So much for polemic. The term I've highlighted in my title, "transvaluation," derives from Kenneth Burke. It entails the reciprocities between symbolic and social systems in the framework of what might be loosely called a social symbology. As I adapt the term for this occasion, the dynamics of transvaluation can be understood through a familiar analogy: rhetoric is a function of culture whose workings may be compared to a game of chess. For my purposes, that is, chess is a model of the interplay between symbol-making and social action. I believe this model is intriguing in its own right -- especially in relation to the recurrent uses of the chess analogy in linguistics, philosophy, and the human sciences -- and I've tried to explore it elsewhere as a model of literary and cultural studies. Here my concerns are limited to Winthrop's colonial classic. His "Model of Christian Charity" has been canonized, properly, both as a primal act of legitimation for the Puritan venture and as a foundational fiction of the New England Way. I refer in particular to Winthrop's description of the colony-to-be as a city on a hill. And with the chess analogy in mind, I think of that move on his part, that ingenious blend of social imperative and rhetorical invention, as the Winthrop variation.

A variation in chess, like a variation in other games, is a function in context. It is a move which opens a new set of possibilities within standard rules and regulations of play. We say a variation is brilliant not because it transcends the game not because it reaches to some higher realm beyond the rules and not because it demonstrates our capacity to ascend or escape into a world elsewhere of free play but just the opposite. It's brilliant insofar as the variation leads us to a deeper understanding of how the rules work. Appreciation, so conceived, is a function of cognition, and cognition requires us to acknowledge the power of limitations. The boundaries that hedge us in constitute the conditions of agency and innovation. In this sense, the variation in chess is a model for understanding the cultural work of literature.

The model against which this is set is the concept of aesthetics which runs from (say) Shaftsbury through Roland Barthes.It is grounded in the modern notion of the free play of language, a kind of literary equivalent to the ideal of free trade or of the open market-place. Traditionally, the process of transvaluation it celebrates is one in which issues of function and context are redirected towards the quasi-religious terms we have inherited for mystifying capital-A Art. Adam Smith's invisible hand of God has its aesthetic correlative in Coleridge's Primary Imagination.

My chess analogy is an attempt to reverse the process. Its purpose is not to demystify, though that may follow, but rather to understand the mystifying process and its implications. The point is to see how certain so-called universals (like Christian Charity) function; to trace the historical steps by which certain self-declared forms of transcendence (like " America ") were constructed and sustained; and to describe the contexts within which certain kinds of texts (like Winthrop's Model) were made objects of veneration. In all these ways, analysis is redirected away from the noumenal sphere of capital letters towards our time-bound, lower-case world. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, the philosopher of language- games the master of the manifold uses of the chess analogy I want to lead meaning back home to culture.

In that spirit, I ask you now to entertain the following proposition: " America " is a symbol that designates a distinctive social-symbolic system, as " chess " designates a game with distinctive rules. The rules of chess have sometimes been said to point to universals which transcend the game e.g., the extraordinary powers of the queen have been explained in the meta-historical terms of the Oedipus Complex. But isn't that just to leap from one historically-bounded game into another? In any case, to understand what a chess piece signifies is to engage in concrete and particular questions. For example: in what directions can the knight move? And under what circumstances? So too with America: it points to a dream of absolutes --freedom, opportunity, the good society --but we don't know what these abstractions signify unless we understand the function and context of the rhetorical pieces that make up this particular dream.

My focus here is on one piece, Winthrop's "city on a hill," which I assume provides an index to the significance of his address as a whole. My assumption rests on textual evidence, on the seventeenth-century Puritans' response, and above all on historical connections. Winthrop's address comes down to us as a cultural artifact, an integral part of our national legacy, and the city it envisions at its climax is a key to the social-symbolic game through which the United States has perpetuated itself as America. As for the rules of the game, they involve the reciprocity between: (1) the norms of a certain way of life, associated with capitalism and modernization; (2) an ambiguous territory, simultaneously confined to the United States, identified with the New World, and defined as boundless; (3) certain strategies of socialization, rooted in the market-place and ranging from religious multi-denominationalism to academic multi-culturalism; and finally, (4) certain symbolic structures, such as those inscribed in the City upon a Hill.

