Still reading Perry Miller's Roger Williams. In tandem with this week's New Yorker article, about religious right's pressure on separation of church & state.

Roger would have had a lot to say about that. The aggressive proselytizing, which makes Christianity a cultural binding agent rather than a spiritual shriving & quest. A certain worldliness attaches itself to the million-dollar legal & ad-propaganda campaigns. (Then again, who in this world doesn't exude a certain worldliness? Not many.)

The absurd, tragicomic melodrama of relations between religious practices and the practices of society at large... Williams loved to use the "garden & wilderness" metaphor (the church is the garden, the wilderness is the world). This is a useful distinction, which goes back (you might say) even before Christ, to the rite of baptism - which is the sign of repentance, of turning from the ways of the world to the love of God, of recognizing oneself as a child of God before anything else.

There is always this temptation to impose one's landscape (the garden) on the world; to erase that difficult distinction; to create a kind of Christian-imperial fantasy-culture. Williams, on the other hand, loves to point out that the sign of the true Christian is the lamb : the persecuted, not the persecutor.

The power of rhetoric over free inquiry. The willingness to judge & condemn the opponent, the "enemy", in simplistic terms, ruthless castigations (practiced everywhere now, on every side, on every issue).

The first Roger Williams I knew about was the '60s pop musician. I played his fancy version of "Autumn Leaves" as a piano recital. (This was the sheet music:)

Reading Perry Miller's book, Roger Williams (publ. 1953). Seems a good place to start (all over again). Miller tries to get behind the image made useful for later generations & political developments (Williams the genial forerunner of religious tolerance).

Miller's Williams is an adamant, uncompromising spiritual perfectionist, one who followed out his premises to their inexorable conclusions. Not the future-foretelling prophet, but the prophet as pain in the neck.

Also a kind of poet. "Mainstream" Protestantism, from the beginning, was totally opposed to allegorical readings of the Bible. Hence all the New World forms of covenanting & congregating, which attempted to re-enact - literally - the language, law & rituals of the Old & New Testaments. But Williams was a radical typologist - the stories in the Bible were mere figures, allegories, "types" - of that unwritten Someone - God on earth.

"Deep in Williams' being lay an aptitude for figures and allegories; nothing for him was more congenial, as nothing was more antipathetic to Winthrop, that to conceive of historic Israel as an allegory of a church which exists not on land or sea. Winthrop might be compared to - he was more generous than - a modern man of affairs, brought up on Longfellow, when confronted with T.S. Eliot or Kafka. As for Williams, being a rhetorician of allegory, he could not bear to see Charles I or Governor Winthrop take unto themselves those accoutrements of power which Christ had turned into metaphors." [p.39-40]