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

Conflict between Good and Evil in Bradstreet’s The Flesh and the Spirit  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚      A colonial Puritan minister, Thomas Shepard, nicely summarized the paradox of the Puritan religion when he noted that â€Å"The greatest part of Christian grace lies in mourning the want of it.†Ã‚   Shepard suggests, in this passage, that good Christians should spend their days, indeed their entire lives, exploring and proclaiming their own depravity and sinfulness, their â€Å"want† of Christian grace.   Paradoxically, only this kind of a life could lead, ultimately, to the possibile attainment of God’s grace and thus entrance into heaven.   For the Puritans, such a formula posed a never-ending, internal conflict: good Christians who hope for grace can never believe that they are worthy of such grace.   Indeed, Puritans who want to be moral and upright must constantly keep in mind the fact that they are sinful and wicked and not deserving of God’s attention, much less admittance to heaven. The paradox of Shepard’s passage is one that the early Puritans not only firmly believed but also lived day in and day out.   As a central tenet of their existence, this paradox led Puritans to experience a constant internal struggle between two aspects of the Puritan self:   the sinful, wicked side and the redeemed, saved side.   Significantly, the struggle became a common motif in many Puritan works, including Anne Bradstreet’s â€Å"The Flesh and the Spirit.†Ã‚   In this poem, Bradstreet describes not only the dual self that was the result of Puritan theology but also the psychological significance of the Puritan paradox.   â€Å"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 belief 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 Adam’s fall, must always keep an awareness of their depraved 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 God’s grace, they believed that if they maintained the struggle between their dual self in this life, when they died, they might be chosen to receive grace and thus attain salvation. Works Cited Bradstreet, Anne.   â€Å"The Flesh and the Spirit.†Ã‚   The Heath Anthology of American Literature.   Ed. Paul Lauter, et al. 2nd ed. Vol. 1.   Lexington:   Heath, 1994.   302-305.