So understood, the meaning of any single rhetorical piece is overdetermined. This City cannot signify a feudal aristocracy, no matter how utopian. But there is ample room for agency, within bounds. I think here of the complex negotiations potential in the reciprocities I just mentioned (territory, market-place, way of life, forms of speech), and of the extraordinary potential of language to convey that complexity. Like an effective strategy in chess, an effective social symbology opens up a variety of possible combination of moves in a given situation, and so not only allows for but elicits innovation. Consider Whitman's "I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes." 1

It is a shout of joy from a poet who recognizes the multitude of moves available to the language- experimenting "I" under the rules of social mobility and liberal subjectivity. We might think in this regard of a chess-master demonstrating that the knight can move in eight possible different directions, and that each of these directions involves its own interesting consequences. Indeed, one might distinguish on this basis between high and low culture, or to put it more starkly between art and propaganda. Propaganda plays the game in ways that limit options, as though only one or two moves were available to the knight. It thus seems to close down possibilities. Art tends to move in ways that maximize our interpretive options, sometimes to the point of throwing a quite different light on the situation in question. Whitman's editorials seem propagandistic; his poems universal. The difference lies not in his refusal as poet to play the game, but on the contrary in the intensity of his engagement with its rules. The creative move tests the rules by forcing them to their limits. It is thus an assertion of limitations, a full display of the power of boundaries. It may also be a clue to transgression, a test of the rules that leads us by indirections to a different kind of game.

In my work on Puritan rhetoric, I emphasized the rules and controls it entailed. Today I want to explore the second, transgressive attributes of the chess variation. What does the knight signify? One answer would be technical and practical, formulated from within the game as it is played. The knight moves in such- and- such prescribed ways and it has a certain relative value, also prescribed. Our free agency here is a function of our recognition of necessity. Another answer would be historical, formulated from within a perspective on how the game of chess changed over time. This long view is not independent of the game as we now play it, but it challenges the prescriptions we accept as necessary, since those prescriptions are part and parcel of the changes we're examining. It makes for a kind of non-transcendent space, where we are free to speculate on directions and values , and to contextualize the very concept of necessity. We have to speak from within the game of chess, of course, but it's then the game as distinguished from the game as we now play it. And the distinction is particularly dramatic in this case. For the fact is that of all games chess is the one most susceptible to the vicissitudes of history. To understand the function of the knight historically we would have to begin by recognizing that there were not always knights on the chess board. Like virtually every other chess-piece, the knight is the product of the most unlikely cross-cultural, multi-national, inter-racial recombinations. So too by the way is the queen. She is a medieval addition, replacing a petty counselor called Vizier or Senex, the Old Man. The queen took his place after an extended debate on the proprieties of sex-change, and for centuries she remained (as the Vizier had been) the weakest unit on the board. Then in the 1490's, the Columbus era, somewhere in Isabella's Spain, the queen was declared (what we now know her to be) the dominant figure of play. This particular version of the Oedipal theme is grounded in the history of gender and of empire. In the long view, chess is the game of inter- contextuality par excellence.

Hence the dramatic value of the chess-analogy. Chess is traditionally invoked to tell us why we're trapped in systems. By all convention it is the game of Fate, the immemorial symbol for fixed regulations, universal conditions, and objective rules. In the long view, however, the chess analogy works in exactly the opposite direction. It reminds us of the concrete cultural sources of the rules we inherit. It offers not only a critique of the arbitrary nature of all foundational systems, but more to of the point of textual analysis, a model of the shifting sands of culture on which we build our houses of necessity.

From this perspective, let me press the question of function I just posed -- how did the knight come into play?-- and translate it into a problem in cultural transvaluation. How were the boundaries of the social symbology we're considering established? The rhetoric of America is perhaps the major instance of the power of the games of modern nationality. Its scope of play is emblazoned in its official logo, "out of many, one"; and the effectiveness of its strategies is documented in the processes by which such risky catch-words as "individualism," "independence," "revolution," and most recently "subversion" have been made a summons to conformity. And yet, like the game of chess as we now play it, "America" has drawn perforce on many earlier models. One of these, a persistent and influential one, is the model of Christian charity.

