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PARTISAN REVIEW
New Testament), and interpreting secular or providential history in
the light of sacred or soteriological history as embodied in the New
Testament.
In
order to deal with the uniqueness of their enterprise,
represented by the very word America, the Puritans inverted' the
traditional modes of interpretation. Hermeneutics gave way to symbol–
ism. While Bercovitch's use of "symbolism" remains a bit cloudy-he
clearly does not mean the elaborate process of perception and creation
of meaning which is Feidelson's subject-he seems to mean at least the
arbitrary invention of meaning. The inversion of hermeneutics refers
to
the displacement of the authority of scripture by the authority of a
secular place and a secular history named America. To serve this novel
role generated by a necessity novel in Protestantism, secular America
had
to
be transformed into a sacred text, without losing its status as
secular history.
In
the English tradition, for example, providential or
secular history was available for interpretation only by reference to the
sacred book; in New England, the place itself became a sacred book.
This process of inversion, as Bercovitch details it, was neither as
simple nor as wholly arbitrary as my account suggests. America's
sacred-secular history developed through a complex process of inter–
pretation and typological reading. The concept of America as a
fulfillment, as the very figure of (rather than simply the setting for)
redemption, implied a unique blending of the three major Protestant
perspectives of self, history, and nation. With the hermeneutical
inversion the perspectives were virtually interchangeable. This blend–
ing and unifying of perspectives made itself available only to those
who perceived the momentous shift of meaning from scripture
to
secular history, from Bible to America, that is, only for symbolists.
Such readers were then qualified to proclaim themselves not merely
Americans, but America itself. This radically subjective perception,
sanctioned by the hermeneutical inversion, provided the basis and the
method for a new idea of corporate selfhood, an identification of self as
consisting of place, history, and individual being. Real history trans–
forms itself into sacred history, then, through a process of symbolic
reading, a process which is at its heart, Bercovitch indicates, an
imaginative assertion.
My summary hardly does justice to the complexity and elegance of
the argument. Bercovitch is describing an elusive intellectual change of
great importance for the study of one major current in American
cultural life. I have my doubts that the book will set off a Cotton
Mather revival-Bercovitch on Mather is far more gripping than
Mather on Winthrop. But as a transmitter of a highly charged cultural
