Tuesday, February 10, 2009

biographical parallel

In his biography, Manierre boils down Cotton Mather’s style by describing one brilliant literary device: the biographical parallel. This device had many positive effects on it’s readers (seen at the top of page 156), the most important of which was to “animate” them. This motivation caused the people of New England to start drawing parallels of their own in their daily lives, and they found God’s will everywhere.

Mather’s skill in reading with a Prophetic eye turned his writing into a “rhetorical method of utilizing all history as a kind of allegory prophetic to the New England experience,”(157). Suddenly, the people of the New World could believe that there were prophets among them, that they were living through the struggles that were described in the Bible. By “magnifying his subject”(155) Mather pulled the citizens out of Plato’s Cave and gave them the glasses to read.
Through biographical parallel, Mather could compare the significance of present events to those of the past, and since time is eternally present in the mind of God, it was not difficult for a man of his education to convince others’ of God’s presence/will.

1 comment:

  1. I agree wholeheartedly with what you have said, in fact, I almost wrote about this same topic for my blog. As I read the sentence, "rhetorical method of utilizing all history as a kind of allegory prophetic to the New England experience" (157) it sparked the question, is this not blasphemy? Augustine states that "no human reason comprehend the divine reason" (211) and by saying that a human can understand the will of God is to say that a human is on the same omniscient plane. No human is equal to God, and I am sure it is a sin to say otherwise.

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