Conflict between Good and Evil in Bradstreet’s The Flesh and the Spirit

Conflict between Good and Evil in Bradstreets The Flesh and the Spirit A colonial puritan minister, Thomas Shepard, nicely summarized the paradox of the Puritan religion when he noned that The greatest give away of Christian grace lies in mourning the want of it. Shepard suggests, in this exit, that easily Christians should sp closing their days, indeed their entire lives, exploring and proclaiming their own depravity and ejaculatefulness, their want of Christian grace. Paradoxically, only this kind of a life could lead, ultimately, to the possibile attainment of deitys grace and thus entrance into heaven. For the Puritans, such a formula be a never-ending, internal conflict good Christians who hope for grace deal never believe that they are worthy of such grace. Indeed, Puritans who want to be moral and upright must constantly keep in judgment the fact that they are sinful and wicked and not deserving of Gods attention, much less admittance to heaven. The paradox of Shep ards passage is one that the early Puritans not only firmly believed but too lived day in and day out. As a central tenet of their existence, this paradox conduct Puritans to experience a constant internal deal between two aspects of the Puritan ego the sinful, wicked side and the deliver, saved side. Significantly, the struggle became a common motif in many Puritan works, including Anne Bradstreets The Flesh and the Spirit. In this poem, Bradstreet describes not only the dual self that was the result of Puritan theology but also the psychological importation of the Puritan paradox. The Flesh and the Spirit demonstrates that the road to attainment of grace, and thus to salvation, lies not in resolving the conflict between the two aspe... ...e that existed because of the Puritan judgement in total depravity. The conflict between the sinful self and the redeemed self originated from the condition that, according to Puritans, humans, who are stricken with original sin because of Adams fall, must always keep an awareness of their distorted status in the forefront of their thoughts. Such a belief led to a serious internal, psychological struggle that would only come to an end in death. While the Puritans could never be assured of receiving Gods grace, they believed that if they maintained the struggle between their dual self in this life, when they died, they skill be chosen to receive grace and thus attain salvation. whole shebang Cited Bradstreet, Anne. The Flesh and the Spirit. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter, et al. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Lexington Heath, 1994. 302-305.