Background notes Activity 1: Church and community Puritanism has its origins in the Protestant Reformation of Europe in the early sixteenth century. It is generally acknowledged that Martin Luther was the first leader of the Protestants. They were given this name because they protested against the authority of the Pope and Rome. It all started when, in 1517, Martin Luther posted what came to be known as 95 Theses on his church door at Wittenberg. These were largely protests (hence the term Protestant and Protestantism) against the authority of the Pope. In 1521 the Pope excommunicated Martin Luther, which led to the split of the Christian church between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. In Christianity, the Church is not just the pastors or the ministers but the community of believers. Christians believe that life on earth is simply a preparation for eternity, and after death there will be the Last Judgement. (This is recounted in Matthew, Chapter 25.) While it is unfashionable to use the word hell, Christians still believe there will be a reward for the good and punishment for evil. Protestantism places the individual relationship with God or indeed the Devil as critical – we fight for our own salvation, even if God knows from the beginning what we will choose. This means that the voice of the individual believer is heard. The direct experience of the believer being so crucial is the reason the voice of the accusing girls is so important in The Crucible . Their voices and their experiences give powerful testimony to their individual experience of evil in the world. The Christian church is a community of believers united in a single cause: to be reunited with God. The church can therefore be viewed as a community of salvation. The battles fought against the presence of the Devil and evil in the world are seen as very real. Activity 2: Authority and transgression Protestantism placed great emphasis upon the individual’s relationship to God, encouraging the individual reading of the Bible, and believing that a Christian could ask forgiveness for his or her sins directly of God. Early Protestantism thus greatly weakened the authority of the Church organisation – and moved away to form many different churches from Roman Catholicism. This is where the term Reformation comes from – the re-forming of the (Catholic) Christian Church. Martin Luther believed that the State or the government of a country had authority over the day-to-day affairs of the population. In his day in Germany the authorities were kings and princes (and they had long resented the interference of the Pope in Rome.) He believed, however, that the Bible should remain the ultimate guide to how the individual Christian should lead his or her life. How a Christian lived – according to the Bible or transgressing against it – was a matter on which his or her eternal salvation might depend. Luther argued that people were so flawed that only faith could save them – good works they might do would be a sign of their being saved. The Bible was, and remains, the main guide to a Protestant Christian’s salvation, and faith in the Bible is more important than any good works they might do, or any church organisation or minister. Protestant Christianity developed in many different forms, some stricter than others. The other great leader of the Reformation was a man called John Calvin (1509-1564). He was French-born but lived in Geneva for most of his later years. His main ideas are contained in the Institutes of the Christian Religion. John Calvin believed that the rule of the Bible should be the only rule in a society: the rule of the Bible was supreme. In other words, God’s law was superior to laws made by men and women. Although Protestantism made the individual important, this form of Protestantism gave the pastor, the interpreter of God’s law, immense power. In Geneva, Calvin developed a form of society called a theocracy, meaning ruled by the law of God. (We also have the word democracy, meaning rule by the will of the people.) The Protestant followers of Calvin believed in a strict moral code and forbade any form of entertainment that might lead to a weakening of people’s will to obey God’s word – so dancing and indeed theatre were banned. Although such bans are not in the Bible, Calvinism taught that the risk to the individual Christian soul from the Devil was so great that any action that might lead to worse moral weaknesses or sins (adultery for example) were to be avoided. An inflexible or very fixed and rigid attitude to religious life is often called fundamentalism, a term applied to many religious traditions, and often associated with religious fanaticism. Activity 3: Witches, the Devil and the Existence of Evil (Part One) Calvin taught a very strict doctrine of predestination. The doctrine of predestination taught that God – in Christian theology, all knowing and all powerful – had, since the beginning of Creation and the Fall known that some people would be eternally ‘saved’ and be welcomed in heaven and others eternally ‘damned’ and sent by God, after the Last Judgement, to hell. The term heaven is used as a realm where human beings eternally enjoy the presence of God. The term hell refers to the realm where human beings are eternally excluded from God’s presence. In much biblical and later literature hell is referred