The symbolic system it represents is theological of course (we might call it the incarnation- game), but I'm sure you're all familiar with it. The model of Christian charity is Christ. Its rules posit a double reality which is paradoxically one, material and spiritual. The goal of play is to make the paradox visible, while at the same time maintain the qualitative difference between material and spiritual realities, as between Caesar and God, death and life. Broadly speaking, two kinds of moves are allowed. These are sometimes described as horizontal (in and of this world) and vertical (connecting heaven and earth). For my purpose, it would help to think of these lines as linear, as the rook moves, and diagonal, as the bishop moves. [APPENDIX]. In traditional rhetorical terms, the linear move is a form of indirect representation, by simile or by analogy: e.g. the rich, like the elect, are few in number; or, Charles I is king of England as God is king of heaven. Representation here is indirect in the sense that it assumes a basic disparity within the comparison. We are meant to understand that the rich are not really the elect. They are like them figurally like, as distinct from essentially alike. This sort of representation functions to highlight the difference in context between the literal meaning of the referent -- that is, its linear meaning, in and of this world -- and its spiritual meaning, the heavenly connection.

The diagonal move has something like the contrary purpose. It is a form of direct representation, as by figura or synecdoche: e.g., Moses is a type of Christ; or, the true believer is an image of God's people. Here we are to understand that the true believer is one of God's people-- is actually and substantially chosen by God. Whether or not Moses appears to you or me to be like Christ, he and Christ are essentially alike. Moses re-presents Christ literally and spiritually, both historically and under the aspect of eternity.

What's striking about Winthrop's address is the way that he makes use of both kinds of move. He introduces the indirect form of representation first, through the image of hierarchy. His address opens with a picture of rich and poor, king and ministers. As God (he explains) has ordained variety and difference throughout creation, so it is (quote) the "glory of princes to have many officers." The analogy tells us that order is pervasive and absolute and at the same time it reminds us of the chasm separating earthly from divine power. In Winthrop's words, "the condition of mankind" is not that of the kingdom of heaven. Next comes the direct figural connection: "We are all one in Christ," Winthrop intones, "members of the same body," "knit together in love." 2 Here the picture he offers is one of essential equality. The community he portrays partakes of the spirit (reflects it in a glass, darkly) and so transcends all worldly hierarchies, along with every limit of time, office, and place.

Of course, these two images -- the community as social network, the community as one in Christ -- are not contradictory. Indeed, they often appear as complementary forms of speech, secular and sacred. In the tradition that Winthrop inherited, the word "model" denotes either a replica, as in an architect's design, which represents but is not itself the building, or else a perfected pattern of what we see a kind of ideal mirror- reflection as Christ's life re-presents the believer's journey to God. In the first case, the community might be said at best to represent the divine order, but only with the understanding that to represent it signals a qualitative difference between the sign and what's signified. In the second case what's signified, the divine, is re-presented (presented again) in the sign, as a historical being. The common substance between the sign and what it signifies is an ideal in which the believer (through grace) partakes, and so directly (if imperfectly) embodies.

Replica or mirror-reflection, representation or re-presentation: the "or" makes all the difference in the world. More precisely, it marks the difference between this world and the next. And yet the two kinds of speech are as close as "like" and "alike." They are complementary pieces in the same game, like rook and bishop. They work together on the premise that their functions are distinct. In order to make this as clear as possible, Church authorities from Augustine through Aquinas made that distinction (representation or re-presentation) a central tenet of Christian hermeneutics. By that rule Lutherdenied the Pope's right to stand in for Christ. The Holy Roman Empire, he charged, was a replica of the true church, not a re-presentation of it. The fact that it claimed to re-present the true church made it a false replica, hence the Antichrist incarnate. By that rule, too, Milton justified regicide by appealing directly to Christ, the true mirror-reflection of God as king as Charles I (in his view) was emphatically not. The fact that Charles claimed divine right disqualified him as representative of heaven's king. It is not too much to say that the hermeneutics of like-versus alike became a vehicle of theological and social transformation. Understandably, the Reformers were charged with blasphemy -- appropriately they called themselves Protest ants, Dissenters -- but so far as they were concerned, they had come to fulfill the exegetical law, not to break it.

