puritanism 美国文学教材.ppt

Puritanism If Confucianism is the major element influencing the ideology of Chinese, Puritanism is one of the most enduring shaping influences in American thought and American literature. Without understanding Puritanism, we can never know American literature. Puritanism, rather than a fixed set of theories, is a code of values, a philosophy of life, and even a point of view. I. Terminology Literarily speaking, Puritan has its terminological root in “purify” and what Puritans wanted to do is to purify the church which, in their opinion, is old-fashioned and out-dated. Originally used to describe a third-century sect of strictly legalistic heretics, the word Puritan has been applied unevenly to a number of Protestant churches from the late 16th century to the present. Puritans did not originally use the term for themselves. It was a term of abuse that first surfaced in the 1560s. Precisemen and Precisians were other early antagonistic terms for Puritans who preferred to call themselves the godly. The term puritan is not strictly used to describe any new religious group after the 17th century, although several groups might be called puritan because their origins lay in the Puritan movement. The term puritan might be used by analogy (usually unfavorably) to describe any group that shares a commitment to the Puritans Anabaptist points of view. The word Puritan thus always referred to a type of religious belief, rather than a particular religious sect. To reflect that the term encompasses a variety of ecclesiastical bodies and theological positions, scholars today increasingly prefer to use the term as a common noun or adjective: puritan rather than Puritan. II. The Backgrounds of Puritanism Religious Background Although deriving mainly from Catholicism, Puritanism was fundamentally anti-Catholic: Puritans felt that the Church of England was still too close to Catholicism and needed to be reformed further. Puritan teaching called for a commitment to Je