a firm and tenacious grip on our hearts, minds, and bodies.7 Yet early Americans did not automatically conjoin romantic love with erotic desire, as would become the case once the paradigm of sexual orientation took hold. Equally important, their conception of how gender worked enabled them to embrace combinations of love and desire that would later become problematic. This essay uses two particular categories of romantic and erotic relationship in early America to illustrate how necessary it is for us to set aside our most deeply felt assumptions if we are to understand past men’s and women’s experiences of sexual desire and love.
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Let us now visit briefly with another seventeenth-century New Englander in the happy grip of two symbiotic love affairs that defy, among other things, our persistent stereotypes of what it meant to be a Puritan. Edward Taylor, the young pastor at Westfield, Massachusetts, was about to be married. In September 1674, two months before his wedding to Elizabeth Fitch, Taylor sent his prospective wife a passionate love letter. “I know not how to use a fitter comparison to set out my love by,” he wrote, “than to compare it unto a golden ball of pure fire rolling up and down my breast, from which there flies, now and then a spark like a glorious beam from the body of the flaming sun.” Yet Elizabeth Fitch was not the only love on Edward Taylor’s mind, as the young man openly confessed. Love for a human spouse, however sincere and intense, must always be “limited and subordinate” to the devotion that united believers to Christ. The love that Taylor expressed for his savior was intimate, romantic, sensual, and often explicitly erotic. In poems written between the 1680s and 1720s, Taylor envisaged Christ as “a spotless male in prime” and addressed his savior in language of utter infatuation:
Thou art the loveli’st object over spread
With brightest beauty object ever wore
Of purest flushes of pure white and red
That ever did or could the love allure.
Lord make my love and thee its object meet
And me in folds of such love raptures keep.
Faith would prepare Taylor’s heart as a “feather-bed . . . with gospel pillows, sheets, and sweet perfumes” to welcome Christ the lover. The young pastor yearned for divine arousal of his spiritual “fancy” in vividly sexual terms. “Yea,” he wrote, “with thy holy oil make thou it slick till like a flash of lightning it grow quick.” Taylor’s poems leave no room for doubt that he anticipated union with Christ through the ecstatic experience of orgasm and penetration. According to Taylor, the soul was “the womb,” Christ “the spermadote,” and “saving grace the seed cast thereinto.” Once “impregnate[d]” by Christ, the soul was “with child” and in due course would produce “the babe of grace.” That infant was the fruit of matchless passion, conceived “in folds of such love raptures” as only Christ could provide.8
There was nothing unusual or unconventional about Edward Taylor’s dual passion for Elizabeth Fitch and his heavenly bridegroom. In early 1718, the Boston magistrate Samuel Sewall, a few months after the death of his first wife, was already contemplating another loving union. The prospective spouse about whom he enthused to his diary was not, however, one of the widows before whom he would later lay his suit: “I had a sweet and very affectionate meditation concerning the Lord Jesus; nothing was to be objected against his person, parentage, relations, estate, house, home! Why did I not resolutely, presently close with him! And I cried mightily to God that he would help me so to do.” That April, Sewall officiated at a marriage and wrote afterward, “Oh! that they and I might be married to CHRIST; and that our marriage might be known to ourselves, and others!” During the same year in which Sewall was contemplating Christ’s unimpeachable qualifications as a spouse, the influential minister Increase Mather published a sermon in which he described marriage with Christ as “the most desirable one that ever was or that possibly can be.” No “greater dignity” was imaginable than marrying “the only son of the King of Heaven,” no “greater felicity” than to have as a husband “the wisest and richest that can be thought of.” The bride of such a groom would be “made happy for ever.”9
Different Christian cultures have responded to biblical images of Christ as bridegroom and lover in various ways. Most modern Westerners downplay or ignore biblical passages that contain this imagery. Medieval mystics described union with Christ in terms of feelings and relationships that they shunned in an earthly setting: members of religious orders yearned for marriage with their savior and yet committed themselves to celibacy here on Earth as a prerequisite for sanctity. This reaffirmed the opposition of physical and spiritual realms as well as their belief that devotion necessarily involved transcendence of the body. New England Puritans, by contrast, welcomed the sensual possibilities embedded within such passages of the Bible. Eager to celebrate marriage and family life as an agent of grace and social order, they drew direct parallels between human marriage and the soul’s espousal to Christ. They hoped that the latter would provide a model for husbands and wives as they sought to build and sustain their relationships, just as human marriage would inspire believers to strive for union with their other, greater spouse. Marriage and marital sex became a foretaste of what the redeemed would experience when they joined their divine husband in heaven.10
Over the course of the seventeenth century, New England pastors became increasingly effusive in their evocation of Christ as an object of romantic, sensual, and erotic infatuation. Faced with the maturation of young men and women who had not chosen to live in a godly commonwealth and who would decide as adults whether or not to embrace orthodoxy, ministers sought to seduce youngsters into the community of faith by stressing the voluptuous pleasures that awaited them in the form of union with their savior. Pastors described the soul’s marriage to Christ in ever more elaborate detail, occasionally devoting entire sermons to the subject. In so doing, they acted not only as teachers whose duty it was to explicate a recurring scriptural metaphor but also as self-styled “friends of the bridegroom” who courted on Christ’s behalf. The days on which they preached became Christ’s “wooing days,” when the savior would “deck and array himself with all his glory and beauty,” hoping to bedazzle the objects of his love. Since pastors hoped to become brides in their own right, they served simultaneously as interpreters, advocates, and potential recipients of the redeemer’s advances.11
Ministers encouraged their flocks to feel Christ’s love as an intensely voluptuous experience. “Here he comes,” rhapsodized Samuel Willard, “to give us the caresses of his love, and lay us in his bosom and embraces. And now, oh my soul! Hast thou ever experienced the love of a saviour?” Edward Taylor was by no means alone in using sexual and reproductive metaphors to convey Christ’s bestowal of grace, which would “quicken” the believer’s spiritual womb, the same word used to describe the first stirrings of life in a physical womb. Christ’s gift, explained Willard, was as much “physical” as “moral”: “he withal puts in his finger, and makes a powerful impression.”12 Prayer also afforded an opportunity to enjoy “soul-ravishing communion” with Christ. Believers would emerge from such experiences “refreshed with those close embraces which he receives from him whom his soul loves.” Cotton Mather, admittedly idiosyncratic in many regards, confided to his diary the extravagantly sensual experiences he underwent during spiritual exercise, describing “the rapturous praelibations of the heavenly world” in which he was “swallowed up with the ecstasies of [Christ’s] love.” So “inexpressibly irradiated from on high” was Mather that he was sometimes unable “to bear the ecstasies of the divine love, into which [he] was raptured”: “they exhausted my spirits; they made me faint and sick; they were insupportable; I was forced even
