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57 U. Louisville L. Rev. 467 (2018-2019)
Commonwealth as Civic Communion

handle is hein.journals/branlaj57 and id is 485 raw text is: COMMONWEALTH AS CIVIC COMMUNION Sarah A. Morgan Smith* During the seventeenth century, some of the most robust commonwealth theorizing in Anglo-America grew out of the religious movement of Puritanism. This Article focuses on the ways in which Massachusetts's First Charter period (1630-1689) functioned as aproving groundfor an ideal of civic life that understands individuals as literally knit together into one body (whether speaking of the body of Christ in the church, or of the body politic). In particular, Ihighlight the work of Puritan minister Thomas Shepard on the connection between inward and outward government: man must first be able to recognize and address his own sinful nature by exercising an inward government over his actions and desires in order to appreciate and appropriately participate in the various forms of outward government to which he falls subject. 1. INTRODUCTION A Model of Christian Charity (Model), John Winthrop's exhortation to the founding generation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, is so well known for its fleeting reference to the new colony as a city upon a hill that we tend to forget that this image is really little more than a rhetorical flourish at the end of a very dense work of political theory.' Though he never used the term commonwealth, the speech is an extended meditation on the theme as Winthrop offers a vision of a political community based on the radical application of the principles of brotherly affection in the pursuit of the * Sarah A. Morgan Smith is a fellow and the Director of Faculty at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University. She would like to thank the participants in the Future of the Commonwealth Symposium for their insightful comments and questions, and especially to express her gratitude to Colin Crawford for allowing her to look at the development of the concept in a place far away in time and space from contemporary Kentucky, but one with no less need for the kind of thoughtful interaction between legal education and civic education than that which he has modeled so well. As ever, thanks also to her first and best reader, Brian Andrew Smith. ' See John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity (1630), reprinted in 2 WINTHROP PAPERS, 1623-1630, 282 (Stewart Mitchell ed., Mass. Historical Soc'y 1931). The speech was recognized as a significant statement of the ideals and aspirations of the colony very early on. A 1635 letter to John Winthrop, Jr. asks him to send a copy of the Model of Charity back to London. See Letter from Henry Jacie to John Winthrop, Jr. (Feb. 1634/35), in 3 WINTHROP PAPERS, 1631-1637, 188 (Allyn Bailey Forbes ed., Mass. Historical Soc'y 1943). For further analysis of Puritan society, see Sarah A. Morgan Smith, With a Publick Spirit: Community and Commitment in New England (May 2016) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University) (on file with the University of Rutgers Library). 467

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