What, then, shall we say of Winthrop's apparent confusion? Representation and re-presentation blur and shift in his Model. It almost seems a sleight of hand. His image of Christian charity moves in two directions at once. Or rather, he seems to use the same piece of rhetoric, "Christian charity," to make two different kinds of move. He identifies this particular community first as a hierarchy in the form of a colonial venture authorized by royal patent, and then (as it were in the same breath) as a spiritual unity in imitatio Christi. He argues, as I said, first by analogy (prince and steward) and then by direct re-presentation (elect and damned), but then, having as it were announced the full scope of his play, he proceeds to apply the concept of Christian charity boldly and consistently in both senses at once. He identifies these, properly, through the dualism of justice and mercy, or what he calls the "double law" of nature (the moral law) and grace (the law of the spirit), but by this time dualism has become a bi-polar monism. By either law, Winthrop asserts, we arrive at the same literal-spiritual end. Social order is here established in all its aspects -- business transactions, legalities, social relations -- under the aegis of natural law ("according to contract ") and of the Gospel ("according to the example of our Savior"). In his specifications for contractual obligations, Withrop goes so far as to explicate the one in terms of the other.

Let me try to suggest the sheer daring of Winthrop's strategy, the violence implicit in his yoking-together of analogy and type, representation and re-presentation (a violence far more daring, metaphysically, than that of any seventeenth-century poet) -- by recalling the chess analogy. Imagine the argument I just outlined as a game in process. The different rhetorical terms are different pieces on a board. Those pieces are traditional, rule- bound. The rook, which can move only in a linear direction; is the worldly, colonial venture. The bishop, which can move only in a diagonal direction, is the christic ideal. Now let me go one step further: imagine that these pieces are poorly marked for some reason -- perhaps they were weatherbeaten in the course of the Atlantic voyage -- so that it's difficult to tell the chessmen apart. Winthrop moves a piece horizontally, and says "My rook goes here;" then, in his next turn, he moves the same piece diagonally, and says: "My bishop goes there;" and then, as the game proceeds, he actually renames the piece, calls it alternately his rook-bishop or bishop- rook, and moves it consistently in what by all convention is a strange linear-diagonal pattern.

How would we explain his behavior? Our first guess might be that Winthrop was making an amateur's blunder. But in fact he was a qualified professional at the game. Or we might consider his move to be a technical slippage, due to distraction or absent-mindedness. After all, the Puritan company with whom he was playing did claim a double identity, as settlers and as believers. But here we confront an even more striking, more daunting difficulty. The fact is, Winthrop won the game. That's both the long view of the matter and the immediate result.. Winthrop won not only the match but the game. His variation took hold. It inspired many similar variations. It led to America's City upon a Hill. Here is his famous end-game:

Thus stands the case between God and us: We are entered into a covenant with Him [and if He] shall please to hear us then hath He sealed our commission. But if we shall neglect the observation of these articles [and] fall to embrace this present world seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us. Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck is to follow the counsel of Micah. We must be knit together in this work as one man. We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together always having before our eyes our community as members of the same body. [Thus] the Lord will delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and we shall se much more of His wisdom, power, goodness, and truth than formerly. For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. And to shut up this discourse with that exhortations of Moses in his last farewell to Israel, Deut. 30: Beloved, there is now set before us life and death. We are commanded this day to love one another and to keep His commandments. [If] we will not obey we shall surely perish out of the good land [which] we pass over this vast sea to possess it.