to as a place of burning. Roman Catholics believe in a ‘purgatory’, a place after death where a person unworthy as yet for heaven, might receive time for preparation. Protestants abandoned this notion as unscriptural. With no leeway in purgatory, Protestantism tended, certainly in its early years, to emphasise a stark choice between heaven or hell. The most famous account of a journey through purgatory, hell and heaven is by Dante (1265-1321), the famous Italian poet, in his dramatic poem The Divine Comedy . The Fall is the term theologians use to describe the rebellion of human beings, freely chosen, against God’s will. It is symbolised by the exclusion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, the story given in the first chapters of the book of Genesis. Forms of Protestantism deriving from Calvinism sometimes emphasised hell and damnation to a greater extent than the positive things in Christianity, such as God’s love for Creation. Puritanism was a form of Protestant Christianity much influenced by John Calvin. In a new world, the Salem settlers in New England believed they had the opportunity to create a theocracy like John Calvin’s in Geneva. In the early scenes of The Crucible we see the signs of this: the girls’ fear of being caught dancing in the forest and John Proctor’s statement that all he heard in the church of Reverend Parris was talk of hell. In this, one of the several exchanges between Hale and the Proctors, we have an insight into the Puritan view of the world. Extract PROCTOR: … the Bible speaks of witches, and I will not deny them HALE: And you, woman? ELIZABETH: I – I cannot believe it. HALE (shocked): You cannot! PROCTOR: Elizabeth, you bewilder him! ELIZABETH, (to Hale): I cannot think the Devil may own a woman’s soul, Mr Hale, when she keeps an upright way, as I have. I am a good woman, I know it; and if you believe I may do only good work in the world, and yet be secretly bound to Satan, then I must tell you sir, I do not believe it. HALE: But, woman, you do believe there are witches in – ELIZABETH: If you think that I am one, then I say there are none. HALE: You surely do not fly against the Gospel, the Gospel – PROCTOR: She believe in the Gospel, every word! ELIZABETH: Question Abigail Williams about the Gospel, not myself! The Puritan worldview stressed evil and the presence of Satan or the Devil. Sometimes evil and the presence of the Devil (all the dangers Christians faced) were stressed more than the goodness of human beings and of Creation. The Gospels are the first four books of the New Testament, named each after their authors: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They are accounts of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus himself meets with the Devil in Chapter 3 of Luke’s Gospel, and in many passages in all four Gospels he exorcises demons from possessed people, often as it happens, children. But there are no witches in the Bible as a whole, and certainly not in any of the four Gospels. The term Gospel is used in The Crucible in a no doubt deliberately misleading way. The settlers represented in Salem were largely uneducated people; we find little evidence of formal education for most characters in the play. Those people that were educated tended to be the ministers, which gave them a double advantage – to be used for good or otherwise. The most educated person in the play is Samuel Parris, whowe learn went to Harvard College. Harvard was one of the first universities to be established in the newly settled eastern part of America and today is one of the world’s prestigious universities. It is in present day Boston, close to the historical location of Salem, so Parris had returned from Barbados to a part of America he already would have known well. Activity 4: Witches, the Devil and the Existence of Evil (Part Two) The definition of witches is part of the wider world-view of evil presented by Puritan Christianity, but it is important to be clear about the different meanings of the term ‘witch’. In 17th-century New England, a witch was seen as being in a pact with the devilwho, in Christian thought is the personification of evil. In other words, just as Christians believe that God took a human form through Jesus (the incarnation), they believe too that evil has a physical and spiritual form. The Devil is often portrayed in human or human-like form, often with hooves and horns, to suggest an animal nature. The religions of Judaism and Islam also have a belief in the personification of evil. Indeed, Christianity borrowed belief in the devil from the Jewish scriptures. In the Garden of Eden it was the Devil who tempted Eve to encourage Adam to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which God had strictly forbidden. It was this first sin (going against the will of God) that Christians call the ‘Fall’. The removal from the Garden of Eden (heaven, paradise) is a sign of separation of God’s creatures from their Creator. Because God created human beings with free will this separation is seen as their own choice. God accepted that some creatures would wish not to be in harmony with the creator but in league with those who oppose his will. The devil is the embodiment of this opposition. God sent his son Jesus to earth in order to re-establish harmony between God and his creatures. The Devil in Christian thought still