of God” to “destroy the Son of God?” The Puritan response creates nothing more than a deepening of the problem; “that Power by which Pharaoh persecuted Israel, that Power by which Pilate crucified Christ, yet it will not be granted that God gave the power to do.” Implicit in this statement is the belief that those powers arose from the Devil, insisting that God is necessarily ‘good’ and incapable of ‘evil’, they entrench the division of evil from good. However, as the ultimate power of God is a fundamental belief in Christian doctrine, then it may be argued that “if all that is an act be produced by the Power of God, then why not the act that is sinful arise from the same Power.” This division necessarily means that God is not all powerful as he only controls one half of the moral spectrum. One cannot disprove the logic of this statement, thus it would be foolish to understate its sweeping significance. Because Puritans accept that all power is drawn from the power and will of God, then within the confines of Puritan dogma, we are therefore forced to accept that it is by the “power and wisdom of God, to swear, drink, whore and steal.” Clarkson has thus made trivial the basis of Puritanism by proving good and evil to be manifestations of the duality of one God and not devices of separate entities, and in doing so he even bolsters the sanctity of the divine power.

That being concluded he then attacks the confusion surrounding sin, saying “the very title Sin, it is only a name without a substance” as “what to one is pure, to another is impure.” Even the apostle Paul says, “To him that esteemeth anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean.” Arguing against Puritan doctrine using the scriptures as his reference material, Clarkson shows that the very tenets of Puritanism are not only diametrically opposed, but even in opposition to fundamental Christian tenets, such as the omni-presence and supremacy of God. And it must be noted that a view more moderate than that of the Puritans, one that did not insist on black and white arbitrary definitions of nature, would not have been susceptible to this attack, and therefore Clarkson exposes the problem to be exclusively Puritan.

Establishing the cause of the problem as the Puritan interpretation of faith, we may realize that all this while that Clarkson has been prophetically insisting that “[he] shall make darkness light before them” he has indeed been referring to how he wishes to correct the views of his audience. To this end, we see a shift from attack on the Puritans to the construction of independent arguments. Underlying Clarkson’s following propositions is the notion that “when as a man in purity in light, acts the same acts, in relation to the act, not the title: this man doth not swear, whore nor steal.” Essentially, since all is in the ‘eye’ of the beholder, a “single, pure eye,” then in all “there appeareth Devil and God”; it is only a matter of semantics that separates the two.

The development of his argument begins as he writes, “consider what act soever is done by thee, in light and love, is light, and lovely; though it be an act called adultery in darknesse it is so; but in light honesty.” To clarify, Clarkson is constructing an argument by acceptance whereby if he is to accept the tenets of Puritanism, even in that case there lies a problem. Therefore, Clarkson continues, “thy imagination will pursue thee, arraign thee, and condemn thee for a swearer, an adulterer and a thief.” As every man’s imagination has at some time wandered into sinful thoughts, Clarkson points out that “whatever thy tongue Saith, yet thy imagination in thee declares sad things against thee, in that thou esteemest them acts of sin, thy imagination will torment thee for this sin.” Moreover, even those who claim to be pious are only so by contrived self-definition, whereas in thought they are not; conversely “Happy is the man that condemns not himself in those things he alloweth of.” 

Hence the audience has been led to the argument that “if that within thee do not condemn thee, thou shalt not be condemned.” Therefore, since Puritans judge others to the point where people are very fearful of “being considered immoral or fallen,” the prospect of freedom from this fear is very appealing. From this point Clarkson then launches into the final aspect his argument and consequently his solution, which is that “not only your spirit, but your body must be a living and acceptable sacrifice, therefore till acted that so called sin, thou are not delivered from the power of sin.” It is only with freedom to experience that comes the freedom to choose and that should be the focus of one’s way of life.

And all this leads to the following summation: “without act, no life; without life, no perfection; and without perfection, no eternal peace and freedom indeed.” It is the rigidity of Puritanism and its unnecessary attention to the meaning of sin and condemning sinners that inherently precludes its philosophy from bringing its followers toward salvation. Essentially if the reader accepts that if life on Earth should be free and that freedom is good, then as he likely acknowledges that Puritans are not free in thought and action and if a life without freedom is bad, then therefore Clarkson has allowed his reader the chance to recognize that experiencing one’s own definition of sin and then choosing to renounce it is far more reasonable than the fear and self-hate of Puritan faith.

Until now, these arguments are ostensibly for a reformation of Puritan dogma, however Clarkson’s final section, The Ensuing Queries, show that he has broader aspirations. He wishes to show that the same contradictions that make Puritanism problematic make all of Christian faith problematic, as both are predicated upon the interpretation of scriptures. Since we have seen the problems created by the conceptual intangibility of God, it is time to reconsider “What that God is so often recorded in Scripture, and by the Creature believed.” In crystallization, these queries posit that God “cannot be confined,” he is “omni-present in all places” and “if God be in all things, then in all men, the wicked as the godly…why have they not both one title”; “If God be in all, why are not all things one in God?” And if this problem arises from the misinterpretation of the scriptures, then as the scriptures allow for interpretation, “so long as there is this Scripture, there will be Religions, not Religious forms, not spirit; war, not peace; envy, not Love, the teachings of men, not the teaching of God.” Just as one may come to his own conclusions about sin, he may do the like about God, all the while not detracting from the fact that as creations of God are good and we are creations of God, “ultimately all mankind, without exception, will be saved.” In the end, by staying away from the quagmire of interpretation, Clarkson has lead us to the conclusion that it is plain to see that as a virtue of God’s omnipresence and goodness, it would be sacrilegious to believe that salvation can be limited to only an arbitrary chosen few.

It is common in the course of reaction both address the situation and go further by addressing how to make the situation better. A Single Eye is a reaction to Puritanism at the same time as it is layered with the hidden agenda of secularizing the reader. Clarkson shows that Puritans seek not to learn about, understand and love God, but to label, discriminate and instill fear in the name of God. He shows that by a virtue of the free will of the human mind, the Puritan definitions of sin make us all sinners, and therefore Puritanism does not take into account human nature and emotion. Thus as Puritanism is inapplicable to free humans, we see both that it is flawed and that some of the things that make Puritanism so bad also illuminate flaws in Christianity as a whole. Any belief predicated on interpretation is inherently flawed, and therefore the reliance on scriptures allows Christianity to morph into misguided forms like Puritanism. Clarkson’s solution, essentially to not judge others and to prevent the restriction of free will, implies that the church should not be involved with government and law, for it should not be the interpreted decree of God by which you decide who is empowered or who is a sinner. Indeed, as Clarkson requests that we see God as an all loving being that does not discern between what individuals consider good and evil, and as the law requires one to make those discernments, then God necessarily has no place in the affairs of the state. Much may be derived from A Single Eye in this fashion, but empirically we see that implicit in the arguments against Puritanism are arguments for a universal overhaul of Christian dogma and the ways in which society interacts with and views religion.

Bibliography

1) Lawrence. A Single Eye. London, 1650.

2. The Hypocrisy of Puritanism
3. Description of Puritans and History

4. Ranters:
5. Hill, Christopher. The Experience of Defeat. Viking Penguin Books, 1984. New York
6. Aylmer, G.E.. Short History of the Seventeenth Century. Blandford Press, 1963. London

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