This fantastic configuration Winthrop turns into a means of legitimating a particular economic and social hierarchy. He invokes it as an ideal of spiritual unity (love, absolute mutuality) that authorizes (in his words) secular forms of "subjection." But he does not thereby collapse the distinction between type and analogy. That is the crucial point to observe about Winthrop's game-plan. He uses the combination of rhetorical moves, linear and diagonal, to instate a tension between them. On the one hand there is the figural Jerusalem which cannot fail. On the other hand there was the old literal Jerusalem which did fail, once and for all. Winthrop's City signifies both of these -- not one or the other, promise or threat, but a willful conjunction of the two -- literal and figural held together in a state of permanent conditionality.

Again, we must account for a rather glaring deviation from (or manipulation of) the rules. In order to grasp its import, consider the following scenario: (1) a form of chess that allows for only linear or else diagonal moves; (2) a situation in a particular match where one of the players perceives that he may win if he can move a certain piece in a direction which is both diagonal and linear, as in fact the knight's move is in modern chess [APPENDIX]; and (3) that he succeeds by negotiating a special set of conditions. "Let's try an experiment, " he proposes. "If I win the game, then we'll agree that this new- fangled move was valid, a legitimate variation of play. If I lose, we'll declare the move to have been illegal, and the piece I used will simply revert to its former linear or diagonal status." Does this seem far-fetched? Let me tell you that something quite like that sort of change occurred in Reformation Germany, shortly after the Peasant Revolt, when the caste-bound Indian foot-soldier or pawn (renamed "Bauer," farmer), was permitted to become a queen upon reaching the eighth rank (the opposite end of the board) on the condition that the pawn did reach the eighth rank.

Winthrop's variation may be said to build upon that strategy, but it goes further still. The Bauer retains a singular concrete identity at any given time -- either pawn or else queen. The ideal, we might say, is upward mobility, but basically the game-plan remains class-bound. It is assumed that in principle, as a rule, pawns will remain pawns. Winthrop's move challenges that structure -- and even ( by indirections) the principle behind it. His emphasis is on potential. Indeed, we can say with hindsight that that's precisely the radical crux of his strategy. It was Winthrop's intention to blur the line between alternatives -- in his case only between bishop and rook, but by extension between all similar choices, including that between pawn and queen. Or to put it in positive terms (as we should, with hindsight), it was his intention to keep such alternatives open at all times. Winthrop's linear-diagonal knight is fundamentally, by definition, provisional. It is founded upon the if in " if I win." Its context is a game in process. Its function is quasi -apocalyptic. The terms are not win or lose -- all or nothing -- but rather win and lose, all and nothing. And those terms, be it noted, shift the objects at stake in the match. The paradoxes of incarnation deal with heaven and earth. Winthrop's provisional knight deals with spiritual and secular prospects in this particular New World venture. It works to sustain tensions within the process of colonization: tensions between present and future, expectation and experience, migration and possession -- between the literal (linear) transition toward a new country and the spiritual (diagonal) rights to its ownership. And the transition itself, so conceived, effects a sea-change in identity from the related-but-distinct concepts of settlers and saints to the mixed image (ambiguously hierarchical and egalitarian) of a company in covenant. What the City upon a Hill makes visible is a far-reaching rhetoric of conditionality: a ritual of order-to-be that potentially unites a group of colonists in the bonds of grace, and so grants them provisionally the good land they have come to claim by prophecy and (not or) legal patent.

Potentiality, so conceived and so directed, was Winthrop's brilliant response to what might well be considered a desperate situation. The two-stranded model he advanced was designed for a community that posed a double threat to order, as religious dissenters and as worldly entrepreneurs. Winthrop's appeal to unity-in-love ("knit together as one man") reminds us, on the one hand, that the Puritans were militant sectarians. Predictably, the history of the New England Way turned out to be a history of theological warfare. On the other hand, Winthrop's appeal to hierarchy reminds us that these religious zealots were intent on rising in the world. Their leaders were college-educated clergy, merchants, and lawyers, like the Cambridge law graduate, John Winthrop, grandson of a self-made businessman, and son of a nouveau-riche merchant fallen on hard times. The statistics of the 1630 Great Migration are: 10% poor (servants), 10% lower class (unskilled laborers), 1% aristocracy and riffraff combined, and the rest (79%) "middling": artisans, tradesmen, shopkeepers, independent farmers. They came to the New World at a time of severe economic depression in England, not only as rebels against Anglican rituals, but equally as youngish (thirty-something on the average), ambitious, mobile professionals who had been enticed by the promises of a chartered profit-seeking corporation. Behind Winthrop's opening insistence on hierarchy (rich and poor, officers and subjects) lie his well-grounded anxieties about governing a colony of middle-class dissidents who (as he put it, grimly) were "seeking great things in this present world," "for [them] selves and [their] posterity."