tries to keep creatures separate from God. In the Christian scriptures Jesus himself is tempted by the Devil (see Luke Chapter 3). The Book of Revelation (the last book in the Bible, sometimes called The Book of Apocalypse ) envisages a vast universal struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil. According to Christian tradition, the Book of Revelation was written by Saint John on the Greek island of Patmos. In the book,John has visions of the vast struggle between good and evil, describing many horrific scenes of violence and destruction, including the end of the world. In many ways Christianity strengthened this world view, in which good struggles with evil. It borrows from ancient Greek thinking, especially the writings of the famous Greek philosopher Plato (c.429 BC–c.347 BC). Plato wrote a vast number of philosophical works, and one of his key ideas was that the physical world was just a poor reflection of the heavenly world. This was a very simple but powerful idea that influenced the development of early Christianity. Some key Christian thinkers like Saint Augustine knew the writings of Plato well. The idea of a perfect heaven and an imperfect heaven had the effect of making early Christians consider many things of the world to be bad and the things of heaven good. Christianity does have some strict moral laws on how people should treat each other, including guidance on sexuality. In the history of Christianity, for example, the excessive seeking of sexual pleasure is often associated with evil, and has led to associations with the devil. Christians also use the term Satan for the Devil. It is easy to dismiss the world view of the Salem Puritan community as primitive and superstitious. And indeed, in the play, Arthur Miller is clearly trying to say that the charges of witchcraft were made maliciously. There is no hint that there was any foundation whatsoever to the accusations. However, the existence of evil in the world continues to fascinate people. Philosophers struggle with what is known as ‘the problem of evil’. A major problem is how to reconcile the idea of an all-good, all-powerful God with suffering in the world. Philosophers often distinguish two types of evil: natural and moral. Natural evil is the pain and anguish caused by the existence of disasters, disease, tragedies of all kinds, indeed death itself. Moral evil is concerned with the inclination some people have to commit acts which deliberately set out to inflict pain and suffering on others. In Salem the struggle is with moral evil, but there are different ways of regarding this. First there is the struggle with the moral evil embodied by the Devil and ‘witches’. Second, and from Miller’s point of view, there is the moral evil of how Christians are themselves guilty, evident not only in the lying of the girls but in the abuse of religious authority by the Reverend Parris and by the Judges Hale and Danforth. Activity 5: Visions of utopia - extended learning In 1945, after two world wars and the mass slaughter of millions upon millions, the international community formed the United Nations. The twentieth century witnessed many variations of government called totalitarianism – National Socialism (or Nazism) in Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) and Soviet Communism. Soviet Communism was particularly repressive under Joseph Stalin (1879-1953). After the Second World War, the Cold War defined relationships between America and the Soviet Union. The two superpowers were constantly on the verge of war without actually fighting. The great threat was nuclear war. The philosophy of Communism was most famously defined by Karl Marx (1818-1883) in the Communist Manifesto (1848). Communism is also distinctive as an ideology (or view of the world) in that it is atheistic. Religious believers were persecuted in the era of Soviet Communism, and still today religious freedom in Communist countries is in question. It was in a period of great tension during the Cold War that Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible. The play makes an analogy between the persecution of innocent people charged with witchcraft and the persecution of innocent Americans in the 1950s whose so-called crime was to have Communist sympathies. Arthur Miller himself was charged with contempt of Congress for failing to co-operate with the trials chaired by Senator McCarthy (the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings) and refusing to name any members of the Communist Party. The forming of the United Nations in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, had taken place less than a decade before the McCarthy hearings in America, and the writing of The Crucible. In many ways Salem Puritanism and the United Nations were based on idealist principles. Indeed, Reverend Parris is described in the play as an idealist who believed in what he was doing sincerely and who had sacrificed a good living in Barbados to minister to a new Puritan community in New England. Senator Joseph McCarthy, like Parris, was also an idealist who must have sincerely believed that what he was doing was in the interests of America, protecting it from what he believed to be the threat of Communism, but The Crucible demonstrates what dangers there can be in rigid adherence to ideals, what today we sometimes call fundamentalism. | 