By what authority could Winthrop impose control on this volatile community? The answer may be gleaned from an antiquarian gloss, composed by Winthrop's son sometime in the mid-1630s:

Written on board the Arbella, on the Atlantic Ocean, by the Honorable John Winthrop, Esquire, in his passage (with the great company of religious people, of which Christian tribes he was the brave leader and famous governor), from the Island of Great Britain to New England in the North America.

Now, Justice of the Peace is the office designated by "honorable" and "esquire," and it had taken on a dramatic new importance during the Tudor period. Previously, the chief law enforcer had been the sheriff, who controlled the courts of common law in the medieval village jurisdiction, technically known as the tourn. It was a hierarchical form of control, of course, but it was based largely on local tradition customs and codes handed down orally from one generation to another -- in effect, a medley of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Norman-French precedents, locally applied according to village or tourn memory, in more or less consensual ways, within relatively autonomous because relatively insulated communities.

The transition I mentioned from Medieval to Renaissance England might be described, legally, as a movement from tourn to corporation, and from sheriff to justice of the peace. That movement followed upon profound and lasting cultural changes -- economic upheavals, class realignments, demographic shifts, and technological and scientific revolutions. It issued in the centralization of authority under crown and court. By 1588, when Winthrop was born, a new system of law was in place. I quote here from the standard legal history of the period:

In the courts held by the Justices [of the Peace] was vested all the common law jurisdiction of the country, civil and criminal. Royal justice had won a complete victory of the older [feudal and communal] local courts But [in 1500] there was still left to the old courts and the old officials [that is,] to the tourn and the sheriff certain police duties and criminal jurisdiction. Royal justice won its final victory when [under the Tudors] it practically absorbed this last remnant of their jurisdiction. 4

Among other things, this vast reorganization was remarkable for two overarching ironies. The first has to do with cultural contrasts. The process of centralization reveals that this so-called consensual, static world of the medieval tourn was a configuration of relatively independent communities, whereas the highly regulated modern world of boroughs, companies, and corporations was the product of upheaval and fragmentation. The second irony pertains directly to Winthrop's model. In the late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England, the agents of centralization often turned their jurisdictions into centers of dissent. For the fact was that justices of the peace characteristically came from the class that also characteristically produced the Puritans, who then proceeded to turn their delegated powers against the central authorities. Many counties and boroughs (such as the county of East Anglia, from which Winthrop came, along with most of the Arbella passengers), became strongholds of Puritan influence, under the governance of Puritan justices of the peace, abetted by dissenting clergy. The clergy set out the articles of faith for what would become England's Puritan Commonwealth. The justices of the peace sought to provide the terms of communal solidarity. Their lay-sermons, variously gathered in historical, legal, and theological collections -- a large, rich, and unduly neglected archive -- marshal the expected scriptural arguments for separatism or congregational independence. But they also built upon a different, secular theme. In defying the nation's civil and religious center, they turned for an alternative authority to the memory of what they pictured as the good old days of sheriff and tourn an elaborately-constructed nostalgia for the harmonious, consensual, and independent life of the medieval village.

I believe we may trace the myth of the middle ages to these documents. They carry in embryo the dream-visions of Morris, Ruskin, and Tennyson a longing for some quasi-feudal stability and spiritual kinship in a world of change. This is not the place to discuss either their rhetoric or their legacy, but one point is worth noting, in view of the ironies I just mentioned. In rebelling against national authority, the English Puritans reinforced a new, emphatically Protestant model of nationalism. Their appeal to the past eventually extended from medieval to antiquarian fable and lore from sheriff and tourn to Robin Hood, King Arthur, Alfred the Great, Druid legends and so helped provide a secular myth of origins for the modern English state, and what was to be its far-flung empire, reaching in the New World from the tropical Bahamas to Canada's Dominion of the North.

This is precisely what Winthrop's model works to accomplish. Considered as an example of the cultural transvaluation, its most conspicuous aspect is the absence of any reference to or even trace of medievalist nostalgia. It is not that Winthrop shied away from the conflict between real and ideal. If anything he magnifies this by substituting Christ for the sheriff. Apparently, however, he considered it inadequate or inappropriate to invoke antiquated feudal ways as corporate standards. And the reason, as I've suggested, lay in his peculiar problem of authority. It may be well here to supplement my earlier sketch of those volatile Puritan emigrants with a contrast between them and the general population, drawn from the most recent detailed study of the Great Migration:

[The] emigrants [came from ] places where commercial activity [and] religious dissent combined to loosen the ties of traditional authority. [In] England as a whole, [for example,] farmers outnumbered craftsmen by more than seven to one; among the prospective colonists artisans were nearly twice as numerous as farmers. [Moreover,] these farmers, who comprised 16% of the population, were "relatively prosperous," "literate," and "independent." [As for the artisans, they] usually practiced skilled trades that placed them on the middle rungs of the economic ladder. 5

The medievalist fantasy was an ingenious variation, but it could not accommodate the circumstances of the Arbella emigrants. Winthrop was responding to a special problem in religious and social cohesion, one that required (in Perry Miller's words) an ideal commensurate with the Protestant Ethic. Winthrop's variation is a move in that direction. It consecrates the modernizing tendencies embodied in his delegated function (JP, Esquire) while legitimating the separatist tenets of his religious company's dissent. And much more than that. In the double process of consecration and legitimation, Winthrop invents a new history for the colony, replacing its secular past, medieval and renaissance alike, with the progress of the church. As Winthrop outlines the history of Christian Charity, it runs from Eden ("man in the estate of innocency") to the Israelite "household of faith," to Christian believers "in the apostles' time" (that is, as recorded in the New Testament) and climactically, in this time, to the covenanted "community of peril."

I want to focus on this last image for a moment, because it becomes Winthrop's dominant figure for the New England venture. "Community of peril" contrasts dramatically with the benign, harmonious vision of the tourn and in doing so it offers a fit correlative for Winthrop's strategy of probation. It also establishes a distinctive ancestry for his imperiled City upon a hill. "Christ," Winthrop explains, gave

a general rule (Math. 7:22): Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye the same to them. [That] rule must we observe in case of community of peril. Hence it was that in the primitive church they had all things in common. Likewise in the return out of captivity, Nehemiah exhorts the Jews to liberality in remitting their debts to their brethren. This is to be observed [as well] in the latter stories of the churches.

That rule must we observe in case of community of peril [as] did some of our forefathers in times of persecution here in England and so did many of the faithful [elsewhere in Europe] in other [Protestant] churches, whereof we keep an honorable remembrance of them [in] latter [day] stories of the [martyrs].

Now, some of these Reformation heroes may really have been related to some of the company then present, but that is not Winthrop's point. His genealogy is a model of spiritual descent that identifies him as the "brave leader" of "Christian tribes" fleeing what he had called a year before "a land of destruction," ripe for some sweeping catastrophe and punishing plagues from heaven.6 In that figural perspective, his phrase "here in England," spoken in passage to a New World, is a wonderfully revealing conjunction of agency, tradition, and transgression. Here in England is the background against which Winthrop's transvaluation may be gauged. His ambiguous reference to the English forefathers is an index to the enormous visionary shift underway in his model. Seen in retrospect, the City upon a Hill is a prototype not only of the way that rhetoric has functioned in the social construction of "America," but of the importance of literary transvaluations in the general process of modern nation-building. The Winthrop variation deploys uncertainty and displacement as vehicles of cultural self-invention. What is displaced is both visionary (a medieval utopia) and actual (familial, communal, and geographical origins). What comes into place is broadly modern: a community written into existence by contract and consent, through a declaration of principles and rules that bend tradition to legitimate a venture in colonial enterprise. As things turned out, those new-fangled rules also opened into something specifically American: a corporate identity built on a provisional-apocalyptic view of history.

"We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill": the imperative ("must consider") centers upon a potentially millennial future (prefigured by the image of Moses at Canaan's frontier). Potentiality, however, means self-doubt: "we shall be" entails the prospect of being "made a story and by-word through the world." And vice-versa: the threat entails the dream of what "we shall be." Part of the brilliance of Winthrop's transvaluation lies in the fact that his double-edged rhetoric has it both ways. Its conditional tense defines the community as secular, experimental, and fallible; and that same conditional tense is the premise of spiritual transformation. It is as though (1) an accurate replica might yield a perfect mirror-reflection; and (2) the force of that possibility were not a promise of perfection but instead the excitement of living in the might be. If we keep discipline, says Winthrop, we will be a beacon to the world; if not, we will become a by-word for failure. The "we" is circumscribed by a double "if." What we are at any given time is beacon and by-word. That and is a formula for perennial anxiety. And anxiety is Winthrop's formula for empowerment. In game-terms, it is the conditional link that allows for the simultaneity of linear and diagonal identity. The "if" that doubly circumscribes the "we" affirms that we are already chosen because we are now under probation. By that symbolic logic, Winthrop already grants the emigrants, before reaching harbor, the territorial rights to the "Canaanites'" "good land," which they, the emigrants, have "pass[ed] over this vast sea to possess." By that emphasis on peril, he already releases these entrepreneurs, as emigrants, as immigrants and colonists, from the burdens of their secular past.

It is not necessary to exaggerate Winthrop's achievement in order to appreciate its significance. I began by alluding to contemporary uses of the city on a hill (from, say, Kennedy through Reagan) as a ritual of founding, a cultural totem designed both to infuse hope and to establish law and order. But I have assumed throughout that Winthrop's strategies were transitional, a variation in play rather than a full-scale invention. Its sources lie in the rules and regulations of an Old World game: the Bible, the Church Fathers, and the Protestant Reformation. These are the lines along with Winthrop's new-fangled rook-bishop moves. Even when it arrives, hypothetically, at its special destination, "New England in the North America," it occupies essentially an Old World position: Winthrop has European Protestants in mind when he says that "the eyes of all people are upon us." It would be another forty to seventy years before the colonists would have an indigenous myth of their own founders their own distinctive legends of a golden age of tribal patriarchs, rivaling the medieval tourn, or ancient Rome, or even the primitive churches, and located wholly within the "American strand." Another generation or two, that is, had to elapse before Winthrop's rhetorical piece could claim a proper place for itself, its own New World Square, a sacred-secular space replete with its own history -- sacred beginning, anxiety-fraught middle, and conditional end. And of course a century would have to elapse after that before Winthrop's provisional knight could have a proper set of royalty to defend a group of Founding Fathers, constructed according to Enlightenment rules of power, eliciting progressivist forms of anxiety (every pawn a king, potentially), and moving within republican lines of pragmatism and promise.

Still, let us not underestimate Winthrop's achievement. He does say "all people," as though "the people" at large were the authorizing constituency, and as though all of history were at stake. More important is the geographical shift that follows from his emphasis on process. By the logic of conditionality, Winthrop re-focuses the objective upon the meaning of the New World. There is the place of crisis and trial. That is where the spirit may be made visible: diagonally, through the regeneration of individuals; and linearly, through the community's secular-moral growth in Winthrop's words, a sacred covenant to progress here in this world, in this land, in "wisdom, power, goodness, and truth. The City upon a Hill represents the first ideal to take the fate of the New World as its condition of failure and success. As a symbol, it derives from two traditions that proved inadequate as the ideological framework for modern nationalisms: kingship and Christianity. Winthrop varied both those traditions to accommodate a modern venture, and in the course of variation he opened the prospect for something new under the sun, the America-game.